Rafe Blaufarb, a historian specializing in the Atlantic revolutionary era, examines how the French Revolution fundamentally transformed the relationship between property and political power. Before the Revolution, owning land often meant owning jurisdiction over the people who lived on it: the right to collect taxes, administer justice, and command labor. The Revolution abolished these 'feudal' arrangements, creating a sharp distinction between political authority exercised by the state and economic property held by private individuals. Blaufarb calls this transformation 'the great demarcation' and traces its implementation through revolutionary legislation, legal disputes, and resistance. He shows how this distinction between public and private, political and economic, which now seems natural and obvious, was actually a revolutionary creation that required enormous effort to establish. The book examines how different groups experienced this transformation: nobles who lost jurisdictional rights, peasants who gained freedom from seigneurial obligations, and the revolutionary state that accumulated unprecedented power by monopolizing sovereignty. Blaufarb also traces how this model of separated public and private spheres spread through colonialism and revolution to shape property regimes worldwide. Essential reading for understanding how the modern distinction between politics and economics, public and private, came into being through deliberate revolutionary action rather than natural evolution.