— AI translation — Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic)

Part One — A theory of rent and space · Chapter 2

2 The historical regimes of land allocation

The previous chapter isolated a mechanism and posed it as trans-historical: land does not produce, it conditions, and whoever holds the conditioning levies a toll on access. But a mechanism is never realised in a pure state: it takes forms, and these forms have a history. The main ones have already been named — redistributive levy, status-based due, market price — with the announcement that they would be unfolded here.¹ Such is the object of this chapter: a long-run typology of the regimes by which societies have allocated access to land, from the temple-city to the market, by way of medieval tenure and of the violence that made the bed of price.

One thesis commands the whole journey: the problem of rent was born with the city, and it worsens as the city intensifies. The reason is already in chapter 1: rent is positional; it feeds not on the fertility of any piece of ground but on location, centrality, density. And nothing makes situated space scarcer than the concentration of human beings. As long as people live dispersed, there is no toll to levy; when they settle and store, the conditions of the toll appear; when they agglomerate into cities, the toll becomes a general, administered problem; when the city becomes a metropolis, it reaches its acme. It is this arc that we follow here, from an Acheulean encampment to the obelisk of Babylon.

One last warning, valid from one end of the journey to the other. From this history we draw only the contingency of the price-form: allocation by the market is the latest comer among the regimes, long a minority one, and therefore a choice of organisation, not a law of nature. We never draw from it the desirability of the earlier forms: the temple-city was priestly and servile, tenure a hierarchy of dependencies. The argument here is empirical (what history shows), not normative (what would be desirable, which is demonstrated separately, in part IV). Let us begin, then, before rent, where there was not even land to allocate.

2.1 Before rent: inhabiting is not owning

Shelter is as old as the species; landed property is not. The earliest traces of built habitation are traced very far back, and the site of Terra Amata, near Nice, is the textbook case. Henry de Lumley, on the basis of the 1966 excavation, reconstructed oval huts there: alignments of stones as windbreaks, post holes, hearths, and as many as twenty-seven successive “occupation floors”.² Yet this reconstruction does not hold. By refitting the flint flakes that join up from one “floor” to another, Paola Villa showed that these levels are mixed by post-depositional displacements: they are not sealed habitation surfaces but palimpsests, and the alignments of stones are explained as well by runoff and dune dynamics as by a human hand.³ The hearth itself, readily presented as one of the oldest in Europe, does not make a secure case: the first firm traces of habitual use of fire in Europe assert themselves only towards three to four hundred thousand years, and Terra Amata is not their type-site.⁴

The argument, and this is its strength, depends on none of these controversies. Even granting the most generous reading (a windbreak, a hearth), a shelter against the weather is not an appropriation of land. The decisive distinction does not run between the one who takes shelter and the one who sleeps under the stars, but between sheltering oneself and holding a situated piece of ground against others in order to monetise access to it. Now, the anthropology of mobile hunter-gatherers establishes the point: one inhabits and travels a territory without making it a property. Ingold distinguishes territoriality, a mode of spacing and communication, from tenure, a mode of appropriation; the hunter-gatherer’s space is a journey invested with relations, not an exclusive, transferable good.⁵ In the societies called “immediate-return” societies, access to resources is direct and sharing is enforced on demand; nothing accumulates, nothing is held in order to be rented out.⁶ Where there exists no fixed, appropriated, exclusive land, there is no gate to hold, hence no toll: rent is not coeval with humanity.

Must one therefore posit a golden age, which property came to corrupt? No — and here we refuse Rousseau at the very moment we invoke him. If dispersed life knows no rent, it is not through virtue, it is through lack of numbers. Lordon, reading Spinoza, names imperium the power of the multitude: as soon as a human collectivity reaches a significant size, it projects above itself a verticality and institutions which, issuing from it (immanence) but overhanging it (transcendence), are not external to it, but intrinsic to it.⁷ There is therefore no happy before-the-institution; there is a threshold of numbers below which verticality has not yet crystallised. Nor does this “verticality” designate a king, but an impersonal instance — an institution: that numbers make one arise is necessary, but its form, oppressive or emancipatory, remains to be decided. Among the institutions that numbers make arise, there are those that allocate land and collect its toll. These can be the temple, the lord, the landlord, or indeed the commune. And choosing the form of these institutions is not a technical problem but a political one: we shall come to it. The problem of land allocation is therefore, literally, a problem of concentrated numbers — that is, of urbanisation, which obliges us to understand the long run of history.

2.2 The threshold: sedentism, storage, numbers

Land becomes a thing that can be held only from the moment people settle, store, and agglomerate. The first step is Neolithic, and it is a slow step, spread over millennia, not the sudden “revolution” the word suggests.⁸ Its factor is not agriculture but the conjunction of sedentism and storage. Before any full agriculture, the Natufians of the Levant settle and store; later rise dense towns — the tower of Jericho, the clustered houses of Çatal Höyük. Against the received scheme, anthropology has established it: it is storage, joined to sedentism, and not agriculture in itself, that tips hunter-gatherers over into accumulation and inequality.⁹ The demonstration holds on the side of rights as on that of extraction: the field of cereals is the taxable object par excellence, because it is situated, fixed, visible, measurable and storable; one can stand at its edge and levy.¹⁰

But the truly decisive condition, the one that makes conditioning a general political problem, is not storage alone: it is concentrated numbers. Here opens a debate that must be crossed without being settled by authority, for it engages the core of our thesis — and care must be taken not to enlist in the wrong camp. The disagreement does not oppose two readings of this or that fact, but two conceptions of the modality of history. For Scheidel and the materialist-evolutionist tradition, inequality is the default slope of complex societies: it sets in as soon as there is storable surplus and density, and only rare episodes of violence — mass war, revolution, collapse, plague — compress it; equality there is the fragile exception.¹¹ For Graeber and Wengrow, conversely, there is no attractor: nothing but contingent political choices, and hierarchy is a “trap” in which we have locked ourselves, not a destination — they who, moreover, reject Rousseau’s noble savage as much as Hobbes’s war of all against all.¹²

On contingency, this book is resolutely on the side of Graeber and Wengrow: if allocation by price can be undone (that is the whole stake of part IV), it is because no iron law fixes the forms. But this contingency must not be paid for with a symmetrical myth: that of a great human concentration that would have remained horizontal. It is here that the imperium decides the matter, provided one distinguishes two questions that the debate confuses. That numbers make an institution arise (an instance overhanging the multitude) is necessary; which institution, and whether it oppresses or emancipates, is contingent. Graeber and Wengrow are therefore right that a city could exist without a monarch; they are wrong when they slide from there, as Scheidel has shown them, to “seven centuries of collective self-government”, turning a hypothesis they themselves called “speculative” into an established fact.¹³ For it is not the king who allocates the land and collects its toll: it is the institution, whatever its form.

The threshold that matters to us is therefore there: less the invention of agriculture than the moment when human beings gather in numbers large enough for situated space to become scarce and for its allocation to become the business of an overhanging institution. That moment has a name: the city.

2.3 The city and the tribute: from Uruk to Babylon

Uruk, at the end of the fourth millennium, is the first of these centres of concentration — “the first city”. At the end of the fourth millennium, the built city already covers some two hundred and fifty hectares and houses several tens of thousands of inhabitants; the wall of nearly nine kilometres, which tradition attributes to Gilgamesh, is later.¹⁴ What is certain is the coincidence: in the same place appear concentration, monumental architecture and writing. And writing is born there not to sing but to count: the oldest tablets are administrative — rations of barley, heads of cattle, labour rosters, assignments of fields.¹⁵ This mutation has been named the “urban revolution”, and one of its diagnostic traits already states our whole subject: every producer there pays a tithe or a tax to a god or a king, and belonging is defined by residence on a territory, no longer by kinship.¹⁶ The city is the institution through which land, labour and surplus become a recorded, managed — and tolerated — problem.

What was the political form of this first city? It is more uncertain than one thinks, and this must be conceded: for several centuries of dense urban life, no king is assured — neither royal title (lugal), nor palace, nor royal tomb before the Early Dynastic period, around 2900; the “priest-king” of the images is, at best, a religious and managerial office (the en), not an attested monarch.¹⁷ But from this absence of a king one will conclude neither to a city without power, nor above all to an egalitarian city. The “primitive democracy” that some thought they read at Uruk is reconstructed from much later texts (myths and epic) projected backwards; criticism has shown that the “two assemblies” of the epic are a literary device, not the constitution of the fourth millennium.¹⁸ What is beyond doubt, on the other hand, is the institution: from the Late Uruk period onwards, an administration measures and assigns the land, rations labour (the ration bowls) and counts dependent human beings in the very forms in which it counts cattle.¹⁹ And this point weighs heavily, for far from weakening the thesis, it hardens it: that this toll could function without a king reveals its nature. Rent is not the fault of a tyrant; it is the effect of a function — that of the institution which holds access to scarce space. A rent without a king is the purest demonstration that the problem is structural, and not moral.

The temple, then the palace, is here a redistributive institution in Polanyi’s sense: it captures the surplus and reallocates it in rations; land there is held in exchange for a service and according to a status, conditionally and for use only, not as a transferable title.²⁰ Two corrections come at once. One will not say that the temple owned everything: the old model of the “temple-city” (the god as owner of the entire land) was refuted within a decade by Assyriology, which re-established, alongside the institutional sector, a communal and lineage-based sector and individual tenures.²¹ And one will not say that no market existed: deeds of sale of land survive, carved in stone, from the third millennium onwards — but they most often required the collective consent of an entire lineage, or were expropriations under royal constraint, not the operation of a free market.²² An Assyriologist puts it justly: in this system, almost the whole population was provided for by redistribution, so that there was “neither demand nor supply to make a market function”.²³

If the city gives birth to the problem, its growth intensifies it — and it is Babylon that makes this visible. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE) already presupposes a developed regime of letting: it regulates the lease of the field and sharecropping, from fixed-rent tenancy where “the loss falls on the cultivator” to the division of the harvest by halves or by thirds; it knows the service tenure (ilkum) attached to an office; it provides even for the letting of the house, paid in advance in silver, and the sanction of the landlord who evicts before term.²⁴ A thousand years later, in the Neo-Babylonian period, urban rent is fully documented as an income: the great households of the temple and of the business families farmed out land, sublet, lent at interest and drew from house rents a regular income in silver. The dense city has become a seam of rental rent — what Marx will say, of housing, in terms we shall meet again in chapter 5: poverty there is “a richer source than the mines of Potosi”.²⁵

This trajectory, finally, was anything but idyllic. The historians of the ancient Near East, citing Marx on primitive accumulation, underline the coercion and the ideological compensation at the heart of the temple-city: corvée labour, surplus extracted, servile dependence; and Babylon knew debt slavery, of which ground rent was one of the springs.²⁶ From this we draw the contingency of price and the correlation of rent with the city, without looking there for a model.

2.4 Status-based allocation: land held and the “proprietary desire”

Another form dominates medieval Europe: land there is not owned but held. On one and the same parcel, rights are superposed without excluding one another. The jurists of the ius commune split property itself in two: to the lord the dominium directum, the eminent title and the right to the dues; to the tenant the dominium utile, the right to use and to enjoy the fruits.²⁷ Seisin (protected possession) is relational, never the absolute title above which there would be nothing. Full ownership (the allod) is the regional exception; tenure (the fief, the censive) is the rule, summed up in the adage “no land without a lord”. Collective use rights — pasture, gleaning, wood — pile yet other claims onto the same ground. The medievalists have said it: the seigneurie excludes free exclusive ownership of land.²⁸

The point is delicate. One will not reify “feudalism” into a uniform system: historiography has shown that the tidy model of fief and vassalage is in part a construction of post-medieval jurists, projected onto far more varied and local realities.²⁹ That is why we speak here of a status-based regime of superposed rights rather than of a “feudalism”: the very diversity this critique restores contradicts the idea of a single, absolute property.

The “proprietary desire” (the idea of an absolute, exclusive, transferable property) is, for its part, a late construction. It returns with the revival of Roman law (Bologna, twelfth century) and its unitary dominium, which the medieval jurists had to soften (whence the doubling directum/utile) to fit it to a divided reality; it consolidates only with the modern, then the revolutionary, order. The history of law establishes it: medieval property was plural and “thing-bound”, anchored in the effective relation to the thing and its uses, whereas modern property is unitary, abstract, subjective — one subject, one absolute power.³⁰ The history of ideas recalls it: private property has always had to justify itself against the idea of an original community of goods; its absolute form is an argued choice, not a self-evidence.³¹

It is there that the difference with the capitalist regime lodges. Under the status-based regime, the levy is a due — cens, champart, corvée — fixed by custom and status, not a price maximised on a market; and the land is encumbered, bound, barely alienable. The lord can neither raise the due to “what the market will bear”, nor sell his title freed from the web of obligations that holds it. The status-based levy is indeed the toll of chapter 1, but in the form of a due tied to status; what it lacks, and what the next regime will supply, is the freedom to transfer and to maximise.

2.5 Force and price: enclosure and absolute property

The passage to the regime of price was no gentle evolution: it is force, ratified by law. In England, the enclosures (fifteenth–nineteenth centuries) convert the open fields and the commons to exclusive private use; parliamentary enclosure legalises the extinction of customary rights. Marx named the process: so-called primitive accumulation — the expropriation of the peasantry, the conversion of arable land into sheep pasture, the bloody legislation against the expropriated.³² English social history has shown that the same movement requalifies customary use as an offence (the Black Act): what was a right becomes a theft, and what is at stake are rival definitions of property.³³

The juridical keystone is the Civil Code. Its article 544 (1804) states: “Property is the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided one does not make a use of them prohibited by statutes or by regulations.”³⁴ Property is henceforth absolute, exclusive, transferable, abstract: one subject, one total power, the superposed rights and the customary uses swept away. This is exactly the juridical form under which rent becomes what chapter 1 defined — a freely transferable and maximisable income of the bare title: the power to exclude, joined to the power to transfer, makes the power to levy the toll at the market rate: the “proprietary desire” found in article 544 its juridical consecration.³⁵

It remains that price does not abolish the other regimes at a stroke: it long coexists with status-based dues and with the commons before claiming to replace them all. And when it triumphs, it is to meet the city that was waiting for it: absolute property gives the urban toll its purest form, and the industrial metropolis gives it its densest matter. The two movements — the generalisation of price and urban intensification — compound; it is from their meeting that contemporary real-estate rent is born, whose transposition to built space chapter 4 will follow.

Taking stock

From this journey emerge a single mechanism, its successive forms and a favoured site: a long age without any allocation of land, for want of appropriable land and for want of numbers; then, with sedentism and storage, the conditions of the toll; then, with the city, the toll as an administered problem — the redistribution of the temple-city, intensified at Babylon into a documented rental income; then the status-based due of medieval tenure; then the market price of capitalism, whose midwife was force (the enclosure), and which the absolute property of the Civil Code completed. Price is the latest comer in this series, and it long remained subordinate within it.

Hence the only conclusion this chapter authorises: the allocation of land by price is contingent, and the problem it pushes to its height is, at bottom, a problem of urbanisation — born with the city, aggravated with its intensification. The principle of imperium accounts for this history without moralising it: concentrated numbers always make a verticality and its institutions arise, but they make no particular form either necessary or desirable — neither the temple, nor the seigneurie, nor the market. This chapter therefore authorises no nostalgia: the temple-city was servile, the seigneurie a hierarchy of dependencies, neither was democratic. That another, democratic, allocation is possible and desirable, history does not prove; it is argued, normatively³⁶, in part IV, which will take up this typology again to draw its political consequence.³⁷ To confuse the contingency established here with the desirability argued there would be the cardinal error against which the whole book guards itself.

The regime of price once born, it remains to analyse its accomplished form — rent as Marx dissected it. That is the object of the next chapter.