‘There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property.’ So declares William Blackstone, the first Vinerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford, in his magisterial Commentaries (1765–69). Property, he goes on to say, is ‘that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe’. Having gone so far, he is moved to open the Bible, citing Genesis 1: 28, which he calls ’the only true and solid foundation of man's dominion over external things’. It is rare to find Blackstone evoking the imagination or expressing such a sense of awe. And yet it is understandable here: for he is confronting the ground and abyss of his great theme. The laws of England, as gathered and ordered by him, are at heart an affirmation and elaboration of the right to property.

That property is a natural right, established at the level of the individual rather than the State, is the burden of John Locke's eloquent remarks on the subject in his Two Treatises of Government (1690). To say that his theory of property was influential would be a tepid understatement; it formed a horizon for all discussions of law and society in eighteenth-century Britain, including Blackstone's lectures.