Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the World

Prompted by his purchase of a woodland in upstate New York, Simon Winchester considers the origins of land ownership and the beginnings of cultivation. He then explores the work of early surveyors and cartographers, and the establishment of boundaries, contrasting indigenous peoples' ideas of stewardship with those of the Europeans who would dispossess them, before asking how so much of the Earth's surface came to be owned by so few people.