Landed property

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Landed property or landed estates is a real estate term that usually refers to a property that generates income for the owner without the owner having to do the actual work of the estate. In Europe, agrarian landed property typically consisted of a manor, several tenant farms, and some privileged enterprises such as a mill. Modern landed property often consists of housing or industrial land, generating income in the form of rents or fees for services provided by facilities on the land, such as port facilities. The Duke of Westminster, one of the UK's richest people, derives much of his wealth from property in what is now central London.

Landed property was a key element of feudalism, and freed the owner for other tasks, such as government administration, military service, the practice of Law or religious practices.

In later times, the dominant role of landed estates as a basis of public service faded. Development of manufacturing and commerce created capitalist means of obtaining income, but ordinarily demanding the attention of the owner; at roughly the same time, governments began imposing taxes to fund government bureaus and the military so that people of talent could perform government services for salaries without need for the proceeds of ownership of farmland. Parts of the United States of America, typically New England and Pennsylvania, never had a landed aristocracy, so their armed forces and government agencies could never be organized on the basis of a landed aristocracy.

Exactions through taxation to support armies and navies or government bureaus with a civil service typically proved less onerous^{[citation needed]} than the exactions of absentee landlords who maximized income through the oppression of the peasantry; where the government practiced the separation of church and state, as in America and, later France after the 1789 revolution (and other countries afterwards), churches could survive only through voluntary contributions from the membership.

The last large exemplar of the principle of a landed aristocracy as a basis of rule, Russia under the Romanov dynasty, literally died in the Bolshevik Revolution.