This chapter addresses developments in Late Antiquity, which witnessed a partial shift to more land-based conceptions of both ownership and rulership. The prior literature has pointed to two explanatory factors: the decline of classical polis culture amidst the deurbanization of Late Antiquity, and the rise of Christianity. The chapter draws together the threads of this literature, in order to develop an account of late antique cultural change. Classical Roman property law, it argues, had its context in classical cities. The relative decay of urban dominance and the rise of Christianity tended to undermine the classical foundations of the law of both ownership and rulership. The Empire was reconceived in more territorial terms, while classical conceptions of elite power faltered. The resulting shifts did not result in any decisive and thoroughgoing transformation of the understanding of ownership and rulership, but they set the stage for later developments of great significance.

This chapter discusses archaic Roman property law, whose symbolism and terminology show a striking orientation toward the ownership of living creatures, human and animal. That symbolism and terminology was seized upon by many of the leading thinkers of the past, who believed it offered clues to the origins of human society. It was also seized upon by both Communist and Fascist ideologues. Today, by contrast, its significance is generally dismissed. Modern scholarship has been heavily dedicated to reconstructing the socio-economic realities; scholars often deploy their learning to dispel the “myths” in the sources, among them the myths in the archaic Roman sources. Yet the myths matter; “idioms of power” cannot simply be written off. The chapter brings the anthropology of property law to bear on the interpretation of these mysterious sources, and describes the long intellectual and political history of their interpretation and ideological use.

This chapter discusses the early modern transformation of the law. By the end of the eighteenth century, the law of ownership was firmly centered on land and the conception of the state was becoming firmly territorial, while the nineteenth century witnessed the abolition of the lawful private ownership of human beings. The chapter traces the rise of an early modern conception of property, which held that acquisition was primarily acquisition of land, and that it was established through cultivation rather than mere occupation. It shows how the venerable law of use rights found a home under a new doctrinal rubric, eminent domain, and discusses the transformation of the ancient law of enslavement through war. The chapter draws on the work of historians of the state who study the rise of a territorial understanding of sovereignty. It emphasizes the long legal history behind the disappearance of lawful private enslavement.

This chapter discusses the early modern transformation of the law. By the end of the eighteenth century, the law of ownership was firmly centered on land and the conception of the state was becoming firmly territorial, while the nineteenth century witnessed the abolition of the lawful private ownership of human beings. The chapter traces the rise of an early modern conception of property, which held that acquisition was primarily acquisition of land, and that it was established through cultivation rather than mere occupation. It shows how the venerable law of use rights found a home under a new doctrinal rubric, eminent domain, and discusses the transformation of the ancient law of enslavement through war. The chapter draws on the work of historians of the state who study the rise of a territorial understanding of sovereignty. It emphasizes the long legal history behind the disappearance of lawful private enslavement.

This chapter discusses the formation of high classical Roman property law, which displays what Orlando Patterson calls a master/slave “idiom of power.” It focuses on the emergence of the term dominus, “master,” as the ordinary word for “owner.” The rise of the dominus was once the topic of extensive analysis and controversy, and it figured prominently in the ideologies of Communism and Fascism. It has, however, been forgotten by contemporary scholars. The chapter sets out to revive this forgotten topic. Drawing on Roman social history, the chapter argues that the appearance of the new terminology of the dominus in classical law can be linked to important social changes in the nature of Roman elite power. The chapter closes by arguing that Roman property law bore a kinship to classical Greco-Roman religion, which was marked by the “symbolism and ideology of the paradigmatic hunter.”

This chapter discusses the most famous hypothesis about the development of property law: that Western social evolution was determined by a passage “from slavery to feudalism,” from the ownership of humans in the slave economies of Antiquity to the ownership of land in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. That hypothesis was embraced by Marx, Weber, Bloch, and many others, but has been rejected today, because it rested on claims about economic history that have been proven dubious. The chapter argues that there was truth in the classical hypothesis, but that it should be reinterpreted as an account of transformation in the legal imagination. The chapter investigates the origins of the classic theories, and makes the case that the classic thinkers erred by mistaking the imaginative orientations in the legal sources for the economic realities.

This chapter explores the anthropology of early human property. Making use of the ethological distinction between territoriality and social dominance, it argues that norms of social dominance largely governed early human property orders as nthropologists reconstruct them. Rights in land, rather than taking the Blackstonian form familiar from modern legal orders, were “use rights,” granted out in line with the social hierarchical of society. An important form of “ownership” also attached to rights in prey taken in the hunt. The chapter closes by challenging the economistic accounts found in the well-known “tragedy of the commons” literature, as well as economistic theories intended to explain that some societies display the ownership of humans rather than the ownership of land.

The Introduction defines the book’s major concepts, such as belonging with, elucidates its major keywords – movement, listening, radiance, resuscitating, restoring, and recycling, and explains its foundational ideas and methodology. These intertwine feminist, historical, ecological, and subject–object analyses to underpin how diminishing women and objects is a related activity. Second, it establishes how texts heal injurious mergings between women and matter and jettison the supposed “female virtues” – dissimulation and passivity – in order to embrace actual ethical beliefs and independence, reconnect women’s corporeality, reason, spirit, sexuality, and virtue, rendering these cooperating, rather than sparring, bodies. Third, it argues that these materialist ethics reveal how consumption can be constructive, a finding that disputes mainstream concerns that women were merely thoughtless consumers. Finally, it illuminates how the political and personal need to incarnate ideals by rendering concrete such abstractions as the “rights of man” entwines with gender debates and subject–object explorations during the revolutionary years.

This chapter examines how the Venus de Medici entered the historical storylines of eighteenth-century models of gender, and – once plundered by Napoleon and whisked to Paris – the narrative of artistic restoration and political liberty. The statue generated complex thing–human interactions, for viewers collapsing boundaries between marble and human flesh imagined the Venus as both a withdrawn ideal yet intimately connected to them: touching her, they measured her proportions and gauged her sexual “motives” while debating whether she met British standards of female modesty. Belinda, which alludes to the Venus, also engages in these activities as characters “measure” each other; the novel, however, incorporates those travelers’ debates about the Venus’s modesty, sexuality, and virtue to emancipate female characters from calculating standards that produce negative consequences such as racism and gender stereotyping. Embedded in Belinda, the Venus obliquely restores the right for Lady Delacour to her body and to invoke nonperfection and nonconformity as a just privilege.

In this chapter I consider two controversies over the taxation of urban land at the twilight of Ecuador’s Citizen’s Revolution. The first is the campaign by the Pueblo Kitu Kara, an organisation representing Indigenous peoples in Quito, for recognition of communal property and territory, together with its constitutionally guaranteed freedom from taxation. The second was a highly controversial (and short-lived) tax on capital gains from real estate, promoted by the post-neoliberal president Rafael Correa as a counter to speculation, corruption, and unearned gains from the land market. Taken together, these conflicts illustrate the historically limited reach of hegemonic processes of state formation in Ecuador, and how those limits also open up opportunities for introducing and (sometimes) sustaining institutions distinct from the normative forms of the capitalist state, even as they present marked political challenges for transformative state projects. The trajectory of both controversies also highlights the contradictions and dangers of a top-down and technocratic approach to social and economic transformation in a polity shaped by profound inequalities of class and coloniality.

This chapter explores how taxes shape the meaning of other payments and money flows in highland Bolivia. The concept ‘ecology of payments’ is introduced to describe the world of payments amongst the so-called informally employed in the city of Cochabamba. It explores how, for instance, receipts for commercial licence taxes and property taxes paid provide people with the right to make other kinds of payments, such as fees to local neighbourhood associations and unions. An ‘ecology of payments’ pays attention to the multiple links and dependencies between payments and the way they transform each other. This approach encourages a focus on the local impact of taxes paid, as opposed to the effect of taxes on long-term state–society relations. To ascertain the role of taxes within this ecology, the chapter also aims to understand how the concept of formality informs the power and character of different payments.

This chapter contributes a decolonising analysis of tax primarily in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine the legal constitution of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act in relation to its attempts to reform First Nations’ governance. I demonstrate how the federal government looked to organise a ‘taxpayer’ ethos amongst First Nations citizens through publicising First Nations band salary details and audits. This taxpayer ethos was meant to simultaneously encourage citizens to critique their governments rather than the Canadian federal government, but also to promote private property on reserves. I make a theoretical argument for the necessity of thinking through tax with a decolonising lens that both specifically respects the sovereignty of Indigenous nations and offers a critique of how tax operates to erode that very sovereignty.

This chapter provides an overview of this book’s core arguments and structure.

This chapter explores the intervention of the late-18th century Ottoman jurist Kadizâda Mehmed Tâhir in a longstanding controversy: the legitimacy of istibdāl (the exchange of an endowed property for cash, or for another property). This mechanism was recognised as valid by the Ḥanbalī school of law, somewhat exceptionally. Istibdāl was an important means of reviving defunct endowments (sing. waqf) whose properties no longer generated the income necessary to support the charitable causes they had been devoted to, as well as a means of ensuring the continued circulation of property in society. Kadizâda Mehmed Tâhir argued in favour of the legitimacy of this mechanism and sought to uphold the decision of a Cairene deputy judge of the Ḥanbalī school who permitted istibdāl in a case where the endowment deed (waqfiyya) explicitly precluded its use.