So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to buy land, he called on the state to tax it.

Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress – together. In the pages of Henry George’s classic, Progress and Poverty (1879), she encountered his conviction that ‘the equal right of all men to use the land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air – it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence’. The inspiration began with a book that her father, the anti-monopolist politician James Magie, had handed to her. In addition to confronting gender politics, Magie decided to take on the capitalist system of property ownership – this time not through a publicity stunt but in the form of a board game. ‘Girls have minds, desires, hopes and ambition.’ Her aim, she told shocked readers, was to highlight the subordinate position of women in society. Taking out a newspaper advertisement, she offered herself as a ‘young woman American slave’ for sale to the highest bidder. She was unmarried into her 40s, independent and proud of it, and made her point with a publicity stunt. Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion.īorn in 1866, Magie was an outspoken rebel against the norms and politics of her times. The game’s little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game has turned out to be. It’s a maxim that would certainly serve you well in a game of Monopoly, the bestselling board game that has taught generations of children to buy up property, stack it with hotels, and charge fellow players sky-high rents for the privilege of accidentally landing there. ‘Buy land – they aren’t making it any more,’ quipped Mark Twain.

Monopoly board monopoly original