The concept of a “property-owning democrac y\,” coined by British Conservative MP Noel Skelton in 1923\, exercised a p owerful hold over a number of twentieth century political movements and thi nkers\, from John Rawls to Margaret Thatcher. Despite its influence on poli cy and theory\, there are strikingly few historical analyses of the concept . In this talk\, I trace a direct context for the development of Skelton’s thought by linking 1920s Britain to a central legal experiment in its colon ial empire: the Torrens system of property registration. Instituted in 1858 \, Robert Richard Torrens’ system linked the simplification of transactions in land to Indigenous dispossession and visions of a property-owning democ racy. These colonial legal reforms served as a model for a similar transfor mation of English property law in the 1920s under Skelton’s government. I a rgue\, then\, that the property-democracy dyad has a crucial moment of crys tallization in the conditions of the settler colonial state and market cons truction.
Bio:
Ari Finnsson is a PhD Candidate in the Dep artment of History at the University of Toronto. His research interests are in imperial intellectual history\, including liberal political philosophy\ , law\, biopolitics\, political economy\, and social and historical theory. His dissertation focusses on property-owning democracy and the entanglemen ts between property\, democracy\, colonialism\, and law in the French and B ritish empires.
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