[PEN-L:34286] "Measuring America" and the rise of US capitalism

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The subtitle of the book by Andro Linklater, a Scot living in Kent, is in fact

> How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the
> Promise of Democracy


The blurb I read yesterday explicitly noted the importance of land
measurement in laying the foundation for capitalism in the US.

Indeed Linklater has claimed

> what you see is the beginning of capitalism and the beginning of democracy


The NYTimes review of Jan 25 comments

> Scarcely four pages into the book he is tackling the notion that for most
> of history, up to Tudor England perhaps, it was the use of land and not
> land itself that was considered a possession. It might be individual, as a
> hereditary feudal right derived ultimately from the monarch; or
> collective, as with the right of American Indian tribes - derived from the
> spirit-given nature of things - to wander, plant and hunt. Linklater
> points, by contrast, to the magic that Hutchins would introduce into the
> Western lands, the transformation of the wilderness into property.
>
> His point is that the very possibility of property depends on measurement
> and that commerce as well as science is inconceivable without it.


This opening extract from chapter one, The Invention of Landed Property,
gives a lot of historical detail from 16th century England, well capable of
a marxist interpretation, despite the libertarian ideology Linklater promotes.

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-first-measuring,0,5786649.htmlstory?coll=cl-books-features

Private ownership of land is not essential to capitalism, though it is
consistent with it. The commodification of such a large natural resource
probably greatly aided the development of capitalism in the USA.

What remains to be seen is whether the private ownership of land really is
consistent with "the promise of democracy" rather than a system in which
the use of land is socially accountable.

Chris Burford

London