From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands

James Q. Whitman offers a new account of the disappearance of lawful slavery, and asks us to reconsider some of our most basic ideas about the nature of property. The book will interest students and scholars of law, the history of slavery, European colonialism and imperialism, and classics.

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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.