ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the state in constituting rights in land, through law, as potential objects of exchange. It considers the way in which elements of modern town planning in Britain and the modern land market were jointly formed in response to the contradictions of landownership under the nineteenth-century system of great estates. The chapter shows that town planning, rather than simply reacting to market breakdowns, was part and parcel of the process of twentieth-century market formation. Studies of law and administration reveal that the state has played an important role in the development of commodity relations. The history of nineteenth-century landed property shows that the relationship between the state and landed property is more complex. Over the past hundred years landed property has not only been developed as a private object of exchange; it has also been constituted as a complex object of public administration under the laws of modern town planning.
