“[…] under the doctrine of res nullius, most famously embraced by John Locke, only that private property in land which is productive of value (that is, which involves the application of productive social labour for commodity production) is deemed legitimate. Failure to produce value (and surplus value) not only justified the wholesale dispossession of the land rights of the Irish by the British, it also justified the wiping out and dispossession of ‘unproductive’ indigenous populations to make way for the ‘productive’ colonisers particularly throughout the Americas and now across much of Africa.”

– David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism