The Puritan ability to justify atrocities in the name of a divinely privileged social order was shocking. Their tendency to project onto aberrant women and fiendish Indians the dark forces of their own desire could lead to horrendous consequences. Making this even worse was a rapidly expanding thirst for land and market growth. In this turbulent combination of disordered passions, it became a matter of convention that nature itself required an exercise of dominion akin to the mastery of unruly women and native peoples. Land was assumed to be an “object” involving proprietary rights, no longer
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