The Map, the Territory, and the Law
Commentary by Martin Lockman.
Martin Lockman (Climate Law Fellow, Sabin Center, Columbia Law School) shares this review of Steven Stoll’s Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill & Wang ed. 2017).
The philosopher Alfred Korzybski once said, “[a] map is not the territory it represents”—rather, it is an abstraction, “which accounts for its usefulness.” But as legal tools, maps do more than just describe the land that they map—in law, mapping changes a territory. A map, if coded in law, simplifies a piece of land into a set of easily defined rights that can be sold to someone half a world away. These rights, in turn, drive the physical transformation of the land: a plat survey is projected across a neighborhood in picket fences; an international investment based on survey maps sends bulldozer blades through a neighborhood in Nairobi.
Hernando de Soto, a renowned Peruvian economist, emphasizes the value of this legal mapping. In The Mystery of Capital, de Soto ties developing-world poverty to non-fungibility. By recognizing and titling the property claims of the world’s poor, he argues, countries unlock the value of those claims and let owners buy, sell, or borrow against them. This just-so story has established de Soto as one of the most prominent development economists of the modern era and inspired a global push to incorporate unmapped “dead capital” into markets.
Ramp Hollow, a 2017 book by historian Steven Stoll, stands as a defiant refutation of de Soto’s formalization. It documents the legal coding of Appalachia as capital, and the precarity, poverty, and expropriation that followed. In the half decade since its publication, Ramp Hollow has largely been overlooked by legal academia (with the notable exception of Professor Ann Eisenberg’s Distributive Justice and Rural America). In recent years, however, property and development scholars have increasingly pushed back against the transformation of land into a fungible and prioritized asset class in the name of economic efficiency and at the cost of rural dispossession. This work should prompt a reevaluation of Ramp Hollow not as a history of Appalachia, but as a legal history of the making of property and poverty in rural America. In an era where capital markets increasingly demand mapping, demarcation and quantification, Ramp Hollow tells the story of a territory and a people consumed by the map entirely.
The Map and the Mountains
Ramp Hollow opens with a literal map, an 1867 “Title Map of the Coal Field of the Great Kanawha Valley,” showing ownership boundaries surrounding Charleston, West Virginia. This map, complete with details delineating the depth and quality of coal seams, the value of the timber, and the navigability of rivers to market, contains an extensive disclaimer:
This Map . . . is made from authentic documents of record, showing the ancient surveys, now of valid title, as the boundaries have been determined and fixed by litigation or otherwise . . . Considerable portions of some of the large surveys are held by senior patentees (included under prior claims), or junior patentees holding adversely; or under possessory rights under the Virginia Statutes. All such claims are held in severalty.
It sold in two locations: Charleston, West Virginia and 28 Liberty Street, New York, New York—two blocks from the New York Stock Exchange.
Similar maps drove investment in distant capital markets, which turned to Appalachia to fuel the industrial revolution. “Looked at this way,” Stoll writes, “a mundane illustration of cadastral boundaries, ‘fixed by litigation or otherwise,’ posed a threat in cartographic form—a lit fuse in the ongoing war over the control of subsistence in the southern mountains.” (Stoll at 4).
Early Appalachia was the site of overlapping ownership claims. Following the American Revolution, states made enormous grants of land to soldiers, politicians, and financiers, who held the land as financial assets but rarely visited. Meanwhile, squatters had already claimed much of the land for immediate sustenance, with the expectation that state governments would eventually acknowledge their titles. “[O]wners filed deeds and forgot about them, unaware that a frontier society took shape on their property.” (Stoll at 9).
This created two systems of property, one represented by official grants and private surveys and the other enacted by settlers occupying and exchanging “scraps of landscape with impunity.” (Stoll at 102). As a result, “[a] grantee residing in Philadelphia often had no idea that hundreds or thousands of people regularly bought and sold parts of his estate.” (Stoll at 103). By 1800, counties were registering and taxing land that was separately registered to investors hundreds of miles away. In the shadow of these titling conflicts, local communities used the land in a way that Stoll characterizes as an Appalachian commons. While Appalachia was largely titled, “[i]t functioned as common property.” (Stoll at 61). Those who were technically “landless” still had access to what Stoll calls the “ecological base.” They hunted, foraged, and ran livestock in the Appalachian forests and meadows. Locals who claimed hundreds of acres “usually improved no more than twenty.” (Stoll at 108).
Property pluralism set the stage for the enclosure of Appalachia. Virginia, for example, established a system of “senior patents,” officially recorded title, and “junior patents,” transferrable use-rights established by prior use. (Stoll at 159). This transition is described by de Soto himself. In de Soto’s story, America gradually formalized “extralegal arrangements,” which “left the assets of the American settlers and miners primed to be converted to capital.” (De Soto at 101).
Stoll fills in the gritty reality elided by de Soto’s phrase, “converted to capital.” Dual titling preserved absentee speculators’ rights in the face of adverse possession. As the value of Appalachia’s timber and minerals increased, agents were dispatched to align speculators’ claims with the reality on the ground. Sometimes they bought land outright, but agents also leveraged the system’s uncertainty and exploited every ambiguity in local titling. They offered clear surface title for mineral rights or swapped use-rights for title “as an intermediate step to removing people.” (Stoll at 159–162). Many Appalachians traded more than they realized. Distant mineral owners were free to reshape the surface: damning creeks, constructing access roads, and stripping away mountainsides. Mining and logging destroyed the ecological base, making subsistence more difficult in what little forest remained. This increased the pressure on Appalachians to turn their claims into cash. (Stoll at 159–165).
The Map and the Mountaineer
The legal coding of Appalachian resources went beyond land titling. Although many think of subsistence agrarians as “poor,” Stoll shows that labor and production in the Appalachian commons were diversified and early Appalachians were far more insulated from changes to markets, crops, or circumstances than modern workers. (Stoll at 28–29, 33–34). Legal coding designed to tie individuals to broader markets undercut this diversification.
Currency was the first tool of Appalachian development. Early Appalachians engaged in some market production, but goods were often traded locally without conversion into cash. (Stoll at 117). The 1791 whiskey tax, which demanded cash and made no distinction between home consumption and commerce, sought to change that. (Stoll at 89, 98, 110). Alexander Hamilton and his contemporaries viewed the tax as a development tool that required mountaineers to convert a “product of their labor to money” and would draw new resources into markets. (Stoll at 93, 97).
Attempts to make local economies fungible often precipitate crisis because fungibility and alienability go hand in hand. The whiskey tax provoked the Whiskey Rebellion and was ultimately scrapped. (Stoll at 97–98, 117). However, Stoll draws a line between Hamilton’s whiskey tax to Wickard v. Filburn, the well-known 1942 decision in which a unanimous Supreme Court held that even wheat produced for home consumption affected interstate commerce (and, as a result, was subject to federal regulation). (Stoll at 248). He also connects Appalachian development to the “green revolution” in the Philippines and to modern “land grabbing” in Mali, which each encouraged interdependence with markets at the expense of self-sufficiency. (Stoll at 259–263, 286). Throughout history, Stoll argues, development of Appalachia meant drawing its labor and products into the global market.
As mining and logging increased, wage labor proliferated. These were hard jobs, but initially the commons limited companies’ leverage. Appalachians could resist dangerous or exploitative conditions by simply returning to subsistence farming. In response, companies sought more vulnerable labor, hiring formerly enslaved people or immigrant workers with no land to fall back on. (Stoll at 220–221). Eventually, the enclosure and erosion of Appalachia’s ecological base “threw people into wage work.” (Stoll at 57, 174, 148).
As Appalachians shifted to wage labor, coal companies offered a simulacrum of the lost commons. Company houses with “captured gardens” allowed workers to grow some of their own food and companies to offer lower wages. At the same time, companies issued “scrip,” private coinage redeemable in company stores that was paid to workers as credit or in lieu of wages. (Stoll at 122–23). Scrip unwound Hamilton’s efforts and severed Appalachians, whose resources and labor were now fully in the global economy, from the benefits of that economy. Housing, subsistence, and currency were tied to employment. “Provision grounds became battlegrounds over the control of life and work, with companies restricting access to food during labor actions.” (224). When striking miners were fired, they lost access to their homes, food, and even their saved scrip “currencies” (223–35). Although labor conditions eventually improved through decades of activism, 20th century Appalachians who traded property rights for contractual ones found themselves thrust into a legal ecosystem of precarity.
Off the Edges of the Map
Ramp Hollow contains complexities that belie any attempt to perfectly extract a moral, and its ambitious scope leaves lots of ground uncharted. It focuses on a certain set of Appalachians—white agrarian settlers. Still, Stoll repeatedly returns to the theme of racialization, which he casts as a phenomenon that followed economic interests. Stoll describes how Appalachian stereotypes changed based on settlers’ relationship to the economic elite. (Stoll at 16, 21–23, 278). He draws analogies between coal miners and Black sharecroppers (Stoll at 233–34) and between the enclosure of Appalachia and the forced removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears. “In both instances,” Stoll claims, “a privileged commercial class depicted the members of a target group as a despised race before taking their land.” (Stoll at 24).
Stoll’s argument, however, shows the limits of economic theories of race. The bigotry described in Ramp Hollow is shorn of the racial-legal hierarchies embedded in Jim Crow laws, legalized seizure of Native American lands, or other discriminatory legal structures. White Appalachians remained “white” in the eyes of the law, free to move between the worlds of speculators, workers, and agrarians.
Ramp Hollow has also attracted criticism for neglecting women’s role in Appalachian development. This is warranted. Ramp Hollow pays little attention to women, and none to women outside of the family unit. Similarly, by focusing on dispossession spurred by capitalist investors, Ramp Hollow does not engage with works that address legal coding and dispossession through other lenses, or grapple at any length with the Appalachian dispossession that preceded it—the often-violent removal of Native Americans at the hands of early settlers whose lives, Stoll repeatedly emphasizes, “did not conform to the rationale described by capitalist political economy.” (Stoll at 68–69).
Ramp Hollow ends with a policy proposal cum manifesto, of sorts—Stoll argues vigorously for the (re)creation of “commons communities” to alleviate modern Appalachian precarity. Given the omissions discussed in this review, this closing falls flat. Ramp Hollow persuasively argues that distant capital’s need for measurability, predictability, and fungibility caused immense suffering in Appalachia. Readers will likely be less persuaded that the remedy is to recreate the status quo of the men who, through rifle and title, imposed their own legal order to seize the Appalachian Mountains.
Conclusion
Despite these omissions, Ramp Hollow is a masterpiece, and shows the human cost of coding Appalachia as capital. Ramp Hollow falls in a long tradition of detailed historical scholarship outlining the “conquest by law” that characterized America’s continental expansion. In addition, the story Stoll tells about legal transformation is uniquely relevant to modern rural scholarship because enclosure and formalization are active, not historic, legal battles. Changing technologies and land uses, including the boom in wind and solar energy and increasing financialization of farmland, have sparked renewed property conflicts across the country. In the face of these challenges, the human struggles described in Ramp Hollow present a warning against embracing de Soto’s “just-so” story of property.
Appalachia’s legal transformation, and the power of maps to remake territory, is perhaps best told through a story—not from Ramp Hollow, but one I learned as a young boy growing up in West Virginia. The story is recounted in The Appalachians, a natural history of the region by Professor Maurice Brooks. “Some years before the Civil War, a speculating land company bought a tract of 69,000 acres on the slope of Shavers Mountain,” Brooks recounts. In mapping their new purchase, however, the company’s surveyors confused true north and magnetic north—a difference of four degrees. This error left unclaimed a wedge of forest seven miles long, totaling almost 900 acres. A local “brought the error to light, and under a sort of ‘doctrine of vacancy,’ claimed the wedge of land left by a corrected survey. … While timber above and below the wedge was cut, this narrow holding was undisturbed.”
Today, of the 10,000,000 acres of virgin forest that covered West Virginia when the enclosure of Appalachia began, those unmapped acres are nearly all that remain.