This chapter addresses the nature of Roman imperial rule. Roman historians have often argued that rulership in the Roman Empire was modeled on the household powers of the Roman paterfamilias. In particular, as Myles Lavan and other recent scholars have suggested, Roman rule made heavy use of the ideology of the master/slave relationship; the idiom of power of Roman rulership, on this account, turned on the rhetoric of enslaving the peoples of the world. The chapter surveys these interpretations, with the purpose of highlighting the conceptual connections between Roman ownership and Roman rulership. Just as the modern territorial state is conceptualized in ways that are in close harmony with the modern private ownership of land, the classical Roman understanding of rule was in harmony with the Roman understanding of household domination.

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.