How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

By Simon Winchester

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There is a subtle difference between the two terms: while real estate has come to mean the tract and any improvements made to it – a house, for instance – the term real property signifies in addition the so-called Bundle of Rights that can come with simple ownership: the rights, for example, to occupy, to sell, to mine, to clear away timber, to prevent trespass, to exclude others. Further explanation later. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.4)

Some may wonder why the word land came into common usage so much earlier the word sea. There is a reason, and it points to two fundamental differences, other than the obvious physical dissimilarity between earth and water, and which so markedly separates the two. One difference is that while the sea generally looks – and indeed is – much the same everywhere around the planet, varying only slightly in apparent color and warmth and salinity – the land varies hugely in aspect from place to place, and often does so in close proximity – there are mountains here, valleys there; there is desert or glacier, swamp or meadow, the surface is undulating or jagged, fertile or barren, wooded or grassy, its features hot and dry, or bitter cold and edged with ice. Variation of landscape is a basic feature of land, and is something to which inhabitants are sensitive, and of which they presumably always have been profoundly aware. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.7)

The newcomers, eager legally to secure the taking of the abandoned native lands, introduced one formality that their Indian predecessors had never known: the title deed. Such a document, much like that which I would be handed three centuries later, coon became an essential for demonstrating that one was actually the rightful owner of a piece of real estate. One of the earliest such New England title deeds was written in 1664, when a Dutchman named Willem Hoffmeyer bought three small islands in the Hudson, recording the purchase from three Mohican chiefs. His handwriting on the deed, and that of his clerk, is florid, legible, and adorned with extravagant curlicues. The Indians were naturally unversed in the writing or reading of English, and their signatures on the deed are, respectively, a line drawing of a bull, a turtle, and a field of corn. The simplicity of their part of the document has a poignancy all of its own, when it is considered how utterly dispossessed these three Mohican men would likely be, probably before the ink on the agreement was dry. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.20)

Little more than vaguest shadows of Native American occupation, centuries-long perhaps, maybe even millennia-long, can be discerned or surmised, even though they would be, should by right and human decency be, the true owners of the land. The first owners, one might say. In recent times some communities in New England have taken to offering – with a brief speech, a short homily, a moment of silence before a public meeting – a token of respect to those Native Americans who came first. This has already been done for years in Australia and New Zealand, countries whose treatment of their own aboriginal predecessors is no less lamentable than America’s has been. That the notionally redemptive practice is now spreading slowly up to – and by way of New England now into the public fabric of – the United States can do little but good, even if it comes a century or more too late. If nothing else the pause it brings serves to remind us that when we reach back so far in time, questions about the precise nature of the ownership of land, in the United States and elsewhere, become necessarily ever more vague and the answers less fathomable than they are today.

(Winchester 2021, pp.28)

But it remains a reality that, in most societies today, ownership of land happens – even if the very concept of ownership reduces itself to one simple and popularly accepted fact, as a land lawyer put it: ownership means that you have the right to call the police to throw anyone else off what the title documents say belongs to you. It is not so much that you own it; it is just you own the right to tell everyone else to keep off it.

(Winchester 2021, pp.34-35)

The use to which a piece of land is to be put is of no consequence. It really does not matter whether the land is to be tilled, as here with these farmers, or grazed or cropped or quarried, whether it is to be built on or mined or left to lie fallow. All that is essential is that it has to be defined. Its whereabouts have to be known. Its dimensions have to be agreed. Especially its edges, where one piece of surface abuts onto another. 

In other words, the piece of land has to have boundaries. It needs agreed-upon borders. It must know its place. Place may of course be many things – it may be sea or earth or a spot in the firmament or on some distant world. And place may in many cases actually be land. But land is in all cases, and always, place. Before anyone like these two farmers can lay any claim to it, so this place must be somehow distinguished from all other places. It has to be unique. It has to have a position. No two tracts can occupy the same position, no two or more can be in the same place at the same time. Schrodinger might argue otherwise, but the land is not a cat, cannot truly be there and not there at the same moment. Land’s place is essentially fixed, and that fixity needs to be established and be properly and literally demarcated. It would have been these first farmers who worked out the best means of doing so. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.41-42)

The Lake of the Woods, a wildly irregularly shaped body of water that straddles Ontario and Manitoba, and provides Winnipeg with much of its water supply, is a relic of the once massive Lake Agassiz, one of the largest-ever glacial lakes in history. When the immense volume of Agassiz freshwater finally drained out through a broken ice dam, eight thousand years ago, the world’s sea levels steadily rose by as much as nine feet – an event that gave rise, many suppose, to the biblical myths of the Great Flood, Noah’s Ark, and the supposed strandings on the summit of Armenia’s Mount Ararat. Fanciful these myths may be, but the legacy of the Lake of the Woods remains, and its very existence helped create a geographical fancy of its own, two centuries ago. 

The origins of the error go back to the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which fully recognized the legitimate existence of the new-made republic of the United States, and granted to this new country perpetual title to its immense extent of lands. Exactly what these lands comprised and where they began and ended was a little vague, especially in the north around the Great Lakes – but the treaty’s framers, with a small army of geographic advisers, did their best to define the division, the ultimate border, between the latitudinal limits of this new nation and the British-ruled remnants of land to its north, which would become Canada. Until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the lands west of the Mississippi River belonged variously to Spain and France, and so the river was considered to be the western frontier. In 1883 it was erroneously assumed that the lake, according to the celebrated British mapmaker John Mitchell,* was shaped like an egg, not the wild mess of inlets and arms and outlets that surveyors later determined it to be. The border would thus pass from “the northwesternmost point of this lake,” as the framers of the 1783 treaty wrote, and more critically, “thence across to the Mississippi in the west.” The ragged-looking thing that eventuated would be the frontier-line between new-made American territory and the possessions of France, after which the line would follow the Mississippi southward all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. So, a border was laboriously drawn, and inscribed onto the maps of the day. America had its first official outline.

* A respected expert on the biology of the opossum, Mitchell was also the man who helped discover that plants have either male or female characteristics, as well as being a cartographer of legendary brilliance whose maps were employed as recently as 1932 in the settlement of boundary negotiations between Canada and the United States.

(Winchester 2021, pp.89-90)

One such, blessed with no native population and possessed by no one, is the island of South Georgia, in the cold South Atlantic waters some few hundred miles off the coast of Antarctica. It is a long, boomerang–shaped island with a spine of sharp snow-covered mountains, scores of glaciers and deeply incised fjords, and with settlements built by late-nineteenth-century Eropeans from which they would hunt for whales out in the deep ocean.

It is also an island with an intriguing story on many levels – as the island where Ernest Shackleton and his fellow survivors from the ice wreck of the Endurance finally found rescue; as a breeding ground for one of the world’s largest seabirds, Diomedea exulans, the wandering albatross; as the home of some of the largest king penguin colonies on the planet. And also, most relevant here, as the island where cartographers from England, familiar with the excellence and profound meaning of their homegrown Ordnance Survey sheets, decided during the 1950s to turn their skills to making a comprehensive and wholly accurate map of this very island, eight thousand miles from home. 

These surveyor-dreamers were all young men, ex-army in most cases, and, most intriguing, they were led on their expeditions – staged during three austral summer seasons between 1951 and 1957 – by a man named Duncan Carse, a figure already known the length of the British Isles, by children especially, for being the voice of the man character in Dick Barton, Special Agent, a beloved BBC radio thriller. That a fictional radio detective could be also a skilled mapmaker and a somewhat heroic explorer of the sub-Antarctic – fo the ice-bound interior of South Georgia presents a formidably challenging landscape, and there were injuries aplenty on the expeditions – says something both about the temper of the times, and about the nature of the actual workings of empire, the nature that is seen when one looks beyond the cruelties of imperial oppression and intolerance. The science of mapmaking has a certain intellectual honesty to it, its practitioners enjoying a certain independent nobility of spirit. And all of it is essential to the demarcation of the world’s land, wherever it may be. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.99-100)

The great majority of those in the world today who lay claim to owning a piece of land have acquired it secondhand. Generally speaking, land that belongs to someone now has belonged to someone else before, and whether it be meadow or moorland, a tract on a mountainside or a parking lot on Main Street, it can invariably and rightly be described in just the way that an old car might be described, or a washing machine: the land acquired is previously owned, has been lightly or gently used, is a hand-me-down.

But not quite always. There are of course enormous acreages around the world that are uninhabitable, or inaccessible, or seem to be mineralogically worthless, and so are not presently owned by any individual or institution and are superintended only by the country in which they happen to be situated. There are also, however, and thanks mostly to the forces of geology – and in places to the ingenuity and pressing needs of man – small pockets of brand-new land that in most cases never have been owned nor ever will be, and so will never enter the chain of possession that defines almost everywhere else.

(Winchester 2021, pp.103)

Ahead of them all was an expanse of territory that would soon be a state named Oklahoma, a conflation of the Choctaw words meaning “Red People.” The crowds – single men and whole families, drawn from all over the country and beyond – were engaging this April day in the first of many land runs, so called by the United States government, that had been designed to settle this territory’s acres and, with hard labor and commercial guile and over hopefully brief periods of time, make them productive and pleasant, civilized and rich. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.124)

John Winthrop, the Bay Colony’s second and most influential governor, was the first to dilute Grotius’s opinion by stirring a tincture of godly authority for landownership* into the mix by arguing – as the English philosopher John Locke would argue more forcefully fifty years later – that it was man’s Christian duty not just to own the land, but to improve it. The Book of Genesis, after all, spoke of the injunction for humankind to “increase and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it.” Winthrop could thus argue that the settlers now had both a natural, God-given right to own, but a civil right too, one that came about only when the land was fenced in, manured and improved, to paraphrase his own words in a pamphlet that he published in 1629 designed for the westbound voyagers to read on their Atlantic crossing. 

* The traditional views of the Wampanoag toward landownership echo many ancient attitudes to land elsewhere, a notion that will be explored later. Jews, for instance, drew their original inspiration from the Book of Leviticus, and Yahweh’s commandment that all land was God’s and the “strangers and sojourners” had no innate right to possess it. Then again, Hammurabi ruled Babylon by courtesy of the Levantine deity Baal, and any citizen wanting land nearby could acquire the tenancy of it only by serving the king in his role as god’s agent. Likewise, in imperial China, the Celestials won their use of territory in return for service to the Son of Heaven, who owned the country on behalf of God. And even in the less devout corners of Europe the barons and lordly bishops saw themselves as in service to the Almighty, and those whom they permitted to occupy land were no more than components of a long string of obligation connecting Heaven to Earth, by way of Man. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.130)

The idea put forward then – and which has generally held legal sway throughout all subsequent American history, even though it started by being limited to the colonizing ambitions of just Portugal and Spain – held that if a European nation was lucky enough to discover foreign lands peopled by non-Christian natives, it had an inalienable right to own those lands and to colonize such people as were unlucky enough to live in the Europeans’ path. England and France soon followed suit, employing their own version of the Doctrine of Discovery to justify their own behaviors around the world as their empires burgeoned through the centuries; and the United States, once it got itself under way in the 1780s, used the same or a similar version of the doctrine to claim ownership of the lands hitherto settled by Indians. Merely by planting a flag, the doctrine said, you owned the land on which you planted it.

The British went further: believing the doctrine extended authority over humanity every bit as much as it did over landscape, they also took large numbers of Native Americans into slavery. Ironically the Spaniards, reputedly leaders of thought in these matters, had made slavery of Native Americans illegal in the mid-sixteenth century, leading the British to employ subterfuge and semantic sleight of hand to force indigenous people to work their plantations in the Caribbean – fulfilling the initial land-grabbing and slave-making suppositions of the doctrine to the letter, in other words. The Americans later took thousands of locals as slaves too, though this “other slavery,” as it has been recently called, was also perpetrated in cunning ways, coercive labor based on financial indebtedness being the classic means of forcing natives to work on the southern plantations, alongside the African importees.

So now the principle had been conceived and agreed to – that by divinely sanctioned right and with formal papal endorsement, European flag-planting settlers might now take away the land previously settled by the America’s vast and varied population of native peoples. And with that, so the rush to gather up the spoils – the land and its landscapes, soon to be deconsecrated and commodified – got ponderously under way.

Land was by now a fully recognized capital asset, with its value positively straining to be released by the labor of men who worked on it. This was one of the central messages of the then widely published and popular writings of William Petty, the seventeenth-century philosopher-anatomist who was at the time cutting a swathe through economic thinking in England. Petty – mathematician, linguist, astronomer, surveyor, navigator, doctor, thinker of formidable breadth, and a prodigious talent – had convinced most in the English establishment of the day that land was not a merely static resource, rock and grass and little else, but was an asset with an inherent capital value that could be released by the simple process of working it. Moreover, land’s intrinsic value would also increase by the simplest principle of supply and demand, in that land was limited in supply but the population that wanted it would always be guaranteed to increase, such that the land would become ever more in demand, and so command higher and higher prices at sale. Since land would in both theory and practice bring profit to all involved, land must be acquired by colonists coming to America if they were to profit and prosper and lead the colonies into the sunlit uplands of economic success.  

(Winchester 2021, pp.132-133)

* The Choctaw were accompanied by five hundred Black slaves. Disagreeable though it may be to recount, the Five “Civilized” Tribes were regarded as being advanced in part because they each owned slaves, thereby mimicking the behavior of the supposedly advanced whites of the time. The Cherokee took some two thousand slaves on their various marches. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.147)

During its prime, Anglo-Saxon England did, however, create a system of landownership, and it is fair to say that during the period leading up to the Norman invasion just about all the land in Old England was owned by someone. The word acre, so central to the concept of land and landownership, was born during these times, and it remains – along with bread and earl and half – one of the oldest recorded words in the language, indicating how important concepts relating to food, society, and arithmetic – and land – were to the earliest English. 

Formal concepts relating to land were adopted, with the various kings exercising the rights of ownership and their assistants, the thanes (or thegns, as they were first spelled) being given rights of tenure and in most cases actual written charters to allow these rights of tenure and in most cases actual written charters to allow these rights to be passed on to their descendants. It is believed that around four thousand thanes were tenants of kingly land – known as bookland if the thanes held a charter, folkland if not – in tenth-century England. Most of these or their successors would have then lost their holdings and their security once the Norman barons had vanquished their monarchs and stolen their tenanted parcels away. 

Go backward till further, and matters become somewhat more vague. Before the confusing times of the Saxons, and during the reigns of the Danes and the various interregnums and rules of other Scandinavian invaders whose encroachments on the British Isles made for so many decades of battling and mayhem, there were the Roman colonizers. Their four centuries’ rule of Britannia was at least disciplined and organized, if not exactly allowing for self-determination by the inhabitants. Scholars believe that the entirety of the conquered country – right up to Hadrian’s Wall, which had been built in the far north of England to keep the bellicose Picts at bay and to help preserve order even t the most distant reaches of the empire – was regarded as imperial property, but which could be and indeed was occasionally given out to some local tribe as either reward or inducement. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.165-166)

Perhaps not all of these new possessions proved affordable. Perhaps some of the new farmers were not so proficient, and their crops failed, or their cattle succumbed to murrain and blowfly. Maybe these men failed, and left. But some, possibly even most, remained, and now they had land, they had real estate, they had the fee simple ownership of acreages of the solid surface of England. Land which, as Winston Churchill would famously remark in 1906, “is a necessity of all human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position – land, I say, differs from all other forms of property in these primary and fundamental conditions.” 

Seen through the eyes of a wily politician like Churchill, the enclosure legislation that was to wind down at the beginning of the twentieth century, its work effectively done, was to result in very much more than “the better Cultivation, Improvement, and Regulation of the Common Arable Fields, Waste and Commons of Pasture in this Kingdom.” It was to help create and stimulate a slow-moving social revolution; and though it is seen by many as helping to increase the power of the very rich at the expense of the landless and very poor, it can be argued that it may have helped to foster an environment in which the middle class could own land for the first time – as the map of Barton-upon-Humber and thousands of other similarly enclosed places will demonstrate. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.180)

In strict technical and legal terms this British monarch exercises stewardship over the virtual entirety of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, realms that together make up a sizable portion of the Crown’s 6600 million acres. In many other democratic countries – Germany, France, and the United States, most obviously – an individual may own land subject only to a few restrictions. Where the relict British writ still runs, the arrangement is more akin to vassalage, if much diluted and with any slight historic obligation seldom if ever enforced. The somewhat-past-its-sell-by-date theory holds that if the ture and ultimate owner of all the Earth is God, and if the current holder of the British Crown is God’s representative on Earth, then it surely follows that the monarch holds the land in trust on God’s behalf, and for the Deity’s convenience and pleasure. Few but the most worshipfully doctrinaire seem not to chafe at the absurdity of this arrangement. 

Of course, when considering how owners steward their lands it is hardly possible to judge those who own entire countries. Queen Elizabeth can hardly be expected to know how well or ill a wheat field in Saskatchewan is being looked after; nor can the King of Saudi Arabia, a man with a myriad pressing concerns, be too bothered about the condition of every dune in the Rub’ al Khali. The granularity of stewardship can really be considered only by looking at the landholdings of those lesser individuals, men and women who own great tracts yet are by no means sovereign in doing so. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.195-196)

It does not help, does not mollify local sentiment, that the Wilks brothers say that in buying land and keeping it for themselves or selling it on to developers, they are merely doing God’s will. They are intensely, and some might say eccentrically, religious. Their parents, Voy and Myrtle, reportedly suffered the unusual punishment of being “disfellowshipped” from their initial spiritual brotherhood, the theologically ultraconservative Church of Christ, apparently because they were eager to cleave to an even stricter doctrine, even more rigid dogma. The sons then went one step further than their parents, establishing their own church, that of the Assembly of Yahweh (7th Day), which has bewildering set of rules – it adheres to traditional Jewish rites, its adherents keep kosher, follow the literal interpretation of the Old Testament, have Saturday as their Sabbath, do not mark Christmans, Easter, or Good Friday, and so far as public morality is concerned, regard abortion in all circumstances as nothing less than murder and homosexuality as a grievous crime, a “base and demented” practice that could see “the end of our nation” and the “breaking of Yahweh’s covenant,” as the Wilks have said in their sermons from the Assembly pulpit. 

More concerning, so far as their ownership of land is concerned, is the brothers’ utter disdain for matters to do with environmentalism and with the fiction, as they see it, that is climate change. “We didn’t create the earth, so how can we save it?” is Farris Wilks’s oft-repeated refrain. “When you realize that Yahweh is in control it’s much simpler – you can turn over some of those responsibilities to him. And if the polar ice is getting a little scorched, well, maybe that is just a message from God.” Pedophilia and bestiality, the brothers believe, are soon likely to become legal in America. The nation is fast heading for the scripturally predicted end times, an armageddon, a rapture, brought about by humankind’s eternally sinful and non believing practices. They believe Donald Trump the best leader to push back against such evils, the man most prepared and determined to repair the damage already done; they have given millions to support him and those causes that are dear to his heart. 

These are the people who currently own 705,000 of America’s acres. In the name of their god, they have since put up their fences, have closed access to roads still considered by the state as belonging to the public at large, have turfed loggers off their lands, have forbidden snowmobiling, skiing, and snowshoeing. To ensure compliance they hired a lobbyist in Idaho with a view to changing the law on trespass, for “our Heavenly Father has blessed us with lots of gifts, and our family’s priority is to protect them.” And under the relentless pressure of these extremely wealthy men, a raft of enhanced anti trespassing measures has indeed now become settled Idaho law. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.212-213)

For in Scotland there is today essentially no such thing as trespass. One now has an absolute statutory right to wander anywhere in the country at any time of night or day, no matter who the land belongs to, and no matter if the landowner objects to your presence on his acres. Your right of access generally trumps his right to privacy – a revolutionary development that was first undertaken in 2003, and how has the whole world enthralled. Despite furious objection and bluster from some of those who are in possession of many of the Scottish acres, the new arrangement appears in first years of existence to have done very little harm and achieved a great deal of public good. 

The right to roam harmlessly across a landscape, to take exercise or simply to recreate the soul, was for centuries an inalienable part of human existence. Common sense and common decency would and should suggest that this right is so basic as to defy any need for explanation. There is, for now, no suggestion anywhere that the general public should have limits imposed on right to breathe the air, not that one might be forbidden to bathe in the sea. Both belong to all. Land, air, and ocean were once all components of the human birthright – and yet in recent years the public nature of land, uniquely, has been greatly reduced, and common human rights of use of it have been massively attenuated, simply through the introduction of private ownership – and helped by such hostile inventions as barbed wire, warning signs, mantraps, bailiffs, and shotguns. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.221)

It is important to remember that the central plank of Stalin’s draconian policy was the collectivization of the land – a policy that was at first voluntary but had later to be enforced because of the vehement opposition of the kulaks. That being said, it is impossible to minimize the tragedy that resulted – whether it was the state-directed annihilation of the kulak class, the catastrophic failure of the policy itself, or the failure of Soviet communism as a whole, fifty years later in the nation’s history. Nor is it possible to minimize the nature of the starvation, as another activist, tortured by remorse and quoted by Robert Conquest, recalled:

With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible – to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to “intellectual squeamishness” and “stupid liberalism,” the attributes of people who could not see the forest for the trees.

In the terrible spring of 1933, I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue but still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses – corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the old Volodga, under the bridges of Kharkov. I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who sent me out to take away the peasants’ grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade their barely-walking, skeleton-thin or sickly-swollen people to go into the fields in order to fulfill the Bolshevik snowing plan in shock worker style. 

Nor did I lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.297-298)

Change comes with great and impressive swiftness to New Zealand, and it does so for two reasons.

New Zealand was the last country on the planet to be discovered and settled by a human population. The Polynesian canoeists were first, sighting the long chain of islands in, it is now generally assumed, the mid-fourteenth century. And then, three hundred years later, came the Europeans – with New Zealand’s best-known ecologist, Geoff Park, noting drily that his country’s fertile plains “were the last that Europeans found before the Earth’s supply revealed itself as finite.” 

As well as being the last place on the planet to be found, New Zealand was also the first country on the planet to install as its chosen political system the most genuine kind of democracy, with voting rights early on extended to both sexes and to all residents – indigenous peoples included – quite regardless of their ethnicity. And further: Maori men were in fact given the vote in 1867, fully twelve years before their white counterparts, making New Zealand the first settler state in the world to give the vote to its indigenous population – and almost a century before Australia next door gave the vote to her aboriginals. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.323-324)

One of the many failings of the British empire, when making such attempts as this to bring a native people gently to heel – rather than the more traditional means of colonial expansion via conquest and annexation by force of arms – was th often bovine inability of Britons to even try to understand the subtleties and nuances of another and unfamiliar people. The Maori chiefs assembled here, studying the translated text that was presented to them, could have had no notion whatsoever of sovereignty, nor could they fathom what the rights of British subjects might be, since they had no certain idea of what or where Britain was. And as for phrases like “the full exclusive and undisturbed possession” of lands – to a Maori the concept of individual land possession simply did not compute. 

One Maori word used in the treaty continues to cause trouble. The British first granted to the chiefs what in the translated text was called rangatiratanga – from the word rangatira, meaning “chief” – and which was taken by all to signify “chieftainship.” But the colonists also went on to ask the chiefs to cede to their new rulers kawanatanga – and this was an invented word, a neologism, and it was intended by the British intended to mean “governance.” The chiefs agreed to both terms – a something that meant a great deal to them, but at the same time ceded to the newcomers something that meant very little, or of which they had no real understanding.  

The kinds of questions the assembled chiefs put to the white men displayed their perplexity: “What do we want of a governor?” asked a leader named Rewa. “We are not whites not foreigners. We are the governor. We are the chiefs of this land. Return!” The very concepts of empire that was embodied in Hobson’s visit – let alone its implications for the solid surface on which all the locals lived, on the forests and the fields and the seashore and the mountain ranges – eluded all the Maori that day. The settlers got it, of course, as did the French, whose Gallie disdain for the British was all too evident. But the Maori, presented with this document, must have wondered why on earth they were being so bothered, why shaken so rudely out of their long arcadian slumber. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.332-333)

Ulva and its 4500 acres of farmland used to belong to one person. It also used to sport a population of six hundred people – at peak times, eight hundred. Now it has a population of just six. 

But matters have lately changed, profoundly. And, significantly, they have changed in large part because of government fiat. Because of politics. Since the summer of 2018 this island that used to belong to one person has come to belong to many. By undergoing this change of status, Ulva has become a poster child for a new form of ownership that has swept through Scotland in recent years, one that is summed up by the rallying cry of the landowning revolution it represents: it has suffered, or has enjoyed, a community buyout.

(Winchester 2021, pp.3443-344)

Africans were about to get their countries back. The anti-imperial rebellions had started decades before: the Mahdi’s precursive stand in Sudan long ago, the Ashanti rising in the Gold Coast at the turn of the century, the Matabele and Mashona troubles in Rhodesia, the insurrectionary habits of the Zulu in Natal, the Mau Mau insurgency in 1950s Kenya, the Ibo in Nigerian Biafra, the rising of Frelimo in Mozambique. Civil unrest and extreme violence and open warfare was so much the leitmotif of the previous hundred years of Africa’s history that it was widely accepted that only a wholesale European withdrawal could allow for a lasting peace. All the more so since, in theory at least, some of those who would now be getting their countries back were going to get their lands back as well. The Happy Valley Set and their like would – in many cases, but by no means all – be persuaded, obliged, or forced to hand back their estates and their farms to the peoples of Kenya from whom they had been taken years before – whether they liked it or not. And what would happen in Kenya would happen in Uganda too – and in Tanganyika, Bechuanaland, Nyasaland, Somaliland, the Belgian Congo, and South-West Africa and in myriad other corners of the continent that would now be cleansed of foreign influence and governance, and whose institutions and peoples would be remade such that foreign domination – by which, essentially, one meant white domination – would never be allowed to occur again. 

And so, one by one, the chartered jets flew south with important European personages aboard, and these personages, often dripping with diamonds and magnificence, hosted final formal dinners at Government Houses, made declamatory speeches full of flourish and earnest promise, signed parchment documents of retrocession and release, and presided the following morning over military march-pasts and many-gunned salutes and the lowering of the European flags and the raising of new and colorful African banners, and there were aerodrome handshakes filmed against the background whine of jet engines and then final farewell waves from outside the aircraft door and after takeoff maybe the dab of an eye with a handkerchief, as beneath the plane the panorama of the great green landscape of Africa – with her forests and her red murrum roads and her clouds of circling egrets – was at first made vague by wisps of cloud, and then vanished clear away as the plane gained altitude, after which it was time to make a course back north to the chilly airports of Europe, and to leave Africa to find her own way home. 

Such passing-out ceremonies punctuated the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, with an almost dizzying abundance. Once the drone of the last departing aircraft had faded, and the interlopers had all left, the maps they had drawn and the boarders they had created – it is worth noting that there had never been any entity called Nigeria, for instance, until Sir Frederick Lugard has designed it,* no Whodesia until Cecil Rhodes had struck a mining deal with Chief Lobengula of the local Matabele and had the resulting concessioned territory named after himself – were put to use, in most cases, as the geopolitical framework for the construction of the new Africa. 

Not a few country names were changed, however: the world saw the birth of locally run nations called Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Malawi, Zaire. And not a few periods of strife then had to be endured, and various tyrants opposed or deposed as time went by, and as new governments tried shakily to settle themselves into place. 

It would be ideal to say that the nation-building efforts of new Africa have been everywhere a consummate success – except that the continent does now enjoy the knowledge, if such brings comfort, that those who run Africa today are no longer strangers from beyond Africa’s coasts, but are the African tribes of ancient times, admitted to full flourish once again. And so the continent is once again a place of Ashanti and Shona, of Herero and San, of Toro and Ndebele and Zulu and Swazi and Tuareg, of Hausa, Masai, Kikuyu, and Matabele, the poetry of their hundreds of names – and languages and dialects and appearances and traditions and customs and clothing and gods – adding to the barely believable complexity of the land in and on which they live. 

Which makes the essential notion of land reform – a concept so central to the idea of nation building, and yet in itself very much a white man’s construct – so wretchedly complicated. Reforming the ownership of land anywhere on the planet is a trying task at the best of times, as these pages have tried to demonstrate. But when the challenges posed by broken colonial treaties and land-grabbing avarice and long established custom and institutional resistance are miced together with the competing claims of scores, hundreds, and maybe thousands of tribes – Zambia alone has seventy-two, from the swamp-dwelling Ambo in the west to the plantain-farming Yombe of the dry center – then tradition-based complexity risks turning into social catastrophe. 

Whether discussing tribal Africans or New Zealand Maori or Arizonan Hopi or the sea people of Polynesia, the very concept of landownership is to some cultures both puzzling and alien. 

* And had his wife, in a letter written to The Times, name the colony after the great Saharan river that flowed into the Atlantic Ocean through the locally British-run jungles. 

(Winchester 2021, pp.366-369)

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References

Winchester, Simon. 2021. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. N.p.: HarperCollinsPublishers.

ISBN 978-006-293833-6