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Sto caricando le informazioni... Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownershipdi Andro Linklater
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Historian Andro Linklater, who died in 2013, was inspired to write what became his last book by the economic crisis of 2008. Inequality was rising and social mobility falling: the top 3% of British taxpayers owned almost 80% of the country's wealth. For Linklater, the question of ownership lay at the heart of the boom and subsequent crash. Owning the Earth is a remarkably wide-ranging and erudite study that explores the global history of possessing land. Thought-provoking and original, it is packed with insights into the history and politics of ownership. Beginning in the 16th century with the carving up of the New World, he traces the emergence in England of the idea that one person could exclusively own a piece of the Earth. He argues that this idea has destroyed traditional systems of rights and responsibilities binding communities to the land, promoting instead an individualistic culture of "greed and selfishness". He concludes that "the private property society" is "a bizarre mutation alien to most of humanity" and a "monstrous method of owning the earth".
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. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)333.309Social sciences Economics Economics of land & energy Private ownership Biography And HistoryClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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If I have to be honest, I was decidedly speed reading after the first fifty pages. This is no criticism of Mr Linklater, simply that he goes into more detail than I wished so to do. I am only interested in a basic overview: this book gives so much more. If you have any desire to know the rules that lead to the current land ownership system, this book is for you - and I confess that whilst I had some idea, in certain areas, I was way off beam... ( )