Naïvely idealistic, one might reasonably say—and yet the mantra of those from whom we took the lands in the first place was, all too often, just that. Sharing land is by no means a revolutionary idea. The aboriginal Australians, the Maori, the Canadian First Nations populations, the Inuit who inhabit the high latitudes from Siberia to Alaska and back again, the Aztec, the Incas, the North American Indians—to all and each of these, land was a commodity so precious and so life-giving that it was indeed to be shared by all, and owned by none.

  Examples of such a kindly, philosophical approach to the world’s surface can found around the planet. Australian indigenes see the Earth as their mother, in constant need of care, admiration, gratitude, and respect. In west Africa the elders of the Ashanti tribe declare that land “belongs to a vast family of whom many are dead, a few are living, and a countless host are still unborn.” To the Goldi people of far eastern Russia every morsel of land and all that grows from it, be it animal or plant, is possessed of a spirit that is to be worshipped and respected. To harm the earth in any way is sinful and unworthy. Akira Kurosawa’s great film Dersu Uzala famously depicts the dichotomy between such animist beliefs and the cruder ways of a Russian survey team that arrives in the forest to make maps: the movie’s stirring narrative—with giant windstorms, torrential floods, tiger attacks, and all manner of other characteristically Kurosawan drama—depicts the ways of the eponymous Dersu, a local hunter, ways as very evidently the more noble, and enduring.

  And in the United States too, representations of the true value of land—of its spiritual value, well beyond its mere monetary worth—can be found occasionally in public declarations of Native Americans. Most famously, perhaps, are the sentiments that were so vividly expressed by the great Chief Sealth—of what is now Seattle—when in 1854 he was persuaded to enter into a treaty with white settlers. The newcomers wanted the chief to cede 2.5 million acres of his choicest coastal land—the irony is inescapable, given coastal land’s new fragility—which at the time was the hunting and gathering and settlement area of his people, as well as their burial ground.

  Sealth, tall and thundering in his manner—and a Catholic to boot, converted in 1848 by French missionaries—is said to have stood at what would be the Puget Sound waterside one blustery spring day in mid-March 1854 and offered a great oration to his gathered people. Over the years many versions of this speech—or this letter; some say he had it written down and mailed to President Franklin Pierce—have been published, each of them different and yet each asserted to be true. Most are florid, implausible, horribly embellished. What follows is still too wordy, but it seems to scholars among the more reliable (if, indeed, there ever was a speech or a letter made or sent at all—some doubt it). But the words of this ring fairly true, and the sentiments certainly reflect the views of most Native Americans, from Miwok to Mohican, from Choctaw to Cherokee, all of them at the time bowing in forced subservience to their inevitable conquest by the power and greed of the advancing white man.

  This is what the wise old man—he was sixty-eight at the time; he would live a further dozen years—is supposed to have said. He spoke of his acceptance of the settlers’ offer, but he did so with evident apprehension and regret. Sealth could never have imagined the great iron and glass towers that would eventually rise on his land, particularly in the city that would be named in his honor. Nor could he have supposed that men like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, men with such very different values to his own, would become the local tribal leaders of their times. “The President in Washington,” Sealth declared,

  The Suquamish leader Chief Sealth, after whom the City of Seattle is named, spoke with reportedly great eloquence of his regret and melancholy in handing over his lands for white settlement in 1854. His speech, much romanticized, exists in many versions.

  sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? Buy or sell the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

  Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

  We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

  The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each glossy reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father.

  The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give the rivers the kindness that you would give any brother.

  If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

  Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

  This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

  One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

  Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted with talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is to say goodbye to the swift pony and then hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival. When the last red man has vanished with this wilderness, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

  We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it, as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it, as God loves us.

  As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you.

  One thing we know—there is only one God. No man, be he Red man or White man, can be apart. We are all brothers after all.

  Thirty-some years after Chief Sealth offered these words, and halfway across the world, a man of similar age and standing was to pose a related question, one that haunts us still.

  In 1886 Leo Tolstoy, with both War and Peace and Anna Karenina successfully published, and his literary reputation assured—offered up a brief parable under the title “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”

  The question of numbers—of how much?—is especially pertinent in the United States. This is a country where so much land exists, and yet where so little of it is owned by the country’s native people—who never believed in private ownership anyway—while so much of it is possessed by what can only be described as white newcomers. Might a man who presently owns two million acres of land that once belonged to Iroquois or Sioux ever dare to contemplate how much does he really think he needs, to live a decent and fulfilling life? Just what might be the right number?

  Thomas Jefferson’s view of the yeoman farmer, who with his few acres and dedication to hard work would transform the fledgling America, has long been idealized in cartoons such as this, from 1845.

  There are some hints from history. Thomas Jefferson’s belief that the sturdy yeoman farmer was the key to the creation of a successful republic had in mind that a man and his family, if all were put to work, might make a living from 50 acres. If the soil was thick and the harvests good, he could maybe handle a little more, maybe as many as 200. Many years later the first of the Homestead Acts thought it meet and proper to distribute the country’s public lands, in newly formed and unpeopled states and territories like Nebraska, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas, in parcels of 160 acres or so. The figure represents a full quarter of a section, this last being a uniquely American areal measurement, its boundaries established along lines extending from the so-called point of beginning in East Liverpool, Ohio, the place from which all west-of-the-Ohio America was first surveyed and measured. Some lands deemed more difficult to work—if covered by forest, for example—were handed out in full sections, 640 acres for each worthy applicant. Then again, in the period of Reconstruction that followed the Civil War, freed slaves were initially offered the chance of acquiring the famous “forty acres and a mule,” an offer made by the U.S. army in part to ensure that slaves did not take immediate possession of the plantation lands on which they had worked. This offer was rescinded in short order, however, a decision that caused a degree of disappointment and bitterness that lingers to this day. The disparity between the amount of land owned today by Blacks and by whites—the average Black household holding assets of no more than 8 percent of those owned by the median white household, land being a central component of those assets—is an enduring legacy that contributes to the country’s racial disharmony.

  In sum, then, successive early American laws and policies have indicated that, in order to achieve success and contentment, a citizen once needed between 40 and 640 acres of improvable land. No doubt similar numbers could be quite easily determined in other countries—likely it would be a smaller number in the much more populated and congested Europe; and a rather larger number in Russia, where the steppe extends without seeming end from sunrise across to sundown, a vast and thinly populated expanse of rich, black earth, yearning for improvement. This what Leo Tolstoy saw from the study in his great estate at Yasnaya Polyana: his seemingly simple rhetorical question sought to determine how much land might any man need. It sought also to delve into the mystery of why any man could think of himself as actually owning a piece of what, in essence, eternally belongs to Nature.

  The protagonist in his story is a peasant named Pakhom, a man who, while seeming outwardly content with his respectably impoverished lot, holds tight to one particular grievance. As he declares to his household one day, “I don’t have enough land. Give me enough of that and I’d fear no one—not even the Devil himself.” But as it happens the Devil is listening to this rumination, and he decides, in a typically Tolstoyan literary device, that he’ll now have “a little game” with poor Pakhom. “I shall see that you have plenty of land,” he says with a diabolical snigger, “and that way I’ll get you in my clutches!”

  Leo Tolstoy, wealthy and aristocratic, nonetheless had settled and critical views about landownership in Russia—and the avarice that impelled so many to accumulate vast holdings on the steppe.

  Soon thereafter, some nearby land comes on the market, from a local widow with whom Pakhom has long been on friendly terms. She owns three hundred acres: Pakhom thinks he might be able to afford a small fraction of it. So he scrimps and saves, selling a foal and some bees, borrowing from his brother-in-law, sending a son to get wages in advance for menial work—and finally comes up with enough cash to pay for thirty acres of partly wooded land—not ideal, but good enough to farm. Now, at last, he is a landowner—and within a year he becomes a successful one, by dint of hard work and intelligence. “Whenever he rode out to plough the land which was now his for ever, or to inspect his young corn or meadows, he was filled with joy . . . he lived a landowner’s life, and he was happy.”

  The Devil, however, has work to do. Before long, and for a variety of reasons, Pakhom begins to get too big for his boots—angering his neighbors, falling out with former friends, behaving badly, and ultimately leaving for another village, for a larger estate of some hundred acres of land, then repeating the experience and leaving yet again, and this time coming into the ownership of no less than thirteen hundred acres, well on his way now to becoming a serious, big-time landowner. By now he is a man who can perhaps one day dream of marching with the Muscovite aristocracy, of becoming a member of the Russian landed gentry. Greed consumes him. The Devil is well at work.

  And it is at this point that Pakhom hears a rumor—of an exceptionally innocent and craven group of country people called the Bashkirs who live way down in the south of the country. He hears tell of them that “there is so much land that you couldn’t walk round it all in a year. It all belongs to the Bashkirs. Yes, the people there are as stupid as sheep and you can get the land off them for practically nothing.” And so Pakhom, salivating at the prospect, sells up once again and leaves for the south. After traveling for seven full days, laden with gifts of tea and vodka, he finally comes to the Bashkir settlement—finding them to be, as foretold, a people who are “very ignorant, knew no Russian, but were kindly.”

  They turn out indeed to be willing to sell their land—but seeing in Pakhom his very evident eagerness to own a great deal of it, they make him an unusual offer. They will sell him land just as anyone else might sell land, with title documents exchanged, deeds made clear, and so on. But as the village elder explains, the price in rubles will be determined not by the acre, but by the day. It will cost a thousand rubles a day.

  Pakhom protests that he doesn’t understand. “A day? How many acres would that be?”

  The elder responds: “We don’t reckon your way. We sell by the day. However much you can walk round in a day will be yours. And the price is a thousand rubles a day.”

  To Pakhom, with the Devil of avarice evidently whispering in his ear, the deal seems unbeatable. He is young, he is fit, the weather is fair, the countryside pleasing to the eye and hardly challenging to walk through. So before the appointed day he slept well; he rises before dawn and begins his walk. Thirty-five miles he should make by sunset, easily. He needs only to return to his starting point, where the Bashkirs and their elder will be waiting for him with a pen and the contract paper ready to be signed, and he will hand over the cash and be the owner of a mighty new estate.

  As he walks, so he marks out his passage, turning slightly leftward every so often to keep going in a large circle. He leaves markers every three miles or so. It gets warmer, he begins to shed clothing. His boots starts to hurt. His feet are cut by the sharp grass and the rocks. What he had supposed might be easy is proving to be a challenge. But the more he walks, the faster he goes, the more territory he encloses with his widening gyre, the larger his estate will eventually be. At noon he reaches the point where he will turn back, but is by now farther from the starting point than he imagined, so he begins to trot, then lope, then run full tilt to be sure of getting back in time. And he almost doesn’t make it. By the time he sees the waiting Bashkirs, the sun is sliding down across the horizon, and he has to sprint with all his remaining strength, the Devil willing him ever onward, on to the waiting contract, on to achieving the fulfillment of his dream to own so vast an estate of land.

  And at last, in the gathering dark of dusk, he lurches forward and falls face-down before the Bashkir elder—who cries out his congratulations, and declares with delight to the effect that my word, that’s a lot of land you’ve earned yourself!

  But of course Pakhom is dead. The waiting Bashkirs click their tongues sympathetically, and they proceed to bury him.

  They dig a hole for him. They measure it out with paces. They cut into the sod. The hole is six feet long and three feet wide. It is just the amount that poor Pakhom needs, no less and no more. It is just the amount that any man needs. Nice and dark and deep, and in area six feet by three feet, exactly.

  With Great Thanks

  In this endeavor, I stand on the shoulders of one memorable giant: the writer Andro Linklater, scion of a remarkable Scottish family, an author whose range of interests was breathtakingly broad, but whose later books, written just before his untimely death in 2013 at the age of sixty-eight, were devoted to matters of land measurement and ownership and, to me, were biblical in their authority. His Owning the Earth (Bloomsbury, 2013) is in particular a book for the ages, and was a profound inspiration for my very much more modest effort.

  This book was born out of a discussion at home—my wife, Setsuko, and I were talking one morning about the iniquities of the then-current American immigration policy—concerning the degree to which land enclosure in Britain might have played a part in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century transatlantic crossings. There seemed a cruel irony about it: that those who found themselves newly dispossessed on one side of the ocean had then sailed across it and settled again, but only promptly to dispossess those who already lived and prospered in what to the migrant Britons was a newfound and unowned country. The irony seemed worthy of exploration, and of recounting.

  Researching what then turned out to be a very much more intricate and subtle story than I imagined required a great deal of travel, from Latvia to New Zealand, from the Scottish Highlands to the Ukrainian steppe, to India and Japan and all by way of America’s midwestern prairies. Very many people generously took my hand as I stumbled into these variously unfamiliar territories—with my asking each time: Who owns this land and how did it come to be owned? So here I list, in alphabetical order, those who helped me in a variety of ways, offering their thoughts or their coffee or their writings or their hospitality, and often all of these things and more. I hope they will realize how vastly grateful I am to them, and how this book was made so much better as a consequence of their kindness, advice, wisdom, and consideration. Any errors are mine and mine alone.