The actual nature of the land rioters in New Jersey and New York seems to be in dispute. The causes are perhaps straightforward enough. Titles to land in the new colonies were often made by monarchs far away in England, with only the vaguest description as to where the properties were located, and no surveying to clarify. This resulted in not only overlapping claims by the different states as to borders, but also overlapping claims by those awarded the land, or buying it. This was an enormous problem in almost all of the colonies, and because it would involve many claimants and surveys, it often required a long time to sort out. The grant to Lord Fairfax of territory in northern Virginia, for example, created a mess that took several decades to resolve ( and gave George Washington a job as a surveyor for a while). New York's land riots basically seem to have been fueled by smallholders and tenant farmers's resentment towards the few wealthy families that owned and controlled most of the Hudson Valley: but you could add the creation of Vermont and the action of the Green Valley Boys into that picture. New Jersey is perhaps the odder case, where the territory was taken from the Dutch and two proprietors were named, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, who divided the state between them. But then the military governor of New York also granted that land to others, largely Puritans, who moved in. Then some other settlers bought land from resident Indian nations, which they claimed had the real rights to sell it, and finally, because many of the landholders did not actually occupy all their holdings, squatters moved in to the vacant areas as well. New Jersey seems to have had a special kind of chaos over who could own what. The landowners might control the court system, but they were far outnumbered by the smallholders, so although a rioter might be thrown in jail by a proprietor, he might be quickly liberated by a sympathetic mob of his friends.

Now, some would like to see this as a prelude to the real revolution, and that might be true. The Revolutionary war was, for many, an assertion of egalitarian notions , and in the land riots you can discern a contest between the powerful elites and the poorer masses. But some of those elites lined up against the British, during the war, and not all the poor masses did the same, and there were other important divisions, religious and ethnic, that separated or aligned the various groups. It's outside my field, really, and I won't take a stand: maybe a specialist will wander by and comment. But you can certainly say that these were all disputes caused by people wanting land, arable land. Agriculture was the way most people lived, and to an agricultural society, land is money, but unlike money, land doesn't increase. There were a lot of immigrants streaming into the colonies wanting a share. Between 1700 and 1720 the population of colonists doubled, and between 1720 and 1740 it doubled again, to reach almost a million, and in 1760 it was around 1.5 million. That's a pretty big number of farmers getting off a boat and wanting someplace to plow and some trees for making into a house, and with the chaotic state of land titles, boundaries and surveys it's not very surprising that there was often trouble as a result. That desire for land would eventually put the Colonists into territory claimed by France, resulting in the French and Indian War ( or Seven Years War). Who had to pay for that war was of course soon a part of the colonists' complaints, when it ended. But also a major complaint was over the Royal Proclamation of 1763, at the end of the War, in which the English government acquiesced to the Indian nations and fastened a border along the Alleghenies, beyond which no new settlement could be established. Some of the colonists had already started trying their luck further west: that shut the door on them. While it's possible that some sort of negotiated settlement could have been reached between the British government and the Continental Congress that would have prevented the Revolutionary War from igniting, there's no doubt that the prospect of undoing the Proclamation of 1763 and getting access to more land in the west motivated colonists fighting it. As soon as fighting stopped, land speculators swarmed into what's now Kentucky and, yes, began staking out so many overlapping claims that they would later be described as shingling the state. Happily, the Northwest Ordnance set down rules for claims in the northern territories, so Ohio and Indiana avoided similar chaos.

Brendan McConville: Those Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey