Owning the earth : the transforming history of land ownership / Andro Linklater.
Linklater, Andro, author.
2013
HD1251 .L496 2013 (Mapit)
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Title Owning the earth : the transforming history of land ownership / Andro Linklater.
Author Linklater, Andro, author.
Edition First U.S. edition.
ISBN 9781620402894 hardcover alkaline paper
1620402890 hardcover alkaline paper
Published New York : Bloomsbury, 2013.
Language English
Description viii, 482 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Call Number HD1251 .L496 2013
Dewey Decimal Classification 333.309
Summary Overview: Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history by, Andro Linklater persuasively argues, the most creative and at the same time destructive cultural force in the modern era-the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land. Spreading from both shores of the north Atlantic, it laid waste to traditional communal civilizations, displacing entire peoples from their homelands, but at the same time brought into being a unique concept of individual freedom and a distinct form of representative government and democratic institutions. By contrast, as Linklater demonstrates, other great civilizations, in Russia, China, and the Islamic world, evolved very different structures of land ownership and thus very different forms of government and social responsibility. The history and evolution of landownership is a fascinating chronicle in the history of civilization, offering unexpected insights about how various forms of democracy and capitalism developed, as well as a revealing analysis of a future where the Earth must sustain nine billion lives. Seen through the eyes of remarkable individuals-Chinese emperors; German peasants; the seventeenth century English surveyor William Petty, who first saw the connection between private property and free-market capitalism; the American radical Wolf Ladejinsky, whose land redistribution in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea after WWII made possible the emergence of Asian tiger economies-Owning the Earth presents a radically new view of mankind's place on the planet.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references (pages 449-466) and index.
Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
All Resources
A new way of owning the earth
The concept
The rights and politics of owning the earth
The rights of private property
The two capitalisms
The morality of property
The alternative to private property
What came before
The peasants
Autocratic ownership
The equilibrium of land ownership
The society that private property created
Land becomes mind
The independence of an owner
The challenge to private property
The triumph of individual ownership
The evolution of property
The empire of land
The end of serfdom and slavery
The crisis of capitalism
The threat to democracy
State capitalism
The Cold war
The end of land reform
Rostow's legacy
The experiment that failed
The economics of the industrial home
Undoing the damage
Feeding the future
Epilogue.

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