Simon Winchester - The Ownership of Everything

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DEDICATED TO CHIEF STANDING BEAR

In 1879 the U.S. government declared this
Ponca chief to be a person under the law.

But they still took away his lands.

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU ,
Discourse on Inequality (1755)

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

1: Transaction

2: Foundation

3: Population

4: Exploitation

5: Demarcation, Eviction, Possession

6: Exploration

Part I: Borderlines

1: When the Worm Forgave the Plough

2: The Size of All the Earth

3: Just Where is Everything

4: At the Edges of Worlds

5: Drawing a Distinction

Part II: Annals of Acquisition

1: Up and Out and on the Level

2: Islands of the Dammed

3: Red Territory

4: The Land and the Gentry

Part III: Stewardship

1: The Tragedies of Improvement

2: The Accumulators of Space

3: Going Nowhere and Everywhere

4: The World Made Wild Again

5: On Wisdom, Down Under

6: Parks, Recreation, and Plutonium

Part IV: Battlegrounds

1: The Dreary Steeples

2: The Unholy Land

3: Death on the Rich Black Earth

4: Concentration and Confiscation

Part V: Annals of Restoration

1: Mori in Arcady

2: Strangers in the Hebrides

3: Bringing Africa Home

4: Aliens in Wonderland

5: Trust is Everything

Epilogue: Yet Now the Land is Drowning

With Great Thanks

A Glossary of Terms, Some Possibly Unfamiliar, Associated with Land and Its Ownership

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Also by Simon Winchester

Copyright

About the Publisher

UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, ALL IMAGES ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR ARE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.

Chief Standing Bear

An early American land deed

Map of Dutchess County, New York

Crofter using a caschrom plough (courtesy of Getty Images)

Strip lynchets (courtesy of Alamy)

Beating the bounds (courtesy of Getty Images)

Struve Geodetic arc

Albrecht Penck (courtesy of Getty Images)

IMW sheet (courtesy of Marcy Bidney)

Sir Cyril Radcliffe (courtesy of Getty Images)

Wagah border gate ceremony (courtesy of Getty Images)

View of U.S.Canada border, showing the vista (courtesy of the International Boundary Commission)

Southern part of Raasay on Ordnance Survey map (courtesy of Ordnance Survey, 1947)

Cornelis Lely (courtesy of Getty Images)

Flevoland (courtesy of Getty Images)

Railroad broadside for land (kansasmemory.org, Kansas State Historical Society)

Unassigned lands in Oklahoma

Land Run in full spate (courtesy of Getty Images)

Guthrie buildings (courtesy of Getty Images)

Domesday Book (courtesy of Getty Images)

An Enclosure Act

The Mannie (courtesy of Alamy)

Dunrobin Castle (courtesy of Getty Images)

A crofters home (courtesy of Getty Images)

Gina Rinehart (courtesy of Getty Images)

Ted Turner (courtesy of Getty Images)

Shooting bison from a train (courtesy of Getty Images)

Land owned by the Wilks brothers (courtesy of Max Whittaker)

Patent 157124 for barbed wire

Wildlife in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) (courtesy of Getty Images)

Burrell and Tree at Knepp ( Christopher Pledger/Telegraph Media Group Limited, 2018)

Purloined aboriginal shield (courtesy of Alamy)

Cool fires being set (courtesy of Alamy)

The Maidan, Kolkata (courtesy of Getty Images)

Destruction of Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis (courtesy of Getty Images)

Map showing gap in Denver beltway (courtesy of AAA)

Rocky Flats plant (courtesy of Getty Images)

Palestine border wall (courtesy of Getty Images)

Soviet propaganda poster for Ukraine

Memorial to Ukrainian victims (courtesy of Getty Images)

Strawberry Festival in Bellevue, Washington

Minidoka, Idaho, concentration camp (courtesy of Alamy)

Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (courtesy of Alamy)

Whina Cooper on the Land March, New Zealand

Queen Elizabeth signs apology (courtesy of Getty Images)

Island of Ulva (courtesy of Getty Images)

Isle of Eigg (courtesy of Getty Images)

Sgurr of Eigg, Scotland

Cecil Rhodes bestriding Africa (courtesy of Getty Images)

Violent occupation of a colonial farm, Zimbabwe (courtesy of Alamy)

John Muir (courtesy of Getty Images)

Miwok Indians in Yosemite

Vinoba Bhave (courtesy of Getty Images)

Henry George (courtesy of Alamy)

Land Value Tax wagon (courtesy of Alamy)

Land being inundated (courtesy of David Freese)

Chief Sealth (courtesy of Getty Images)

Idealized vision of a yeoman farmer (courtesy of Alamy)

Tolstoy and horse (courtesy of Getty Images)

It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that cant fly away.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE ,
The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)

---

A Caveat

W ith the worlds sea level rising fast, the assumption that land is the only thing that cant fly away, or the only thing that lasts, is for the first time now shown to be demonstrably false. The belief in lands limitless stability has informed humankinds approach to the possession of the worlds surface for centuries past, as the following pages illustrate. But now a profound change is coming.

The future is a foreign country: they will do things differently there.

---

O n a warm midsummers evening just before the end of the last century, in a book-lined lawyers office in the pretty town of Kent, Connecticut, I handed over a check for a moderate sum in dollars to a second-generation Sicilian American, a plumber named Cesare, who lived in the Bronx but who had driven up into the lush New England countryside especially for the brief formalities of this day. The all-too-complicated rituals of what in real estate parlance is called a closing were familiar to the lawyers, less so to me. In exchange for the checka cashiers check, certified by the bank to be as good as cash; the lawyers had insisted; and to me it indeed felt like cash, painfully disbursed, and representing some years of scrupulous saving on my partI was handed by Cesares stone-faced attorney an engraved, embossed, and rather elegant piece of what looked like parchment, a document formally known as a deed.

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