Although private property rights are accepted as dogma in Western society, it’s valuable to question how this conclusion arose. Additionally, there is the curiosity of how humans claimed rights to the planet they appeared on millions of years ago, who or what the right came from, and whether ownership is ethical. These topics are excellently explored in the 1760’s book Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone and the 2013 book Owning the Earth by Andro Linklater. Despite the time difference of books’ publication, both authors grapple the same issue of validity and ownership origin. Clearly, property rights are a philosophical and ethical question to be discussed alongside human nature and the wonders of the world; it is not just a modern debate limited to politics and discussions of socialism versus capitalism. The origins of anthropological property (as these documents only discuss human ownership of Earth, not other species’ ownership, which is an equally valid preponderance, as humans are a species like any other) are hypothesized by Blackstone and Linklater, which give insight into interpreting historical documents like Peter Schaheger’s 1626 letter.
Blackstone proposes three possible origins: God, nature, and scarcity. First, Blackstone cites Genesis, which states that God gave human “dominion over all the earth.” Blackstone sees this as possible, but not sufficient. Philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, however, would find this answer completely unsatisfactory, as he’d assert God granting property only reasons if everyone believes in the same God. Otherwise, law is rendered useless. Also, even if humans followed one God, divine commandment would justify public property, not private property.
Blackstone then moves on to discuss human nature in property. Humans find a resource no one else is using, claim it, and then it’s theirs until willing relinquishment. So, once all resources are claimed, do new humans simply have to wait their turn in line? This seems ridiculous, so there should be some partitioning of goods as new humans emerge. Furthermore, Blackstone’s “pick-up theory” is far less applicable in determining when relinquishment occurs. For instance, does death allow property to fall back to the hands of Earth? Blackstone agrees that “the instant a man ceases to be, he ceases to have any dominion.” This terminates the legitimacy of wills, which are an important tool of capitalism as it encourages saving resources, investment, and wealth hoarding.
Lastly, Blackstone asserts that humans adopted private property of land to ensure their livelihoods when resources were scarce. However, historian Yuval Noah Harari claims in his book Sapiens than agriculture and private land emerged organically as a result of gradual increase in the time spent by natural wheat fields and former generations forgetting the hunter-gatherer way of life. Either way, “both sides agree [ . . . ] that occupancy is the thing by which the title was in fact originally gained.” The discrepancy is on how that occupancy emerged.
Author Linklater starts his book on property with a microscope on human living quarters to see how private rooms and property have developed. Linklater heavily discusses engrossment and profit as the leading agent in property rights. By recounting economic incentives that led to feudalism’s fall and how shepherds engrossed land, Linklater paints private property as a product of individual economic interest. Also discussed by Linklater were the feudalism-era, rich landlords influencing government, which is reminiscent of today’s dollar-voting democracy and makes past landlords’ greed believable.
On the subject of God-given property rights, Linklater goes more in depth than Blackstone by citing various religions. Although Christianity bestowed exploitation rights to human, Linklater cites Islam and Judaism, which deny human Earth ownership rights. Thus, leaders like the Babylonian king and Chinese emperors would claim divine authority granted them property rights. However, even if rulers did receive divine property rights, it’s questionable whether rights to own and exploit are transferable to other humans. Perhaps God is a landlord who rented out land to human rulers, but doesn’t allow subletters. Then, the ruler should not be allowed to reap profits from non-divine humans using the land.
After reading these thorough texts, documents like Peter Schagher’s 1626 letter to the directors of the West India Company breathe new life. The historical document plainly lays out the state of people in what would become New Netherland, the animal products and harvest aboard the ship, and the purchase of the Island Manhattes, which would later become the U.S.’s most populated metropolitan area. This produces further thought on property rights, monetary profit from land, and right of use to goods produced by land. For instance, did natives have the right to sell land to the colonizers? Blackstone would argue that natives achieved right-to-own by being the first to use it and that the colonizers only justly use the land once it is willingly relinquished by the initial owner. Blackstone and Linklater would agree that some societies believe the natives got permission from God or spirits, such as the indigenous people of Iban, who “offered a lavish sacrifice [ . . . ] to the god of the harvest [ . . . ] who actually possessed the land.” Another issue brought about by Schlagher’s document is the right to profit off land; the natives got the Island Manhattes for free, but then sold it for 60 guilders. Blackstone may assert that the natives should have just “dropped” the land to let colonizers pick it up for free.
What’s more, do property rights entail full ownership of the plot of Earth or simply a right to exploit the resources on that plot of Earth? Additionally, does the right to exploit resources include profit rights or merely subsistence rights? If only the latter, then the grains and animal skins aboard the arms of Amsterdam would be unethical. As was claimed at the The Catholic Worker, profiting off of land is unjustifiable. However, all resources stem from land, even human bodies, so then all profiting would be evil. Perhaps even the Iban people would be unethical, as they were taking from God’s land, and even their sacrifices ultimately stemmed from God’s land. In a sense, they had nothing to give, not even their own bodies. Clearly, with property rights, the granter of said right is equally as important as determining the extent of rights.
You have a lot of interesting angles here that perhaps demonstrate how malleable a text, particularly so seminal a text as the Bible, can be to support different perspectives on the right to land. This is even more apparent in the fact that what I assigned to read from Genesis was linked to the Hebrew translation of the Bible and you linked here to the King James version — two different versions and interpretations of ostensibly the same text! I’d love for you to further tease out some of the terms you use here since they’re unfamiliar to me. This “pick up theory”, for example, isn’t quite where Blackstone concludes his recounting of the natural progression of humans to private property ownership, but it definitely shows up in his narrative. Can you talk more about that and why he moves on from simple occupation of land as the source of ownership? And what might be a more critical reading of the Schagen (watch your spelling) letter in which the Lenape are not, in fact, selling the land? I also wonder whether the issues at hand really comes down to ethics, as you analyze it, or if they may have to do as well with survival and competition? That is, while religion, especially Judeo-Christian religion in this case, is often cited as the reasoning behind the theories proposed by everyone we’ve read so far, how much does religion dictate behavior when it comes to property accumulation? Or does the will to survive/compete/win simply dictate how religious texts are interpreted?