In the beginning, all the world was America.

Locke makes this remark in his discussion of property and political society in the Second Treatise of Government (published 1689). Arguing against the idea that legitimate ownership depends on royal grant or ancient title, he describes an original “state of nature” in which land is held in common and becomes private property through labor and use. America—understood by Locke as sparsely settled and largely uncultivated by Europeans—serves as his contemporary example of conditions resembling that early state. The line functions rhetorically to naturalize his account of early human society and to support his labor theory of property by pointing to what he takes to be observable practices among Indigenous peoples and in colonial settings.

The sentence compresses Locke’s claim that humanity once lived without settled government, money, or extensive private landholding: the world began in a condition like what Europeans imagined “America” to be—abundant land, low population density, and limited enclosure. In Locke’s argument, this supports the idea that private property can arise legitimately from labor prior to formal political institutions. The phrase is also revealing historically: it turns “America” into a conceptual stand-in for primitiveness and origin, a move that helped later writers justify colonial appropriation by treating Indigenous land use as insufficient “improvement.” Thus the line is both a key pivot in Locke’s property theory and a telling artifact of early modern colonial ideology.