How Our Hunger For Land Shaped History | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘This legal definition of Terra Nullius. Do you see laws surrounding land ownership as as a revolutionary moment that changed the way we thought about land? Or do you just see it as an extension of something that might have happened anyway?’
‘The answer to this question could take up this and many other podcasts. I mean, land law is voluminous in extent. But I mean, at its most simple, fee simple, it's the perfect word to use here. Because if I were to be your own landlord, I own a house in England, Wales. I own that in fee simple. I mean, it's an expression, which is archaic, but what it means is that I can own this land, I can have what is called the bundle of rights. In other words, they have the right to fell trees on it, or mine it or excavate, sell it to somebody else, lease it to somebody else, or exclude anyone I wish from it, that's part of my bundle of rights. And yet, because I hold this land in fee simple, that is an acknowledgement that, in fact, I don't really own it at all, the person that owns it, is the queen. The Queen owns everything. The monarch, the sovereign, and that tradition is common in most societies in the world, it's true in ancient or up to the revolution, 1949 revolution in China. True in Japan, because the Emperor, the Shogun, the Imperial leader of those countries is seen as God's representative on earth, and God owns the land, thereby we're going full circle, which is what the Native Americans and the Aboriginals and the Maoris think. No human can own the land.
But we have this conceit in England, that, yes, all England is owned by God. God's representative is the Queen. So the Queen owns all of England… this doesn't exist in the United States. That's an important distinction, that if you own land in the United States, you own it. That's it. But it's one of the reasons why the law of trespass which fascinates me is so savagely applied in America. You can, if you’re in Texas, you have as the bundle of rights, the right to exclude people from your land. If you shoot someone who's on your land, the courts will look very sympathetically at you. Probably if you kill them, not charge you with murder. Death by misadventure, manslaughter or whatever, because you have an inalienable right to defend your land, because you are the absolute title holder. There's no Queen, standing between you and God as it were. And this has its fullest expression in other monarchies in Europe. In Scandinavia, particularly, which is what I think is fascinating. There is essentially no law of trespass, in Sweden as an example. There is this and has been for centuries, the phenomenon which in Swedish, and my pronunciation is not good enough, of course, is almonds ratan, which means all men's right. Everyone has a right, the perfect right, protected by law to wander about so long as you behave yourself on all the land in the country. You can't go into someone's private garden, you can't go into their house and demand a cup of coffee. But if they own 100 acres, you have an absolute right to wander over it. Behave yourself, but they can't say: get off my land. And that is because there's an acknowledgement that actually the land belongs ultimately to God. To the monarch, to the king or queen of Sweden. It's a very interesting phenomenon…
The whole law of primogeniture in England that everything goes to the oldest son. And then the next one goes into the army, and the next one gets into the church, and the fourth one goes to the colonies. That's still extant. And it means, it was one of the reasons I suppose that priests, Catholic priests were not allowed to marry because then marriage would theoretically divide the land that the church owned again and again and again. And the church would not have any land left because all the priests would be marrying and, and distributing the land among their heirs and successors...
The scheme [in Zimbabwe] initially, which I thought was, was somewhat wise, was that the British would, the British government would set up a fund and the Zimbabwean government would seek to buy the white farmers out and replace them reasonably with, with Zimbabwean farmers, black Zimbabwean farmers, and the money for the purchase of the farm from the white farmer will be supplied from London. And that seemed, you know, it was no, therefore no charge to the Zimbabwean government. London paid the price, the British taxpayer paid the price. But one might say a small price to pay for what we had done to Africa over the, over the years. But it all, the wheels fell off this particular plan because the money that was transmitted from London to, to Harare, the new capital of Zimbabwe, was mismanaged and went into the wrong hands. And then the transfer became sort of violent confiscation rather than transfer. And is deemed today not to have been a success story. There was a lot of, a lot of wounding and killing, unpleasantness, and the Zimbabwean agricultural economy took a nosedive...
Map making is tremendously political… there was this noble attempt that I wrote at some length in the 1890s, by a gentleman, a cartographer called Albrecht Penck, who decided that he thought the world should map itself. And there should be a global effort to create a map of the entire planet at the scale of one to a million, and the sheet should all look identical, identical in color, identical in typography, identical ins scale, one to a million, and they would all be of a particular color, projection, such that if you took tape and stuck them all together, you would have a map of the entire planet at a million the size of the planet, which is about the size of a large country house, and to make sure that they weren't politically biased, his plan which he put to the International Geographical Congress, held, I think in Bern in Switzerland in the 1890s, that countries should never map themselves. So the United States should map let us say China, Indians should map Brazil, the Portuguese should map Australia. And it happened… by the time they had produced about 850, needing only about another 50, the United Nations at a rather melancholy conference in Bangkok, they superintended the project then said, let's pull the plug on it, there's no need for these maps...
[In New Zealand] We signed this treaty in 1840, the Treaty of Waitangi, copies of it were taken by horseback all around New Zealand over the subsequent year. And effectively all the tribal leaders of all the 60 or so different Maori families said, okay, the land that we had previously owned, now belongs to Queen Victoria. Seems bizarre. And under that arrangement, so New Zealand chugged along relatively happily for about 100 years. But then, in the 1940s, after the Second World War anyway, Maoris started to quite understandably become restive, and said, Wait a minute, why should this land be owned by a monarch 10,000 miles away in London? And why indeed, is that our country, a little England in the South Sea? Its daffodils, its lawn bowls, its cricket, its warm beer. It is singing God Save the Queen. No. And this remarkable lady called Feanor Cooper [sp?], elderly Maori later, lady led a march from the very tip of the North Island down to the capital in Wellington in the 1970s saying this is ridiculous. You took away our land, we want it back. And slowly but surely, in the years since, with the establishment of the Maori Land Court and the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal, the Maoris are starting to get some of the wrongs righted. Access to the seashore. The seashore used to belong to white people, effectively now, it belongs to Maoris. Farms, which used to be the sovereign property of English people are now, in small numbers, too small a number for most Maoris, are returning to their traditional ownership. And in symbolic ways too. And the country is no longer named New Zealand on its own. It's now known as New Zealand Aotearoa. All of these things together with land reform and respect for the Maoris will I believe seep westwards across Tasman Sea to Australia. And then I would like to think would seep further to the United States to Britain or to Britain, certainly. The United States is another matter. In so many ways New Zealand seems to be a model country we should all look at with admiration and respect.’"
Amazing. The British didn't just buy out slaves (in the 19th century)
but also bought out land - both at their own expense; though of course
nothing will ever be enough for grievance mongers. They should've bought
the land themselves instead of leaving it to the Zimbabwean government.
That would've gotten them slammed for paternalism but at least the
money wouldn't have been stolen. The farms would've still failed but at
least the original owners wouldn't have suffered (as much)