Chattel Property Rules and the Construction of Englishness, 1660–1800

Abstract

To think of property as “things” owned by “persons” may be to miss a more interesting relation in which personhood itself can be constructed out of ownership rights, especially out of what a particular person is privileged or forbidden to own. Moreover, what is sometimes thought of as “private property” might more accurately be understood as the product of a joint venture engaged in by both individuals and the state. Now, instead of personhood and property existing outside of and independent of the state, both are significantly creatures of the modern state. In early modern England we can see the extent to which “England” and “Englishness” were themselves invented through rules of ownership and through the state's use of rules of ownership to project and to enforce certain ideas of desirable Englishness. A wide variety of statutory changes in the rules of property ownership conferred ownership rights on some persons previously lacking them and took away ownership rights from other persons previously possessing them; these rule changes were intended to promote certain kinds of personhood judged desirable by the legislature and to stigmatize and limit other kinds. Since early modern politicians and social theorists were quite self-conscious about the relations between property law and social structure, it is often possible to discern in the rule changes and in the debates about them what contemporaries supposed the ideological implications of the legal changes they advocated or resisted were.