Andro Linklater

Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history by, Andro Linklater persuasively argues, the most creative and at the same time destructive cultural force in the modern era-the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land. Spreading from both shores...

Ranging from the late-eighteenth century to the present, a narrative history reveals how the boundaries and borders that formed both states and the nation as a whole created a sense of identity that is central to defining American character.