A startling expose of Britain's most valuable asset - its land. Kevin Cahill's investigations reveal how the 6000 or so landowners -mostly aristocrats, but also large institutions and the Crown - own about 40 million acres, more than half the country, and have maintained their grip on the land right throughout the 20th century.

Who own's England? Behind this simple question lies this country's oldest and darkest secret. This is the history of how England's elite came to own our land - from aristocrats and the church to businessmen and corporations - and an inspiring manifesto for how we can take control back.

Who Owns the World is the first ever compilation of landowners and landownership structures in every single one of the world's 197 states and 66 territories. It covers the history of landownership as far as written history will allow and shows the division of landownership in every region of the globe. Packed with revelatory information, the book: * identifies the person who owns the largest proportion of the world's land and documents that person's landholdings; * provides details of the next 25 top landowners; * reveals that aristocratic families own over 60 per cent of Europe's land mass and receive most of the EC's agricultural subsidy allowance; * documents the vast landholdings of the four largest religious groups: the Catholic Church and the other Christian churches, the Islamic trusts, and the temple possessions of the Hindus and Buddhists; * details the landownership structure of all the countries of the British Commonwealth; * contains a complete survey of the historic record of landownership, starting in Mesopotamia/Iraq in 8000 BC; * lists many of the world's great Domesdays, going back to the earliest, in Ptolemaic Egypt; * includes an analysis of the legal structures that have reduced 85 per cent of the earth's population to serfdom. This is a breathtaking tome of huge political, economic and social importance. It will revolutionise our understanding of our planet, its history and its land.

It is the barbed wire entanglement that tortures yet frees in the long story of this small island on 'the dark edge of Europe'. It defined the national struggle for independence far more than any other single issue. The famine between 1845 and 1850 killed a million of the island's population of 8 million and drove another million into exile. This event chopped Irish history in half, demonstrating as nothing else could that without security of tenure for a normal life span you were at the mercy of landowners. This book is not about the famine, but about the key event that followed it: the extraordinary redistribution of land from mainly aristocratic landed estates to small farmers. This redistribution took over 150 years, from famine's end to the closure of the Land Commission in 1999, and was achieved with some civility and far less violence than the actual independence struggle itself. Who Owns Ireland is a startling expose of Ireland's most valuable asset: its land. Kevin Cahill's investigations reveal the breakdown of ownership of the land itself across all thirty-two counties, and show the startling truth about the people and institutions who own the ground beneath our feet.

The biggest question in the world of art and culture concerns the return of property taken without consent. Throughout history, conquerors or colonial masters have taken artefacts from subjugated peoples, who now want them returned from museums and private collections in Europe and the USA. The controversy rages on over the Elgin Marbles, and has been given immediacy by figures such as France's President Macron, who says he will order French museums to return hundreds of artworks acquired by force or fraud in Africa, and by British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has pledged that a Labour government would return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Elsewhere, there is a debate in Belgium about whether the Africa Museum, newly opened with 120,000 items acquired mainly by armed forces in the Congo, should close. Although there is an international convention dated 1970 that deals with the restoration of artefacts stolen since that time, there is no agreement on the rules of law or ethics which should govern the fate of objects forcefully or lawlessly acquired in previous centuries. Who Owns History? delves into the crucial debate over the Elgin Marbles, but also offers a system for the return of cultural property based on human rights law principles that are being developed by the courts. It is not a legal text, but rather an examination of how the past can be experienced by everyone, as well as by the people of the country of origin.

How public land has been stolen from us. Much has been written about Britain's trailblazing post-1970s privatization program, but the biggest privatization of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatization of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land- for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing - has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.

How did Britain’s economy become a bastion of inequality? In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as ‘rentier capitalism’, in which ownership of key types of scarce assets—such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, or digital platforms—is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals: rentiers. If a small elite owns today’s economy, everybody else foots the bill. Nowhere is this divergence starker, Christophers shows, than in the United Kingdom, where the prototypical ills of rentier capitalism—vast inequalities combined with entrenched economic stagnation—are on full display and have led the country inexorably to the precipice of Brexit. With profound lessons for other countries subject to rentier dominance, Christophers’ examination of the UK case is indispensable to those wanting not just to understand this insidious economic phenomenon but to overcome it. Frequently invoked but never previously analysed and illuminated in all its depth and variety, rentier capitalism is here laid bare for the first time.