ABSTRACT
All analyses benefit from an examination of the historical and institutional milieu in which the relevant issues evolved. This is particularly true when investigating the ongoing tension between government policy toward property interests on the one hand, and on the other, personal or private interests or rights in productive property. In an area where intellectual traditions are also interacting with material developments, we can begin by surveying the complexity of the political and institutional fabric that is in constant interaction with the material matrix of the economy. We may then look briefly at the issues that grew out of the long history of individual and administrative involvement in agricultural production. Finally, as primarily agrarian property interests evolved into the modern industrial system, we can gain some insight into the adjustments and contradictions evolving in the tension between public policy and individual property rights by considering the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century transition in English law and economics.
