Book: LAND POWER: WHO HAS IT, WHO DOESN’T, AND HOW THAT DETERMINES THE FATE OF SOCIETIES
Author: Michael Albertus
Published by: Basic
Price: Rs 799
The book’s title and subtitle reiterate a basic sociological truth: the ownership, control and use of land are more about power than resources. Throughout human history, the control of land has been intermeshed with the making of modern States and the various hierarchies of privilege, social esteem, and wealth. The control of land has fuelled social conflicts and, occasionally, sparked dramatic upheavals around the world. This book is about what happens when land power changes hands and how that determines a society’s trajectory of growth, development and sustainability in the future.
Michael Albertus’s thesis is simple but powerful: over the past two centuries, the way land has been reallocated in a given country has shaped that country’s future in terms of equality, gender justice and development. Put differently, land inequities are progenitors of persistent economic inequalities across multiple axes of social differentiation in a given society. The power that land confers thus makes it a hotly-contested resource.
To substantiate his thesis, the author marshals evidence from a much longer sweep of history and geography. Conceptually, he identifies four distinct types of land reallocation policies that have been followed in the last two centuries by different States: settler reforms, collective reforms, land-to-the-tiller reforms, and co-operative reforms. He calls them crucial elements of the “Great Reshuffle” whose consequences are unfolding in contemporary times.
Settler reforms were part of empire-building enterprises by such nations as Great Britain, France and Spain. Most of these empires subdued indigenous peoples and decimated their cultures and ways of life through land appropriation, war, and the spread of new diseases. The colonies in America, Canada and Australia are examples of British settler reforms. Even though settler reforms were inextricably linked to colonialism, countries like the United States of America, Canada, and Australia continued them long after gaining sovereignty, thereby undermining indigenous communities and ethnic minorities.
The Soviet Union was the great exemplar of collective reforms — the second type of the “Great Reshuffle”. China and Zimbabwe fall under this category too. These reforms are State-run and State-mandated and have had pernicious consequences for the populations concerned.
The Indian case falls under the third category. Appreciably, Albertus talks of the positive distributional consequences of ‘Operation Barga’ in West Bengal. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan are other examples. Some Latin American countries like Peru, Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, and Nicaragua also conducted cooperative reforms after World War II with varying success.
As a highly readable book, Land Power offers us a new way of looking at the value of land and shows us that choices about who owns land have consequences for the global future. It holds extra promise for Indian readers as we witness land grabs of all kinds amidst us wherein a large number of our people are getting expropriated from their land in the name of growth and development.