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.

Within archaeological studies, land tenure has been mainly studied from the viewpoint of ownership. A host of studies has argued about land ownership on the basis of the simple co-existence of artefacts on the landscape; other studies have tended to extrapolate land ownership from more indirect means. Particularly noteworthy is the tendency to portray land ownership as the driving force behind the emergence of social complexity, a primordial ingredient in the processes that led to the political and economic expansion of prehistoric societies. The association between people and land in all of these interpretive schemata is however less easy to detect analytically. Although various rubrics have been employed to identify such a connection – most notable among them the concepts of ‘cultures,’ ‘regions,’ or even ‘households’ – they take the links between land and people as a given and not as something that needs to be conceptually defined and empirically substantiated. An Archaeology of Land Ownership demonstrates that the relationship between people and land in the past is first and foremost an analytical issue, and one that calls for clarification not only at the level of definition, but also methodological applicability. Bringing together an international roster of specialists, the essays in this volume call attention to the processes by which links to land are established, the various forms that such links take and how they can change through time, as well as their importance in helping to forge or dilute an understanding of community at various circumstances.

In Colonial Lives of Property Brenna Bhandar examines how modern property law contributes to the formation of racial subjects in settler colonies and to the development of racial capitalism. Examining both historical cases and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and Israel and Palestine, Bhandar shows how the colonial appropriation of indigenous lands depends upon ideologies of European racial superiority as well as upon legal narratives that equate civilized life with English concepts of property. In this way, property law legitimates and rationalizes settler colonial practices while it racializes those deemed unfit to own property. The solution to these enduring racial and economic inequities, Bhandar demonstrates, requires developing a new political imaginary of property in which freedom is connected to shared practices of use and community rather than individual possession.

Trespassing, "a thoughtful, beautifully written addition to environmental and regional literature" (Kirkus Reviews), is a historical survey of the evolution of private ownership of land, concentrating on the various land uses of a 500-acre tract of land over a 350-year period. What began as wild land controlled periodically by various Native American tribes became British crown land after 1654, then private property under US law, and finally common land again in the late twentieth century. Mitchell considers every aspect of the important issue of land ownership and explores how our attitudes toward land have changed over the centuries.