James Q. Whitman, "Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

About this episode

James Q. Whitman discusses the historical transformation of ownership from humans to land in the Western world.

Today we think of land as the paradigmatic example of property, while in the past, the paradigmatic example was often a slave. In this seminal work, James Q. Whitman asserts that there is no natural form of ownership. Whitman dives deep into the long Western history of this transformation in the legal imagination – the transformation from the ownership of humans and other living creatures to the ownership of land. This change extended over many centuries, coming to fruition only on the threshold of the modern era. It brought with it profound changes, not only in the way we understand ownership but also in the way we understand the state. Its most dramatic consequence arrived in the nineteenth century, with the final disappearance of the lawful private ownership of humans, which had been taken for granted for thousands of years. James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and Law School and also holds an M.A. in European History from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Chicago. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the…

People in this episode

Guest: James Q. Whitman

Topics covered

• property ownership
• legal history
• transformation of ownership
• slavery
• land ownership
• Western history

Keywords

• ownership
• slavery
• land
• legal imagination
• Western history
• 19th century
• property

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Yale Law School, Ford Foundation, Columbia University, University of Chicago, Cambridge UP

Books & works: Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World

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