Evolution of Property Rights: Discussion

Abstract

Barry Field is clearing old ground in his unusual review of common land use in the three centuries before 1900 in New England. The best indication of the paper's uniqueness is the difficulty in categorizing the analysis. It is not clearly economic theory because it is without mathematics; it is not agricultural history, nor economic history, nor history. It is, as Field says, a study of property rights in agricultural commons. I should like to see a proper label, and more work of the same type. My interest is in providing a contemporary context for Field's analysis. First, however, a definition of common lands: land used jointly by two or more households for cultivation, pasture, or wood. Field emphasizes the continuum of common ownership. He sees it as a spectrum, a continuous sequence of ownership types. At the common end of the continuum, a pioneer community has no private land and common fencing of its fields and pasture. An intermediate form would be a town primarily with private cultivation but certain common pasture or wood lands with defined individual proprietors. Approaching the private end of the continuum would be a woodlot owned by two families and managed through mutually agreed cutting. This would be a land ownership which would be more private than common. Finally, private ownership without constraints on use would define the private end of the spectrum. If Field's descriptive continuum of Colonial New England is generalized to include natural as well as agricultural resources, it is seen as the basis for the modern concept of common property resources. The economic characterization of a common property resource is a commodity (either production factor or consumer good) which has value (either monetary and/or nonmarket), and, in the absence of