ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that for a broader approach, one that treats property not simply as a condition of capitalist accumulation but rather as a field of social and political economic interaction. If historical knowledge and social relationships are negotiable, produced and reproduced through social interaction, they are neither static nor unambiguously exclusionary. The chapter draws at colonial and post-colonial Asante and provides to place contemporary debates over land and property in historical perspective. In a market economy, wealth derived from the use of property will be used to acquire more property but not to influence the definition and enforcement of property rights, and agents of the state do not use their power to appropriate wealth. Thus, arguments for the power of property rights assume that the production and circulation of wealth are both predicated on the exercise of power and separated from it.
