Until the Stone Age and the beginning of arable agriculture, humans lived as hunters and gatherers, travelling to find food, by killing animals and birds, catching fish, and foraging for wild fruits, vegetables, fungi, nuts and berries. Although they tended to roam familiar territories, a Nomadic lifestyle didn’t yet lead to a concept of ownership of specific patches of land, even when some groups of people began to claim proprietorship of herds of animals they’d begun to manage in their seasonal migrations to pursue the resources of foodstuffs they needed for survival.
It’s rational to suggest humans learned to manage resources because they got fed up with following their meat to get to vegetables that fed both of them and decided it might be more convenient to stay where they were and plant stuff somewhere they’d be happy to stay.
That, of course, began the need to stop other humans outside their tribe dropping in to take advantage of meat and vegetables being predictably available. This meant some people who used to hunt and gather had to stop others who hadn’t cared for the meat or grown the vegetables, and the division of labour led to the creation of defenders of the land.
These changes happened at widely different times in history around the planet. When people needed to secure their land from others – who hadn’t worked to make it produce what was needed – not only did they risk others taking it from them, but they began to see individuals amongst their own groups claiming ownership of land in return for offering protection to the people who worked to produce resources for the population.
There were times when offering protection meant demanding extra resources from the very producers of their own needs, and so the protectors began to demand tithes and taxes, or to require their service in resisting invasions. (Or invading others who might increase the wealth of their manor.) After many centuries the tendency for specialisation amongst producers led to the creation of hierarchies between the least specialised and the most powerful protectors: the owners of land and property.
Outreach into the wider planet meant some cultures were plundered, others exploited, to provide slaves for the powerful who could negotiate deals or enforce trafficking of people to supply labour at marginal cost to the owners of the land and controllers of the people who made it productive.
In the everyday life of cities, towns, villages and country there’ve always been people who’ve travelled to find a life more tolerable than they could have had if they’d stayed where they started. In the Cotswolds they have been welcomed for centuries. From the fourteenth century, Scots, Irish people and Romany have supplied labourers who met the need for extra hands at harvest time.
Down in Kent there’ve been Cockney Hop-pickers for generations. And even now our farmers need an influx of itinerant harvest workers. Life in a ‘civilised’ world is becoming more complex every day. From time to time there are people who have no home. Their survival is not about ownership.
About twenty and a quarter centuries ago, under the orders of an occupying power, with everybody of their kind, a young couple were ordered to ‘get back to where you once belonged’. An occupying power – then the Roman Empire – wanted to tax them. They ended up being displaced and having to camp in an animal shelter where their baby was born. Having no alternative, they laid him in a feeding trough. Too often human urban civilisation makes people homeless.
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