In his military campaigns into Gaul, Julius Caesar used Roman citizenship through service in the Legion as a means to introduce Roman property law; and more importantly displace Celtic tribal law. Citizenship became a mechanism for establishing Roman legal control in conquered Gaul.
The interface between the English and Eoran in 1788 wasn't racial, it was legal. Conflict was essentially over two different legal systems and the northern Eoran, according to Keneally, attempted to integrate the English into their legal system through the ritualised spearing of Arthur Phillip by Willemering. I think Keneally's argument has a great deal of merit.
The Aboriginal peoples had property laws, and their legal system, despite being non-secular, had very violent ramifications for those that broke the law . Violence is in the eye of the beholder, while the English were shocked at how indirect the Eoran blood-debt system could be, the English were just as violent and showed no qualms about hanging or lashing an individual over a property crime.
Roman property laws followed the principle of pater-familias. The highest ranking male in the family has absolute power, including life and death, over all individuals and property that the family owns. This includes the property of married sons, etc. The absolute power didn't end when a child became an adult as it does in a modern legal system.
There were exceptions in later Rome, for instance soldiers were excepted from pater-familias by Augustus, and could dispose of their pay and booty as they deemed fit. The Roman Twelve Tablets, which was the first attempt to place customary law into writing, also absolved a son from patra-potestus if he was sold by the pater-familias more than three times.
By Caesar granting Roman citizenship to Gaellic soldiers in the legions, any property they owned fell under Roman law, and as the leading male in their family, courtesy of their citizenship, that land passed from under Gaellic law into Roman law - dissipating the control of the Celtic kings, oligarchs and nobles.
From Colin Wells' The Roman Empire:
It is clear from Caesar's own account that he profited from and exploited divisions between pro and anti-Roman factions in most [Gallic] tribes. The main benefit of citizenship in Gaul will have been to bring the new citizen under the Roman law of property, which probably meant that they could now be held wholly and in perpetuity land which probably under Celtic tribal law belonged to the tribe, although in some way assigned to the chief or one of the other tribal nobility. Centuries later, the coming of English law, first to Wales, and later to the Scottish highlands, produced a similar effect.It has been common on agrarian systems for the nobility, or those with access to legislative power, have exploited so-called public land, for personal benefit. The Roman Senators in later centuries exploited land held by Rome and would not give it up, a more recent and local example, is the squattocracy in NSW of the early and middle 19thC. Caesar's granting of citizenship to Gaellic legionaries and nobles who supported his cause, appears to be a policy of dissipating the economic, and hence political power, of the Gaellic nobility. x-posted to eurotrib
