Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership

By Andro Linklater

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 as a result of the most creative – and, at the same time, destructive – cultural force in the modern era: the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land.

This notion laid waste to traditional communal civilisations, displacing entire peoples from their homelands, and brought into being a unique concept of individual freedom and a distinct form of representative government and democratic institutions. 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 seventeenth-century English surveyor William Petty was the first man to recognise the connection between private property and free-market capitalism; the American radical Wolf Ladejinsky redistributed land in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea after the Second World War to make possible the emergence of Asian tiger economies. Through the eyes of these remarkable individuals and many more, including Chinese emperors and German peasants, Andro Linklater here presents the evolution of land ownership to offer a radically new view of mankind's place on the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781408824597

Andro Linklater

Andro Linklater has been a writer for twenty years. He is the author of The Black Watch (with his father, Eric Linklater); Charlotte Despard: A Life; Compton Mackenzie: A Life (winner of the Scottish Arts Council Biography of the Year Award); Wild People: Travels with Borneo’s Head Hunters; and The Code of Love (Weidenfeld 2000).

Reviews for Owning the Earth

[the7ken7petersen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a well written and well researched book about the way that the Earth became owned by the few. Andro Linklater covers the philosophy and history of land snatches and the beliefs which were attached to justify same.If I have to be honest, I was decidedly speed reading after the first fifty pages. This is no criticism of Mr Linklater, simply that he goes into more detail than I wished so to do. I am only interested in a basic overview: this book gives so much more. If you have any desire to know the rules that lead to the current land ownership system, this book is for you - and I confess that whilst I had some idea, in certain areas, I was way off beam...