THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 61
BOOKS
DISPOSSESSIONS
Human history and the hunger for land.BY FRANCISCOCANTÚ
ILLUSTRATION BY VINCENT MAHÉ
T
he final piece of terrain to be in-
corporated into the contiguous
United States was an oddly shaped
strip stretching from Las Cruces, New
Mexico, to Yuma, Arizona. Known as
the Gadsden Purchase, the area was
obtained from Mexico in 1854 for ten
million dollars, adding nearly thirty
thousand square miles to a nation still
drunk with Manifest Destiny expan-
sionism. The motivations for acquir-
ing the land were many—it contained
huge deposits of ore and precious met-
als, held vast agricultural potential in
the soils of its fertile river valleys, and,
most important, had an arid climate
that could allow a rail route to connect
the coasts while remaining free from
snowpack year-round.
Like much of the American West,
the Gadsden region bears unmistak-
able scars of our nation’s drive for ex-
pansion and control. Today, it is dotted
with ghost towns and gaping open-
pit mines, its rivers are in various stages
of death and diversion, and its land
has been divided up according to in-
numerable private and public inter-
ests, forming a patchwork of national
monuments and state parks, milita-
rized borderlands and for-profit pris-
ons, fiercely defended ranches and sov-
ereign Indigenous nations. The stories
that can be unearthed in places likeGadsden, where I have long made my
home, are woven throughout Simon
Winchester’s new book, “Land: How
the Hunger for Ownership Shaped
the Modern World” (Harper). Win-
chester, a British-American author
who has frequented the nonfiction
best-seller lists during the past two
decades, examines our duelling im-
pulses for appropriation and exploita-
tion, on the one hand, and steward-
ship and restoration, on the other,
tracing our relationship to land from
the dawn of agriculture to the current
age. Moving across varied histories
and geographies, he offers us one case
study after another of how the once
seemingly inexhaustible surface of the
Earth has devolved into a commod-
ity, the ultimate object of contestation
and control.
By way of an origin story, Win-
chester imagines two English farmers
of the late Bronze Age. The men are
neighbors, friends, and, he suggests,
sometimes rivals. One farmer plows
his flat fields in furrows; the other,
cultivating an adjoining hillside, ter-
races his slopes with lynchet strips.
Where one farmer’s furrows meet the
other’s lynchets, an easily discern-
ible division is created, giving rise
to “the first-ever mutually acknowl-
edged and accepted border between
two pieces of land, pieces farmed
or maintained or presided over—or
owned—by two different people.”
Small agricultural frontiers like these,
Winchester’s thinking goes, consti-
tuted boundary lines in their humblest
and simplest form, and soon evolved
into boundaries between towns, cit-
ies, districts, and nations.
As borders proliferated, so did the
need to demarcate them. Moving twen-
ty-eight hundred years into the future
with characteristic breeziness, Win-
chester considers nineteenth-century
efforts to mark, measure, and map huge
swaths of the planet. In 1816, the as-
tronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm
von Struve set out to calculate the
length of the Earth’s meridians, em-
ploying an arsenal of theodolites, tele-
scopes, brass measuring chains, and
other hulking surveying tools to trian-
gulate points across great distances and
impossibly varied topography. Four de-
Territorial expansion once meant conquest, but other modes are being explored. cades later, Struve’s Geodetic Arc was