This chapter provides an overview of this book’s core arguments and structure.

This chapter explores the intervention of the late-18th century Ottoman jurist Kadizâda Mehmed Tâhir in a longstanding controversy: the legitimacy of istibdāl (the exchange of an endowed property for cash, or for another property). This mechanism was recognised as valid by the Ḥanbalī school of law, somewhat exceptionally. Istibdāl was an important means of reviving defunct endowments (sing. waqf) whose properties no longer generated the income necessary to support the charitable causes they had been devoted to, as well as a means of ensuring the continued circulation of property in society. Kadizâda Mehmed Tâhir argued in favour of the legitimacy of this mechanism and sought to uphold the decision of a Cairene deputy judge of the Ḥanbalī school who permitted istibdāl in a case where the endowment deed (waqfiyya) explicitly precluded its use.

The chapter discusses the history of the Berlin housing system, the Kantian roots of the German Constitution (Grundgesetz) and the events leading to the emergence of Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (DWE). It explains the origins of the liberal notion of property and how corporate property is premised on ‘blasting the atom of property open’, that is, destroying the links between person and a thing that constitute classical liberal understanding of property.

The transition from an apartheid state to one whose foundation is universal suffrage saw South Africa adopt multiple methods to signify transition from the one form of rule to the other. Such a transition involved, among others, the creation of truth commissions, the amendment of legislation and the promulgation of new legislation – a process collectively referred to as transitional justice. Despite the protections against the arbitrary deprivation of property, provided for in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and other pieces of legislation born of transitional justice, there continues to exist a disparity in respect of who South African property law caters for and protects. Against this background, the South African Constitution and case law, this chapter engages the principle of transformative justice to interrogate the conceptions of ownership and property under South African property law. This chapter argues that the current conception of property and ownership serve to, inter alia, economically exclude a large number of South Africans whose property custodianship exists outside of the current conceptions of ‘ownership’ and consequently outside of the recognition of private ownership of land or property.

Data is one of the most valuable resources in the twenty-first century. Property rights are a tried-and-tested legal response to regulating valuable assets. With non-personal, machine-generated data within an EU context, mainstream IP options are not available, although certain types of machine generated data may be protected as trade secrets or within sui generis database protection. However, a new IP right is not needed. The formerly proposed EU data producer’s right is a cautionary tale for jurisdictions considering a similar model. A new property right would both strengthen the position of de facto data holders and drive up costs. However, with data, there are valuable lessons to be learned from constructed commons models.

The conferral of personhood is a choice made by legal systems, but just because it can be done, does not mean that it should. Analogies made between AI systems and corporations are superficial and flawed. For instance, the demand for asset partitioning does not apply to AI systems in the same way that it does with corporations and may lead to moral hazards. Conferring personhood on AI systems would also need to be accompanied with governance structures equivalent to those that accompany corporate legal personhood. Further, the metaphorical ghost of data as property needs to be exorcised.

This chapter argues that the Epicureans defend a kind of ethical naturalism. The first section of the chapter, focusing on ontology, shows that for the Epicureans justice is conceived of as an accidental property (sumptōma/eventum) and is of the same general sort as the properties that are investigated in science. The second section, turning to moral epistemology, argues that, on the Epicurean view, what is just is directly perceived, showing that the investigation of ethical properties happens in the same general way as investigation in the sciences on the Epicurean view.

This chapter addresses the questions of what public property is and why it matters. The key to defending public property lies in disambiguating the sense in which this system of rights with respect to external resources is public and, ultimately, about our property. Public property can be said to be ours in the sense that we can freely use it. On this view, held by lawyer economists, democratic egalitarians, and some Kantians, public property is akin to easement rights to enter and use a resource without the leave of its owner. The chapter criticizes proponents of the easement conception, arguing that they cannot but fail to explain why the “publicness” of the resource matters. It demonstrates that easement-like rights are fully consistent with a system of private property.

Instead, the chapter argues that public property’s distinctive value lies in control, rather than use, rights. Public property is ours in the sense that we are entitled to control it. That is, it extends autonomous agency to the construction of public spaces and resources. Public property places individuals in a position of collective self-government, manifested in the following two particular ways: First, expressing the ideas and commitments that the political community as a whole affirms; and second, exerting control over the construction and direction of the resources that make up the environment the individuals occupy.

Property has a vexed status in Rousseau’s Social Contract. On one hand, Rousseau seems committed to the conventionalist view that property is a creation of law and state. Yet Rousseau also recognizes prepolitical dimensions of property, such as a right of first occupancy and a natural entitlement to land through “labor and cultivation.” This chapter contends that Rousseau’s seemingly divergent views on property become less paradoxical once one distinguishes between the rights of others and the more self-regarding aspects of morality. Focusing on the dense section of the Social Contract titled “Of Real Property,” it argues that while Rousseau acknowledges moral obligations governing the use of things, he ultimately holds that persons only have full-fledged property rights within the state. It suggests, moreover, that Rousseau’s attention to both the political and prepolitical dimensions of property continues to resonate in contemporary debate.

This chapter explores how political economy was understood in Joseph Johnson’s periodical, the Analytical Review, by investigating which publications were listed under the heading of ‘political economy’, and how they were reviewed. It thereby illuminates how political economy was understood in Wollstonecraft’s intellectual milieu. Political economy emerges as a heterogeneous discourse where political and moral ideas mixed with the economic, and where discussions of human nature, and human motivation, as well as of civil society, were often prominent. Writings reviewed as ‘political economy’ in the Analytical Review reveal how the term was used by radical and progressive thinkers as a means for collecting a range of critical perspectives on contemporary society, as well as setting out possible means of improvement. In the eyes of the Analytical Review, political economy offered the prospect of enacting reforms which might increase the happiness of ordinary people, and a means of critiquing existing injustices.

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s engagement with narratives of property and property society in Smith and Rousseau, as reflected in her A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). In political economy’s imaginary, the figure of property encapsulates the ambivalences at the heart of late eighteenth-century modernity and poses questions of affective response and social relation which were fundamental to political economy’s account of social origin. Wollstonecraft’s attention to property of many kinds on her travels is read as an on-going critique of the contemporary political economic order, as well as attempts to imagine alternatives to it, such as the independent, comfortable existence suggested by the farmstead or cottage. Literary form emerges as a means through which questions of human personality and identity in commercial modernity might be framed, and as a means of insisting on ‘something’ more than the mediated social relations of market society’s ‘society of strangers’.

The Gentleman’s Son’ provides a brief account of the Long family from the time of the conquest of Jamaica in 1655 to the mid-eighteenth century, their marriages and children, their acquisition of property in land and enslaved people, their politics. It introduces the main cast of characters in the Long/Beeston family and what became the three distinct branches: the slave-owners in Jamaica, the merchant family in London and the landed gentry in Suffolk. Edward’s two great-grandfathers, Samuel Long and William Beeston, were founding figures of Jamaica as a slave society. Samuel Long’s acquisition of what was to become Longville and his purchase of Lucky Valley set the seal on the Jamaican family’s ownership of property and enslaved people, the source of their wealth for generations to come. What did it mean to be a colonist? Samuel’s great-grandson Edward, born in 1734, grew up in England and as a child lived in Cornwall. His father returned to Jamaica with the rest of the family to retrieve the family fortune by better management of the plantations. Edward was left alone for his education.

The productive and reproductive labour of the enslaved produced one form of capital; the gendered organization of marriage and inheritance amongst the planters and merchants produced another. If families such as the Longs were to survive, secure their land and increase their wealth, they had to reproduce themselves and ensure the continuity of their line: their hope was to establish a dynasty. Elite colonists reproduced the patterns of the landed English gentry, but with a difference, given their ownership of enslaved people. Merchants tended towards partible inheritance. Property was gendered in such a way as to try to assure the creation and accumulation of wealth. The work of white women was to produce heirs and bring capital to a marriage. Long believed in the importance of maintaining pure English blood and had clear views as to how ‘proper’ marriages and forms of family life were essential for an ordered colonial society. He abhorred the scale of miscegenation and illegitimacy and the irregular relations that characterized Jamaica. He loved his wife and children, and did much to support his mother and siblings. At the very same time, he refused those relationships to the enslaved and disavowed any connection between his family and those of the Africans on his plantation: they were naturally different.

This chapter reads Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men and the Vindication of the Rights of Woman as integral to her critique of the culture, behaviour, psychology, and ‘manners’ of commercial society. Against a narrative of human motivation deeply rooted in political economic discourse, Wollstonecraft associates property with indolence, libertinism, and immorality, and offers an alternative moral economy which links virtue to effort, labour, and exertion in the linked spheres of mind, manners, and morals. The imagination is revealed as posing a fundamental challenge to political economy, as an independent power which frees the self from the subject relations of property order. In calling for a ‘revolution in manners’ addressed especially to women, Wollstonecraft looks to a moral revolution against the forces of history and calls on women to save commercial society from itself, and to save themselves from it.

This chapter examines FBT, which is a separate Commonwealth tax payable by employers on fringe benefits provided to their employees. Fringe benefits cover most kinds of non-salary benefits provided in respect of employment (eg the use of a car, free housing and discounted goods or services). Australia is one of only two OECD countries (the other is New Zealand) that tax employers on the provision of fringe benefits. Most other countries simply assess employees on the value of the fringe benefits that they receive under their general income tax systems. Before the introduction of FBT in 1986, Australia also used to assess employees on fringe benefits under former s 26(e) ITAA36. FBT was introduced because employees had a poor record of complying with s 26(e) and because the provision suffered from various valuation and other technical problems. This meant that, in practice, the income tax system did not adequately capture all types of fringe benefits. FBT was also introduced because it is more efficient to administer since there are far fewer taxpayers to deal with.

This chapter examines section 51(xxxi) of the Australian Constitution, which functions as: (1) a head of federal legislative power empowering the Commonwealth to compulsorily acquire property from individuals and States; and (2) as a limitation on federal legislative power restricting the power of the Commonwealth to acquire property otherwise than on just terms. The High Court has given a broad interpretation of the concept of ‘property’, which includes the full range of property rights recognised by the general law, such as real and personal property, intellectual property, and choses in action. The High Court has also given a broad interpretation to the concept of ‘acquisition’, but has emphasised that mere deprivation or taking of property without some countervailing benefit accruing to another does not amount to an acquisition.