The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

by Jason Hickel

How did the English manage to justify the mass dispossession that ‘improvement’ entailed? For this we largely have the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke to thank. In the late 1600s, Locke – a large landowner in England with stakes in American colonisation – wrote the Second Treatise of Government, which developed a new and very powerful theory of property ownership. He stated that while land initially belongs to all people in common, once you ‘mix’ your labour with it then it becomes your private property. This ‘labour theory of property’ was used to justify the theft of land in the Americas: since it appeared that no one was engaged in agricultural production, settlers could rightfully appropriate the land as long as they were willing to farm it. But of course in many cases there were people farming the land that English colonisers wanted to take, just as in Ireland. In such cases, Locke claimed that what really counted for ownership was not simply the act of farming, but the improvement (i.e. intensification and profit-orientation) of the farming techniques. So settlers who were prepared to apply the principles of English-style agrarian capitalism were justified in appropriating the lands of others. According to Locke, this added to the common good because it would increase overall productivity,

Mofo Locke