[lmilcin]

I am Polish so I may be missing some nuances here... but my understanding is there was no such thing as transferable right of ownership in aboriginal cultures. This came with western civilization because, whaddayaknow, it always needs to convert other civilizations to its way of thinking to even be able to communicate.

The would ignore the local culture as much as possible. Ask for the chief around here, come to him, plant the seed of thinking he actually is a king, and then it is easier to talk to just one guy than get everybody in agreement.

This is better explained in "The Origins of Political Order" by Francis Fukuyama, if anybody is interested.

[koheripbal]

Francis Fukuyama specifically talks about the necessity for WRITTEN laws and literacy in his book as one of the core foundations of political order.

Native populations around the world had no "transferable right of ownership" because they had no written laws.

[dragonwriter]

Many native populations around the world had either or both transferrable rights of ownership and written laws, and while the groups having the former and the groups having the latter overlapped, they weren't the same, and then former wasn't a subset of the latter.

The speculation probably is less radically wrong if you consider property interest in land rather than personal property, though it's worth noting that the kind of free transferrability (some) Europeans wanted wasn't even the norm for land, in Europe until the end of feudalism, which was millenia after the development of written laws. Heck, some of the colonial powers neither sought nor had it as a norm themselves—not everyone was England—relying instead on right of conquest to impose what amounted to a feudal system (Spain, I'm looking at you) many places.

[lmilcin]

The chief would not own his tribal land not because of lack of written laws but because his power came from the tribe. He was the chief only as long as could show it is in best interest of the tribe.

The land would typically be claimed, not owned. As soon as you stopped using the land somebody else was in the right to come and use it.