‘The Monopolists’, by Mary Pilon: collective ideals behind a paean to brash capitalism

This year Hasbro is selling an 80th anniversary edition of “the classic game of Monopoly” in the US for $19.99, with all the original streets and districts from New Jersey’s Atlantic City, including “Marvin Gardens” and Boardwalk. “With a retro game board and cards, the game takes you back to where it all began,” it promises.

Well, not exactly “all”. Charles Darrow, the man from whom Parker Brothers (now part of Hasbro) acquired the game, trademarking it in 1935, did not actually invent it, despite his claims. It was created by various people, some idealists, only a few familiar with the others. None had a monopoly on the idea — it was a collective inspiration.

These days, rather than rewriting history, as Parker Brothers tried to do before it was dragged into a decade-long court battle by an obstinate economics professor and game inventor in the 1970s, Hasbro declares 1935 year zero. It holds the rights to the games with which Monopoly competed and the legal challenges are settled. It has won the competition.

There remains a wonderful irony to Monopoly, as Mary Pilon — previously a New York Times sports reporter — recounts in her intriguing history. Not only has Hasbro ended up with a monopoly on the word Monopoly, but the game that declares the winner the most successful monopoliser of land and property sprung from the opposite impulse. Its precursors built it as a moral story of trustbusting — breaking up abusive giants.

The game spread by word of mouth in the early 20th century, with players in social clubs and university fraternities making their own boards out of oilcloth and improvised pieces. It was only in the Great Depression, with the marketing clout of Parker Brothers behind it, that it finally exploded into a global craze.

Every country has its own Monopoly street names but the US version still bears evidence of the intellectual property heist mounted by Darrow, a Philadelphian who seized his chance after playing the game with friends who had brought it from Atlantic City. The square called “Marvin Gardens” on the first board he saw (the real district is Marven Gardens) is misspelt to this day.

The closest to a true creator of Monopoly was Lizzie Magie, an idealistic and inventive follower of Henry George, the 1880s campaigner for poverty relief in the thrusting age of US capitalism. George advocated ending all forms of taxation apart from a land tax. Since land was the commonweal, he argued, it was correct to tax landlords and owners, rather than tenants and workers.

In 1902, Magie came up with the idea of a Landlord’s Game, with a curiously familiar board, including a square marked: “No Trespassing. Go To Jail.” She wrote that year: “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing, with all its usual outcomes and consequences. It might well have been called The Game of Life.”

Theodore Roosevelt had just been elected president, and such ideas culminated in the “trustbusting” era in which Standard Oil and other trusts were broken up. Yet although Magie filed a patent in 1903 (the same day the Wright Brothers filed theirs on flying machines), it did not gain a monopoly. Other versions proliferated, one becoming popular among Quakers in Atlantic City.

In some ways, the story of Monopoly is the story of many inventions — including flying machines. The elements of an idea or a technology circulate broadly in society and one or more inventors find a way to exploit it. Unsurprisingly, many people played similar games at the same time.

It is tempting to regard Parker Brothers as the villain of the piece. It turned a product of the creative commons into its sole property, and exploited it with the zeal of a JP Morgan or a John D Rockefeller. That may be unfair. It takes branding, marketing and distribution to make a popular product, not just inspiration.

Pilon is a prodigious researcher, and delves into great detail about the intellectual and business roots of Monopoly. The contentious history has been told before, including by Philip Orbanes in his 2007 book Monopoly: The World’s Most Famous Game And How it Got That Way. But Pilon does it adeptly and, after all, what is completely original?

The writer is the FT’s chief business commentator

The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favourite Board Game, by Mary Pilon, Bloomsbury, RRP$27