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Land
A review of

Land

How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

Simon WinchesterHarper • 2021

Everybody Wants Land

by David Meyer

Prolific bestselling historian Simon Winchester provides telling, illuminating examples of human interaction with land and with one another in land disputes.

Bestselling author Simon Winchester’s history of humanity’s use and abuse of land is both inspiring and heartbreaking. He illuminates how land has served as a catalyst for humankind’s greatest achievements, tragedies and atrocities. Winchester, an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), traces the myriad ways people engage with land: revering it, buying and selling it, stealing it, dividing it, fighting over it and – in recent times – striving to preserve it.

Land Ownership

Many ancient societies believed that the Earth’s surface belongs to a deity or several deities and that all people share its use. Individual ownership of land most likely arose about 4,000 years ago as people stopped living as nomadic hunter-gatherers.


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