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From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World

From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World

Author: James Q. Whitman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781009497534
Published In: January 2025
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, the paradigmatic example was often a slave. In this seminal work, James Q. Whitman asserts that there is no natural form of ownership. Whitman dives deep into the long Western history of this transformation in the legal imagination - the transformation from the ownership of humans and other living creatures to the ownership of land. This change extended over many centuries, coming to fruition only on the threshold of the modern era. It brought with it profound changes, not only in the way we understand ownership but also in the way we understand the state. Its most dramatic consequence arrived in the nineteenth century, with the final disappearance of the lawful private ownership of humans, which had been taken for granted for thousands of years.

'A brilliant book with a bold thesis, monstrously erudite, spanning centuries of diverse legal cultures, and written with dazzling clarity and overwhelming authority. This is comparative legal history at its very best.' - Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School, and author of Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law

'James Whitman presents us with a tremendously valuable and important work, erudite yet accessible, that would interest a wide readership. This study shows why history matters: that property in Western thought had transformed from control over people to control over land matters because it had left us with traces otherwise inexplicable, most particularly, the idea of absolute dominium, and the license to employ violence to obtain, maintain and secure property.' - Tamar Herzog, Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs, Harvard University

'Whitman dazzlingly sets out the power of the legal imagination in producing and embedding historical change across the longue duree. He unpeels the palimpsest of property law in this dizzyingly intellectual book. The scholarship is immense, and the implications profound.' - Hannah Skoda, Fellow and Tutor in History, St John's College, Oxford

Introduction: owning humans, owning land, two primitive modes of the property imagination

Part I. Masters of Men and Beasts:

1. Hierarchy and the hunt for prey: the anthropology of early human ownership

2. Masters of men and beasts: the early Roman fantasia of ownership

3. The dominus enters the law

4. Classical Roman slave law: the just hunt for human prey

5. An empire of the chieftainship over people

Part II. From Masters to Lords:

6. Introduction to Part II: from Pierson v. Post to Johnson v. M'Intosh

7. From slavery to feudalism: the great hypothesis

8. From masters to lords in late antiquity

9. From the law of owning humans to the law of owning land: the early modern culmination