Politics & Power Quote by Harry Johnston

Adventure writing often disguises itself as neutral science, and Johnston is doing that trick here: turning the peopling of the Americas into a tidy, almost managerial story about resource acquisition. The sentence has the calm, panoramic voice of the imperial-era explorer, the kind that implies a godlike altitude over deep time. It sounds descriptive, but it quietly argues for a worldview in which humans are primarily economic animals, always scanning for “feeding grounds” and “unoccupied areas” like a species-sized prospecting party.

The key word is “unoccupied.” Johnston isn’t just narrating migration; he’s importing a colonial legal fiction into prehistory. “Unoccupied” reads like terra nullius, a term used to rationalize European seizure of land by claiming it was empty or improperly used. By projecting that logic back onto the first Americans, he naturalizes the idea that land exists to be taken if it’s not currently claimed in a recognizable way. Even “wonderful event” adds a soft moral gloss, framing expansion as progress, not disruption.

Context matters: Johnston wrote in a period when anthropology and exploration were entangled with empire. Diffusionist models and armchair reconstructions of human movement often mirrored contemporary European anxieties and ambitions: mapping the world, classifying peoples, explaining possession. The line’s intent isn’t simply to explain how migration happened; it’s to make that movement feel inevitable, rational, and materially justified. That’s effective rhetoric because it launders ideology through “common sense” biology, letting a political story pass as a natural one.