The book I review here is one that cannot fail to impress any reader interested in the historical evolution of property rights. This will be the case whether you are interested in the legal discourse around the concept of property, or in the real and material interests that may lie behind the discourse. In this review, I will emphasise the aspects of the book I find most interesting, while pointing out some questions that came to mind during my reading. I will highlight not only the most obvious findings, but also the possibilities the book offers for starting a dialogue with historians who, like me, are working on similar topics, albeit from different angles and perspectives.
This dialogue is facilitated by the author's ability to link the multiple references and quotations he provides from classic works, with which we are all familiar, with research from a wide variety of specialised fields. This is evident from the outset. Hence, Blackstone's statement that starts the introduction: ‘[t]here is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind as the right of property, which allows the author to present his book as being about 'legal imagination’; an imagination, he immediately clarifies, that is expressed through the 'idioms of power' (10), a concept taken from Orlando Patterson's book Slavery and Social Death.' James Whitman shares one of the central theses of this book, which is the idea that the modern conception of property has its origins in a slave society. This is an idea that in itself already establishes a dialogue with the modern period, especially in a country such as the United States, which had to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century for the definitive triumph of the 'free-soil doctrines' and the 'disappearance of lawful slavery'. This reference locates us in the contemporary Common Law legal tradition where we are reminded that the success of the 'castle doctrine' and the homestead exemption proves the strong identification of property with land, an idea that is widespread throughout the Western world. To this effect, dialogue between scholars of different legal traditions is guaranteed from the outset because 'the West, as I [the book's author] will speak of it in this book, is the West of the Roman legal tradition' (14). In the last part of this review, I will emphasise the need for this dialogue […]
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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671610
