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Introduction: Owning Humans, Owning Land – Two Primitive Modes of the Property Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2024

James Q. Whitman
James Q. Whitman
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind,” wrote William Blackstone, eminent author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England, in 1765, “as the right of property.”1 This line, one of the most quoted in the literature of the law, states a familiar truth about human psychology: The thought of property kindles desire; we like to imagine ourselves as owners. But what sorts of objects “engage our affections”? When property “strikes our imagination,” what is it that we imagine?

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From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands
The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World
 , pp. 1 - 34
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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