Land: how the hunger for ownership shaped the modern world. Simon Winchester. 2021.

The human yearning for land is necessarily as old as humankind itself. The English word ‘land’ is one of the oldest in the lexicon, it’s written use first recorded in the 8th century. Land underpins all upon which we depend. Now bestselling author Simon Winchester asks what we have done with the billions of acres that make up so much of our planetary surface, and why it matters.

Mass appropriation of land - as perpetrated by European colonists in Africa, by settlers on Indigenous territories in North Africa, Australia and New Zealand, or by Zionist migrants in Palestine - is one important theme. In the company of some heroic early surveyors, Winchester includes a gripping history of map-making from earliest times to the origins of the UK’s Ordnance Survey. His investigation of the world’s largest landowners introduces Australian mining heiress Gina Rinehart’s 29 million acres, the vast realms of the British monarchy and the 100 Americans who together own as much as the entire state of Florida. Inspiration is to be found with Winchester’s discussion of Māori approaches to the guardianship and preservation of land and what happened in 1960sEuropemwhen brand new swathes of earth emerged from the sea.