The emergence of private property in Great Britain coincided with the rise of the nation’s colonial pursuits. Acts of enclosure that privatized land in England had analogues in Ireland and the Americas. Aidan Beatty’s book presents this history with a wide chronological sweep from early modern era enclosures to Elon Musk’s fantasies of colonizing Mars. Underlying this range is an assertion that throughout ‘intellectual partisans of private property have always feared that their propertied social order will be destroyed by a diverse mob of dangerous enemies’ seeking in part to upturn reigning racial and gender hierarchies (p. 1). In his narrative, Beatty works through a number of familiar individuals, texts and events. By placing them within the same conceptual framework, the book encourages readers to think synthetically about private property’s role in shaping society.
As might be expected in a book with this range, the emphasis is less on change over time than continuities of private property as a foundation for the maintenance and reproduction of dominant social hierarchies and sources of political authority. Over the course of six chapters divided into two parts, Theories and Practices, Beatty’s book touches down on what he describes as ‘“central moments” in the history of Anglophone capitalist modernity’ from 1607 to the present. Many of the figures under scrutiny in their defence of private property were driven as much by fear of an amorphous mob taking power. Casting some land as empty and unimproved meant that British defenders of private property also assigned a standard of civilization between themselves and others.
Each chapter of the first part focuses on theorists of politics and economics, with the first chapter devoted to Locke, the second to Burke and the third to Marx and Engels. Within these chapters, Beatty trains his eye on the tie between private property and civilization, seen especially in the ability to make improvements, in the Americas, France and Ireland respectively. In these years, a nascent and developing capitalism challenged some of the protections of private property. While observing eighteenth-century revolutions, Edmund Burke viewed private property as a stabilizing force and viewed finance as an introducer of uncertainty. Land’s physical reality gave property a trust that paper money, for example, could not match. In other respects, private property could mount a critique of the monarchy and its excessive greed for space. Ultimately, Beatty finds in these sources that property was a suitable and natural basis for political life in contrast to the state’s artificiality.
The book’s second half uses the ideas delineated in the previous chapters and focuses on their reverberations over time, practical applications and political effects, mostly in the United States with a final chapter on Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. The chapter on the ardent defender of slavery George Fitzhugh, possibly the book’s least-known major subject, moves the conception of property from land to the enslaved. Fitzhugh’s rationales levelled a critique of capitalism while asserting the natural right of enslavers to hold people as private property and therefore assure their own upward mobility. Afterward, the book moves forward in time to federal housing policy in the United States after 1945. Investment in private property expanded through federal programmes supporting homeownership in whites and mobilized their opposition to racial justice and publicly funded housing. In Britain, narratives of decline and fear bolstered arguments for private property. Fear, an internal Conservative Party paper from 1979 argued, was ‘more potent than hope’ (p. 246). Thatcher harnessed those anxieties to political ends by casting socialism as a ‘pernicious source of contemporary social breakdown’ (p. 247). In contrast, private property with its emphasis on individual resources rather than a welfare state would return society to its right foundations.
Given the broadness of the chronological sweep, it is only to be expected that at times the narrative moves away from its conceptual centre regarding how private property reinforced whiteness and gender norms throughout its long history. The fear of social chaos in the book’s title means that the book focuses on the perspective and writing of elites rather than challenges to private property either rhetorically or through direct action. The book’s organization and geographic focus raises questions about how to write transnational or comparative history, although the book would benefit from being more explicit about how the ‘central moments’ that form the book’s chapters were chosen and the threads that link them together.
With its focus on published texts, the book is as much an intellectual history as an urban one. One can consider this book as an effective guide to think about large questions across time on partitioning land and its legacies. The most generative aspects of the book connect the ways that owning private property demonstrated that an individual belonged and had a right to participate in society. Fears of revolution, socialism, collectivism or indeed any form of solidarity besides those linked by owning private property have, as Beatty reminds us, a very long history worthy of more sustained attention.
