The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset - Hardcover

Bird, Mike

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593719719 ISBN 13: 9780593719718

Verlag: Penguin Random House, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

How the world s oldest asset secretly shapes our modern economy

In The Land Trap, Mike Bird Wall Street editor at The Economist reveals how this ancient asset still exerts outsize influence over the modern world. From the speculative land grabs of colonial America to China's real estate crisis today, Bird shows how fortunes are built and destroyed on the bedrock of land.

Tracing three centuries of history, Bird explores how land quietly became the linchpin of the global banking system, driving everything from soaring housing prices to rising geopolitical tensisons. As governments wrestle with inequality and land grows ever scarcer, The Land Trap offers a powerful new framework for understanding the hidden force behind today's most urgent challenges. 

This is the book for anyone who wants to see beyond markets and money to the real game being played on a foundation as old as civilization itself. Timely, provocative, and essential, The Land Trap will change how you see the ground beneath your feet.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mike Bird is the Wall Street editor for The Economist, leading coverage of topics across the American financial industry and contributing to coverage of finance globally. He also cohosts the financial podcast Money Talks. Previously, he was a financial columnist and market reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Bird studied history and politics at the University of Exeter in the UK. He is currently based in New York City.

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The Lie of the Land

About 3,200 years ago, more than a millennium before Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon and the beginnings of the Roman Empire, more than six centuries before the birth of either Plato or Confucius, a lucky servant named Munnabittu received a gift of land from Meli- ipak II, one of the Kassite kings who reigned in ancient Babylon.

We know quite a few things about Munnabittu and his patch of earth. We know that he owned several hundred acres, a little more than a square mile. The parcel would have made him moderately rich, but not immensely so. We know that the land was on the banks of a canal in a place called Hudadu, possibly an ancient name for Baghdad. We know the name of some of Munnabittu's neighbors too, because he faced a legal challenge over the ownership of his plot, and we know that the decision eventually fell in Munnabittu's favor. We know the names of the officials who adjudicated the disagreement, and we know the names of the bureaucrats who trekked from the royal palace of Marduk-apla-iddina I, the son of Meli- ipak II, to confirm the size of the estate.

We know more with some degree of certainty about Munnabittu-a Babylonian servant who lived in the dying days of the Bronze Age, who was otherwise a historical nobody-than we do about many of the kings, warriors, scholars and prophets who were born during the centuries and millennia that followed. We know about Munnabittu specifically and solely because of the land he possessed, the ownership and saga of which is carved into a piece of smooth black limestone around half a meter long. The stone was recovered from Susa, in Iran, by archaeologists in the early twentieth century. Known as a kudurru, the stone was the centrally held record of the servant's landownership. Munnabittu likely would have had a replica of his own to prove possession to any subsequent doubters.

The fact that Munnabittu's story was recorded in such a permanent manner, and survived for thousands of years even as so much other knowledge was lost, is not some fluke of history. Munnabittu's wealth was carved indelibly into solid stone for a good reason. For many early civilizations, land was power. Governments collected taxes in the form of grain, for which records of ownership were of the utmost importance. Without knowing who owned each segment of earth, it was impossible to know who owed what to the tax collectors. For the very earliest agricultural economies, the way in which land was owned, organized and used was one of the foremost priorities of state-building, which made the difference between economic survival and total collapse.

Across a range of ancient languages, among different civilizations spread thousands of miles around the world, some of the very earliest surviving records are those which delineate landownership. In India, flat copper plates recorded grants of land from local rulers, often to religious establishments, from as early as the third and fourth centuries BC. In Egypt, tombs that were built and sealed more than four thousand years ago are inscribed with the details of the lives of the men buried within-including descriptions of the land they owned. Before the existence of investment funds, pensions, stocks, bonds or international currency markets, even before human history was recorded in any meaningful way, land was the original asset. The ability to own and control territory was the first means of turning power into wealth.

Munnabittu would presumably find a lot of things about the modern world very confusing, but there are elements that might seem familiar to him. After centuries of gargantuan social and economic change, land is still at the center of our world. Owning it still confers social status and financial security. It is still the asset that governs the course of our lives, our successes and failures, more than any other form of wealth. Today, land remains the world's largest single ass

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Random House
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593719719
• ISBN 13: 9780593719718
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland