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Owning the earth : the transforming history of land ownership / Andro Linklater.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Bloomsbury USA, 2013Edition: First U.S. editionDescription: viii, 482 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 1620402890 (alk. paper)
  • 9781620402894 (alk. paper)
Subject(s):
Contents:
Introduction: the birth of a revolution -- 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: a final trespass.
Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 333.309 L756 Available 33111007451822
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: the birth of a revolution -- 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: a final trespass.

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