Politics & Power Quote by Alfred Marshall

Property isn’t “natural” to Marshall; it’s a legal achievement with paperwork, police power, and international enforcement behind it. His phrasing quietly demystifies wealth by yanking it out of the moral realm (desert, virtue, hard work) and planting it in the institutional one: civil codes, treaties, and the thick layer of habit we call “custom.” That last clause - “or at least of custom that has the force of law” - is the tell. Marshall is reminding readers that even when law is absent or vague, societies manufacture stability through norms that function like law: merchants honor contracts because courts can back them up, but also because reputations, trade networks, and state power make breach costly.

The specific intent is to discipline economic talk. If rights to wealth depend on law, then economics can’t pretend to be a physics of timeless market forces. It has to account for the scaffolding that markets stand on: enforceable ownership, predictable adjudication, and cross-border recognition of claims. “National rights” and “international law” expand the frame beyond domestic disputes into empire, trade, and diplomacy - the era when British capital moved globally and needed foreign states (or gunboats, frankly) to respect British claims.

The subtext is political: redistribute the spotlight from individual merit to collective arrangements. If wealth is secured by public institutions, then debates about taxation, regulation, inheritance, and colonial extraction aren’t intrusions into a natural order; they’re arguments over how that order gets written and enforced. Marshall isn’t preaching revolution, but he is puncturing the comforting idea that property stands above politics.