From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands

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

Introduction: owning humans, owning land, two primitive modes of the property imagination; Part I. Masters of Men and Beasts: 1. Hierarchy and the hunt for prey: the anthropology of early human ownership; 2. Masters of men and beasts: the early Roman fantasia of ownership; 3. The dominus enters the law; 4. Classical Roman slave law: the just hunt for human prey; 5. An empire of the chieftainship over people; Part II. From Masters to Lords: 6. Introduction to Part II: from Pierson v. Post to Johnson v. M'Intosh; 7. From slavery to feudalism: the great hypothesis; 8. From masters to lords in late antiquity; 9. From the law of owning humans to the law of owning land: the early modern culmination; Conclusion: from man the killer to man the tiller; Bibliography; Index.