Notes

Introduction: The Birth of a Revolution

a storm of appalling violence: The vivid firsthand account of the Newfoundland expedition comes from Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage to Newfoundland by Edward Hayes, originally incorporated into Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberie, 1589),

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3338.

Principall Navigations also contains a portrait of Gilbert’s character.

crystal ball or scrying stone: the British Museum has a crystal ball, and the Science Museum in London has a flat black disc known as a Claude stone, both of which belonged to Dr. Dee. Each was apparently used in his esoteric researches, especially after his association with Edward Kelley; see John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature by Deborah E. Harkness (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

“5,000 akers of ye new conquest”: July 3, 1582, entry in The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee (London: The Camden Society, 1841–42). The deal was made with Sir George Peckham, another of Gilbert’s partners. But in 1580, Gilbert had promised Dee everything north of the fiftieth degree of latitude, a claim that would have given him most of Canada.

“all the soyle of all such lands”: “Letters Patent to Sir Humfrey Gylberte,” available online at

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/16th_century/humfrey.asp.

“the elevation of the pole”: Hayes, Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage.

an adult must consume a minimum: Calorie counting is as much assumption as science. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’s estimate is at

www.fao.org/hunger/en.

the challenge of caring for the nine billion inhabitants: Figures for 2050 population from the United Nations Commission on Population and Development, 2011; for 2010 farmland, arable and pasture, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistical Yearbook 2012.

intricate warren of dwellings: Population of Dharavi is cited in Alex Perry, “Life in Dharavi, Inside Asia’s Biggest Slum,” Time Asia, June 19, 2006.

“We feel and act about certain things”: William James, “The Consciousness of Self,” in The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1910). That this possessive impulse has a genetic basis is suggested by Jane Goodall’s observation of ownership assertion by the wild chimpanzees of Gombe and the remarkable behavior of Lucy, a chimpanzee who had been taught American Sign Language. Noting Lucy’s absorption in a glossy magazine, Goodall described how at the last page, she signed the comment, “ ‘This Lucy’s, this mine,’ as she closed the magazine and laid it on her lap.” In Jane Goddall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2000).

“This was the room I had to live in”: Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 97.

“Every-single-one-of-them-is-right!”: Rudyard Kipling, “In the Neolithic Age,” in The Works of Rudyard Kipling (London: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994).

much of the world’s grassland: The population of the United States was still largely contained between the Appalachian chain and the Atlantic; the Asian steppes and Siberia were still largely untouched by the Romanov empire; the rapidly disintegrating Hispanic empire was primarily urban; and Africa remained unexplored by Europeans.

This book was devoted: The reference to a “Brytish Impire” first appears in 1577, in Dee’s claim to Gerald Mercator, “That all these Northern Iles and Septentrional Parts are lawfully appropriated to the Crown of this Brytish Impire”; it was published a year later in Dee’s General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation. See E. G. R. Taylor, “A Letter Dated 1577 from Mercator to John Dee,” Imago Mundi, vol. 13 (1956), 55–68.

As night fell: The fate of the Squirrel is recounted in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage.

Chapter One: The Concept

“multitude of chimneys”: William Harrison, “Of the Manner of Building and Furniture of Our Houses,” in Description of Britain and England, originally published in 1578 as part of Chronicles of England by Raphael Hollinshed,

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1577harrison-england.asp.

share the muddy space: Description of French country house in Noël du Fail, Propos rustiques (1549). Modern edition edited by G.-A. Pérouse and R. Dubuis, Propos rustiques de maistre Leon Ladulfi champenois (Geneva: Droz, 1994).

peasants in eastern Europe: Jan Slomka, From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, 1842–1927, trans. by William John Rose (London: Minerva Publishing Co., 1941); reprinted in Documentary History of Eastern Europe, eds. Alfred J. Bannan and Achilles Edelenyi (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), 210–216.

on an island in Puget Sound: William Yardley, “ ‘Barefoot Bandit’ Started Life on the Run Early,” New York Times, July 21, 2010.

I happened to be with dairy farmer: I took this walk with Kristina Andersson in the summer of 2001. As well as upholding the right to own property, Sweden’s 1994 Instrument of Government insists that “everyone shall have access to nature in accordance with allemansrätten [i.e., freedom to roam].”

the planning committee of a kibbutz: Private communication relating to Kibbutz Shomrat. Israel’s nationalization of the land began with purchases made by the Jewish National Fund before 1949 and continued afterwards though the administrative body, the Israel Land Authority, set up by the Basic Land Law of 1960; in step with the rightward shift in Israeli politics, leases have in fact been routinely renewed, and as Joshua Weisman, professor of property law at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, has pointed out, leasehold over ninety-eight years becomes almost indistinguishable from outright ownership.

mountainous jungle of Sarawak: Andro Linklater, Wild People: Travels with Borneo’s Head-hunters (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994).

“If a man owns a little property”: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (London: Penguin, 2001).

“when you enter my home”: Bel Mooney, “My Home,” Good Housekeeping, July 2001.

“a necessity of all human existence”: Winston Churchill, “Land and Income Taxes in the Budget” (speech, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, July 17, 1909).

From about 1450: Historians of the period give different emphases to the ingredients of the sixteenth-century revolution—silver inflation, population growth, the rise of the wool industry, the development of printing, Protestantism, and firearms: the classic positions are those of R. H. Tawney’s emphasis on social and economic upheaval in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: John Murray, 1926); Hugh Trevor-Roper on Calvinism in The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, (London: Macmillan, 1967); Christopher Hill on social upheaval in The English Revolution (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940),

www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution;

Robert Brenner stressing peasant tenure and agricultural production, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe,” Past and Present 70 (1976): 30–74; Guy Bois picking out the impact of inflation on state revenues in La Crise du féodalisme (Paris: FNSP, 1974); Fernand Braudel weaving population growth into technological change in Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century: Volume 1, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (London: Collins, 1981); Marc Bloch on rural change in Land and Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers, trans. by J. E. Anderson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967). And for England in particular, Joan Thirsk giving prominence to rising agricultural production as editor of Agricultural Change, Policy and Practice, vol. 3 in The Agrarian History of England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); G. R. Elton emphasizing inflation and population growth in England under the Tudors (London: Methuen, 1974); Penry Williams selecting enclosure and farm practice in Life in Tudor England (London: Batsford, 1964); Eric Kerridge on rent returns in “The movement of rent, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., VI (I953): 16–34. An important political and sociological substrate stressing private property as the source of individualism appeared in C. B. McPerson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962) and Alan Macfarlane’s The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). Later studies in rights, gender, and culture appear in subsequent chapters.

“the landlord may perhaps have double the rent”: Robert Thoroton, The Antiquities of Nottinghamshire (1677). Cited in Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969).

Close to William Harrison’s parish: Thomas Monnying’s and Joan Payn’s cases, entry for Monday, June 8, 1489 in “The Records of Earls colne,”

http://linux02.lib.cam.ac.uk/earlscolne/cprolls2.

a landlord in the Mekong delta: Robert L. Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam (Boston: MIT Press, 1970), 29.

“the tenants are the members”: John Norden, The Surveyor’s Dialogue (1618). Quoted in Kerridge, Agrarian Problems, 47.

In a single day in 1567: Ibid., 174.

“The earth O Lord”: The prayer appears in the 1553 revision to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s 1549 Book of Common Prayer.

“they plucke downe townes”: Thomas More, Utopia (1516), bk I (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 1888), 32.

“these ryche worldlynges”: Thomas Becon, Works (1564), vol. ii, fols. xvi, xvii. Cited in R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), 7.

“Aftur my sympull reson”: Letter from the Vicar of Quinton in Gloucestershire to the President of Magdalen College, Oxford. Cited in Lord Ernle, “English Farming,” Past and Present (London: Longmans, 1922), 82.

“the first year of king Henry the VII”: Kett’s plea quoted in J. Whittle, “Lords and Tenants in Kett’s Rebellion 1549,” Past & Present 207 (2010): 3.

When Lord Dacre: Andrew Buck, “Rhetoric and the Law of Inheritance,” in The Happy Couple: Law and Literature, ed. by J. Neville Turner and Pamela Williams (London: Federation Press, 1994). See also E. W. Ives, “The Genesis of the Statute of Uses,” English Historical Review 82, no. 325 (Oct. 1967): 673–697.

more than two million acres of farmland: F. A. Hibbert, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London: Pitman, 1910), 2–3.

Among them was the de Vere family: Alan Macfarlane, “The Strife of Two Great Tides: The Harlakenden Case” (lecture, May 1990),

www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Strife.pdf.

“When gentles go walking”: from Thomas Tusser’s Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557); quoted in Penry Williams, Life in Tudor England (London: Batsford, 1964), 87.

The pattern was set: Mary L. Robertson, “Profit and Purpose in the Development of Thomas Cromwell’s Landed Estates,” The Journal of British Studies 29, no. 4 (Oct. 1990): 317–346.

“Merchant Adventurers”: Petition to Henry VIII (1514), quoted in F. J. Furnivall, Ballads from Manuscripts, Publications of the Ballad Society, vol. 1 (1871): 101.

“bie [buy] fermes”: Thomas Lever’s Sermons (1680); Arber’s Reprints; quoted in Ernle, “English Farming,” 94.

a wealthy London cloth merchant: Williams, Life in Tudor England, 103.

Roger Harlakenden, the new owner: Macfarlane, “The Strife of Two Great Tides.”

“there can be no better fodder devised for cattell”: Barnaby Googe, Foure Bookes of Husbandry (1577). Cited in Ernle’s “English Farming,” 152.

“the white rose redd”: George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Field, 1589). Quoted in M. M. Slaughter, “Sacred Kingship and Antinomianism: Antirrhesis and the Order of Things,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 4, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 227–235.

“White meats”: Harrison, Description of Britain and England, ch VI: “The food and diet of the English.”

Chapter Two: The Rights and Politics of Owning the Earth

“during which time”: William Bradford, History of Plimoth Plantation (1620), 57. The description of the first months of the colony’s life is from Bradford.

“The land is our mother”: No documentation exists to show this famous question attributed to Massasoit was uttered by him, but it is entirely consistent with the cultural dilemma he faced between his sworn friendship for the colonists after Edward Winslow helped cure him on his deathbed in 1623—“the English are my friends,” he said, “and love me”—and their incessant desire to acquire Wampanaog land as private property.

springing from Yahweh’s commandment: Leviticus 25:23.

And the laws made it plain: The Code of Hammurabi, online at

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp.

“Plantations are for young men”: Robert C. Winthrop, Life and Letters of John Winthrop (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1864), 329.

“God has given”: Ibid., 311.

“Increase & multiply”: Genesis 1:22.

“appropriated certaine parcells”: John Winthrop, “Reasons to be considered for justifying the undertakers of the intended Plantation in New England, and for encouraging such whose hearts God shall move to join with them in it”; Winthrop Papers (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929–1992), 2:138–145. Online at

http://www.winthropsociety.org/reasons.htm.

Cotton’s sermon: John Cotton, “God’s Promise to His Plantation,” (1630),

http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/22/.

The actual verses cited by John Cotton were from Genesis 21:30–31: “And [Abraham] said ‘for these seven ewe lambs shalt thou take of my hand, that they may be a witness unto me, that I have digged this well.’ Wherefore he called that place Beersheba because there they sware both of them.”

“a city upon a hill”: John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (sermon, printed 1630).

Among the rest of Britain’s burgeoning: The seventeen colonies were Newfoundland (1583), Virginia (1607), Bermuda (1609), Nova Scotia (1621), New Hampshire (1623), Barbados (1627), Massachusetts (1629; incorporating Plymouth in 1620 and Maine in 1622), Maryland (1632), Connecticut (1633), Rhode Island (1636), Jamaica (1655), New York (1664), New Jersey (1664), Carolina (1670), Leeward Islands (1674; incorporating Saint Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat), Pennsylvania (1681; incorporating Delaware in 1664).

“Many good, religious, devout men”: Captain John Smith, Advertisements for the Inexperienced Planters of New England, originally printed by John Haviland in London, 1631;

http://www.winthropsociety.com/doc_adverts.php.

in the words of its sixth-century codifier: The Institutes were issued in AD 535 and remained the basis of Roman or civil law as understood in Europe in the sixteenth century. Apart from the emphasis on mutual obligation, the pattern of civil law tended to advance from abstract principles to practical cases, in distinction to the common law’s testing of cases against precedent and statute.

forcing King John to sign the great charter: Although often taken to embody concepts of liberty as understood by later generations, the actual aims of the barons as delineated in the small number of clauses referring to individual rights are always made in the context of land ownership.

“Day labourers, poor husbandmen”: Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583), ch. 24,

http://www.constitution.org/eng/repang.htm.

“enslave and rule”: Plato, The Republic: Plato in Twelve Volumes, vols. 5 & 6, trans. by Paul Shorey (London: Heinemann Ltd., 1969), bk. 4, sec. 442b.

And the Hindu emphasis: Bhagavad-Gita, ch. 16, verse 21,

http://vedabase.net/bg/16/21.

William Shakespeare paid William Combe: Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 185–86.

measurements that varied: Andro Linklater, Measuring America (New York: Walker Books, 2002), 17–18.

The modern, definitive: Sarah Bendall, Dictionary of Land Surveyors and Local Mapmakers of Great Britain and Ireland (London: British Library, 1997).

the mathematical inventor: Linklater, Measuring America, 23–25.

a subtle change in mortgage law: Thomas Lyttleton, Tenures, ed. by Eugene Wambaugh (Washington, DC.: Byrne, 1903), 157,

http://archive.org/details/littletonstenure00littiala.

“the equity of redemption”: John Brewer and Susan Staves, Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1996), 115–116.

“If you will not take”: Sir John Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 665.

It was important to know what was happening: Thomas Phayer, The New Boke of Presidents, originally published by E. Whytchurche, London, 1543. Cited in Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Taylor & Francis, 1993), 104.

In the bleak words: Sir William Blackstone, “Of Husband and Wife,” in Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1769), bk. 1, 430,

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/blackstone.asp.

Portia dresses the idea in more romantic guise: Merchant of Venice, act 3, sc. 2, lines 157–71.

But in disposing of his own property: E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 170.

the twelve million acres of farmland in England: Farmland in England is extrapolated from Thorold Rogers’s classic, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England from the Year After the Oxford Parliament (1259) to the Commencement of the Continental War, vol. 1, giving an estimate of thirty-two million acres of arable and pasture, including rough pasture, for medieval England; the modern estimates of twelve to thirteen million acres of arable land in such sources as Stephen Broadberry, Bruce Campbell, and B. van Leeuwen, “Arable Acreage in England 1270–1871,” in their long-term study “English Medieval Population: Reconciling Time Series and Cross Sectional Evidence”; and Gregory King, A Scheme of the Income and Expence of the Several Families of England Calculated for the Year 1688, quoted in André Vanoli, A History of National Accounting(Lansdale, PA: IOS Press, 2005), 6.

declared that the selfish behavior of property speculators: Becon, Works, 8.

“superfluous appareling”: François Egerton, The Egerton Papers (London: Bowson, 1840), 247.

“insaciable gredyness of mynde”: quoted in Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 7.

“the rude son”: Troilus and Cressida, act 1, sc. 3.

Chapter Three: The Rights of Private Property

“[T]he earth was not made”: Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers (1649); quoted in Christopher Hill, The English Revolution and online at

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/winstanley/1649/levellers-standard.htm.

the ruinous civil war that wracked: Among numerous sources are Hill, The English Revolution; Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century; The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1638–1660, eds. J. Kenyon. and J. Ohlmeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Trevor Royle, Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1660 (London: Little, Brown, 2004).

“I can tell you, Sirs”: Christopher Hill, Oliver Cromwell, 1658–1958 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1973), 27.

“An arrow against all tyrants”: Richard Overton’s pamphlet, “Printed at the backside of the Cyclopian Mountains, by Martin Claw-Clergy, printer to the reverend Assembly of Divines, to be sold at the sign of the Subject’s Liberty, right opposite to Persecuting Court. 1646,”

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=2252.

The Putney debates broke up: Sir William Clarke, Puritanism and Liberty, being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, ed. by A. S. P. Woodhouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),

http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1322&Itemid=264.

One by one, their ringleaders: R. H. Gretton, The Burford Records: A Study in Minor Town Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920), 251–252.

Thomas Hobbes believed: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Form & Power of a Common-wealth, political and civill (London: Penguin, 1968),

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm.

De Corpore originally printed in London 1655, but composed in the late 1630s; trans. William Molesworth as Elements of Philosophy (London: Bohn, 1839),

http://archive.org/stream/englishworkstho21hobbgoog#page/n8/mode/2up.

Outline of Hobbes’s life and thought at “Thomas Hobbes: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,”

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hobbes.

In 1656, James Harrington published: James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

“When you answer the question”: George M. McBride, The Land Systems of Mexico (New York: American Geographical Society, 1923), 2.

“We believe in the family-size farm”: Harry S. Truman (speech, War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, October 17, 1950).

The earliest formulation of international law, usually credited to Hugo Grotius’s groundbreaking work, in particular, Mare Liberum (1609) and De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1625), came as a response to the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which by papal authority divided the New World between Spain and Portugal. To justify Dutch incursions into the Portuguese half that included the East Indies, Grotius appealed to the prior authority of “natural law,” derived from classical and biblical sources.

“a turbulent state of affairs”: Hugo Grotius, De Iure Belli ac Pacis, bk. 1, ch. 3, section 9,

http://www.constitution.org/gro/djbp_103.htm

Chapter Four: The Two Capitalisms

The best accounts of Petty’s life are to be found in Ted McCormick, Willliam Petty and the Ambition of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Wilson Lloyd Bevan, Sir William Petty: A Study in English Economic Literature (New York: Guggenheimer, Weil & Co., 1894); John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon, 1898). Petty’s writings are to be found in The Collected Works of Sir William Petty (London: Routledge, 1997). Political Arithmetick (1690) is also online:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/petty.

“a bad farmer”: Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, On Agriculture, trans. Harrison Boyd Ash (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941).

For the rising price of land in colonial America, see Andro Linklater Measuring America and A. M. Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble (New York: Harper and Brother, 1932).

“not minding anything but to be masters of great tracts of land”: Robert Beverley, History of Virginia in Four Parts (Richmond, VA: Randolph, 1855), 45.

“by taking up & purchasing”: The Writings of George Washington, ed. by Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), vol. II,

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=2377&chapter=225005&layout=html&Itemid=27.

For changes in the English economy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see The Economic History of Britain since 1700: Vol. I: 1700–1860, ed. Roderick Floud and D. N. McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) second edition; Julian Roche, The International Wool Trade (Cambridge: Woodhead, 1995); Robert C. Allen, “The Price of Freehold Land and the Interest Rate in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” The Economic History Review, New Series, 41, no. 1 (Feb. 1988): 33–50; Robert C. Allen, “The High Wage Economy of Pre-Industrial Britain,”

www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers2/Allen77.pdf.

“the natural fertility of the soil”: Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, 1937), bk. 3, ch. IV, p. 133,

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/index.htm.

For the early development of mercantile capitalism, see Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (London and New York: Penguin, 2008).

“This oligarchical power”: Ibid., 71.

For the economy of the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Simon Schama, An Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Period (London: Collins, 1987); Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).

“Will not only discourage us”: M. F. Epstein, The Early History of the English Levant Company (London: Routledge, 1908), 271.

“It is permitted to every man to enslave himself”: De Iure Belli ac Pacis, bk. 3, sec. 8,

http://www.constitution.org/gro/djbp.htm.

“How selfish soever man”: Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edition (London: Millar, 1790). Part 1, sec. 1, ch. 1, para. 1,

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS1.html.

“That action is best”: Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, first published 1725, modern edition ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2004),

http://files.libertyfund.org/files/858/0449_LFeBk.pdf.

“our own sentiments and motives”: Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, part III, B, ch. 1b, para. c.

“the vices and follies of mankind”: Ibid., part I, sec. 2, ch. 3, para. 4.

“Justice is the main pillar”: Ibid., part II, sec. 2, ch. 3, para. 4.

“two different systems of political economy”: Smith, Wealth of Nations. bk. IV, “Of Systems of Political Economy,” Introduction.

For the Physiocrates see Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats: Six Lectures on the French Economistes of the 18th Century (London: Macmillan and Co., 1897),

http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/286;

the basis of physiocratic economics was, in Quesnay’s phrase, that “la terre est l’unique source des richesses,” a concept that provides the theme of of the first chapter in Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, and is fundamental to William Petty’s Political Arithmetick.

For Richard Cantillon, see W. S. Jevons, “Richard Cantillon and the Nationality of Political Economy,” Contemporary Review (January 1881),

http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/CantillonNature/SingleChaps/Jevons.pdf.

“It is not from the benevolence”: Wealth of Nations, bk. 1, ch. 2, para. 2.

“But the mean rapacity”: Ibid., bk. IV, ch. III, part 2.

Chapter Five: The Morality of Property

“millionous multitudes”: George Alsop, “A Character of the Province of Maryland, 1666,” in Narratives of Early Maryland, ed. Clayton C. Hall (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 345.

“Wild Turkies”: Thomas Ashe, “Carolina, Or a Description of the Present State of that Country, 1682,” in Alexander S. Salley Jr., Narratives of Early Carolina: 1650–1708 (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 150; “such infinite Herds of Deare,” “innumerable of Pines, tall and good for boards or masts,” and forests of oaks with “great Bodies tall and streight,” “like to manure,” Gerald Smith, “God and the Land: Natural Theology and Natural History in America” (lecture, at Sewanee, the University of the South, 1993),

http://www.touroinstitute.com/Religion%20and%20Ecology.pdf.

“we cannot sett downe”: Father Andrew White, “Father White’s Briefe Relation,” (1634), quoted in Narratives of Early Maryland, ed. Clayton C. Hall (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 45.

“The mildnesse of the aire”: Captain John Smith, Description of Virginia and Proceedings of the Colonie, printed in 1612, quoted in Narratives of Early Virginia: 1606–1625, ed. Lyon G. Tyler (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 97–98.

“a most fertile, gallant, rich soil”: Francis Yeardley’s Narrative of Excursions into Carolina, letter dated May 8, 1654, quoted in Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650–1708.

“There is one square”: “Second Letter of Hernando Cortés to Emperor Charles V,” from The Dispatches of Hernando Cortés, The Conqueror of Mexico, addressed to the Emperor Charles V, written during the conquest, and containing a narrative of its events. (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1843),

http://mith.umd.edu/eada/html/display.php?docs=cortez_letter2.xml.

“very fine woods and meadows”: Samuel Champlain, Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, originally published in 1609; modern edition, trans. Charles Pomeroy Otis (Boston: Prince Society of Boston, 1878),

http://www.usgennet.org/usa/topic/preservation/epochs/vol1/pg179.htm.

For the history of the Lords Proprietors, Sir John Yeamans and colonial South Carolina, see Walter B. Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 84–85; for correspondence sent by John Locke on behalf of the Lords Proprietors, see “America and West Indies: November 1670,” Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, Volume 7: 1669–1674 (1889): 122–140,

www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=70201.

“to chuse out of themselves”: Penn’s Charter of Liberties, April 25, 1682,

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/pa03.asp#1.

“In the beginning ... all the world was America”: Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas Hollis (London: A. Millar et al., 1764). ch. V, para. 49, oll.libertyfund.org/title/222/16269.

“such a master of taciturnity and passion”: Letter from the bishop of Oxford in 1684 quoted in H. R. Fox Bourne, Life of John Locke (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), 484.

“Consciousness always accompanies thinking”: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, ch. XXVII, para. 9; “Self depends on consciousness,” bk. 1, ch. XXVII, para. 17.

“Though the earth”: Locke, Two Treatises of Government, bk. 2, ch. V, “Of Property”; “the Turfs my Servant has cut,” ch. V, ibid. “The great and chief end,” bk. 2, ch. IX, “Of the Ends of Political Society and government.”

“like a Landlord to his Tenant”: Daniel Defoe, Party Tyranny, or an Occasional Bill in Miniature as now practiced in Carolina, quoted in Narrative of Early Carolina, 221–264.

three natural rights “which every man”: Commentaries on the Laws of England, bk. 1, 125.

“sole and despotic”: Ibid., bk. 2, 2.

“If taxes are laid upon”: Samuel Adams’s instructions to Boston’s representatives on the Massachusetts Assembly in response to the 1764 Sugar Act, dated May 24, 1764.

property “to which ... people are entitled”: Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 235.

“no one ought to harm another”: Two Treatises, bk. 2, ch. II, “Of the State of Nature.”

“where there is enough”: Ibid, bk. 2, ch. V, “Of Property.”

“As Justice gives every Man”: Ibid, bk. 1, ch. IV, “Of Adams’ title to sovereignty by donation Gen. I. 28.”; “[N]o man could ever have,” ibid.

“From its birth in 16th century England” : The element of social justice in the Poor Law, always in danger of being submerged by the element of self-interest, was made plain in the judgment delivered by Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough, a notoriously conservative judge, in Rex v. Inhabitants of Eastbourne 1803, concerning the reluctance of the inhabitants of a coastal town to fund poor relief for foreigners. “[T]he law of humanity which is anterior to all positive laws obliges us to afford them relief to save them from starving,” Ellenborough stated; “and those laws (ie the laws of settlement) were only passed to fix the obligation more certainly, and point out distinctly in what manner it would be borne.” George Nicholls, A History of the English Poor Law in Connection with the State of the country and the condition of the people (London: King & Son, 1904), 368.

Sarah Brosnan, a young psychology professor: Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Animal behaviour: Fair refusal by capuchin monkeys,” Nature 428, 140 (March 11, 2004).

“the obvious and simple system”: Wealth of Nations, bk. 4, ch. 9, para. 51.

For Cromwell’s lifting of discriminatory laws against Jews, see Barbara Coulton, “Cromwell and the ‘readmission’ of the Jews to England, 1656”;

http://www.olivercromwell.org/jews.pdf.

“One early example”: The revolt of the South Carolina colonists against the Lords Proprietors’ rule illustrated the difference between natural and civil rights of property. See Edgar, History of South Carolina, 113.

Chapter Six: What Came Before

Much of the material on traditional land use in Sarawak is based on my book Wild People: Travels with Borneo’s head-hunters (London: John Murray, 1990). The radical transformation of the country since then has been described in Robert A. Cramb, Land and Longhouse: Agrarian Transformation in the Uplands of Sarawak (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). The economic development is detailed through government publications, Sarawak as well as Malaysian, especially the latter’s Department of Statistics. The deforestation is covered by two main sources, timber and paper and pulp industry publications, and conservation agencies such as WWF Malaysia, which together tell the same story. Many of the reports on the cultural and material impact are accessible through the website of BRIMAS, Borneo Resources Institute,

http://brimas.www1.50megs.com.

“Behold brains ooze out along with layers of fat”: translation by Dr. James Masing, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (1984).

Aboriginal dreaming and the chanted myths associated with it have a literature of their own. Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (London: Franklin Press, 1987) is unreliable, but conveys vividly to non-Aboriginals the reality of the songs.

“The association between naming and owning”: Patricia Lane, barrister, “Native Title—the End of Property as we know it?,” paper for Australia’s Property Law lecture series March 9, 1999.

“In 2007, the Suprme Court of of British Columbia”: Although the judgment given by Appeals Court Judge Justice Vickers, in the case Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, 2007 BCSC 1700 (http://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bcsc/doc/2007/2007bcsc1700/2007bcsc1700.html),

turned down their claim, it gave encouragement to the standard of evidence they presented, and the case is currently under appeal. It is also covered in Michael Barry, “Standards for Oral Tradition Evidence: Guidelines from First Nations Land Claims in Canada,” University of Calgary, to the International Federation of Surveyors, October 1999,

http://www.fig.net/pub/vietnam/papers/ts02a/ts02a_barry_3644.pdf.

“Compiled in the twelfth century”: Thomas Kinsella, Taín Bó Cuaílnge—The Táin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). All quotes are taken from this edition.

“there was not ditch”: Taken from the twelfth-century Irish source, Lebor na Huidre, quoted in Karl Marx’s Ethnographical Notebooks c.1881,

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/ethnographical-notebooks/ch03.htm.

“The colonists in Massachusetts Bay”: Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England (Carlisle MA: Applewood Books, 1996).

“Where a Battel has been fought”: The Discoveries of John Lederer (1672),

http://rla.unc.edu/archives/accounts/lederer/lederertext.html.

“And that Day Joshua”: Book of Joshua 4:20.

In his poem “The Gift Outright”: Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright,” A Witness Tree (New York: Henry Holt, 1942).

“In the 1980s, the traditional Iban”: Linklater, Wild People, 148–151.

“The tracts show clearly”: Engels to Marx, November 29, 1869,

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1869/letters/69_11_29a.htm.

The records are largely contained within John Davies, A Discovery of the True Cause Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued Nor Brought Under Obedience of the Crown of England Until the Beginning of His Majesty’s Happy Reign, ed. Henry Morley (London: Routledge, 1890). Marx’s own research was heavily based on the lectures of Henry Sumner Maine, on “The History of Institutions,” delivered in 1875, and influenced by Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: Henry Holt, 1877).

“In the five previous centuries”: A Guide to Early Irish Law, ed. Fergus Kelly (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988), ch 1. W. E. Montgomery, The History of Land Tenure in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), 26–41,

http://archive.org/stream/historyoflandten00montrich#page/ii/mode/2up.

“The land shall not be sold for ever”: Leviticius 25:23.

The jubilee fell out of favor: Leviticus 25:10, 13. “A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be to you ... in the year of this jubilee you shall return every man to his possession”; the idea of the land as a gift to his chosen people so that Israel could only be realized by returning to cultivate once more permeated nineteenth-century Zionist thought; thus Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer, writing in 1863: “there will be four redemptions. The first is redemption of the land itself, planting and raising the crops of the land and holy fruit ...” Documents on the History of Hibbat-Zion and the Settlement of Eretz Israel, ed. Shulamit Laskov (Tel Aviv: Tel-Aviv University, 1982), 103–112.

“The Russian empire”: The continuing influence of the mir or obschina on peasant life worried other Russian Socialists, for example Victor Chernov of the Social Revolutionary Party, who wrote in the 1880s, “Everywhere the picture is the same. A full break with the mir is extremely rare. The overwhelming majority retain the household lot their obschina gave them [after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861], they run their livestock in a common herd, every year they distribute common meadows along with the whole mir, and they receive their due share in common woodlands and so on.” In Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia 1613–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 191.

fuidhir, or landless workers: Montgomery, Land Tenure, 41–47.

“The utmost care was taken”: J. Mill, “Tenants and Agriculture near Dublin in the Fourteenth Century”; Proceedings, Royal Society of antiquaries of Ireland I, 1, 57.

“Every Sachem knoweth”: Winslow, Good Newes, 62.

“The Natives are very exact”: Roger Williams, A Key to the Languages of America (Providence, RI: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1827), ch. XVI, 90.

“The sachims . . . will not conclude”: Ibid., 121.

“The effects were felt most acutely in the O’Neills’ territory” : A. T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: The Roots of Conflict in Ulster (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1989), 41–49.

“not only looks like a desert”: Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638–51 (London: Routledge, 1992), 213.

“Ignatius Stacpole of Limerick”: BBC, “A Short History of Ireland,”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/ashorthistory/archive/intro100.shtml.

The figure of 2.1 million for the population of Ireland is given by M. Perceval-Maxwell in The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1994), 30.

“a man might travel twenty or thirty miles”: Carlton, Going to the Wars, 213.

“And why should Men endeavour”: Petty, Collected Works, 146.

one of the most rapid land revolutions: Sarawak timber statistics from the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) Annual Review, 2011.

“Taib translated political power into property”: Yoolim Lee, “Getting Rich in Malaysia Cronyism Capital Means Dayak Lose Home,” Bloomberg News, August 24, 2009; cites Transparency International’s labelling of the Bakun Hydroelectric Dam on the Balui River in Sarawak as a “monument of corruption”; points to almost two hundred lawsuits pending in the Sarawak courts relating to claims by Dayak people on lands being used for oil palms and logging; quotes Sim Kwang Yang, former opposition MP, describing Sarawak’s economy as “crony capitalism driven by greed without any regard for the people,” and cites as examples the ownership by Taib’s adult children and his late wife, Lejla, of more than 29.3 percent of Cahya Mata Sarawak Bhd., the state’s largest industrial group, involved in construction, property development, and financial services.

Chapter Seven: The Peasants

The dramatic decline and disintegration of Poland’s mighty kingdom is covered by The Cambridge History of Poland, eds. Oskar Halecki, W. F. Reddaway, J. H. Penson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950); and Neal Ascherson, The Struggles for Poland (New York: Random House, 1991).

“he was rowed by the Quene’s men”: May 1, 1583 entry in The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee (London: The Camden Society, 1841–42).

seventy-five Muslim attacks: Brian L. Davies, Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe: 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 2001).

The 1505 constitution was known as the Nihil novi “constitution” because it forbade any new legislation unless the king consulted the Sejm, that is the senate (highest level officials), as well as the lower chamber of (regional) deputies, before enacting any changes.

encapsulated in the gentlemanly code: “Sarmatism” was as pervasive in seventeenth-century Poland as was the idea of the gentleman in eighteenth-century England. At one level it represented gallantry, freedom, and knightly virtues, but at another shaded into an intolerant, narrow-minded defense of privilege.

“shaken by the inrush of silver”: Inflation—from a base of one hundred in the decade 1501–10, prices tripled in England, rose by 250 percent in the Netherlands, and by almost 200 percent in Spain by 1555. John Munro, “The Monetary Origins of the ‘Price Revolution’: South German silver mining, merchant banking and Venetian commerce, 1460–1540,” a working paper, 2003.

“portable firearms such as the arquebus”: The price of firearms over hand-wielded weapons was calculated in detail in the Netherlands in the first half of the sixteenth century; pikes (long spears) cost about four stuivers; halberds (combined battle-ax and spear) cost about fourteen stuivers; a longbow, about fourteen stuivers; a crossbow about thirty stuivers; a harquebus (early musket) about thirty stuivers; but a wrought iron cannon weighing one thousand pounds cost at least 1,250 stuivers, and one in bronze, 2,500 stuivers, and ammunition was extra (in the sixteenth century there were about fifty stuivers in a rijksdaalder, that would become approximately equivalent to a silver dollar in the eighteenth century); James P. Ward, “Prices of Weapons and Munitions in Early Sixteenth Century Holland during the Guelders War,” part of an unpublished doctoral thesis, “The Cities and States of Holland. A participative system of government under strain” (University of Leiden, 2001).

A solid trade in cattle, wheat and rye: Grain exports rose during the sixteenth century, from 10,000 tons of rye in 1500 to more than 150,000 tons by 1600, but most was consumed within Poland. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1996), 258–259.

the Piotrków Privilege: Cambridge History, 260.

“Peasants . . . must not give”: Witold Kula, “The Seigneury and the Peasant Family in Poland,” in Family and Society: Selections from the Annales, Economies, Scoietés, Civilisations, eds. R. Foster and O. Ranum. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976), 192–198.

“As the folk who knew this system”: Jan Slomka, From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor, 1842–1927, trans. William John Rose (London: Minerva Publishing Co., 1941).

“with a very small rod”: Witold Kula, Measures and Men, trans. by R. Szreter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); cited by Linklater, Measuring America, 241.

the historian Jan Dlugosz: Quoted in Adam Zamojski, The Polish Way (London: John Murray, 1987), 52–53.

“In order to encourage people”: Kula, “The Seigneury,” 196.

It was the desperate need for money: Dee, Private Diary and Charlotte Fell Smith, John Dee 1527 to 1608 (London: Kessinger, 2004), ch. 7.

The empire had its roots: Marianne Yaldez, “Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang): Its people and Its culture,” in Turks: Journey of a Thousand Years 600–1600, ed. David J. Roxburgh (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005). Miriam Greenblatt, Süleyman the Magnificent and the Ottoman Empire(New York: Benchmark Books, 2003); Serpil Begci and Zeren Tanindi, “Art of the Ottoman Court,” in Roxburgh, Turks.

119 the sipahis shot arrows: Jack A. Goldstone, “East and West in the Seventeenth Century: Political Crises in Stuart England, Ottoman Turkey, and Ming China,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (Jan. 1988): 103–142.

destructive effects of silver inflation: Şevket Pamuk, “The Price Revolution in the Ottoman Empire Reconsidered,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 33, no. 1 (Feb. 2001): 69–89.

Süleyman’s magnificence lay in his legal reforms: Colin Imber, Studies in Ottoman History and Law (Oxford: Isis Press, 1996), 49–50.

Measured by the crude but unforgiving test of war: Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erikson, A Military History of the Ottomans (Santa Barabara, CA: Greenwood, 2009); Jean de Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant: dans laquelle il est curieusement traité des Estats sujets au Grand Seigneur, originally published in Rouen, 1665, ch. LI.

The eternal conflicts: Goldstone, “East and West.”

“Most of the feudal lords today”: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. II (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 723.

For the rise of the szlachta, Cambridge History, 333–346; monopolization of power by szlachta, Ascherson, Struggles, 19–21; liberum veto, Anna M Cienciala, “The Decline of Poland” (lectures, University of Kansas, 2002 and 2004),

http://web.ku.edu/~eceurope/hist557/lect3-4.htm.

In 1786 James Madison examined: In The Federalist 10, Madison specifically ruled out Poland as a republican model; Poland’s elected kingship was cited during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as a reason not having an elected president, but Madison noted the objection by one delegate, James Wilson, that the Polish aristocratic example and proposed popular model for the United States were “totally dissimilar. The Polish nobles have resources & dependents which enable them to appear in force, and to threaten the Republic as well as each other” (July 17, 1787).

For the evolution of the çiftlik: Doreen Warriner, Land Reform in Principle and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 390.

one third of the German-speaking population died: Modern research focuses on the localized impact of the war, ranging from 50 percent of the population in the east to perhaps 15 percent in the west. See Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years War (London: Routledge, 1997), 177.

Black Forest peasants in 1525: From this meeting came a celebrated assertion of rights known as the Twelve Articles of the Black Forest. See The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents, ed. Tom Scott and Robert W. Scribner (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities, 1991), 251–276.

“Say, you wretched, shabby bag of worms”; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Mercury, 1972), 266–269.

Usually the conflict was resolved: Rouilliard’s case is cited in Wolfgang Schmale, “Liberty Is an Inestimable Thing,” in The Individual in Political Theory and Practice, ed. Janet Coleman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

The struggles of European peasants for control over their use of land is studied in Marcus J. Kurtz, “Understanding Peasant Revolution: From Concept to Theory and Case,” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (Feb. 2000): 93–124; E. J. Hobsbawm, “Peasant Land Occupations,” Past & Present, no. 62 (Feb. 1974): 120–152; Edgar Melton, “Gutsherrschaft in East Elbian Germany and Livonia, 1500–1800: A Critique of the Model,” Central European History, vol. 21, no. 4 (Dec. 1988): 315–349; Terence J. Byres, “The Landlord Class, Peasant Differentiation, Class Struggle and the Transition to Capitalism: England, France and Prussia Compared” (Paper for Land, Poverty, Social Justice & Development conference, Jan. 2006). For peasant economics more generally, see A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, trans. R. E. F. Smith and Christel Lane (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

land around Paris: Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 97 (Nov. 1982): 77.

Across western Europe, landowners reasserted their powers: Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, The Perspective of the World, vol. III (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 394.

raised only twenty-six million pounds: The estimate of China’s taxation is computed in the following way: in 1774, the Qianlong emperor boasted of raising seventy-eight million tael in taxes; with about 1.2 troy ounces of silver per tael this is roughly equal to 93.6 million ounces of silver; a George III silver crown coin contained about 0.85 troy ounce of silver, giving a value of approximately 3.4 ounce of silver to one pound; by this rough calculation, the sterling equivalent of seventy-eight million tael would be twenty-six million pounds, at a time when fortuitously, silver was worth about the same in Britain and China.

“Having seen the extraordinary [taxes]”: Braudel, Civilization, 394.

Chapter Eight: Autocratic Ownership

the great film director Sergei Eisenstein: The transcript of Eisenstein’s remarkable meeting with Stalin was first published under the title Kremlevskii Tsenzor [Kremlin censorship] by G. Maryamov in Moscow, 1992; it first appeared in English in the Indian Communist journal Revolutionary Democracy III, no. 2, September 1997.

It was in the spring of 1565: Janet Martin, Medieval Russia 980–1584 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), 345–347.

one cavalryman “on a horse with complete equipment”: V. O. Klyuchevsky, A History of Russia, vol. 2, trans. C. J. Hogarth (London: Dent, 1911), 280–281.

a separate kingdom or oprichnina: Ibid., and Heinrich von Staden, The Land and Government of Muscovy: A Sixteenth Century Account, ed. and trans. Thomas Esper (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967).

the tsar’s decision to abdicate in 1565: Matthew P. Romaniello, The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552–1671 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 170–173.

“In those years”: “Prologue” to Requiem by Anna Akhmatova in Selected Poems, trans. D. M. Thomas (London: Penguin Classics, 2006).

None did so to more dramatic effect than Peter: Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London and New York: Penguin, 2003), 15–18; Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 75–79.

laws known as the Ulozhenie: Law code of 1649,

http://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/1649-Ulj.htm.

“Table of Ranks”: Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 18.

Adam Weid was given an estate: These and other examples of estates being clawed back appear in J. Paaskoski, “Noble Land-Holding and Serfdom in ‘Old Finland,’ from pomest’e to votchina,” in A Window on Russia, ed. L. A. J. Hughes and M. di Salvo (Papers, Fifth International Conference on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Gargnano, 1994 and Rome, 1996), 83–91.

almost thirty thousand square miles of new territory every year: Computed by dividing the area in 1914, 8,803,129 square miles, by the 303 years from 1614 to 1917.

“the fundamental factor”:—Klyuchevsky, History of Russia, vol. 1, p. 2.

“Nothing in nature could be finer”: Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba and Other Tales (London: Floating Press, 2011), 36.

“The tulips, roses, lilies of the valley”: Peter Putnam, “John Perry: Engineer to the Great Tsar (1698–1712),” in Seven Britons in Imperial Russia (1689–1812) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1952), 3–21.

For the Ordnovortsy, see Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia 1613–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), ch. 2, “The Ordnovortsy.”

For the development of Voronezh, see Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Pallot and Shaw, Landscape, 58–63.

For the development of serfdom, see Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 17–24.

criticize landowners for “beating and tormenting [serfs]”: R. Nisbet Bain, The Pupils of Peter the Great: A History of the Russian Court and Empire 1697–1740 (London: 1897); ukase of April 21, 1721, forbidding serfs to be sold separately, ibid., 533.

Count Pyotr Sheremetev: Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 19–26.

Obschina or mir: Pallot and Shaw, Landscape and Settlement. See Ch. 6, “The Commune.”

Alexander Radischchev, an earnest: Allen McConnell, “The Empress and Her Protégé: Catherine II and Radischev,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 36, no. 1 (Mar. 1964): 14–27.

“The nobility is not identified”: Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), quoted in Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985), 29.

the characteristics of the Asiatic temperament: Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 363–367.

“indifference, naivety and cunning”: Gogol, Taras Bulba. See introduction.

the lassitude of the minor nobility was fictionalized: Ivan A. Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories, 2011), 3.

their “extreme immiseration”: Sundarland, Taming the Wild Field., op. cit., 123–133.

twenty-three thousand German Mennonites: Having visited the Germans 1841, one official commented, “When you enter the Mennonite colonies, you feel as if you are entering another country . . . [everywhere else] there is laziness and neglect which together with a lack of education block evey path to progress.” Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 117; Jeffrey Longhofer, “Specifying the Commons: Mennonites, Intensive Agriculture, and Landlessness in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Ethnohistory 40, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 384–409.

“A German is like a willow tree, stick it anywhere and it will take”: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956 (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 400.

“the common people have but very little heart”: Perry, Seven Britons, 57.

families forcibly moved to Belgorod: David Moon, “Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia’s Frontiers, 1550–1897,” The Historical Journal 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1997): 888–889; for families settled at Voronezh, see Pallot and Shaw, Landscape and Settlement, 26.

“and after spending a short time on the Cossack settlements”: Sunderland, Taming the Wild Frontier, 30.

1.7 million migrants moved to the steppes, see Ibid., 113.

the state of New Russia: Ibid., 128.

When William Richardson: “Extracts from Anecdotes of the Russian Empire,” in Seven Britons, 141–179.

“eternal and hereditary disposition”: J. Paaskoski, “Noble Land-Holding and Serfdom.” Originally holdings were referred to as zemlevladenie or land possession, but in 1734 Count Petr Semenovich Saltykov received the former estate of Fedor Matveev in vechnoe i potomstvennoe vladenie or “eternal and hereditary possession.”

Mortgaging of serfs: Ibid. “The first application [to the Gosudarstvennyi Zaemnyi Bank] was made in September 1786, when . . . General Fieldmarshal Count Ivan Petrovich Saltykov [son of Anna’s favorite] and his wife Dar’ia Petrovna Saltykova applied for permission to mortgage their peasants.

Chapter Nine: The Equilibrium of Land Ownership

an American farmer, William Hinton: Hinton’s experiences were described in his classic, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966).

Draft Land Law: Ibid., 7.

“This ancient lag”: Ibid., 3.

“Under the bondage of feudalism”: Mao Zhedong et al., “The Chinese Revolution,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. II (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, No date).

In the first house Hinton visited: Hinton Fanshen, 253; home and social position of Sheng Ching-ho, ibid., 32–33.

“China has long been one of the richest”: Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, ch. 8.

The argument about why China fell so far behind the West in economic and technical development—the “great divergence,” to quote the title of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), which largely set the grounds for the debate—has produced a large, enlightening literature exploring possible causes including availability of coal, efficiency of markets, level of farm production, and government competence, all of which are explored here. However, Pomeranz inadvertently obscured the most promising explanation, the particular nature of China’s land ownership, by confusing it with the private property developed in common law societies. There is good reason for this mistake—Han Suyin, author of A Many Splendored Thing, who lived in China and whose husband was an expert in real estate, regarded Chinese land possession as personal possession. However, as will be clear by this stage, the common law ascribed a primacy to individual ownership that was unthinkable in China. Not only did it give rise to forms of personal behavior as well as social, economic, and political structures that were absent in China, its entire individualized ethos was completely at variance with the priority that Confucian principles accorded to the sustenance of the family.

China’s agricultural productivity and market efficiency are the subjects of a series of studies influenced by the work of Robert Allen of Nuffield College, Oxford University, including Robert C. Allen, “Agricultural Productivity and Rural Incomes in England and the Yangtze Delta, c. 1620–c. 1820,” The Economic History Review 62, issue 3 (August 2009): 525–550; R. C. Allen, J.-P. Bassino, D. Ma, C. Moll-Murata, and J. L. van Zanden, “Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, Japan, and Europe, 1738–1925,” LSE Research online (2009),

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27871/1/WP123.pdf;

Robert C. Allen, “Involution, Revolution, or What? Agricultural Productivity, Income, and Chinese Economic Development,” Citeseer online,

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.196.563.

“a man standing permanently up to the neck in water”: R. H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China, cited in Hinton, Fanshen, 45.

warning not to “punish the people as thieves”: Peter C. Perdue. China Marches West (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 375.

character for harmony: The UCLA Confucius Institute explains, “The idea suggested in this character is that harmony is achieved when food and a hungry mouth come together,”

http://www.confucius.ucla.edu/think-qiu.

needed only to memorize: Perdue, China Marches West, 255.

On the impact of the silver trade, see Richard von Glahn, “Myth and Reality of China’s Seventeenth-Century Monetary Crisis,” The Journal of Economic History 56, no. 2 (June 1996): 429–454; Helen Dunstan, “Orders Go Forth in the Morning and Are Changed by Nightfall: A Monetary Policy Cycle in Qing China, November 1744–June 1745,” T’oung Pao, Second Series, vol. 82, fasc. ⅓ (1996): 66–136. Particularly interesting is the comparative study of the impact of silver on China to its effect on Britain and the Ottoman Empire by Jack Goldstone, “East and West in the Seventeenth Century: Political Crises in Stuart England, Ottoman Turkey, and Ming China,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 1 (Jan. 1988): 103–142.

Chinese merchants, flush with silver, began to buy land: Perdue, China Marches West, 375–380.

For the earnings of landless laborers, see Allen, “Agricultural Productivity,” 6–15.

Kuei Yu-kuang lamented the vulgarization: Quoted in Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 381.

The most influential exponent of Confucian studies: For Wang Yangming’s teaching of Confucian precepts, essentially restoring their personal application in place of the mandarin’s increasingly abstract interpretation, see Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550–1900(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 7–14.

For corruption in exams, see Goldstone, “East and West,” 122–124 and Perdue, China Marches West, 249–255.

“eight-legged essay”: So-called because it came in eight parts and was widely citicized by nineteenth-century reform-minded Chinese and Western sinologists for rewarding abstruse details. See Elman, On Their Own Terms, 333–335.

Yao Wen-jan, a descendant of merchants: Hilary J. Beattie, Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T’ung-ch’eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 68.

For the exploits of the Levelling Kings, see Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), 245–246.

For the continued power of local merchant-descended families, see Beattie, Land and Lineage, ch. 4, 88–111.

For the artistic accomplishments of the Qianlong emperor, see “A Matter of Taste,” by Harold Kahn in The Elegant Brush, Chinese Painting under the Qianlong Emperor, 1735–1795, ed. Ju-hsi Chou and Claudia Brown (Phoenix, AZ: Phoenix Art Museum, 1985).

“it should be about the season”: Quoted in Perdue, China Marches West, 417.

“cut off from the world”: This phrase appears in Qianlong’s letter to George III, pointing out that Macartney’s uncouth behaviour is supposing the emperor would be interested in his instruments, but excusing it because “I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea,”

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1793qianlong.html.

“The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first rate man-of-war”: Macartney’s comment in An Embassy to China, Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney During His Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung, 1793–1794, ed. J. L. Cranmer-Byng (London: Longmans, 1962), 212–213.

162 Cao Xuequin’s classic novel is so huge, magical, and beguiling, any summary amounts to a travesty, but the danger faced by imperial officials and the Mandarin’s Life-Preserver appears in chapter 4 in The Story of the Stone, vol. 1, trans. David Hawkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1973), 111.

For the calculation of the imperial taxes, see note to page 141.

For the power of the provincial gentry, see Beattie, Land and Lineage Ch 4; and Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch’ing China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985); passim; by the end of the eighteenth century, Zelin judged, “rational fiscal administration was dead,” 301.

For China’s enterprising farmers, see “Environment, Market, and Peasant Choice: The Ecological Relationships in the Jianghan Plain in the Qing and the Republic” by Jiayan Zhang. Modern China 32, no. 1 (Jan. 2006): 31–63.

when British colonial authorities in Hong Kong. A 1963 Hong Kong government report, “Chinese Customary Law in Hong Kong’s New Territories: some legal premises” by Edwin Haydon, based its findings on an earlier report, entitled “Memorandum of Land,” which formed an appendix to the Report of Mr. J. H. Stewart Lockhart, colonial secretary and registrar general of Hong Kong, dated February 7, 1900. Lockhart reported that although apparently measured by the mu, one sixth of an acre, the land was in practice measured by variable grain measures, pointing to an agricultural economy whose yardstick was family support rather than financial value. In addition, villages paid the equivalent of a land tax as protection money to the clan that offered them security against attack from outside.

all carved out trading privileges: Sir Robert Hart, British-appointed head of China’s Customs service, pointed out that foreign countries were tearing China to pieces, because approximately 40 percent of the government’s small revenue was allocated to them as reparations for supposed losses during wars with China. Stephen Thomas, Foreign Intervention and China’s Industrial Development, 1870–1911 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984) 11.

split between more than seven hundred households: Haydon, “Chinese Customary Law.”

the number of people it would support: Allen, “Agricultural Productivity,” 14.

Chapter Ten: Land Becomes Mind

Walter Baker, a self-styled “professor of physic”: For Walter Baker’s struggle to break Dr. James’s patent, see Adam Mossoff, “Rethinking the Development of Patents: An Intellectual History, 1550–1800,” Occasional Papers in Intellectual Property and Communications Law, Hastings Law Journal 1255 (2001), 25–26.

Sir Edward Coke, the preeminent spokesman: Coke based his argument against monopolies on the grounds that “a mans trade is accounted his life, because it maintaineth his life; and therefore the monopolist that taketh away a mans trade, taketh away his life, and therefore is so much the more odious.” Mossoff, ibid; while Samuel Pufendorf wrote in his 1672 treatise, De Jure Naturae et Gentium, “Monopolies ... tis an odious Name, and the Laws of many States brand it grievously,” ibid., 23.

“teach an artist”: Mansfield’s instructions to the jury in another patents case, Liardent v. Johnson, were printed in the Morning Post, Feb. 23, 1778, for everyone to read. Ibid., 30.

“there is no connection between ownership”: The Marquis de Condorcet’s objection appears in Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago, vol. 11 (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1847), 308–309.

This system of state-sponsored innovation: Kaye’s career in France is described in “Technological and legal transfers in the Age of Enlightenment” by Liliane Hilaire-Pérez. La Revue de la Musée des Arts et des Métiers, no. 12 (Sept. 1995). Granted a privilège exclusif, he was deemed to be “at the service of the State.”

At first glance: The cost and dubious protection offered by a patent are explored in Christine MacLeod, “The Paradoxes of Patenting: Invention and Its Diffusion in 18th- and 19th-Century Britain, France, and North America.” Technology and Culture 32, no. 4, Patents and Invention (Oct. 1991): 885–910; 891–901.

“The whole claim”: Justice Yates’s objection in Mossoff, “Rethinking,” 49.

On the other side of the Atlantic: Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, “the Copyright clause,” empowers the Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writigns and Discoveries.”

This unfriendly atmosphere: The failure of Cartwright’s and Arkwright’s patents are studied in Trevor Griffiths, Philip A. Hunt, and Patrick K. O’Brien, “Inventive Activity in the British Textile Industry, 1700–1800,” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 4 (Dec. 1992).

“We had better bear with some inconvenience” in Mossoff, “Rethinking,” 33.

Yet the messiness of the British process: The counterintuitive consequence that weak patent law and hostile judges should have helped diffuse technical knowledge is explored in detail in Macleod, “The Paradoxes of Patenting,” 885–910.

“the property one has”: Adam Smith’s contention that a patent was a real right, in Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 198.

Fighting their way: The judicial struggle to decide whether patents were privileges or property is covered in Mossoff, “Rethinking,” 43–50; Loughhborough’s judgment, 46.

Jethro Tull, a lawyer-turned-farmer: For the background to Jethro Tull’s inventions see Norman Hidden, “Jethro Tull I, II, and III.” Agricultural History Review 37, pt. 1 (1989): 26–35.

“The working manufacturing people”: Daniel Defoe’s opinion of the English diet appeared in The Complete English Tradesman: In Familiar Letters; Directing Him in All the Several Parts and Progressions of Trade . . . Calculated for the Instruction of Our Inland Tradesmen; and Especially of Young Beginners, vol. 1. London: Charles Rivington, 1726, 386.

the price of land should have fallen : For the price of land in the eighteenth century, see Robert C. Allen, “The Price of Freehold Land and the Interest Rate in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” The Economic History Review, New Series 41, no. 1 (Feb. 1988): 33–50; and John Habakkuk, “The Rise and Fall of English Landed Families, 1600–1800.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series 29 (1979): 187–207.

it no longer made economic sense: Although rents for enclosed land in the eighteenth century rose considerably, Allen, in “The Price of Freehold Land,” argued there was no gain in efficiency, while the economic returns were not much better than Consols according to Gregory Clark in “Commons Sense: Common Property Rights, Efficiency, and Institutional Change.” The Journal of Economic History 58, no. 1 (March 1998): 73–102.

Shortly before emigrating, Morris Birkbeck, who rented Wanborough farm in Surrey, England, went on to found the anti-slavery center known as the English Settlement in Illinois. His reason for emigrating was primarily, he wrote in Notes on a Journey in America, “to escape the insolence of wealth and the servility of pauperism” that he had experienced in England.

government posts as property: Owning administrative posts as property did not end until the early nineteenth century. For the life and career of Spencer Perceval, see Andro Linklater, Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die: The Assassination of a Prime Minister (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

The transition was made obvious in: The far-reaching nature of David Ricardo’s theory, most completely advanced in The Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation (1817), of the comparative advantage enjoyed by one means of production over another, where each employs equal quantities of capital and labor, tends to obscure its important context: Ricardian economics is grounded in rural, rather than mercantile, capitalism. His definition of rent as “that portion of the produce of the earth which is paid to the landlord [by the tenant] for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil” also applies to industrial production, as do his theories on taxation—that a tax on the economic rent, or unearned increase in value, of land cannot be passed on. But they do so only in certain conditions. Ricardian economics held good throughout the nineteenth century, and still do in many circumstances today, but become distorted by solutions to the crisis of overproduction.

The origins of the Industrial Revolution are endlessly debated, not least because they are multiple and interdependent. But the range of topics discussed by members of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce and covered in its magazine indicate why Britain’s rural capitalists should have morphed so easily into industrial capitalists.

When Samuel Garbett, described by Matthew Boulton to Benjamin Franklin in 1766 as “a Zealous Advocate for Truth & for the rights of your oppress’d Countrymen,” combined roles as the founder of large scale chemical production (sulphuric acid) and armaments manufacture (Carron iron works) with political lobbying against taxation of industrial exports, and the promotion of Birmingham industry and finance. See J. M. Norris, “Samuel Garbett and the Early Development of Industrial Lobbying in Great Britain.” The Economic History Review, New Series 10, no. 3 (1958): 450–460.

two thirds of the capital available: The significance of landed capital in the early nineteenth century appears from comparative tables from 1688 to 1863 produced by Robert Giffen in The Growth of Capital (1889) cited in Peter Mathias, Industrial Economies: Capital Labour and Enterprise 7, pt. 1, p. 33, in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe. The pattern is probably more reliable than the raw data:

A fully equipped textile factory: For the cost of investment in factories, see Herbert Heaton, “Financing the Industrial Revolution.” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 11, no. 1 (Feb. 1937): 1–10.

Labor was cheaper still: John Fielden, manufacturer, social reformer, and member of Parliament, succeeded in passing the 1847 Ten Hours Act limiting the amount of time a child could be worked in a factory. His firsthand account of industrial conditions was published in The Curse of the Factory System (1836).

George Robinson built no fewer than six mills: George Robinson’s career described in J. H. Beardmore, The History of Hucknell Torkard (1909),

http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/hucknall1909/hucknall1.htm.

pledging the value of their property: Property as security, see Heaton, “Financing the Industrial Revolution.”

Chapter Eleven: The Independence of an Owner

described the attempt as an attack on property: James Otis’s claim to a natural right of property appeared in “Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” (1764). His argument was both constitutional, as a British subject his property rights were guaranteed, and grounded in the Puritan belief that freedom was the God-given liberty to exercise conscience freely and equally.

And his argument was echoed: Samuel Adams’s instructions to Boston’s representatives in the Massachusetts Assembly.

“civil immunities”: Blackstone, Commentaries.

Franklin provocatively predicted: Franklin’s prediction that the population of the United States would double in twenty-five years turned out to be more accurate than his assumption that they would be English. “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” (1751) in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 35 vols. to date. eds. Leonard W. Labaree, et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–1999), 225–234.

the creation of more than a dozen land companies: For the proliferation of land companies see Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble.

the American Canaan: in De Brahm’s report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America, ed. Louis de Vorsey Jr. (New York: Columbia, 1971), 105.

“I can never look upon the Proclamation”: George Washington to William Crawford, September 20, 1767. George Washington Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“The country might invite a prince”: For the early land explorations beyond the Appalachians, see Linklater, Measuring America, 44–51.

it increased at an annual rate: The figures on the growth of American capital are from Alvin Rabushka, “A Tax Revolt, First and Foremost.” Hoover Digest No. 4. Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace (Oct. 2008). Excerpted from Rabushka’s book of the same name.

“such an amount of good land”: From Travels in North America by Peter Kalm, London (1771), quoted in Readings in the Economic History of the United States by Ernest L. Bogart and Charles M. Thompson (New York: Longmans, 1925), 110.

confronted by a national debt: The growth of the British national debt. Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005), 45.

The change of tone is noted in Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 533–535.

“We cannot be happy, without being free”: Letter XII, by “A Farmer,” i.e., John Dickinson, published Pennsylvania Chronicle, Philadelphia, PA, 1768.

The idea of happiness: That Calvinism should have been the cradle for the generous idea of an innate desire to seek happiness is less of a paradox than it might appear. The transmogrification of its bleak doctrine of predestined hell for the many and heaven for the elected few began with Jean Calvin himself, who pointed to a happy family life and concern for the welfare of others as a symptom of election. The emphasis had already shifted sufficiently in the reformed Calvinism that Francis Hutcheson imbibed in his youth for predestination to be regarded as close to an innate tendency to goodness in this world rather than a pre-stamped ticket for eternity.

The optimistic teaching: Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural Law, trans. Thomas Nugent, 1752 (Cambridge, MA: University Press, 1807).

http://www.constitution.org/burla/burla_1.htm.

Part 1, chapter V contains the critical writing about droit, here translated as “rule,” and about the desire for happiness as “the grand spring which sets us in motion.”

Jefferson’s attitude to property rights: Jefferson’s doubts about natural rights in property were expressed in a letter to Isaac McPherson, Aug. 13, 1813.

“For shame”: The conflict appeared in a sermon preached by Nathaniel Niles in 1774; in the Pennsylvania Assembly’s “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, 1780”; in Dr. Johnson’s pamphlet Taxation no Tyranny published in 1775; in the Philipsburg Proclamation issued by General Sir Henry Clinton on June 30, 1779.

The underlying conflict: Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention are online:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/debcont.asp;

and his thoughts appear in numbers 10, 14, 37–58, and 62–63 of The Federalist Papers; his notes form the basis of The Constitution and America’s Destiny by David B. Robertson (Cambridge and New York: 2005). His views on the political marketplace are best found in Federalist 10:“The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.”

“He perceives truth with great clearness”: Fisher Ames made his comment in letter to George Minor, May 29, 1789; Alexander Hamilton’s remark was made to George Beckwith in the same year, and is quoted in The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788–1800 by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 125.

“the alternate domination”: George Washington’s attack on faction was delivered in September 1796 in his “Letter to the People of the United States,” better known as his Farewell Address.

Chapter Twelve: The Challenge to Private Property

went out to negotiate: For the background to the events at Étampes see David Hunt, “The People and Pierre Dolivier: Popular Uprisings in the Seine-et-Oise Department (1791–1792).” French Historical Studies 11, no. 2 (Autumn 1979), 184–214.

Helping the Americans: French involvement in the American War of Independence cost 1.3 billion livres, doubling the national debt. Interest payments produced an annual deficit of 112 million livres. William Doyle, Origin of the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch 2.

“Liberty in commerce”: This argument had been put to the crowd with Simonneau present by two representatives from the National Assembly after a riot in Étampes the previous September. See Hunt, “Popular Uprisings,” 189.

seethed with peasant anger: Rural discontent at the changes threatening an old way of life surfaced in the cahiers de doléances—the lists of complaints produced by each of the Three Estates, nobility, clergy, and others, in 1789—with a significant number from the Third Estate protesting the innovations of new seigneurs.

the news of Simmoneau’s murder: For the response of the National Assembly, see Hunt, “Popular Uprisings,” 26–29.

“It is revolting”: Dolivier’s response was contained in his pamphlet L’Essai sur la Justice primitive, pour servir de principe générateur au seul ordre social qui peut assurer à l’homme tous ses droits et tous les moyens de bonheur, published in July 1793 by the Commune d’Anvers.

“From how many crimes”: The Origin of Inequality, originally published in 1754, is best known for opposing Hobbes’s picture of natural life as nasty, brutish, and short, with one of natural nobility and goodness. Inevitably, therefore, civilization must be corrupting.

“the general will”: Contmporary critics of the Revolution, such as Edmund Burke in “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly” (1791) and Benjamin Constant in “On Ancient and Modern Liberty” (1819) held Rousseau responsible for the Revolution’s attack on individual liberty.

“dull, monotonous”: For the monotony of Robespierre’s voice but his electrifying effect on audiences, see Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 303–305.

the influence of Robespierre: For the pervasive influence of Rousseau on Robespierre’s thought, see “The Fundamental Ideas of Robespierre” by Alfred Cobban. The English Historical Review 63, no. 246 (Jan. 1948), 29–51.

A direct line of thought: The linear connection between Dolivier and Marx was first made by Jean Jaurés in Histoire socialiste de la Revolution française (Paris, 1970), vol II, 460.

On the Present High Price of Provisions: The focus of Malthus’s essay was the influence of the Poor Law in keeping the price of grain higher than it should have been. He was, apparently, unaware of the violence inflicted by the hungry poor on Simonneau.

the Scottish political reformer Thomas Muir: The judge delivered his sentence on Thomas Muir with a classic definition of prevailing opinion: “In this country, [the government] is made up of the landed interest which alone has a right to be represented; as for the rabble who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? What security for the payment of their taxes? They may pack up all their property on their backs and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye, but landed property cannot be removed.”

The catalyst was an encounter: Jefferson’s encounter with the beggar woman outside Fontainebleau was described to Madison in a letter dated October 28, 1785.

“that the earth belongs”: The idea of usufruct ownership of the land or modified leasehold was put forward in a letter dated September 6, 1789; it reappeared at the foundation of the state of Israel in 1949 when nearly all its territory was vested in the state and was available only on a forty-nine-year, or sabbatical-length lease, and in the economists’ public letter addressed to President Gorbachev November 7, 1990.

Three different Congressional committees: The reports of the committees on the acquisition, measuring, and disposition of the Western Lands were all made in March and April 1784, and appeared in conjunction with Jefferson’s two other reports on decimalizing the currency and the weights and measures of the United States, an exceptional outpouring of constitutional creativity.

“The small landholders”: Jefferson, September 9, 1789, letter to Madison.

Chapter Thirteen: The Evolution of Property

The Public Lands Survey, the basic mechanics and the repeated changes and refinement of the process, are contained in the Bureau of Land Management’s Instruction for the Survey of Public Land, Washington D.C., 1947; and in Linklater, Measuring America.

In a striking sentence: Cutler’s remark, Measuring America, 82.

The Pulliam family’s fortunes are recounted in John Mack Farragher’s classic account of frontier life, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).

“That it tended to be suffused in speculation”: Donald W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 244.

For the influence of Marshall’s two judgements see Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2005), 170.

“It is difficult to describe the rapacity”: Democracy in America, vol. 1 by Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. John C. Spencer (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1841), 322.

Between May 1800 and June 1820: figures from “The Public Domain and Nineteenth Century Transfer Policy” by Gary M. Anderson and Dolores T. Martin. Cato Journal 6, no. 3 (Winter 1987).

the value of even “unimproved” land: See “Changes in Total U.S. Agricultural Factor Productivity in the Nineteenth Century” by Robert E. Gallman. Agricultural History 46, no. 1, American Agriculture, 1790–1840: A Symposium (Jan. 1972), for evidence that land improvement may have accounted for as much as 80 percent of American physical capital stock.

the growth in value: The estimate of 12 percent gains for farmers in the Midwest and Northeast comes in To Their Own Soil: Agriculture in the Antebellum North by Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1987), 252–262.

“by giving credit”: Wealth of Nations, bk. II, ch. 2.

The twenty-seven banks: For the structure of nineteenth-century banking, see “Comparing UK and US Financial Systems, 1790–1830” by Richard Scylla, in The Evolution of Financial Markets and Institutions from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Jeremy Atack and Larry Neals, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Banks were not the only means: “The Emergence of a Capital Market in Rural Massachusetts, 1730–1838” by Winifred B. Rothenberg. The Journal of Economic History 45, no. 4 (Dec. 1985): 781–808.

the rising value of their farms: see Rothenberg, “Emergence of a Capital Market” for rural investment in industrial, financial, and other nonfarm activities.

the American System: described in “National Planning of Internal Improvements” by Carter Goodrich. Political Science Quarterly 63, no. 1 (March 1948): 16–44.

“Who ever heard of a man”: The Cultivator 1836, quoted in “Housing Bubbles Are Few and Far Between” by Robert J. Shiller. New York Times, Feb. 6, 2011.

Horace White: for his account of the settlement’s foundation, see Beloit College archives published online at

http://www.beloit.edu/~libhome/Archives/papers/beloitbegin.html.

“The titles in Kentucky”: See “Speculators and Settler Capitalists: unthinking the mythology about Appalachian landholdings 1790–1860” by Wilma A. Dunaway in Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight Billings, and Altina Waller, eds. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

“partly on account of slavery”: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 23.

Judge Joseph Story: his attribution of Kentucky’s woes to the decision to allow settlers to appropriate land “by entries and descriptions of their own, without any previous survey under public authority, and without any such boundaries as were precise, permanent, and unquestionable” came in “An address delivered before Members of the Suffolk Bar” in The American Jurist and Law Magazine 1, ed. Charles Sumner (Boston: Freeman & Bolles, 1829), 1.

the conventional explanation: figures for slave ownership derived from the U.S. Census 1860.

up to 90 percent: for the the distribution of Kentucky land, see Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists.”

“those who hold and exercise”: in The History of Kentucky, Exhibiting an Account of the Modern Discovery; Settlement; Progressive Improvement; Civil and Military Transactions; and the Present State of the Country, vol. 1 by Humphrey Marshall (Kentucky: Robinson, 1824) 415.

“do business on commission”: Dunaway “Speculators and Settler Capitalists,” 55.

“Leaves cut out of the Books”: Quoted in Linklater, Measuring America; description of the spread of the survey, ibid.

“The possession of land is the aim”: by Harriet Martineau, Society in America (Paris: Galignani, 1837), 292.

“Every industrious citizen”: John Melish, A Geographical description of the United States . . . intended as an accompaniment to Melish’s map” (Philadelphia, 1818), 59.

“Other peoples of America”: In Democracy in America, vol. 1, by Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Dearborn, 1840), ch. XVII, part 4.

Lorenzo Dow: appears in Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 2, James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., 579.

“fresh from the backwoods”: No reliable source has been found for Davy Crockett’s supposed self-description.

“all the Indian Tribes once existing”: Henry Knox comment, quoted in Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind by Roy Harvey Pearce (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 56.

American empire: In his popular textbook, American Geography (Boston, 1789), Jedidiah Morse made clear the imperial nature of American expansion. “The Mississippi was never designed as the western boundary of the American empire . . . We cannot but anticipate the period, as not far distant, when the AMERICAN EMPIRE will comprehend millions of souls west of the Mississippi.”

a claim from John Potter: Linklater, Measuring America, 209

Chapter Fourteen: The Empire of Land

Edward Gibbon Wakefield: see the generally admiring Edward Gibbon Wakefield: Builder of the British Commonwealth by Paul Bloomfield. London: Longmans, 1961; the generally critical Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream: A Reconsideration (Wellington, NZ: Friends of the Turnbull Library, 1997); and the generally evenhanded A sort of conscience: the Wakefields by Philip Temple (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2002).

The Privy Council statement: this appears to be the first official declaration that this was the policy of the British Empire. Acts of the Privy Council: Colonial Series, vol. 6, ed. W. L. Grant and J. Munro (Hereford, 1908–12), 491.

William Bligh: see The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World 1650–1900 by John C. Weaver (Montreal, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 75.

“It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield”: Marx paid his compliment in vol. I, ch. 33, of Capital (Moscow: Progress, 1972–76),

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm.

“Great Britain derives nothing but loss”: Wealth of Nations, bk. IV, ch. 7, sec. 3, 2.

a book that made clear the debt he owed: Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America: a comparison of the political and social states of both nations (London: Bentley, 1837). “Their rule for the disposal of waste land,” 175; “the English will hunt over the world,” 88.

The opening experiment was in South Australia: Wakefield’s own account appears in A View on the Art of Colonization (London, 1849). For a more dispassionate version, see Temple, A Sort of Conscience, 166–173.

Thomas Newman: His testimony appears in A Description of South Australia with sketches of New South Wales, Port Lincoln, Port Philip and New Zealand by Theodore Scott (Glasgow: Duncan Campbell, 1839), 29.

London investors: For early British investment in Australia, see ch. 3 of Replenishing the Earth. The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 by James Belich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Wakefield was engaged on his second experiment: Wakefield’s account of his Canadian activities appears throughout The Art of Colonization. Temple, A Sort of Conscience, pp. 209–21 is more reliable; Melbourne’s warning not to touch him “with a pair of tongs,” ibid., 210.

an extensive plan for the government of Canada: Lord Durham’s Report on the affairs of British North America, 2 vols. by John Lambton Durham (Oxford: Clarendon, 1839). “useless and consequent delay,” 210; “no security of property in land,” 231.

The development of Bruce County: from History of the County of Bruce by Norman Robertson (Ontario, Canada: Briggs, 1906),

http://www.electricscotland.com/history/canada/bruce/index.htm;

the context comes from William L. Marr, “Nineteenth Century Tenancy Rates in Ontario’s Counties, 1881 and 1891,” Journal of Social History 21, no. 4 (Summer 1988): 753–764.

“In no spot within British territory”: quoted in Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 148.

a quirk of banking regulation: Canadian banking practices from “A history of banking in Canada” by B. E. Walker in vol. 2 of A History of Banking in All the Leading Nations; Comprising the United States; Great Britain; Germany; Austro-Hungary; France; Italy; Belgium; Spain; Switzerland; Portugal; Roumania; Russia; Holland; The Scandinavian Nations; Canada; China; Japan (4 vols) ed. the Editor of the Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin (New York: The Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, 1896).

French-Canadian farming: in “Land Tenure, Ethnicity, and the Condition of Agricultural Income and Productivity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Quebec” by Morris Altman. Agricultural History 72, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 708–762.

“Wakefield discovered”: Marx’s comment on Wakefield, Capital, ch. 33.

“Be it by larceny”: Quoted in Gladstone 1809–1898 by H. C. G. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 276.

the New Zealand Company on his advice: Wakefield’s activities in New Zealand comes from Temple, A Sort of Conscience, part 4, “A Suicide of the Affections”; William Wakefield’s activities, ibid., ch. 22.

With the loss of land: The cultural alienation of Maori is addressed by numerous government and voluntary agency publications, among them Suicide Prevention in New Zealand: A Contemporary Perspective by S. Collings and A. Beautrais (Wellington: Ministry of Health, 2005). Similar sociological studies confirm the same dislocated pattern among the descendants of indigenous peoples in every private property society.

“the utter absence of individual title”: Elias Rector’s comment is quoted in Alexandra Harmon, “American Indians and Land Monopolies in the Gilded Age.” The Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (June 2003): 106–133.

the success of the Afrikaaners: The conflict between Afrikaaner farmers and British landowners is examined in “The Globalization of Property Rights: An Anglo and American Frontier Land Paradigm, 1700–1900” by John Weaver (Working Paper 00/1 McMaster University, 2000).

“His neighbours’ smoke shall vex his eyes”: “The Voortrekker” by Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling (London: Wordsworth, 1994), 581.

Chapter Fifteen: The End of Serfdom and Slavery

“I’m like a man possessed”: Tolstoy’s habitual raping of female serfs was detailed in his diary, which he forced his wife to read. “Peasant women in the garden,” quoted Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 265; “Today, in the big old wood,” quoted in “In which we die on the altar of Leo Tolstoy” in Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, Revised Edition, by Paul Johnson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).

In Russia, that process began: For the general impact of emancipation on landowners, see The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 by Terence Emmons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). The Jarosval petition, ibid., 288.

Boris Chicherin: For his background and influence, see “Peasant Emancipation and Russian Social Thought: The Case of Boris N. Chicherin” by Gary M. Hamburg. Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 890–904.

“Commercial farming is growing much more rapidly”: Lenin’s ambivalence about the consequences of emancipation—anxiety about the spread of “commercial farming” and relief that it signaled the bourgeois stage necessary for revolution—emerge clearly from The Agrarian Question in Russia Towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 15 in Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1973), 69–147.

mortgage lending had reached almost one billion rubles: From “A History of Banking in the Russian Empire” by A. E.Horne, vol. 2 of A History of Banking in All the Leading Nations.

The growing mobility of Russian peasants: Researched in “Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia’s Frontiers, 1550–1897” by David Moon. The Historical Journal 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1997): 859–893; the settlement of “American” Siberia comes from “Peasant Pioneering: Russian Peasant Settlers Describe Colonization and the Eastern Frontier, 1880s–1910” by Willard Sunderland. Journal of Social History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 895–922.

How Much Land Does a Man Need?”: Tolstoy’s story can be found online at

http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/2738/.

“A mir is a union of the people”: Quoted in Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution by Richard Stites (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 220.

wielded great power: The mir’s redistribution of land as a source of welfare emerges clearly from a memoir based on extensive travel in the 1870s, Russia by Donald Mackenzie Wallace, originally published 1905,

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1349/1349-h/1349-h.htm.

“For actual property”: Jefferson’s bleak conclusion in the last years of his life was written in a letter to Jared Sparks, February 4, 1824.

“Body of Liberties”: Digitized copy of Old South Leaflets (Boston, 1900),

http://history.hanover.edu/texts/masslib.html.

Definition of “bond slaverie,” verse 91.

“the male servants and slaves”: In The History and Present State of Virginia (1705) by Robert Beverley,

http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/beverley/beverley.html.

ch IX, 235.

“it cannot be presumed”: Virginia’s 1669 law, cited in Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia by William Waller Hening (Richmond, VA: Pleasants, 1809–1823).

Hans Sloane: His testimony is quoted in The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 by Robin Blackburn (London: Verso, 1995), 345.

“The master may sell”: From Louisiana Civil Code, Article 35, 1834.

Judge Thomas Ruffin: His verdict is quoted in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1854),

http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/key/kyhp.html.

Part 2, ch. II, “What is Slavery?”

France’s 1685 “Code Noir”: Issued 1685,

http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/335/.

the Spanish Empire allowed more humanity: Spanish law was derived from the thirteenth-century codification Las Siete Partidas, discussed especially in relation to Cuba in “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited” by Alejandro de la Fuente. Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 339–369.

“a negroe or mulatto”: The development of racial prejudice. The Massachusetts Act from Massachusetts Acts and Resolves of 1705, ch. 10, sec. 4,

http://archives.lib.state.ma.us.

Legislation did not stop the sex: Advertisements for escaped slaves in the Pennsylvania Chronicle from 1767–73 and the slave register of Chester County, PA, 1780, both showed 20 percent of slaves were mulatto. Cited in Slavery in the North by Douglas Harper,

http://www.slavenorth.com/slavenorth.htm.

Chief Justice Joseph Lumpkin: His opinion was delivered in Bryan v. Walton, 14 Georgia 185 (1853).

“property in persons”: Daniel Webster’s much-quoted speech in defense of the Union was delivered in the Senate March 7, 1850. Emerson’s response came in a lecture, “The Fugitive Slave Law,” delivered in the Tabernacle, New York City, March 7, 1854. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 12 vols. (Fireside Edition. Boston and New York: 1909),

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1961&chapter=123098&layout=html&Itemid=27.

“We have a right of protection”: Senator Albert Brown’s speech quoted in A People & a Nation: A History of the United States by Mary Beth Norton et al. (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2011), 381.

Massive changes were brought about: For Reconstruction, see Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction by Eric Foner (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2005).

“Political reconstruction is inevitable now”: Mary Greenhow Lee’s entry in her nine-hundred-page diary is quoted in Slavery in America by Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider (New York: Infobase, 2005), 376–377.

Chapter Sixteen: The Crisis of Capitalism

“such a triumph over physical difficulties”: For the impact of the Dunedin’s voyage, see OECD Insights International Trade Free, Fair and Open? by Patrick Love Patrick and Ralph Lattimore. (Paris: OECD), 116.

Almost twelve million bushels of wheat: For British and American commodity trade, see Belich Replenishing the Earth, ch. 14, “Urban carnivores”; “call Ohio her kitchen garden,” ibid., 485.

“They are also purchasing horses”: For the impact of the Volga Mennonites, see “The Migration of the Russian-Germans to Kansas” by Norman E. Saul. Kansas Historical Quarterly 40, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 38–62.

Similar networks operated internationally: For nineteenth-century migration pattern, see Belich, Replenishing the Earth, ch. 3, “Exploding West,” (267–268); 12 million migrants (ibid., 66); youthfulness of migrants (ibid., 205); “land mania” (ibid., 267); “most mercurial” (ibid., 187).

“I shall buy eighty lots”: Astor’s advice, Linklater, Measuring America, 179.

the freedom and equality that characterized the United States: Even at its most egalitarian, American society had its inequalities: as much as 25 percent of midwestern farms were rented before the Civil War, and the richest 1 percent owned 12 percent of the land. However, so long as the supply of land appeared inexhaustible, a statistical anomaly indicated that the society had achieved perfect equality. By entering infinity, representing open access to limitless resources, the Gini coefficient, the most informative equation for calculating income and wealth inequality, will give a result equivalent to zero, or perfect equality (where all the resources are owned by one person, the result is one).

No one perceived this more clearly: Henry George’s Progress and Poverty is accessible online,

http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm.

the rules of the marketplace had ceased to apply: For the circumstances that led to the crisis of overproduction, see Recent Economic Changes and Their Effect on Production and Distribution of Wealth and Well-Being of Society by David A. Wells (New York: Appleton, 1891), “Those engaged in great industrial enterprises,” 73.

the need to bring in more investment: Limited liability developed earlier in the United States, developing on a state by state basis, beginning with Massachusetts in 1808. It was especially beneficial to the spread of rural banking, with no fewer than 330 state banks in operation by 1825. See Scylla, “Comparing UK and US Financial Systems,” 109–111. However American banks were limited to state operation, while British banks and other financial institutions operated internationally.

“the great producers”: Wells, Recent Economic Changes, 74.

United States Steel: For international steel production, see The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1989), 242–244; coal production, Henry Adams in “A Law of Acceleration” in The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918).

“the great wheat fields of the state of Dakota”: Wells, Recent Economic Changes, 57–58.

What underpinned the banks’ lending: For an explanation of the anomalous financial state of American farmers at the end of the 19th century, see “Economic Development and Competition for Land Use in the United States” by Philip M. Raup. Journal of Farm Economics 39, no. 5, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Farm Economic Association (Dec. 1957), 1,514–1,526; also “Corporate Farming in the United States” by Philip M. Raup. The Journal of Economic History 33, no. 1, “The Tasks of Economic History” (Mar. 1973), 274–290.

Among the grain merchants: Cargill, now the largest private owned corporation in the United States, and Archer and Daniels, have becomes two of the four giants known as ABCD—ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus—that dominate the food industry.

more than three hundred cartels: For Germany’s cartels, see History of Germany 1780–1919: The Long Nineteenth Century by David Blackbourn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), part 3, “The Age of Modernity,” 311.

“Even today,” he wrote in 1910: For his plan to take control of the economy through the banks, see Finance Capital by Rudolf Hilferding (London: Routledge, 1981), 367–68.

“part of the Greater Britain”: quoted in Belchin, Replenishing the Earth, 481.

“a projection of the nineteenth century’s fear”: Alan Greenspan’s defense of monopolies appeared in a paper given at the Antitrust Seminar of the National Association of Business Economists, Cleveland, September 25, 1961.

“conspicuous consumption”: In Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen. Fairford, United Kindom: Echo, 2007, 33–36, and ch. 4 passim.

“It’s part of him. . . .”: in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1997), 35.

Chapter Seventeen: State Capitalism

The birth of the new Prussia: German reform, see History of Germany 1780–1919: The Long Nineteenth Century by David Blackbourn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 81–84.

“The strongest pillar”: Quoted in “Prussia in Transition: Society and Politics under the Stein Reform Ministry of 1808” by Marion W. Gray. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series 76, no. 1 (1986), 1–175, p. 128.

“It is indeed a wonderful sensation”: Hegel’s encounter with Napoleon. Hegel: A Biography by Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 228.

“all spiritual reality”: in The Philosophy of History by G. W. F. Hegel, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener, ON: Batoche, 1900). Introduction, “Classification of Historic Data,”

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/lectures.htm.

“put an end”: The Communist Manifesto in Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress, 1969), ch. 1, 98–137.

land-hungry junge Herren: For the Junkers, see Ordinary Prussians. Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500–1840 by William Hagen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Their origin p. 6.

“those who wish to operate with open pastures”: Bismarck’s Speech in the North German Reichstag in Defense of his Draft Constitution (March 11, 1867),

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/search/search.cfm.

“to be available to my people”: Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau, “The Rural Landlord and his people,” c. 1883, from his Erinnerung [Memoirs], 1936,

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=487.

Within months of the 1807 reform edict: For the Junkers’ classic move to seek political protection for their property, see Hagen, Ordinary Prussians, 606.

Courts “far more costly than profitable”: quoted in Gray, “Prussia in Transition,” 97.

“the right to approve state revenues”: The Progressive party’s goals according to von Sybel in Vorträge und Aufsätze [Lectures and Essays] by Heinrich von Sybel, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1875) 322–327. English excerpt “Heinrich von Sybel Describes the Structure of the German Empire and the Prospects for Liberty” (January 1, 1871) in German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) (Washington, DC: German Institute).

The timing of Prussia’s industrial revolution: For the persistence of handloom weavers and other preindutrial crafts see Blackbourn, History of Germany, 137–139.

“It is bad policy”: In “Outlines of American political economy,” (1827) quoted in “Friedrich List and the political economy of the nation-state” by David Levi-Faur. Review of International Political Economy 4, no. 1 (Spring 1997), 154–157.

“The iron rails become a nerve system”: The National System of Political Economy (1841), quoted in Cyclopædia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States, ed. John J. Lalor (New York: Maynard, 1899), vol. III, ch. 118, para. 35.

Prussia’s powerful bureaucracy: For the ethos of the Prussian civil service, see “The Social Policies of Prussian Officials: The Bureaucracy in a New Light” by Hermann Beck. The Journal of Modern History 64, no. 2 (June 1992), 263–298.

A lobbying campaign for greater freedom: For the motives of German business 1861–63, see “Salus publica suprema lex: Prussian Businessmen in the New Era and Constitutional Conflict” by James M. Brophy. Central European History 28, no. 2 (1995), 122–151; the three hundred-million-taler meeting, 147; political withdrawal, 147–149.

“Bismarck’s dodge”: quoted in The Age of Bismarck: Documents and Interpretations ed. Theodore S. Hamerow (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 156–158.

“these much-maligned Junkers”: Baumgarten’s self-criticism, “Der deutsche Liberalismus. Eine Selbstkritik” (1866) is quoted in “German Liberalism Recast: Hermann Baumgarten’s Self-Criticism,” GHDI.

“The Bismarck System is developing terribly quickly”: “Max von Forckenbeck to Franz von Stauffenberg on the need for National Liberal opposition (January 19, 1879) in GHDI, ibid.

Bismarck’s truly astonishing invention: Bismarck’s creation of the corporate state, see Blackbourn, History of Germany, 342–350.

German historians, led by Hans Rosenberg: Rosenberg’s thesis that the roots of Nazism lay in Prussian absolutism has fallen out of favor for reasons explained in William W. Hagen, “Descent of the Sonderweg: Hans Rosenberg’s History of Old-Regime.” Central European History 24, no. 1 (1991), 24–50.

“If a manufacturing enterprise is to flourish”: In Carl Ferdinand Freiherr Stumm-Halberg (1936), quoted in “Carl Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg, Address to his Employees (c. 1889), GHDI.

brushed aside by the growth of industry: For the decline in agricuture’s share of GNP, see “Forging an Empire: Bismarckian Germany, 1866–1890,” GHDI.

“They’re no longer the pillars”: The Stechlin by Theodore Fontane, trans. William L. Zwiebel (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1995), 228–229.

Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB): For an exceptionally lucid explanation of the intent of the BGB in property exchange, see the website

http://www.dr-hoek.de/EN/beitrag.asp?t=German-Land-Law.

they routinely had to resort to ballot-box fraud: The evidence for ballot-box stuffing comes in “Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud: The Case of Germany Before 1914” by Daniel Ziblatt. OCSID working paper 04; Oxford Centre for the Study of Inequality and Democracy (2005).

blaming their ills on a Jewish conspiracy: For the Agrarian League’s politics and embrace of anti-semitism, see “Anti-Semitism, Conservative Propaganda, and Regional Politics in Late Nineteenth CenturyGermany” by James Retallack, German Studies Review 11, no. 3 (Oct. 1988), 377–403.

Chapter Eighteen: The Cold War

Roughly the size of California: Japan’s physical shape and fifteen-degree slope come from Encyclopedia of World Geography ed. Peter Haggett (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2001), 3,062.

the feudalism of the Tokugawa was nationalized: For the impact of land reforms see Land Reform in Japan by R. P. Dore. (London: Athlone Press, 1984).

ideology based on the kokutai: The creation of the “national community” is explored in “The Japanese “Kokutai” (National Community) History and Myth” by Joseph M. Kitagawa. History of Religions 13, no. 3 (Feb. 1974), 209–226.

“everyone should play his part”: The rural context of Nhon-shugi and the transfer of samurai values to business come from The rise of modern business: Great Britain, the United States, Germany, Japan and China (3rd edition) by Mansel G. Blackford (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 125.

the Meiji government deliberately taxed agriculture: The Meiji government’s policy of taxing agriculture to kick-start industry is a central theme in “The Role of Agriculture in Economic Development” by Bruce F. Johnston and John W. Mellor. The American Economic Review 51, no. 4 (Sept. 1961), 566–593.

Secret nationalist societies proliferated: For the Young Officers and 1930s violence, see Blackford, The Rise of Modern Business, 138.

the basic difference between imperial Germany and imperial Japan: Richard Sims explicitly contrasts the nature of fascism in Japan and Germany in “Japanese Fascism,” History Today 32, issue 1, 1982.

So long as the Nazis remained outsiders: The change in Nazi fortunes from being outsiders to mainstream is customarily ascribed to the economic effects of the Depression, but Hitler’s switch of emphasis on Clause 17 transformed popular perception of their street violence.

That heroic achievement: Appropriately, Litten is commemorated by the Hans Litten prize awarded for outstanding work in the defense of human rights.

For Wolf Ladejinsky’s life and career, see “Wolf Ladejinsky, Tireless (and Frustrated) Advocate of Land Reform” by Ben Stavis, Temple University, PA (2004).

http://astro.temple.edu/~bstavis/courses/215-ladejinsky.htm.

And, Agrarian Reform as Unfinished Business: The Selected Papers of Wolf Ladejinsky ed. Louis Walinsky. (London: Oxford University Press, 1977); for reforms in Japans, ibid. 281–285; Ladejinsky noted that one “immediate result of the transfer of ownership was the sharp increase in the accumulation of rural capital,” 285; and, looking back over a decade later, “Beyond the Land Reform: Japan’s Agricultural Prospect” by R. P. Dore. Pacific Affairs 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1963), 265–276.

“several million tenant farmers”: Quoted in Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945–52 by Howard B. Schonberger. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989), 65.

“the democratization of the villages”: Dore’s comments on change in social attitudes after land reform are in Land Reform in Japan by R. P. Dore (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), “end of hallowed hierarchy” (ibid., 161); “sense of equality” (ibid., 218); the number of peasants involved (ibid., 149).

Wider economic impact, see “Agricultural Land Reform in Postwar Japan” by Toshihiko Kawagoe. Policy Research Working Paper 2111; World Bank Development Research Group, 1999.

its role was essential: For the role of land reform in Taiwan’s economic success, see “Agriculture as the Foundation for Development: the Taiwanese Story” by Tsu-tan and Shun-yi Shei, in Taiwan’s Development Experience: lessons on the roles of government and market, eds. Erik Thorbecke and Henry Wan (Boston: Kluwer, 1999); for the increase in productivity, see “Economic Consequences of Land Reform in Taiwan” by Anthony Y. C. Koo. Asian Survey 6, no. 3 (March 1966): 150–157.

“Negotatiating with a tiger”: Quoted Ladejinsky, Agrarian Reform, 101.

his third success: Land reform in South Korea. “Outcome of Land Reform in the Republic of Korea” by Ki Hyuk Pak. Journal of Farm Economics 38, no. 4 (Nov. 1956), 1015–1023.

a direct comparison with North Korea: The differences between South Korea’s development path and those of Japan and Taiwan are explored in “Contesting Models of East Asian Development and Financial Liberalization: A Case Study of South Korea” by Amiya Kumar Bagchi. Social Scientist 36, no. 9–10 (Sep.–Oct., 2008), 4–23.

The prize in the competition: Ladejinsky’s supporters claimed his program was “the only successful anti-communist step we have taken in Asia,” quoted in The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia by Nick Cullather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 95.

“Small-scale production”: Lenin’s interest in agriculture surfaced in ch. 2 of The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), expressing his belief that rich peasants had become capitalist. The Bolshevik nationalization of land in 1918 was the necessary first step toward making agriculture socialist.

“avaricious, bloated and bestial”: Lenin’s outburst was quoted in The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 312.

families of more than half a million farmers: The most commonly quoted figure for deaths from famine and government is twelve million. The figures for the growth of the Soviet economy are taken from “A reassessment of the Soviet industrial revolution” by Robert C. Allen in Comparative Economic Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Chapter Nineteen: The End of Land Reform

Castro as “a petty bourgeois putschist”: quoted in “The Resurrections of Che Guevara” by Mike Gonzalez. International Socialist issue 77, 1997.

“The mass carries out with matchless enthusiasm”: taken from one of Guevara’s last public pronouncements, “From Algiers, for Marcha: The Cuban Revolution Today,” written March 1965 (The Che Reader [Sydney: Ocean Press, 2005]).

the National Institute of Agrarian Reform: The activities of INRA and Guevara’s disillusionment with the growing power of the Communists are detailed in Gonzalez “Resurrections.”

“a national security risk”: Ladejinsky’s indictment, and the shift away from land reform. Cold War Culture and Society: The Cold War by Lori Lyn Bogle (New York: Routledge, 2001), 310–314.

Ladejinsky’s new role: Ladejinsky’s attempts to introduce land reform to Vietnam. Ladejinsky, Agrarian Reform, 246–258; “robbed by the Viet Min,” 255; data on land distribution, 301–302.

“more primitive, less efficient”: History of Latin American Civilization: Sources and Interpretations, the Colonial Experience, vol. 1, ed. Lewis Hanke (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1969), ix.

the one constant in all the political convulsions: From the failed attempt in the 1930s by President Getualo Vargas in Brazil to redistribute land, to the twenty-first century Plan Zamora designed by the late President Hugo Chavez to put unused land into the hands of Venezuelan campesinos, plans for land reform in Latin America have remained as constant as the inequalities.

“a definitive social, political, and cultural victory”: “The Take-Off into Self-Sustained Growth” by W. W. Rostow. The Economic Journal 66, no. 261 (Mar. 1956), 25–48.

Rostow neglected to mention: For Sweden’s land reforms, see “Towards Agrarian Capitalism: The Case of Southern Sweden during the 19th Century” by Jens Möller. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 72, no. 2–3 (1990), 59–72. For its financial development prior to “take-off,” see “Sweden in 1850 as an ‘Impoverished Sophisticate’: Comment” by Charles P. Kindleberger. The Journal of Economic History 42, no. 4 (Dec. 1982): 918–920.

Denmark’s smaller farms and unproductive sandy soil: For the cooperative development of Danish agriculture, see “Late 19th Century Denmark in an Irish Mirror: Land Tenure, Homogeneity and the Roots of Danish Success” by Kevin H. O’Rourke. NBER Working Paper, 2005.

The most tragic failure: For the failure of the Great Leap Forward, see Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 by Frank Dikötter (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

For the failure of Soviet collectivization, see “The Former Soviet Union and the World Wheat Economy” by James R. Jones, Shuang L. Li, Stephen Devadoss, Charlotte Fedane. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 78, no. 4 (Nov. 1996), 869–878.

Chapter Twenty: Rostow’s Legacy

a seismic change in American identity: The farm population in the 1920s was more than thirty-one million, but by 1960, it had shrunk to slightly more than than fifteen million.

the former have industrialized: “The Stages of Economic Growth” by W. W. Rostow. The Economic History Review, New Series 12, no. 1 (1959), 1–16.

“all would have a share of future wealth”: World Development Report, World Bank. 1991.

Huntington eloquently pleaded: Political Order in Changing Societies by Samuel P. Huntington (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).

the White Revolution: For Arsanjani’s reform, see Land Reform in Principle and Practice by Doreen Warriner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 119–126.

the Green Revolution: For its weaving together of farming, science, and politics, see Cullather, The Hungry World; “there is a deficiency of nitrogen,” 61; Norin 10 development, 190–200.

“betting on the strong”: Cullather, ibid., 189. So great was the extra demand for nitrogen associated with the Green Revolution, Bechtel of California offered to build five plants in India each producing 750 tons a day.

the miracle variety: The IR 8 variety of rice was dark green to absorb sunlight, short to minimize use of energy, pest and disease resistant, and stiff enough to be machine harvestable.

“The real revolution”: Cullather, Hungry World, 234; “Even if it wasn’t such a spectacular producer,” ibid., 171.

“the meek and humble among the farm owners”: Ladejinsky, Agrarian Reform, 535.

the Ottoman Land Code: The Tanzimat reforms produced a web of land ownership rules that were increasingly localized, although for tax purposes they gave an impression of regularity.

percent of Iraq’s territory: For Iraq distribution of land, see Warriner, Land Reform, ch. 4, “Revolutions in Iraq,” 77.

“uneducated people, tribal people”: Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazards: My Time governing in Iraq (London: Picador, 2006); “uneducated people,” 31.

lively debate in Islam: Islamic responses to landed property are examined in “A Disputed Utopia: Islamic Economics in Revolutionary Iran” by Sohrab Behdad. Comparative Studies in Society and History 36, no. 4 (Oct. 1994), 775–813; “unbridled capitalism,” 807.

Khomeini’s inability to deal with privately owned property: For the intricate ownership of water and land in Iran, see “Robbing Yadullah’s Water to Irrigate Saeid’s Garden: Hydrology and Water Rights in a Village of Central Iran” by François Molle, Alireza Mamanpoush, and Mokhtar Miranzadeh (International Water Management, 2004).

“If the people one day decide to live”: quoted in a forum posting, “Tunisia: A Moment of Destiny for the Tunisian People and Beyond?” by Dyab Abou Jahjah on openDemocracy, Jan. 13, 2011.

Chapter Twenty-One: The Economics of the Industrial Home

“absolutely elemental”: Warren Harding to Mrs. Maloney, July 21, 1922.

the production of refrigerators: For the flood of consumer products, see Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process by Joseph Schumpter (New York: McGraw Hill, 1939), 363.

“When a family buys a home”: President Clinton launching his National Homeownership Strategy, June 5, 1995.

the new homeowners of the 1920s: For the 1920s housing boom, see “Lessons from the Great American Real Estate Boom and Bust of the 1920s” by Eugene N. White, NBER Working Paper No. 15573, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009.

Hoover’s overriding priority: For Hoover’s strategy, see The Clash of Economic Ideas: Great Policy Debates and Experiments of the Last Hundred Years by Lawrence White (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 3, “The Roaring Twenties and the Austrian Business Cycle Theory.”

“The deterioration of the conditions”: Ernest Bevin by Peter Weiler (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993), 54–55.

“Chentlemen! A depression iss for capitalism like a good cold douche”: remembered by Robert Heilbroner in “The Embarrassment of Economics” in Challenge 39, no. 6, 1996.

the theory that von Mises presented: Ludwig von Mises in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951),

http://mises.org/books/socialism/contents.aspx.

the idea originated with his mentor: For Carl Menger in particular and the context of the Austrian School, see The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 by William M. Johnston (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 77–82.

economic freedom could be equated to individual liberty: The Road to Serfdom appeared in a shortened, best-selling Reader’s Digest version, but the original is definitive (London: Routledge, 1944).

“This is what we believe in.”: Story cited in Margaret Thatcher: Portrait of the Iron Lady by John Blundell (London: Algora, 2008), 41.

It was a revealing admission: The Constitution of Liberty by Friederich Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

The heavily taxed and regulated economy grew: Economic growth 1950–70. U.S. GDP growth, “Historical trends 1950–92, and current uncertainties” by Ronald E. Kutscher. Monthly Labor Review Nov. 1993. Stock market returns, compound annual rates of return from S&P 500, figures from MoneyChimp. UK figures from “A backward glance: the reappraisal of the 1960s” lecture by Samuel Brittan to the Institute of Contemporary British history, April 1997.

almost half of all Americans rented their homes: U.S. housing figures, U.S. Census Bureau, Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, 2011.

“the General Motors of the housing industry”: Quoted in American Family Home, 1800–1960 by Clifford Edward Clark (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 221.

you are inferior: Von Mises to Rand, letter dated Jan. 23, 1958.

“intellectually limited”: Greenspan’s remarks appear in his autobiography, Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin, 2008).

the deregulation of the City of London: Big Bang was the centerpiece of a wave of deregulation that included airlines, utilities, and communications.

“unfettered market competition”: Greenspan testified to Congress Oct. 23, 2008.

the value of subprime mortgages: $1.3 trillion of subprime mortgages, figure from “Move over prime,” The Economist, February, 5, 2009.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Undoing the Damage

shot herself with a handgun: Mrs. Addie Polk’s tragedy stood out because it happened quite early in the fallout from the crash, but as the tidal wave of foreclosures washed across private property economies, the loss of shelter, security, and even identity that a home represents brought millions more close to her despair.

“a property-owning democracy”: The flaw in this model of social engineering was that the banks owned the property, not the inhabitants. For the connection between a housing boom and an economic bust in 1929 and 2008, see “Household Cycles and Economic Cycles, 1920–2010” by Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith (Chapman University, CA, 2010).

The growth of lending: For the huge growth in mortgage lending, see “The Rise and Fall of the Mortgage and Credit Markets” by James R. Bart et al. (Milken Institute, 2009).

almost six hundred trillion dollars: The figure from the Bank for International Settlements for the last quarter of 2007, $596 trillion.

the number of politically free countries: Figures for 2007 from Freedom House, “Freedom in the World,” 2008.

the 1992 paper he cited: Professor Fukuyama’s assertion of a “strong correlation” between industrial development and democracy is made in “Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later” by Francis Fukuyama, History and Theory 34, no. 2, Theme Issue 34: World Historians and Their Critics (May, 1995), 27–43. The paper he refers to is by Larry Diamond, “Economic Development and Democracy Reconsidered,” American Behavioral Scientist 15 (March–June 1992), 450–499.

“free and equal in dignity and rights”: Compared to the painstaking arguments that backed the assertion to natural rights in property and to the pursuit of happiness, the United Nations’ assertion of its human rights is strangely bare. But perhaps it was felt that the hideousness of Nazi ideology had made a case for human rights that was overwhelming.

a recent study concluded: The study was conducted by two law professors, David S. Law and Mila Versteeg, in “The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution,” New York University Law Review 87, no. 3 (2012).

eligible to buy thirty-year leases: For the change in property law, see “The Law of Property and the Evolving System of Property Rights in China” by Albert H. Y. Chen (May 25, 2010).

an open letter to the People’s National Congress: Professor Gong’s lengthy letter pulled no punches. “[The proposed law’s] essence and main agenda are to protect the property rights of a small minority. The Draft seeks essentially to protect private property.”

The “small minority,” however, included city chieftains. Tensions between the Communist Party and the cities bear an obvious resemblance to ancient rivalries between imperial servants and provincial officials.

a potentially significant move: Significantly, the tentative move to tax mansions had a follow-up. In early 2013, the Party Congress announced a new wealth tax on the sale of houses.

successive administrations brought down: In practice, the cuts brought the average top rate down to under 29 percent.

a gap that had to be filled by borrowing: President Reagan’s borrowing was partly to pay for his administration’s hiring of an extra 324,000 employees, while President George W. Bush’s borrowing included the costs of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

the incomes of CEOs: The 2007–8 United Nations Human Development Report showed that while the CEO of a major U.S. company drew a salary twenty-five times that of an average worker in 1965, the differential had grown to more than 250 times the average worker’s in 2006.

the top 1 percent of Americans: Research by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective” showed that the richest 1 percent earned 18.3 percent of national income, a figure not matched since 1929.

“there is an inside track”: Britain’s finance industry used its muscle in the political marketplace to secure unprecedented freedom from regulation, and relief from bearing the cost of the consequences.

the health of Americans had dropped: Research by Harvard School of Public Health published by the Harvard Magazine July–August 2008 showed that while life expectancy is growing for most people, 4 percent of poor American men and 19 percent of poor American women would have shorter lives, or no longer, than their parents.

the bottom half of the OECD’s membership: OECD report 2011 ranked the United States twenty-first among the OECD’s forty nations in terms of life expectancy, and thirty-second in terms of infant mortality. The UK ranked eleventh and twenty-sixth, but behind France and all the Nordic nations.

twenty-three of the largest companies in the world: Start-up rates of S&P 500’s largest companies, “The demographics of global corporate champions” by Luis Véron. Bruegel; Brussels, 2008

a pallid reward: Stock market returns 1988–2008, compound annual rates of return from S&P 500, figures from MoneyChimp.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Feeding the Future.

it was deemed to have created: U.S. figures from “Intellectual Property and the US economy,” U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, April 2012. UK figures from Intellectual Property Office, July 2011.

the German congress: The German economists met at the Kongress deutscher Volkswirthe held in Dresden, September 1863.

the number of patents: The figures for U.S. patents issued came from “How Patent Laws Are Stifling American growth,” Bloomberg News, February 24, 2013. UK figures from “British patent numbers (under the Patents Act 1977) 1979 to present day,” Intellectual Property Office.

the Uruguay round of trade agreements: For the effect of TRIPS on communal and traditional medical knowledge, see “Native medicines—who should profit?,” New Scientist 181, issue 2436 (February 28, 2004), 15.

In a prescient article: “The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age” by John Perry Barlow. Wired, Mar. 1994.

“cancerous” and “unAmerican”: Microsoft’s epithets are quoted in an interview with Linus Torvals in “Linux succeeded thanks to selfishness and trust,” by Leo Kelion, New York Times, June 13, 2012.

“There is no enterprise”: Henry Dawes made his comment to the Senate in 1883.

Research into innovation: “The Patent System and Competition: A Statement to the Federal Trade Commission/Department of Justice Hearings on Competition and Intellectual Property Law and Policy in the Knowledge-Based Economy” by Josh Lerner, Harvard University and National Bureau of Economic Research. “Patent Protection and Innovation Over 150 Years” by Josh Lerner, Harvard University and NBER.

“a patents cliff”: appears in such quotes as “the pharmaceutical industry is about to fall off a patents cliff” in “Rebooting Industry” by Nick Clayton, Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2011.

“Our mind-set was surpluses”: Quoted in “A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself” by Justin Gillis, New York Times, June 4, 2011.

“farmland is going to be one of the best investments”: Quoted in The Great Food Robbery: How Corporations Control Food, Grab Land and Destroy the Climate by GRAIN (Cape Town: Pambazuka, 2012).

almost 110 million acres of farmland: Land grab figures, ibid.

“We could be moronic”: Susan Payne, ibid., 123.

“We bring foreign currency”: Jittu’s Ethiopian investment. “Speculating with Lives: How Global Investors Make Money Out of Hunger” by Horand Knaup et al. Der Spiegel, Sep. 1, 2011.

this traditional shape was upset: For the background to Mali’s occupation by Tuareg and terrorists, see Great Food Robbery, 130–133. Subsequent developments in various media 2012–13 and ongoing.

created by the U.S. Congress in 2004: Millennium Challenge Corporation.

www.mcc.gov.

attempt to modernize Afghan society: For Rostow-inspired development in Helmand province, Afghanistan, see Little America: The War Within the War by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

equitable land distribution was fundamental to social stability: Typically government approaches to the challenge of feeding the future still deal with systems rather than the people who own the soil, the produce, or simply the labor. See, for example, the British government’s approach The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability (2011). For information, see Food Outlook reports twice yearly from“Global Information and Early Warning System” Food and Agricultural Organization.

“the slightest problem during the entire famine”: Amartya Sen’s remarkable theory of food entitlement turns Malthus on his head, and placing the emphasis on accessing food rather than producing it. See Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation by Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982).