ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to better depict the private estate, and in so doing, clear sufficient space for property diversity. It analyses the history of private property as it pertains to so-called 'settler societies', particularly the United States, Australia and New Zealand. In charting the rise of private property and its hallmark right to exclude, it is convenient but not contrived to commence in 1765 with the Commentaries of William Blackstone. Informed by Blackstonian and Lockean ideals, the subsequent expansion of private property in settler societies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was driven in large part by two contemporaneous influences: the political imperative of government to encourage closer settlement, and the desire for secure and durable property rights on the part of the new settler. As a social institution, private property conforms to social, political and economic pressures. The public-private divide views property rights as private individualized rights diminished or restricted by public regulation.
