(Mainstream Publishing, £25)
When William the Conqueror commissioned the Domesday Book at Christmas 1085, he instructed his emissaries to find out "what or how much each landholder had in land and livestock, and what it was worth," so he could properly tax his new kingdom.
According to Kevin Cahill, who has set out to compile a modern Domesday Book on a global scale, the British monarch's pre-eminence in absolute land ownership has grown over the centuries and the Queen remains by far the world's biggest landowner, today owning a sixth of the earth's land surface. This may be a bombshell headline, but it is also pretty meaningless, since Cahill rests his argument on the absurd notion that the Queen not only "owns" the entire United Kingdom and its dependencies and territories, but also Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Cahill breathlessly cites constitutional texts and arcane feudal laws, but misses the vital point that "allodial" ownership (absolute ownership without any encumbrance of law) is, in the modern era, the domain of states, not individuals. To put it another way, the idea of ownership is empty without the possibility of making a sale. Although there have been major land sales in modern history, such as the Louisiana and Alaska purchases in the 19th century, it is hard to imagine the Queen offering George W Bush a slice of Canada. Whatever Cahill says about the matter, Canada is not the Queen's to sell.
This should not detract from the mammoth scale of Cahill's undertaking, nor should it devalue his two main conclusions. First, reliable data on private land ownership is very hard to find: the land registry of England and Wales holds records for barely half of land in the two countries; land ownership records in the US are scattered in 3,143 local registries and there is no central database; in Brazil, barely a tenth of land is covered by the land registry. Second, land ownership has long been concentrated in the hands of very few. Cahill suggests that the two facts are connected. The relationship between the obscurity of data and the concentration of ownership can be illustrated by the fate of the "second Domesday," a land census carried out in Britain in the 1870s and compiled in a report called The Return of Owners of Land. The report detailed every landowner in Britain and Ireland, and showed that fewer than 3,000 families held about 95 per cent of the present UK. This was not something that powerful landowners wished to advertise, and according to Cahill, the report was quietly removed from public record.
Historically, large private landholdings were accumulated by conquest or gifted by the sovereign, secured by the threat of violence and perpetuated through inheritance. But John Locke challenged this feudal basis of land ownership with his labour theory of value, holding that people can only take rightful ownership of land once they have "mixed" their labour with it. Although this Enlightenment idea did little to change land ownership in Europe (despite the lasting land reform that occurred during the French revolution), it did end up being the model for the allocation of land to settlers in frontier America.
Ruling elites in Washington resisted the claims of penniless immigrants for as long as they could, but in the end they recognised that squatters had been settling land extra-legally for decades. The law was changed in 1862 so that if squatters could show they had "improved" a parcel of land—by enclosure, cultivation or irrigation—it became theirs to own. The result was an initial land distribution much more equal than Europe's, and a system of property law that, according to the celebrated Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, is a precondition for the development of a successful capitalist economy.
Economists fret about the lack of available capital for investment in new businesses in poor countries, but according to de Soto, these countries do not lack assets. Rather, they lack the systems of property law needed to transform fixed assets into working capital. By his calculations, the real estate held, but not legally owned, by the world's poor is worth 90 times more than the aid given to poor countries in the past 30 years. However, secure property depends on legal rights of ownership, which often requires land reform.
In Europe, revelations about the concentration of farm subsidies in the hands of aristocratic landowners and corporate agribusiness are giving the lie to the notion that the EU's common agricultural policy supports small-scale family farms. Today in Britain, 69 per cent of land is owned by just 158,000 families, mostly descendants of the 3,000 families identified 140 years ago in The Return of Owners of Land.
The young Winston Churchill felt that there was something unfair about profits derived purely from land ownership: "Roads are made; electric light turns night into day; water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off—and all the while the landlord sits still?… He contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived." An illustrious line of economists, starting with David Ricardo, has advocated a land tax as the most efficient way of financing government expenditure, particularly expenditure on infrastructure. It is an idea which united the neo-Keynesian Robert Solow with Milton Friedman, the high priest of monetarism.
In an era of globally mobile capital and international migration, governments face the challenge of financing infrastructure improvements and expensive social welfare without driving wealth creation overseas. But land remains the one truly fixed asset—one crying out for progressive taxation. Instituting such a tax would help move us beyond the neo-feudal patterns of land ownership that Cahill tirelessly documents.
