Has land ownership changed our lives for better or for worse?

If the gentle reader has any concerns that a study of land ownership might tend to the dry, they will be dispelled in the very first pages of this book by the spectacular flamboyance of its opening. There is not an economist in sight. Instead, we have the piratical figure of the Sir Humphrey Gilbert — Elizabethan seadog, soldier and mathematician, ‘openly bisexual’, and with the arresting habit of ‘decapitating his enemies after battle [and] then lining the path to his tent with their severed heads’ — returning in 1583 from the first expedition to create an English colony in North America.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert stands proxy for a momentous historical transformation. For in Owning the Earth, Andro Linklater argues that Gilbert’s England was the first state to replace feudal principles of land ownership, founded on obligations of service and custom, with a radically new theory of landholding that asserted ‘exclusive control of the ground’: landed property was something absolutely at the disposal of the owner, to use and profit by as he saw fit.