Arguing that the growth of property would “keep pace with the progress of inventions and discoveries” and that the possession and inheritance of property was regulated by progressive forms of social organization, Morgan directly linked concepts of property with technological and social evolution (1877:525–526).
- During the stage of savagery, property was minimal and not inherited since it was buried as grave goods when the owner died.
- In the Lower Status of Barbarism, property increased in quantity but was distributed among the gens on a member’s death without specific inheritance by spouses (Morgan 1877:530–531).
- By the Middle Status of Barbarism and with the development of agriculture, property increased in quantity and variety. New relationships developed between people and land, such as forms of communal land ownership in which individuals had the right to use, but not sell, it (Morgan 1877:535–536).
- By the end of the Upper Status of Barbarism, two forms of land tenure evolved—state ownership and individual ownership—which became well established by the ethnical period of Civilization (Morgan 1877:552).
But how did Morgan determine the relationship between ethnical periods, essentially defined by technological inventions, and forms of government and property? Basically in two ways.
- First, he proposed a plausible but conjectural history, arguing that different forms of social organization or of property were necessarily based on earlier, simpler forms in the same way that metallurgy presumed the prior invention of fire. (Comparative method and idea of Origin of species)
- Second, Morgan assumed that primitive societies were representative of earlier stages of social evolution, producing a relative ordering of social and property forms. With the exception of the Lower Status of Savagery, for which “no exemplification of tribes of mankind in this condition remained to the historical period,” primitive, non-Western societies represented the stages in cultural evolution, a point Tylor also made and that was later echoed by the French social theorist Émile Durkheim . Morgan held that the domestic institutions of the barbarous, and even of the savage ancestors of mankind, are still exemplified in portions of the human family with such completeness that, with the exception of the strictly primitive period [i.e., Lower Savagery], the several stages of this progress are tolerably well preserved. They are seen in the organization of society upon the basis of sex, then upon the basis of kin, and finally upon the basis of territory; through the successive forms of marriage and of the family with the systems of consanguinity thereby created; and through house life and architecture; and through progress in usages with respect to the ownership and inheritance of property. (1877:7)
Thus, an ethnographic study of the Australian aborigines or the Iroquois or ancient Romans was not a study of different cultures, but of representatives of specific stages of cultural evolution. Civilized nations had progressed through similar stages and profited by the “heroic exertions and the patient toil” of barbarian and savage ancestors, which was “part of the plan of the Supreme Intelligence to develop a barbarian out of a savage, and a civilized man out of this barbarian” (Morgan 1877:554).