The idea of private property and the value we give to land ownership, both legally and socially, is so strong that it is difficult to imagine any other system of land use.
It is also difficult to comprehend just how recent and revolutionary it is for individuals to have ownership of a tract of land fee simple, with few strings attached. It is an idea that took root in the Americas a little more than three centuries ago when most of Europe still operated under a feudal system in which almost all property in a kingdom belonged to either "the crown" or the church.
"In the seventeenth century, land came to be seen as an object of quantity, something that, in theory at least, could be bought and sold," explains writer John Hanson Mitchell in his book, Trespassing: An Inquiry into the Private Ownership of Land. "Part of this may have had something to do with the fact that the art of mathematical surveying developed at this time and holders of rights of land were able to actually measure land accurately."
Mitchell's appraisal of the land ownership issue is presented as the object lesson behind the story of a small band of Pawtucket Indians just west of Boston who converted to Christianity in the 1650s and were "legally" granted title to a 2,000-acre tract called the Nashobah Plantation.
It is doubtful whether the Pawtuckets fully understood the concept of private property or what it meant to "own" land. Like other Native Americans, they had a strong sense of territoriality for their tribe and would fight with other groups to maintain it, but within the tribe all members commonly shared rights of use to hunting grounds, fishing weirs and berry-picking areas.
"But in little more than fifty years, this system of holding land in common would be subsumed by the concept of private property. Within another hundred years, this new system would oversweep the entire American continent and replace the idea of the common. It was a uniquely American phenomenon, new even to the conquering English and French."
Land ownership, the ability to lay claim on a piece of ground and bequeath it to your descendants, has enormous appeal. Is there any feeling more liberating than the confidence that comes from holding title to a place? Is there anything more worth fighting for than the security of one's home?
The prospect of becoming a landowner lured millions of immigrants to the Americas; it inspired people to brave hardships and write constitutions and ignore the prior claims of native peoples.
With a fine sense of irony, Mitchell tells how the band of Pawtuckets at Nashobah, like other Native American tribes across the continent, were taught how to hold private property rights to lands that once were common, and then how to sell those rights to another party.
"One of the key moments in Indian history occurred in 1887 with the passage of the Dawes Act, or the General Allotment Act," Mitchell points out. "The concept was that all Indian lands would be divided into privately held, single-family plots that could be bought and sold at will, regardless of the desires of the tribe as a whole. Indian historians now see it as a double-edged cut: on the one hand, it broke up the land, but worse, it broke up the idea of communal land, of council and consensus and transferred it into the ideal of private ownership. In effect it broke the traditional culture of the Indians."
The common grounds of the Americas were not all converted to private property, certainly, although there are libertarian voices clamoring for such action. The vast acreages of public land in the West are still more or less communal property of all citizens. And even in the crowded urban corridors along both coasts, Mitchell cites how new common areas are being established from what was once private property.
With a meandering style, Mitchell's narrative wanders back and forth in time as he weaves together the story of the Indians at Nashobah, present-day efforts to reign in developers, and a personal inquiry into the pros and cons of land ownership. He tests assumptions that have long gone unchallenged and recounts familiar histories from a new perspective. He trespasses on philosophical grounds that deserve greater scrutiny.