This chapter addresses developments in Late Antiquity, which witnessed a partial shift to more land-based conceptions of both ownership and rulership. The prior literature has pointed to two explanatory factors: the decline of classical polis culture amidst the deurbanization of Late Antiquity, and the rise of Christianity. The chapter draws together the threads of this literature, in order to develop an account of late antique cultural change. Classical Roman property law, it argues, had its context in classical cities. The relative decay of urban dominance and the rise of Christianity tended to undermine the classical foundations of the law of both ownership and rulership. The Empire was reconceived in more territorial terms, while classical conceptions of elite power faltered. The resulting shifts did not result in any decisive and thoroughgoing transformation of the understanding of ownership and rulership, but they set the stage for later developments of great significance.

The ancient historian M. I. Finley once organized a forum to discuss “Roman investment in property.” Finley believed that studies of the ancient economy should put the focus on ancient elite mentalities, and his symposium was designed to test the proposition that ancient and modern mentalities differed: The question he put to the participants was “just what the notion of ‘investment’ meant in Roman society.” “[N]o presuppositions about maximization of income and the like,” he added, “were implicit in the choice of the word.”1

This chapter describes the wider political and economic changes that enabled foreigners, and particularly the British, to increasingly access and engage with the existing world of collecting, education and the sciences on the subcontinent. The result would be a slowing of the growth of resources in Indian centers such as Seringapatam and an acceleration of the growth of individual European-owned collections. The chapter begins by exploring changes in the patterns of accumulation that accompanied the conquest of Bengal. Here, I focus on the early careers of several Company servants who would eventually bring significant collections to Britain: Robert Orme, Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Wilkins. Each of these individuals would play an important role in the establishment of Company science back in Britain. And each, in their modes and methods of acquiring collections of knowledge resources from Asia, illustrate the debt that the growth of British resources would owe, in this period, to two major factors: wartime conventions of looting and plundering, and (in consequence of the wartime upheaval) deepening social and political interaction between foreigners and local scholars and educators. While foreigners in India had always collected, both wartime plundering and the Company’s new position relative to the Mughal Empire would open up many new avenues of access for Britons intent on acquiring manuscripts, curiosities and other knowledge resources. But the large collections that were beginning to be brought back to London would remain, for now, part of the private trade, destined for personal collections or sale by individuals. The final section of this chapter follows the Company’s first steps toward moving from contracted-out to Company-owned science, which began with institutional changes on the subcontinent in the wake of the major land reforms in the 1790s.

This chapter discusses archaic Roman property law, whose symbolism and terminology show a striking orientation toward the ownership of living creatures, human and animal. That symbolism and terminology was seized upon by many of the leading thinkers of the past, who believed it offered clues to the origins of human society. It was also seized upon by both Communist and Fascist ideologues. Today, by contrast, its significance is generally dismissed. Modern scholarship has been heavily dedicated to reconstructing the socio-economic realities; scholars often deploy their learning to dispel the “myths” in the sources, among them the myths in the archaic Roman sources. Yet the myths matter; “idioms of power” cannot simply be written off. The chapter brings the anthropology of property law to bear on the interpretation of these mysterious sources, and describes the long intellectual and political history of their interpretation and ideological use.

“There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind,” wrote William Blackstone, eminent author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England, in 1766, “as the right of property.”1 This line, one of the most quoted in the literature of the law, states a familiar truth about human psychology: The thought of property kindles desire; we like to imagine ourselves as owners. But what sorts of objects “engage our affections”? When property “strikes our imagination,” what is it that we imagine?

This chapter explores how a set of gay men living in Cambridge developed their art and sexuality together, to explore the connections between a gay life and an artistic life in the twentieth century. It uses archival material to analyse the biographies of John Tressider Sheppard, Dadie Rylands, Roger Fry, Edward Dent and Boris Ord – figures who made significant contributions to theatre, music, literature and art on a national and international scale which were formed by their experiences in Cambridge.

This chapter investigates the political and economic dimension of the accumulation of knowledge resources at India House after the foundation of the library-museum. The chapter begins by describing how the Company came to play a more direct role in the acquisition and management of knowledge resources for repositories in Britain. Between the opening of the library and museum and the Great Exhibition of 1851, survey collecting for the Company, and private collecting by Company surveyors, was a primary means by which the Company’s new institutions of knowledge management were enriched. Following in the wake of military campaigns, Company surveys during this period became closely tied to both cultural plundering and biogeographical collecting. Embedded in a series of ongoing conflicts over territory and trade, the making of these collections served as a means of further weakening rival states. Once back in London, these collections also would be crucial to the early development of the Company’s library-museum. During the same period, Crown support for the old monopoly was beginning to wobble. The last section of this chapter considers the place of knowledge accumulation and management in the tumultuous period around the charter debate of 1813, when many of the Company’s monopoly privileges would be annulled. During these debates, a key defense of the monopoly was for the directors to present the administration at India House as the most trustworthy, authoritative source of knowledge regarding Asia in Britain, and thus the institution most suited to controlling trade and exercising governance. Within the Company, however, confidence in the Company’s grasp of knowledge about Asia was far less absolute, and after the Company’s losses in the 1813 charter, new worries about the Company’s knowledge management practices would lead to even further efforts to centralize and better organize the stores of information accumulating at India House.

This chapter explores how a set of gay men had instrumental lives as public figures in politics, both narrowly and broadly conceived. Through the archival records of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, C. R. Ashbee, Maynard Keynes, Rupert Brooke, E. M. Forster and their friends, it explores how the tolerant life of a Cambridge college affected the political interventions of these figures.

This chapter discusses the early modern transformation of the law. By the end of the eighteenth century, the law of ownership was firmly centered on land and the conception of the state was becoming firmly territorial, while the nineteenth century witnessed the abolition of the lawful private ownership of human beings. The chapter traces the rise of an early modern conception of property, which held that acquisition was primarily acquisition of land, and that it was established through cultivation rather than mere occupation. It shows how the venerable law of use rights found a home under a new doctrinal rubric, eminent domain, and discusses the transformation of the ancient law of enslavement through war. The chapter draws on the work of historians of the state who study the rise of a territorial understanding of sovereignty. It emphasizes the long legal history behind the disappearance of lawful private enslavement.

This chapter discusses the early modern transformation of the law. By the end of the eighteenth century, the law of ownership was firmly centered on land and the conception of the state was becoming firmly territorial, while the nineteenth century witnessed the abolition of the lawful private ownership of human beings. The chapter traces the rise of an early modern conception of property, which held that acquisition was primarily acquisition of land, and that it was established through cultivation rather than mere occupation. It shows how the venerable law of use rights found a home under a new doctrinal rubric, eminent domain, and discusses the transformation of the ancient law of enslavement through war. The chapter draws on the work of historians of the state who study the rise of a territorial understanding of sovereignty. It emphasizes the long legal history behind the disappearance of lawful private enslavement.

H Staircase is not a metaphor, nor an allegory, nor a symbol. But place does matter, and does become charged with a heightened significance, layered with memory, a lure for stories. Topography, from atmosphere to institutional form, has proved crucial to the construction of the experience of men who desired men. The college has always been a privileged space. I do not mean simply that it has educated the rich and entitled, though it has certainly done that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as, correspondingly, it has spent a lot of time and effort from the 1960s onwards trying to broaden access.