The Territorial Imperative

The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry Into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations, usually referred to as The Territorial Imperative, is a 1966 nonfiction work by Robert Ardrey. It describes the evolutionarily determined instinct among humans toward territoriality and the implications of this territoriality in human meta-phenomena such as property ownership and nation building . The Territorial Imperative extended Ardrey's groundbreaking anthropological work, contributed to the development of the science of ethology, and encouraged an increasing public interest in human origins.