What do you think?
Rate this book
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
The author of The Professor and the Madman and The Perfectionists explores the notion of property—our proprietary relationship with the land—through human history, how it has shaped us and what it will mean for our future.
Land—whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city—is central to our existence. It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing—and have done—with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World examines in depth how we acquire land, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the essential question: who actually owns the world’s land—and why does it matter?
Land—whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city—is central to our existence. It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing—and have done—with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World examines in depth how we acquire land, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the essential question: who actually owns the world’s land—and why does it matter?
464 pages, ebook
First published January 19, 2021
About the author
Simon Winchester
95 books2,100 followersSimon Winchester, OBE, is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster who resides in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel, and his articles appear in several travel publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic.
In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent. Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror.
After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming The Guardian's American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where Winchester covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months.
Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his first-hand experiences during the turmoils in Ulster. In 1976, Winchester published his second book, American Heartbeat, which dealt with his personal travels through the American heartland. Winchester's third book, Prison Diary, was a recounting of his imprisonment at Tierra del Fuego during the Falklands War and, as noted by Dr Jules Smith, is responsible for his rise to prominence in the United Kingdom. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River.
Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998), published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller, and Mel Gibson optioned the rights to a film version, likely to be directed by John Boorman.
Though Winchester still writes travel books, he has repeated the narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman several times, many of which ended in books placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that Changed the World, focused on geologist William Smith and was Whichester's second New York Times best seller. The year 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, as well as the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earthquake in A Crack in the Edge of the World. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham, who helped to expose China to the western world. Winchester's latest book, The Alice Behind Wonderland, was released March 11, 2011.
- source Wikipedia
In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent. Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror.
After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming The Guardian's American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where Winchester covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency. In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months.
Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his first-hand experiences during the turmoils in Ulster. In 1976, Winchester published his second book, American Heartbeat, which dealt with his personal travels through the American heartland. Winchester's third book, Prison Diary, was a recounting of his imprisonment at Tierra del Fuego during the Falklands War and, as noted by Dr Jules Smith, is responsible for his rise to prominence in the United Kingdom. Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River.
Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998), published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller, and Mel Gibson optioned the rights to a film version, likely to be directed by John Boorman.
Though Winchester still writes travel books, he has repeated the narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman several times, many of which ended in books placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that Changed the World, focused on geologist William Smith and was Whichester's second New York Times best seller. The year 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, as well as the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earthquake in A Crack in the Edge of the World. The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham, who helped to expose China to the western world. Winchester's latest book, The Alice Behind Wonderland, was released March 11, 2011.
- source Wikipedia
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 371 reviews
January 20, 2022
This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. - from Chief Sealth’s letter to President Pierce on a treaty giving much of what is now Washington state over for white settlementWhat are the three most important things in real estate? All together now, “Location, location, location.” Simon Winchester, in his usual way, has offered us a grand tour of land, and thus real estate on our planet. Note the subtitle, How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World). This is not the broker’s walk-through in which the good elements are highlighted while the less appealing aspects are minimized or ignored. It may be that location is the most important property of land, but there are other features that are worth knowing too. Things like How much land is there? How do we know? How was it measured, by whom, and why? Is the amount of land fixed? Can it increase or decrease? Can land be made unusable? Where is everything? Who can make use of it? Is land inherently public, for (reasonable) use by all? Was it ever? How did it come to be private? How do different cultures think about land? Why is land divided up the way it is, into public and private, into parcels of particular size? Who gets to own land, and who is relegated to merely renting it? Winchester has answers.
Land is the defining characteristic of every nation. Our (the USA’s) national anthem, for example, goes "O'er the land of the free" not o’er the pond, lake, river or fjord of the free, (and no, Norway's anthem makes no specific mention of fjords), not the sweet air of the free, not the great views of the free (although “spacious skies” and "purple mountain majesties" from our other national anthem, America the Beautiful, comes close), but the land. Check your nation of choice for common ground re this. (Click for a list of anthems) The word "land" figures prominently Although I suggest you check out the Algerian lyrics. Dude, switch to decaf. The war is over.
Land is seminal in human culture as well as national history. For many of us in the West, our very origin story begins with a landlord-tenant dispute. “If we owned the garden instead of renting it, Adam, I could have eaten the goddam apple and it would have been nobody’s business but my own. And we wouldn’t have to put up with the creepy landlord spying on us all the time, or his freaky feathered bouncer. The guy should get a hobby, make some friends or something.”
Simon Winchester at home in his study in the Berkshires – image from The Berkshire Eagle - Photo: Andrew Blechman
This is the eighth Winchester I have read, of his fifteen non-fiction books (so, plenty left to get to) and they have all been engaging, informative, and charming. He read Geology at Oxford, so, has a particular soft spot for explaining how physical things on our planet came to be where they are, how they changed over time, and why they exist in the forms they have taken on. You might be interested in the Atlantic Ocean, maybe the Pacific? Winchester has written a book on each. How about looking at the creation of the world’s first geological map, or maybe why Krakatoa blew its top. He is also interested in tracing back how we know what we know, (or, um, history) as a crucial element of understanding things as they are now, and how they came to be. The Perfectionists looks at how industrial standardization developed, and how machine tolerances improved to the point where they are beyond the control of flesh and blood humans. In The Professor and the Madman he looks at how the Oxford English Dictionary was made. The third element in Winchester’s trifecta of interest is people, often odd personalities who played pivotal roles in the development of technical and intellectual advances, thus expanding and deepening human understanding of the world.
I think what I’ve done is to get obscure figures from history and tell the stories like I’ve told you about Mister Penck and his maps, Mister Struve and his survey, Mister Radcliffe and his line, and turn them into what they truly are, which is heroic, forgotten figures from history….I just become fascinated by these characters. - from the Kinukinaya interviewThere are plenty of interesting sorts in Land. Maybe none of the folks noted here are quite so interesting as the institutionalized murderer in The Professor and the Madman, but they are still a colorful crew, and it is clear Winchester had fun writing about them. They include Cornelius Lely, who built the 20-mile-long Barrier Dam in The Netherlands, which turned the Zuider Zee into vast tracts of arable land, Gina Rinehart, the world’s largest private landholder, not someone who has contributed nearly so much to the store of human knowledge as she has to conservative politicians, and Friedrich Wilhelm Georg von Struve, who spent forty years measuring a meridian for the tsar of Russia. There are many more, of both the benign and dark variety.
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. -- Desmond TutuThere are surprising connections made, such as the relationship between the invention of barbed wire and America’s appetite for beef. Or the link between the growth of commercial aviation and the development of World Aeronautical Charts, well maybe not so surprising, that. But that such things did not exist prior to people flying the friendly skies reminds us just how recent so much of the foundation of today’s world truly is. I suppose it also might not count as surprising, but John Maynard Keynes had an interesting solution to the problem of landed gentry, euthanasia.
Winchester details many of the outrages that have been inflicted, in the name of seizing land, on indigenous people across the planet, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA figuring large in these. But there are also plenty of other people who have been expelled from their homes, livelihoods, and history by the forces of greed across the planet. These include immigrants to the USA whose land was stolen while they were illegally incarcerated, and farmers who were dispossessed by land-owners seeking to maximize the profitability of their holdings, via the Enclosure and Clearance laws passed in England and Scotland. Then there are the perennial turf battles, like those in Ireland and the Middle East.
Gripes are, per usual with any Winchester book, minimal. He writes about the role, historical, current, and potential, that trusts have, had, and might have for the preservation of land from destructive exploitation. Yet, in doing so, there was no mention of The Nature Conservancy. Their motto could be (it isn’t) We save land the old-fashioned way. We buy it. It has over a million members (yes, I am) and has protected about 120 million acres of land. It definitely merited a shoutout here. Another part of the book tells of the annihilation of bison from the American west. The critters are referred to as multi-ton. Like the mythical eight hundred pound gorilla which grows only to about 400 pounds at most, bison max out at roughly 2,000 pounds, or a single ton, which still leaves them as the largest land mammal in North America.
Like any good geologist, or writer, Simon Winchester enjoys digging. And we are all the lucky recipients of the informational nuggets he unearths. He is a master story-teller, and if you are ever fortunate enough to find yourself at a party with him, or find a chance to see him speak publicly, just pull up a seat and listen. You won’t be sorry.
So, I can tell from the looks on your faces that this one would be a perfect fit for you, particularly if you are planning to start a library soon. Do you think you’d like to make an offer on the book? There are other potential buyers stopping by this afternoon, and I would hate for you to miss out. It won’t stay on the shelves very long. Take my card and give me a ring when you make up your mind, ok. But I can assure you that, whether your preferences for land are LaLa, Never, Sugar, Holy, Promised, Wonder, Native, or Rover, when you check out Simon Winchester’s latest book, you will be a Land lover.
We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1948)
Review first posted – February 5, 2021
Publication dates
----------January 19, 2021 - hardcover
----------January 18, 2022- trade paperback
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages
A nice overview of Winchester’s professional life can be found here
Interviews
-----Kinokuniya USA - Interview with Simon Winchester on 'Land' - video - 30:03 – by Raphael - This is wonderful. The interview is a lot like SW’s books, one fascinating story follows another follows another.
-----RNZ - Simon Winchester: how land ownership shaped the modern world by Kim Hill – text extract plus audio interview - 48:24
-----The Book Club - Simon Winchester: Land - audio - 42:46
Songs/Music
-----Woody Guthrie - This Land is Your Land
-----The Lion King - This Land
----- LaLa Land - soundtrack
Reviews of other Simon Winchester books we have read:
-----2018 - The Perfectionists
-----2015 - Pacific
-----2010 - Atlantic
-----2008 - The Man Who Loved China
-----2005 - Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded
-----2001 - The Map That Changed the World
-----1998 - The Professor and the Madman
Items of Interest – by Winchester
-----From 2013 - Simon Winchester at TEDxEast re his book The Men Who United the States – There is an interesting morsel here about 11 minutes in on an important Jeffersonian decision having to do with land ownership
-----American Scholar - Experience Everything
Items of Interest
----- Citizen Simon: Author, journalist, OBE, sage of Sandisfield by Andrew D. Blechman - Posted on September 9, 2018
-----International Map of the World
-----The Nature Conservancy
An extra bit. I had intended to incorporate the following into the body of the review, but just felt off about that. Nevertheless I do hold with the notion expressed, so here it is, tucked away at the bottom:
I was taken with a particular instance of the horrors that accompanied land grabs in the expanding USA, as having resonance with today, with Donald Trump as the embodiment of that carnage. Whereas the racist yahoos of the 19th century westward expansion delighted in slaughtering bison from a moving train, in order to deny the native residents a living and to make it easier to clear them from desired land, so Trump has spent his time in the limelight, and in power, blasting away at the things that are central to our culture, to our values, so that he could deny us our cultural and legal core, as he seized all he could grab for himself and those like him.
February 1, 2021
I've long been a Winchester fan and was looking forward to this book, but its flaws are too gaping to overlook. While his writing about Indigenous people and issues is clearly meant to be sympathetic, it can most generously be described as condescending and colonial. The number of times Indigenous people are described as standing by, "bewildered," as their land is stolen is ... bewildering, and there are far too many characterizations that all but say "noble savage." I don't know how much of this language made it through the editing process, and there is almost no case where Winchester seems to have made attempts to consult Indigenous people themselves, or even their own historical accounts.
Aside from that, it leaves a great deal of scholarship on land ownership by the wayside, seeming to favor instead detailed descriptions of things like surveying to discovering the size of Earth. There is nothing wrong with surveying stories -- and it's something Winchester excels at -- but this was meant to be a book about land ownership, not about land measurement. While I enjoyed some of his writing and stories, Andro Linklater's "Owning the Earth" remains a far better and more thoughtful book on this subject, not to mention Henry George's 1879 "Progress & Poverty," which delves deeply into the injustices of land ownership; and I wish Winchester would have actually spoken with Indigenous people instead of trying to write their histories through a sympathetic but entirely colonial lens.
Aside from that, it leaves a great deal of scholarship on land ownership by the wayside, seeming to favor instead detailed descriptions of things like surveying to discovering the size of Earth. There is nothing wrong with surveying stories -- and it's something Winchester excels at -- but this was meant to be a book about land ownership, not about land measurement. While I enjoyed some of his writing and stories, Andro Linklater's "Owning the Earth" remains a far better and more thoughtful book on this subject, not to mention Henry George's 1879 "Progress & Poverty," which delves deeply into the injustices of land ownership; and I wish Winchester would have actually spoken with Indigenous people instead of trying to write their histories through a sympathetic but entirely colonial lens.
Read
January 9, 2021If you've read any Simon Winchester, you know what to expect in this terrific book: a natural storyteller's ease, a thousand great anecdotes, some very interesting, challenging insights, and maybe a corresponding lack of narrative through-line. Winchester is in great form here, scintillating and funny and wide-ranging in his examination of the million ways humans have obsessed over land in the last thousand years (and as an added bonus, the US hardcover from Harper is quite nice). My full review is here: https://www.thedailystar.net/book-rev...
January 30, 2022
'Land' by Simon Winchester is a terrific read! He has pulled together stories and facts about how people claimed possession of land all around the world from the beginning of human history up to the present.
The author bought land in 1999 for himself, and he wondered at the psychological impulse for ownership of land. The paperwork of deeds, titles, maps made and plot boundaries explicitly described by local governments, the financial and legal processes for owning land through loans/cash, inheritance - it all started where, and why? His purchase of acres of forested hills led to the author writing this book.
Winchester learned his new property had been owned or settled by:
-communities of Mohican Indians
-communities of Schaghticoke Indians
-three Dutch stadholders
-English monarchs
-the loyalist Philipse family
-unknown farmers, hunters and charcoal makers
-the Brasher family
-a Sicilian immigrant named Vacirca
-a German American named Doll
-a Sicilian American named Cesare Luria
-the author Simon Winchester
The book tells of astonishing acts of evil done by governments and ordinary people against nonliterate aboriginals. Often the act of claiming land was pure piracy made palatable by the cover of unjust laws and prejudices. When falsehoods or legal mechanisms didn't work, people grabbed land with the open force of superior arms, ships and numbers, using murder and starvation to convince the original inhabitants, along with destroying homes and livestock. Sometimes explorers simply told the local and clearly oblivious aboriginals, after rowing a dinghy to a beach, that the explorer and their sponsoring home governments now owned this island or that country.
Almost no developed-world countries are free of colonizing blood.
The Netherlands and England were remarkably rapacious and legally inventive in claiming aboriginals' lands, as well as in taking over entire countries already claimed and established by other people - which the author describes. The Dutch also became expert at creating land, making Netherland swamps into modern cities and productive farmland, another remarkable story. England itself changed hands a number of times, from prehistoric people to ancient Romans to Normans. Israel is still being bitterly fought over, which is a very interesting history. New Zealand aboriginals, however, have managed to wrest their lands back from a greedy England, mostly, another interesting chapter in the book.
Most aboriginal people believed no one owned land - it was communal property. How did we change from that accepted policy of most of the ancients to the accepted practice of individual or government ownership of property today? Some modern countries declare all of their land is owned by the national government alone, Israel being one of those, apparently, as well as China, North Korea and Russia.
Speaking for myself, I wonder if other readers will be as shocked as I was to read the statistics of how a few wealthy individuals actually own most of the land in a democracy like England and Scotland. Scotland has been working at changing this statistic - another fascinating chapter.
I was amazed to learn how it was that large areas of land began being professionally surveyed and mapped in order to draw boundaries - it was the early nineteenth century. How it was surveyed blew my mind! Of course, locals have worked out boundaries of property between themselves for millennia, sometimes not without a lot of disputation because of the reliance on verbal history and customary usage.
Why are some plots of land unloved? Hello, Chernobyl. But Winchester writes of an astonishing historical event I knew nothing about that was as terrible as Chernobyl. It happened near Denver, Colorado. The Rocky Flats plant processed plutonium for decades, and it did so with the result of long-term land and water pollution despite promises the owners made in how they would put in place safeguards for nearby Denver's land and population. Not. The people in their own nearby Colorado lands and property are still being threatened by possible radiation if they dig more than three feet down!
I recommend 'Land' to all readers. It's an important history and very interesting. I thought the book well written, and the author includes only a few in-depth events which illustrate the general milestones of history in owning land. There is a glossary of terms, a Bibliography and an Index.
The author bought land in 1999 for himself, and he wondered at the psychological impulse for ownership of land. The paperwork of deeds, titles, maps made and plot boundaries explicitly described by local governments, the financial and legal processes for owning land through loans/cash, inheritance - it all started where, and why? His purchase of acres of forested hills led to the author writing this book.
Winchester learned his new property had been owned or settled by:
-communities of Mohican Indians
-communities of Schaghticoke Indians
-three Dutch stadholders
-English monarchs
-the loyalist Philipse family
-unknown farmers, hunters and charcoal makers
-the Brasher family
-a Sicilian immigrant named Vacirca
-a German American named Doll
-a Sicilian American named Cesare Luria
-the author Simon Winchester
The book tells of astonishing acts of evil done by governments and ordinary people against nonliterate aboriginals. Often the act of claiming land was pure piracy made palatable by the cover of unjust laws and prejudices. When falsehoods or legal mechanisms didn't work, people grabbed land with the open force of superior arms, ships and numbers, using murder and starvation to convince the original inhabitants, along with destroying homes and livestock. Sometimes explorers simply told the local and clearly oblivious aboriginals, after rowing a dinghy to a beach, that the explorer and their sponsoring home governments now owned this island or that country.
Almost no developed-world countries are free of colonizing blood.
The Netherlands and England were remarkably rapacious and legally inventive in claiming aboriginals' lands, as well as in taking over entire countries already claimed and established by other people - which the author describes. The Dutch also became expert at creating land, making Netherland swamps into modern cities and productive farmland, another remarkable story. England itself changed hands a number of times, from prehistoric people to ancient Romans to Normans. Israel is still being bitterly fought over, which is a very interesting history. New Zealand aboriginals, however, have managed to wrest their lands back from a greedy England, mostly, another interesting chapter in the book.
Most aboriginal people believed no one owned land - it was communal property. How did we change from that accepted policy of most of the ancients to the accepted practice of individual or government ownership of property today? Some modern countries declare all of their land is owned by the national government alone, Israel being one of those, apparently, as well as China, North Korea and Russia.
Speaking for myself, I wonder if other readers will be as shocked as I was to read the statistics of how a few wealthy individuals actually own most of the land in a democracy like England and Scotland. Scotland has been working at changing this statistic - another fascinating chapter.
I was amazed to learn how it was that large areas of land began being professionally surveyed and mapped in order to draw boundaries - it was the early nineteenth century. How it was surveyed blew my mind! Of course, locals have worked out boundaries of property between themselves for millennia, sometimes not without a lot of disputation because of the reliance on verbal history and customary usage.
Why are some plots of land unloved? Hello, Chernobyl. But Winchester writes of an astonishing historical event I knew nothing about that was as terrible as Chernobyl. It happened near Denver, Colorado. The Rocky Flats plant processed plutonium for decades, and it did so with the result of long-term land and water pollution despite promises the owners made in how they would put in place safeguards for nearby Denver's land and population. Not. The people in their own nearby Colorado lands and property are still being threatened by possible radiation if they dig more than three feet down!
I recommend 'Land' to all readers. It's an important history and very interesting. I thought the book well written, and the author includes only a few in-depth events which illustrate the general milestones of history in owning land. There is a glossary of terms, a Bibliography and an Index.
January 26, 2021
Maybe a 3.5 stars. Not really sure I can give it four stars. Surprisingly, the book's thesis about the significance of land - the dispossession of indigenous land and the ownership of settler peoples - and the resulting divisions/conflicts around the world had flaws. There is an uneven quality to the chapters - some hits and misses. The layers of complexity of this topic can't be easily made simple. At times certain chapters have to be questioned about their too simplistic examination of the issue. There is just too much he has tried to do in this one book.
February 10, 2021
As a geographer, I was looking forward to Winchester's popular book on land. I'm disappointed. His treatment of the theft of land from Indigenous peoples is maddening. An enormous missed opportunity, particularly in the connect of the current global moment. Regardless of the moment, Winchester is condescending on the topic of Indigenous lands. So, that's my main critical point.
In general I find his style of rattling off tales, trivia, and fun facts to be frustrating. I can't discern who is his intended audience for this book. His style and tone are enjoyable, but apart from a few tidbits, I didn't really learn much.
Perhaps my expectation is colored by a comparison to academic literature, but this book didn't do it for me.
In general I find his style of rattling off tales, trivia, and fun facts to be frustrating. I can't discern who is his intended audience for this book. His style and tone are enjoyable, but apart from a few tidbits, I didn't really learn much.
Perhaps my expectation is colored by a comparison to academic literature, but this book didn't do it for me.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 28, 2020
This book has two parts, the first part is geological and discusses the creation of land and the type of land and the beginning of man to harness it as opposed to just living off what exists. The biggest change to the relationship of man and land is when he began to settle in places and create agriculture which meant staying in one place, to plant and sow.
As more people lived together, they began to go from groups to tribes to communities. Communities then began to compete for resources and to conquer others to make their lives easier by exploiting those who were conquered. Little by little different groups began to take land as their gd given rights. Empires were created, and that's when the book changes to a geographic story.
Empires began to conquer lands around it to control the output of those lands. The Egyptians would take over more and more land up the Nile Valley to enrich themselves and to enslave peoples to do their work and bidding. Rome took on the Carthaginian Empire to give them control of the Mediterranean Sea and all of the commerce that occurred in that area. Later they expanded into other area that had resources they wanted. This is how land was acquired and controlled.
Over the centuries, religion became the primary reason for the controlling of land, as different groups fought to prove that they were gds given. First it was Christianity and the Pagans and then Christianity and Islam, later it was Christianity and Protestantism. As land was controlled by borders and became nations, they again fought over control of resources. In the sixteen hundreds Europe began to go out and begin to control other parts of the world, ending with the division of Africa in the late eighteenth century.
World War I and II were fought over control of land as control of land became power and the proof of status as a World Power. After the war, ideology became the primary reason to battle over land for the now reduced resources. During this time, almost all world colonies were given their independence while the world divided by affiliation to the West (US & Europe) and East (Ussr). With the end of the Cold War, we entered a period of armed nationalism.
This is the last section where Winchester discussed the current problems with control of land for groups over disputes related to religion and ethnicity, or political disagreements. Some places discussed are the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East and South Asia. It's a well written and research history of why many parts of the world are as they are today.
As more people lived together, they began to go from groups to tribes to communities. Communities then began to compete for resources and to conquer others to make their lives easier by exploiting those who were conquered. Little by little different groups began to take land as their gd given rights. Empires were created, and that's when the book changes to a geographic story.
Empires began to conquer lands around it to control the output of those lands. The Egyptians would take over more and more land up the Nile Valley to enrich themselves and to enslave peoples to do their work and bidding. Rome took on the Carthaginian Empire to give them control of the Mediterranean Sea and all of the commerce that occurred in that area. Later they expanded into other area that had resources they wanted. This is how land was acquired and controlled.
Over the centuries, religion became the primary reason for the controlling of land, as different groups fought to prove that they were gds given. First it was Christianity and the Pagans and then Christianity and Islam, later it was Christianity and Protestantism. As land was controlled by borders and became nations, they again fought over control of resources. In the sixteen hundreds Europe began to go out and begin to control other parts of the world, ending with the division of Africa in the late eighteenth century.
World War I and II were fought over control of land as control of land became power and the proof of status as a World Power. After the war, ideology became the primary reason to battle over land for the now reduced resources. During this time, almost all world colonies were given their independence while the world divided by affiliation to the West (US & Europe) and East (Ussr). With the end of the Cold War, we entered a period of armed nationalism.
This is the last section where Winchester discussed the current problems with control of land for groups over disputes related to religion and ethnicity, or political disagreements. Some places discussed are the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East and South Asia. It's a well written and research history of why many parts of the world are as they are today.
April 15, 2021
While I expected the book to be written on a popular level rather than an academic level, I expected the author would tackle land in a more traditional historical manner rather than by jumping from one incident to another in various parts of the world. On page 122 of 660 in the Kindle version, the author states, "No American, so far as I am aware, ever professed a deep and unsullied affection for the USGS topographical sheets that it is possible to order from government agencies. They are fine enough maps, and they cover the entirety of the nation. But seldom are they bought for the sheer pleasure of ownership, of the ability to pore over them and imagine, or remember, to draw contented admiration at their elegant appearance and scrupulous accuracy." My immediate thought was that he had never met a land-platting genealogist! Many purchased these maps for every location in which their ancestors lived or in which they were working for a client. Nowadays the maps are available online and most use software to plat the deeds so fewer maps are being purchased, but there are still many who prefer to own these maps. I realize the author was making a point about the availablility of Ordnance Survey maps in many places in the UK whereas they needed to be ordered from a single location in the United States, but he overstated his case. Unfortunately he exaggerated points in many places in the book. While I initially planned to purchase a copy of this pre-publication, but I'm glad I decided to read a library copy before purchasing. I do not need another dust catcher, and that's exactly what this book would do on my shelves. Its usefulness is minimal.
July 2, 2022
I think I'm done with Simon Winchester. The subjects that he picks for his books always seem interesting, but in practice they are all mildly disappointing. The Professor and the Madman was OK, but Krakatoa less so, and The Pefectionists and this one less still. A book about the history of land tenure would have been interesting, but Mr. Winchester doesn't seem to have progressed much beyond Rousseau and Locke in his ideas about how we ever came up with the crazy idea of owning land, and he gives us less than I wanted in talking about how ideas of real property have developed in different cultures. To his credit Mr. Winchester does smell some of the rottenness in modern ideas of property ownership, but other than his vague feeling of discomfort, he doesn't really provide an analysis of the problems of the system. He spends a lot of time talking about historical struggles that he relates to land - the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Arab/Israeli Conflict and the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union. He says all of them were essentially about land, but I'm not so sure that I agree. I think that they were all about social polarization and the involvement of land in each case was incidental.
There's just not enough of a focus or a consistent point of view in this book. If Mr. Winchester had taken more of a stand and then built the structure of his book around it, it would have been much better even if I had disagreed with the stand that he took.
There's just not enough of a focus or a consistent point of view in this book. If Mr. Winchester had taken more of a stand and then built the structure of his book around it, it would have been much better even if I had disagreed with the stand that he took.
April 21, 2021
This is a large topic to tackle, but Simon Winchester managed it well. I appreciate his details and how much history I learned. This expanded my horizons in all the senses of that metaphor.
February 3, 2022
In books like this, you hope the author brings something new to the subject, either with research (ala Bryson) or a unique viewpoint (ala Graeber). Unfortunately, Winchester doesn't do either, settling for a pretty run-of-the-mill book about...well...a grab bag of focuses all loosely tied to the titular "Land." It starts, well enough, about the subject matter itself, a deep dive into the primordial histories of Winchester's own purchased plot., That was the best part of the book, and he unfortunately exhausts that subject by the quarter mark, and then veers to and fro from the earlier establishment of boundaries to the history of the American "settling." The worst part, the back half of the book feels perfunctory, covering the same tragedies of colonialism, fascism, and racism that you and I have read dozens of accounts of already. If Winchester was clever, he would've heavily reinterpreted the events through the lens of land, ownership, and settlement, similar to Graeber's exhaustive Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Instead you get a pretty tepid recounting with only nominal meaning-makings around the subject matter itself. Look, Graeber's book Debt, I found to be vexing and irritating it the liberties Graeber took to make his points. At least I was engaged! I found Land to be pretty tedious. 2.5 stars.
Edit: Oh! Also, bizarrely, detachedly, at odds with himself in the way that only well off, suburbs-y liberals can be. E.g. anti-city (talking about the blight of cityscapes in the only chapter that focuses on cities) but also a kind of preservationalist, somehow ignoring that to preserve the wilderness you need to enable and encourage resilient, dense cities. His utopian vision of pastoral communal living is either a fantasy or requiring horrific depopulation which I'd assume he's be against (hopefully). It's all tiresome but I found that an especially silly theme.
Edit: Oh! Also, bizarrely, detachedly, at odds with himself in the way that only well off, suburbs-y liberals can be. E.g. anti-city (talking about the blight of cityscapes in the only chapter that focuses on cities) but also a kind of preservationalist, somehow ignoring that to preserve the wilderness you need to enable and encourage resilient, dense cities. His utopian vision of pastoral communal living is either a fantasy or requiring horrific depopulation which I'd assume he's be against (hopefully). It's all tiresome but I found that an especially silly theme.
June 6, 2021
This is a fascinating look at our obsession with owning land, and how that obsession has shaped the modern world. In Winchester's classic fashion, he digs deep for examples across time and geography while laying out a thought-provoking study of what we humans have done, and are doing, with the billions of acres of land on the earth's surface.
One of the fascinating yet troubling themes that run through "Land" is the repeated actions by first owners of land in societies across the globe to take that land from those who originally inhabited it. Whether Scotland or Namibia or the Middle East or most of North, Central and South America, it was - and still is -- indigenous peoples who are pushed out of lands they occupied, often for centuries. Ironically, many of those first peoples did not believe in ownership of lands by individuals.
Winchester rightly points out the hypocrisies in taking land from indigenous peoples to create National Parks (Yosemite) or European settlers coming to North America after being pushed out of lands by wealthy owners (Scotland, Ireland...) only to do the same to indigenous peoples.
In the end, Winchester asks three fundamental questions: who actually owns the world's land, how much of it do we really need, and why does it matter?
This is a highly-recommended read for those interested in politics, geography and conservation.
One of the fascinating yet troubling themes that run through "Land" is the repeated actions by first owners of land in societies across the globe to take that land from those who originally inhabited it. Whether Scotland or Namibia or the Middle East or most of North, Central and South America, it was - and still is -- indigenous peoples who are pushed out of lands they occupied, often for centuries. Ironically, many of those first peoples did not believe in ownership of lands by individuals.
Winchester rightly points out the hypocrisies in taking land from indigenous peoples to create National Parks (Yosemite) or European settlers coming to North America after being pushed out of lands by wealthy owners (Scotland, Ireland...) only to do the same to indigenous peoples.
In the end, Winchester asks three fundamental questions: who actually owns the world's land, how much of it do we really need, and why does it matter?
This is a highly-recommended read for those interested in politics, geography and conservation.
March 11, 2021
Best quote from Desmond Tutu "When the missionaries came, they had the Bible and we had the land.
They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land."
They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land."
February 7, 2021
Important read!
Enjoyed it, and learned a lot about land ownership and the unnecessary draw people have to own land.
Started out strong, but got a little long-winded.
2.9/5
Enjoyed it, and learned a lot about land ownership and the unnecessary draw people have to own land.
Started out strong, but got a little long-winded.
2.9/5
November 17, 2021
Although this was very well researched and contained a lot of really valuable insight, I don’t think it was well organized or accomplished what it set out to accomplish.
March 21, 2023
This book is pointedly less "political" than the title might suggest. At least, I was expecting a more political read. But Winchester does do what it says in the title—the chapters are each small case studies that answer "how did this land come to be owned?"
Some of the examples I was familiar with—especially "improvement" in Scotland. Winchester has a few chapters on that. But the book explores land ownership in areas I knew little about. For example, there was a fab chapter covering the despicable usurping of Japanese-American farms in Washington and Oregon during wartime.
The book's sympathetic to indigenous "land back" movements and community ownership, even if it largely ignores "political" discussions. It's main interest is in viewing the circumstances and often cruel methods that have been used to take and own land. Yet it holds a seat for landowners emotional connection to their land—after all, why do people seek to own it? We're still trying to understand that.
Some of the examples I was familiar with—especially "improvement" in Scotland. Winchester has a few chapters on that. But the book explores land ownership in areas I knew little about. For example, there was a fab chapter covering the despicable usurping of Japanese-American farms in Washington and Oregon during wartime.
The book's sympathetic to indigenous "land back" movements and community ownership, even if it largely ignores "political" discussions. It's main interest is in viewing the circumstances and often cruel methods that have been used to take and own land. Yet it holds a seat for landowners emotional connection to their land—after all, why do people seek to own it? We're still trying to understand that.
April 26, 2021
Simon Winchester is one of those nonfiction authors whose books I would buy just because his name is on them. He is always entertaining and informative. At least, that’s been my experience of far.
Land is a big subject. The subject of land ownership as a concept is a pretty enormous subject in and of itself. I’ve seen some reviews where this book is criticized for not being comprehensive or academic enough. Thank heaven for that. Being academic enough is great for reference material but it tends to suck as reading-for-pleasure material, which is what I’m always looking for. Also, I can’t even imagine how enormous a book would have to be to comprehensively cover the subject. For me, this book is like the third bowl of porridge for Goldilocks. It’s just right.
I love books like this, winding journeys across time, filled with great stories about people, in this case, their attitudes toward land ownership, how it’s impacted their lives and altered the course of history. In this book we get a sense of the past and future of land. It's not as permanent as we might think. What more could you want? Stories well told.
I enjoyed this one immensely.
Land is a big subject. The subject of land ownership as a concept is a pretty enormous subject in and of itself. I’ve seen some reviews where this book is criticized for not being comprehensive or academic enough. Thank heaven for that. Being academic enough is great for reference material but it tends to suck as reading-for-pleasure material, which is what I’m always looking for. Also, I can’t even imagine how enormous a book would have to be to comprehensively cover the subject. For me, this book is like the third bowl of porridge for Goldilocks. It’s just right.
I love books like this, winding journeys across time, filled with great stories about people, in this case, their attitudes toward land ownership, how it’s impacted their lives and altered the course of history. In this book we get a sense of the past and future of land. It's not as permanent as we might think. What more could you want? Stories well told.
I enjoyed this one immensely.
March 8, 2021
I thought the subject was quite interesting but found the book rather troubling. As the book covers many topics, the author simplifies some issues too greatly, sometimes even inaccurately. The book, to me, is very superficial, being just a collection of anecdotes. Also I didn’t like his writing. Even though the author apparently wants to be sympathetic to indigenous people, the book utterly is written from a white male point of view.
October 1, 2021
A fascinating NF read. A well researched book that covers so much ground. An in depth look at how government, power, greed, religion collectively and sometimes individually determine who land belongs to.
This book affirmed knowledge I already had as well as expanded my knowledge about parts of the world that were unknown me.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly ~ indigenous people all over the world have had their land taken from them.
This book may challenge what you think you know and expand your horizons.
This book taught me so much and reinforced something I already know ~ we have much to learn from indigenous people and we have much to learn from the Earth itself.
My only 2 issues with this book - sometimes it could be very dry and sometimes the author does goes on tangents but these issues are insignificant to the text as a wholeA fascinating NF read. A well researched book that covers so much ground. An in depth look at how government, power, greed, religion collectively and sometimes individually determine who land belongs to.
This book affirmed knowledge I already had as well as expanded my knowledge about parts of the world that were unknown me.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly ~ indigenous people all over the world have had their land taken from them.
This book many challenge what you think you know and expand your horizons.
This book taught me so much and reinforced something I already know ~ we have much to learn from indigenous people and we have much to learn from the Earth itself.
My only 2 issues with this book - sometimes it could be very dry and sometimes the author does goes on tangents but these issues as re insignificant to the text as a whole.A fascinating NF read. A well researched book that covers so much ground. An in depth look at how government, power, greed, religion collectively and sometimes individually determine who land belongs to.
This book affirmed knowledge I already had as well as expanded my knowledge about parts of the world that were unknown me.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly ~ indigenous people all over the world have had their land taken from them.
This book may challenge what you think you know and expand your horizons.
This book taught me so much and reinforced something I already know ~ we have much to learn from indigenous people and we have much to learn from the Earth itself.
My only 2 issues with this book - sometimes it could be very dry and sometimes the author does goes on tangents but these issues are insignificant to the text as a whole
This book affirmed knowledge I already had as well as expanded my knowledge about parts of the world that were unknown me.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly ~ indigenous people all over the world have had their land taken from them.
This book may challenge what you think you know and expand your horizons.
This book taught me so much and reinforced something I already know ~ we have much to learn from indigenous people and we have much to learn from the Earth itself.
My only 2 issues with this book - sometimes it could be very dry and sometimes the author does goes on tangents but these issues are insignificant to the text as a wholeA fascinating NF read. A well researched book that covers so much ground. An in depth look at how government, power, greed, religion collectively and sometimes individually determine who land belongs to.
This book affirmed knowledge I already had as well as expanded my knowledge about parts of the world that were unknown me.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly ~ indigenous people all over the world have had their land taken from them.
This book many challenge what you think you know and expand your horizons.
This book taught me so much and reinforced something I already know ~ we have much to learn from indigenous people and we have much to learn from the Earth itself.
My only 2 issues with this book - sometimes it could be very dry and sometimes the author does goes on tangents but these issues as re insignificant to the text as a whole.A fascinating NF read. A well researched book that covers so much ground. An in depth look at how government, power, greed, religion collectively and sometimes individually determine who land belongs to.
This book affirmed knowledge I already had as well as expanded my knowledge about parts of the world that were unknown me.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly ~ indigenous people all over the world have had their land taken from them.
This book may challenge what you think you know and expand your horizons.
This book taught me so much and reinforced something I already know ~ we have much to learn from indigenous people and we have much to learn from the Earth itself.
My only 2 issues with this book - sometimes it could be very dry and sometimes the author does goes on tangents but these issues are insignificant to the text as a whole
Read
January 8, 2024Two firsts for me - (1) reading Simon Winchester and (2) looking at land ownership as a historic construct. I'm interested in reading additional books on this topic from other authors.
Still, Winchester casts a wide net through history and aims to be global in scope. The result is compounding examples of colonialist genocide and mismanagement of ecosystems. It's sobering to consider how many places were overtaken by settlers, monarchs or violent forces. It made me reflect where my own ideas about ownership come from and consider how often war or legal battles are about ownership when proper stewardship of land is rarely discussed.
Winchester suggests that land sharing is a way forward but I worry that his epilogue falls short of providing a compelling case for anyone using supply and demand economic reasoning. A case for incentivizing experienced and knowledgeable local labor or reducing investment risk might appeal more to the media and tech moguls and government agencies who currently own a significant portion of Earth's land today.
Still, Winchester casts a wide net through history and aims to be global in scope. The result is compounding examples of colonialist genocide and mismanagement of ecosystems. It's sobering to consider how many places were overtaken by settlers, monarchs or violent forces. It made me reflect where my own ideas about ownership come from and consider how often war or legal battles are about ownership when proper stewardship of land is rarely discussed.
Winchester suggests that land sharing is a way forward but I worry that his epilogue falls short of providing a compelling case for anyone using supply and demand economic reasoning. A case for incentivizing experienced and knowledgeable local labor or reducing investment risk might appeal more to the media and tech moguls and government agencies who currently own a significant portion of Earth's land today.
December 31, 2022
Firstly, the most important part of any review - I enjoyed the book! So pick it up, have a read, I doubt you’ll regret it.
There are a lot of interesting anecdotes and many varied historical episodes are described succinctly. Surely any reader will learn something given the wide range of events covered.
However, there is for me a “but”…and it is this; Mr. Winchester at times tends to get preachy on well worn topics without offering the reader any particularly new angles or perspectives. Sometimes it felt more a reflection of the author’s political outlook than a study of the Land as we were promised.
There are a lot of interesting anecdotes and many varied historical episodes are described succinctly. Surely any reader will learn something given the wide range of events covered.
However, there is for me a “but”…and it is this; Mr. Winchester at times tends to get preachy on well worn topics without offering the reader any particularly new angles or perspectives. Sometimes it felt more a reflection of the author’s political outlook than a study of the Land as we were promised.
April 14, 2021
Interesting, and quite broad topically. Certainly some scathing history about land acquisition by dispossessing other people groups. I think what surprised me the most was his discussion of how "land" is not as stable as we think, both when sea levels rise and how the Dutch have pulled new land out of the sea. There was an interesting note regarding the creation of United States national parks, which introduced the concept that it is popular to idolise "nature" to keep it "untainted" from "human" use, while stewarded use is often the best way to maintain land. I also enjoyed the comparison of suburban lawnmowing with the tradition of "cool fires" that Aboriginal people in Australia use.
Shelved as 'did-not-finish'
March 5, 2022Non fiction books either work or they don’t work for me. This one seems to have vignettes of information but is not really capturing my full attention. If I didn’t have so many books to read then maybe I would take my time and read more but at this stage it is going on my dnf pile.
August 28, 2021
Plenty of interesting stories and some elegant language. Let down a few times by what looks like very light editing—repeated phrases and stories that could have been cut, and a few clunker sentences.
February 1, 2021
3.5, and maybe a Simon Windhester 3.5 is a 4.0 from lesser authors. but, as third most popular review notes there are hits and misses in the various chapters. Winchester, the consummate historian of broad topics, wrote at least 5 4* star books Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World and Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles-- read these books first if you're interested in grand-scope history.
is Winchester a touch leftist? or am I just getting older ?
is Winchester a touch leftist? or am I just getting older ?
November 5, 2022
I struggled to finish this, not because it is dead boring or badly written, but because it lacks an argument. Instead there's a leitmotiv, which is that non-white approaches to a communal ownership of land are always preferable to models based on private ownership. Even if one shares the sentiment, it is not to Winchester's credit that he doesn't so much tease out why as repeat it almost like a mantra. Most chapters are full of interesting factoids, but few offer genuinely fresh perspectives. In the main, Winchester goes over well-known and often tragic episodes like the massacre and deportation of Indian tribes in the US, colonisation, collectivisation of land in the USSR under Stalin, or confiscation of Japanese-owned farms in the US during WWII when all Japanese-American citizens were shamefully thrown into camps. One figure I knew nothing about is Whina Cooper, who marched 700 miles down to Wellington to demand the return of land to Maori people. Annoyingly, although the book does have an index, it is difficult to refer back to whatever nugget you found striking because only one chapter title includes the name of the people/territory under discussion.
May 1, 2022
This book is a tour through the history of colonialism and how land-ownership has been leveraged to dispossess native people, and consolidate power. Each example is very interesting on its own, but the thesis seems underdeveloped. The fact that land dispossession was a central tenant if colonialism is straightforward, but at the end he seems to imply that private ownership of land is itself to blame, with little evidence. It is incredibly likely that colonial powers who didn’t view the native people they encountered as fully human would have found ways to harm them without formal land deeds. Likewise, there are many examples of private land holdings which have done good for many people. The broad scope of the topic, “Land”, makes for a book that is too general to make any specific argument that “lands” with any authority.
Read this book if: You are interested to learn how colonialism unfolded.
Don’t read this book if: you want theory or insight on the nature of land.
Read this book if: You are interested to learn how colonialism unfolded.
Don’t read this book if: you want theory or insight on the nature of land.
September 27, 2021
The book “Land. How the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world” is aptly named, for it’s about how mankind’s hunger to own property has shaped the birth of nations and caused many to go to war.
I picked up this book because I’ve enjoyed a number of other works by the author, Simon Winchester. This includes his “histories” on the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific ocean.
Mr. Winchester is generally able to take a broad range of unrelated facts and compile them into a cohesive and interesting story. “Land” is another great example of this where he has a traveled the globe – from Latvia to where markers exist to measure the world’s longitude, the Netherlands to where land is reclaimed from the sea, the Troubles in Ireland to those in the Holy Land (Israel) and to how the Europeans seized land form the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand and Africa.
Interestingly it didn’t tackle land grabs in Asia Pacific such as the Japanese invasions of China and Korea or Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
The most important part of the book is the perspective it gives on history. Mankind may hunger for great tracts of land and will beg, borrow and very often steal to get it. But is this really necessary? Just how much land does one person need? And more important why does society allow many to acquire enormous tracts of land that is not used at the expense of those who have little or none?
I liked how the author describes the various relationships that people have had towards land – starting with the aboriginal people of countries like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and many African countries where mankind’s relationship with land was not based on ownership but communal use and respect.
These concepts were quickly overpowered by land hungry colonists – mainly from Europe – who justified theft claiming that territories were terra nullius or vacant territories and by the Doctrine of Discovery Europeans were legally allowed to claim land that had for generations been managed by indigenous folks.
I also liked how there is some movement in the world – in Scotland and in the Trusts of America – to allow more public access to all land.
Overall, I enjoyed the book and recommend it.
I picked up this book because I’ve enjoyed a number of other works by the author, Simon Winchester. This includes his “histories” on the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific ocean.
Mr. Winchester is generally able to take a broad range of unrelated facts and compile them into a cohesive and interesting story. “Land” is another great example of this where he has a traveled the globe – from Latvia to where markers exist to measure the world’s longitude, the Netherlands to where land is reclaimed from the sea, the Troubles in Ireland to those in the Holy Land (Israel) and to how the Europeans seized land form the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand and Africa.
Interestingly it didn’t tackle land grabs in Asia Pacific such as the Japanese invasions of China and Korea or Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
The most important part of the book is the perspective it gives on history. Mankind may hunger for great tracts of land and will beg, borrow and very often steal to get it. But is this really necessary? Just how much land does one person need? And more important why does society allow many to acquire enormous tracts of land that is not used at the expense of those who have little or none?
I liked how the author describes the various relationships that people have had towards land – starting with the aboriginal people of countries like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and many African countries where mankind’s relationship with land was not based on ownership but communal use and respect.
These concepts were quickly overpowered by land hungry colonists – mainly from Europe – who justified theft claiming that territories were terra nullius or vacant territories and by the Doctrine of Discovery Europeans were legally allowed to claim land that had for generations been managed by indigenous folks.
I also liked how there is some movement in the world – in Scotland and in the Trusts of America – to allow more public access to all land.
Overall, I enjoyed the book and recommend it.
May 31, 2023
This book discusses the concept of land as a property to own and conquer. Over the centuries, wars have been fought over little plots of land as the concept of land ownership really took hold. The author discusses how the offer of land rights helped facilitate migration, even though the land was pilfered from others to do so, which I always find to be an enraging topic. The content of this book is sweeping across the centuries and the changing relationship with land and land ownership. It is difficult to properly summarize the book due to that.
This is probably a four star book, but I feel very generous in giving it three stars. I really like other work by this author, and expected to enjoy this book much more than I did. The writing was not dull or poorly written, I just felt that reading it was extremely tedious. Despite my personal feelings, the book contained a lot of information about how people view land. Ancestral lands, land ownership, the value of land, etc. were all points of discussion in this book, and a lot of valid points were made. I have to admit I had never thought about some of the concepts in this book, and learning things I did not know is always a welcome thing in my world. If you are interested in the relationship people have with land, this may be a good book for you. I may suggest getting the physical copy instead of the Audible version, which I have. It may have been a much better book to read in physical format.
This is probably a four star book, but I feel very generous in giving it three stars. I really like other work by this author, and expected to enjoy this book much more than I did. The writing was not dull or poorly written, I just felt that reading it was extremely tedious. Despite my personal feelings, the book contained a lot of information about how people view land. Ancestral lands, land ownership, the value of land, etc. were all points of discussion in this book, and a lot of valid points were made. I have to admit I had never thought about some of the concepts in this book, and learning things I did not know is always a welcome thing in my world. If you are interested in the relationship people have with land, this may be a good book for you. I may suggest getting the physical copy instead of the Audible version, which I have. It may have been a much better book to read in physical format.
May 28, 2021
Non-fiction book about all things "land" - property rights, colonialism, climate change, etc. This is really a pretty hardcore history book if that's not what you're expecting, but it's very comprehensive in topics. Lots of lots of nations stealing & co-opting land from other nations, claiming eminent domain and taking land back from private landowners, public trust lands, how we mistreated Native Americans and a really interesting chapter about the Japanese in California and how we threw them into concentration camps, when really they were the plurality of California farmers before the war.
We also create land! Both human-made and nature-made (i.e. volcanic explosions). Humans filled in land to create polders in the Netherlands, the marina district in San Francisco, and lower Manhattan. When you make land, who does it belong to? This book goes into all that. And how weird it is to "own" tracts of land. Like you pass a deed around from human to human in exchange for money, and suddenly you have the right to throw everyone off it as trespassers. At least here in the U.S.! Apparently, "trespassing" is not a thing in some other countries and you are not allowed to throw people off your land.
A large array of topics (covering the planet) with a heavy history focus.
We also create land! Both human-made and nature-made (i.e. volcanic explosions). Humans filled in land to create polders in the Netherlands, the marina district in San Francisco, and lower Manhattan. When you make land, who does it belong to? This book goes into all that. And how weird it is to "own" tracts of land. Like you pass a deed around from human to human in exchange for money, and suddenly you have the right to throw everyone off it as trespassers. At least here in the U.S.! Apparently, "trespassing" is not a thing in some other countries and you are not allowed to throw people off your land.
A large array of topics (covering the planet) with a heavy history focus.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 371 reviews