Economics has been at the forefront of social contract theory since at least the seventeenth century. When John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government (1689/1988), the English throne had just forcibly changed hands in favour of William III, the former president (stadtholder) of the Netherlands, in an episode of history worthy of the best of television dramas to date. Locke himself claimed that his book sought to justify the accession of William to the throne, although he had probably written most of it much before the Glorious Revolution. The dubious game of thrones that followed the invasion of England by a group of Dutch soldiers, the use of the Dutch fleet and the eventual accession of an Anglo-Dutch foreign leader to the throne, was not only like a medieval power play, but reflected the new realities of the land-owning classes of a growing empire. The invasion was justified as the preservation of the Protestant religion, liberty, property and a free Parliament (where these land owners were represented). Very concerned with establishing the rights of major property owners in his time, Locke in his Two Treatises defended a vision of private property which suited their needs perfectly. Those who work the land, or who invest in it to make improvements, he claimed, have a rightful claim to the ownership of the land, irrespective of customary rights to the land that had existed beforehand. Through a mystical and theological grounding, Locke created the modern theory of private property, which claims that God had given land to men in common, but that depriving others of the land was justified if you mixed your own labour with it. Its Protestant ethics – that salvation is to be achieved through labour – further strengthened the deposing of a Catholic monarch. The famous Lockean theory of property, thus, established the rights of major land owners both at home and abroad, as the appropriation of the commons – land of essentially communal usage that was quickly being privatized by major land owners – and colonial expansion into the Americas were ruthlessly defended against prior users of the land. Locke had himself participated in the writing of the Constitution of the Carolinas, essentially a (social) contract between the eight Lords Proprietors of the province of Carolina, promoting their territorial claims, reinforcing their aristocratic privileges, justifying serfdom and legalizing slavery.