“FATHER OF ALL AND KING OF ALL?” IN SEARCH OF PEACEFUL LEVELING
All the chapters so far have made for rather depressing reading. Time and again we have seen how substantial reductions of the gap between rich and poor were bought at a high price—high in human suffering. Yet not all violence serves this end. Most wars were just as likely to raise as to lower inequality, depending on which side one was. Civil wars have produced similarly inconsistent outcomes but for the most part have tended to widen rather than narrow inequality. Military mass mobilization has turned out to be the most promising mechanism, as exceptional violence has yielded exceptional outcomes. But although this was generally true of the worst wars in human history—the two world wars—this phenomenon and its equalizing consequences were rare in earlier periods: ancient Greece may be the only precursor. And if the most intense type of warfare was the most likely to compress income and wealth disparities, this was even truer of the most intense revolutions: the communist revolutions of the twentieth century, after all, leveled on a grand scale. By contrast, less ambitious ventures such as the French Revolution generated weaker effects, and most popular unrest in history failed to equalize at all.
State collapse served as a more reliable means of leveling, destroying disparities as hierarchies of wealth and power were swept away. Just as with mass mobilization wars and transformative revolutions, equalization was accompanied by great human misery and devastation, and the same applies to the most catastrophic epidemics: although the biggest pandemics leveled mightily, it is hard to think of a remedy to inequality that was dramatically worse than the disease. To a great extent, the scale of leveling used to be a function of the scale of violence: the more force was expended, the more leveling occurred. Even though this is not an iron law—not all communist revolutions were particularly violent, for example, and not all mass warfare leveled—it may be as close as we can hope to get to a general premise. This is, without any doubt, an exceedingly bleak conclusion. But has this been the only way? Has violence always been the source of leveling in the same way that war, according to Democritus, is the “father of all and king of all”? Are there peaceful alternatives that have produced similar results? In this and the next chapter, I review a wide variety of potential candidates, most notably land reform, economic crises, democratization, and economic development. I conclude by considering counterfactual alternatives: in the absence of massive violent shocks, how would inequality have developed over the course of the twentieth century?1
”UNTIL IT BECAME A TEMPEST UPROOTING EVERYTHING?” LAND REFORM
Land reform deserves pride of place for the simple reason that for most of the past, most people lived on the land, and cultivated land generally represented the bulk of private wealth. In France 300 years ago, land accounted for two-thirds of all capital; it represented about 60 percent in Britain. This would have been typical of hundreds if not thousands of years of history around the world. The distribution of land was thus a key determinant of inequality. Attempts to change landownership in favor of the poor were made throughout recorded history. Land reform is not inherently associated with violence: in theory, nothing keeps societies from peaceably adjusting ownership of land to benefit the poor. In practice, however, things usually worked out differently: as we will see, successful land reform almost invariably depended on the exercise or threat of violence.2
The most striking examples have already been discussed in chapter 7. Neither the violent nature nor the leveling power of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions are in doubt, although in some cases—for instance, that of Cuba—violence was latent rather than widely expressed. Radical land reform along these lines faded with the end of the Cold War: Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s are among the most recent examples on record. Since then, Zimbabwe has been the only major case of coercive land redistribution. In that country, land reform had proceeded at a gentle pace in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, with about a tenth of farmland being transferred from white farmers to 70,000 mostly poor black families. Radicalization commenced in 1997 when veterans of the liberation war staged “land invasions” by occupying land owned by white large landowners. In response, another eighth of farmland was earmarked for compulsory acquisition. By now, some 90 percent of the land controlled by 6,000 white farmers back in 1980 has been given to a quarter-million families. The share of large white-owned farms in all land has collapsed from 39 percent to 0.4 percent. This represents a huge transfer of net wealth from a small elite to poor households. The more aggressive second phase of land reform from 1997 onward owed much to violent agitation by the veterans. When the Mugabe government failed to honor promises of welfare and financial support, the veterans and those they helped mobilize challenged not only white settlers but also the authorities, pressuring Mugabe into consenting to the forcible seizure of white-owned commercial farms. After initial attempts to rein in this movement, Mugabe joined it in 2000 by targeting such farms and enacting measures to protect occupiers. We see here echoes of the Mexican revolution of the early twentieth century, when local occupation of estates likewise drove government action. Local violence was a critical means of expanding the scope of land redistribution and thus wealth equalization.3
Many land reforms in history were the result of war. In the fourth chapter, I reviewed a particularly extreme case: land reform in Japan under American occupation that entailed effectively uncompensated confiscation and a wholesale restructuring of landownership across the country. This was a novel phenomenon of the post–World War II era: up to that point, foreign occupiers had never promoted a redistributive agenda. Soviet rule in Central Europe was the principal manifestation of equalization sponsored by conquering forces. Historically, war had provided an impetus for land reform in other ways. One well-established mechanism was reform in response to the threat of war, employed as a means of shoring up a country’s military capabilities.
By some accounts, the Taika (“Great Change”) Reforms in Japan after 645 CE may be interpreted as an early example of this process. Modeled on land equalization schemes undertaken by Sui and Tang rulers in nearby China, farmland was to be surveyed and reorganized in a grid system of equal-sized plots, rice lands were to be assigned to individual households based on the number of their productive members, and periodic reallocations were planned to account for changing circumstances. The assigned plots, technically public, were meant to be inalienable. As so often is the case, we cannot be sure how widely or faithfully this ambitious program was actually implemented. What matters here is that it was undertaken in the context of ongoing reform under the threat of both internal and external war. Involvement in Korea in the 660s pitted Japan against Tang China, raising concerns about military invasion by the superpower next door. Militarization ensued, interrupted by the Jinshin war of succession in 672 and 673. The first-ever census was held in 689, and universal conscription for all adult males was introduced. The threat of war appears to have provided an impetus for domestic reforms designed to suppress local elites and foster cohesion among the general population, which was to be prepared for military mobilization.4
We are on safer ground with Czarist Russia. Within a month of defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–1856, Czar Alexander II promised “laws equally just for all.” Reforms included the emancipation of serfs within five years, a measure meant to create a larger army supported by universal conscription. Peasants were now able to own the plots they cultivated. However, equalization was held back by the peasants’ obligation to pay redemptions equal to 75 percent or 80 percent of the land’s value. Financing was provided by government bonds that the peasants had to repay at 6 percent interest over forty-nine years, a drawn-out drain on their resources that often left them with smaller allotments than they had worked before. Differentiation increased as some received land but others did not, poorer peasants became proletarianized, and more affluent households pulled away from the rest. Unrest in the wake of defeat in the war against Japan in 1905 triggered another round of land reform. At the time, peasants still owned only 3.5 percent of all land. Refusing to make further redemption payments, they went on strike and attacked estates, sacking more than a thousand manorial houses. In response to this violence, all outstanding redemption payments were canceled and peasants given the right to claim their land as hereditary property. As a result, by the time of World War I, more than half of all land had become the property of the peasantry. Even so, the persistent wealth gap between a few large estates and a great many smallholdings raised overall land inequality and workhorses came to be more unequally distributed than they had been earlier.5
This was not an isolated instance. War-driven land reforms that ended up exacerbating inequality have a long pedigree. The Napoleonic Wars had triggered land reform in a number of countries, with unpalatable outcomes in the longer term. In Prussia, the shock of defeat in 1806 prompted the abolition of serfdom the following year, and although tenants were allowed to purchase land from nobles and the crown, prices were high, and large landowners—the Junkers—strengthened their grip on the land and retained a dominant position until the communists expropriated all large estates without compensation in 1945. In Spain, the Napoleonic Wars likewise encouraged liberalization. Entails were abolished in 1812 and public land put up for sale, yet subsequent civil wars resulted in ever greater concentration of landownership—likewise in Portugal. In Austria, it was the revolution of 1848 that persuaded the government to make sure that serfs were freed from feudal obligations: nominally introduced in the 1780s, laws to this end had not until then been properly enforced. Redemption prices for transferred land were set at twenty times annual revenue and equally shared between peasants, state, and landlords (who thus forfeited a third of their landed wealth)—an example of buying peace in response to popular unrest.6
Other reform attempts motivated by war were more radical but proved short-lived. Founded in 1901, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union was unsuccessful in reaching the rural masses until the massive shock of defeat in World War I, which led to surrender, political chaos, and territorial losses, brought them to power in 1920. Its land reform program was ambitious: ownership was capped at thirty hectares, excess holdings were subject to compulsory sale on a sliding scale (with compensation levels shrinking with size) and transferred to the landless and smallholders, and Church land and property obtained by speculation and war profits were confiscated. This soon triggered a violent backlash by the establishment, which led to the overthrow of the government. War effects played out in a more indirect fashion in Guatemala during and after World War II. During the war years, the oppressive rule of large landowners was weakened by the loss of the German coffee market and the nationalization of many German-owned coffee plantations, undertaken under American pressure. This paved the way for agrarian reform by a democratically elected government in 1952: land from large estates was redistributed and owners compensated with state bonds priced in accordance with the generally greatly undervalued tax declarations they used to file. By 1954, in a peaceful and orderly process, 40 percent of the rural population had received land. Yet a coup that year installed a military regime that annulled the land reform and renewed repression. Fully 150,000 died in the long civil war that followed. By the 1990s, 3 percent of owners held two-thirds of all land, and 90 percent of the rural population was almost or entirely landless. Violence featured in this process in different ways: first remotely, by facilitating change, and then through its absence under a peaceful government that proved no match for violent intervention and repression.7
In other cases, concerns about potential violence, internal or external, precipitated land reform. Anti-communism was a particularly potent motivating factor. At the end of World War II, land inequality in South Korea was high: fewer than 3 percent of rural households owned two-thirds of all land, whereas 58 percent had none. Subsequent land reform was driven by the fear that North Korean communists, who had expropriated land in their own part of Korea as early as 1946, might mobilize the local peasantry in the south. American support and a commitment to land reform by all parties that contested the first election in 1948 resulted in expropriation and redistribution on a grand scale. First, all Japanese colonial holdings were seized. In the early 1950s, private property was capped at three hectares of good cropland, excess land was transferred to peasants by seizure or sale for minimal compensation (one and half times annual rent), and rents were fixed at low levels for those who continued to work others’ land. A little more than half of all land changed hands. The redistributive effect was huge: landlords lost 80 percent of their income whereas the bottom 80 percent of rural households gained 20 percent to 30 percent. By 1956, the richest 6 percent of landowners held merely 18 percent of all land, and the share of tenants had fallen from 49 percent to 7 percent. The Gini coefficient of landownership, which had been as high as 0.72 or 0.73 in 1945, fell to the 0.30s by the 1960s. The leveling effect of land reform was amplified by the consequences of the Korean War: as most industrial and commercial properties were destroyed and hyperinflation rendered compensation worthless, the landed elite disappeared completely and a highly egalitarian society emerged that was later sustained by broad access to education. In this case, concerns about war or revolution were overtaken by actual mass mobilization war, with equalizing consequences akin to those encountered in chapter 5.8
Anxiety about revolution and actual war likewise converged in South Vietnam, which instituted land reform in 1970 at the urging of the United States: all tenanted land was to be turned over to the cultivators, who were to receive a certain amount for free; owners were compensated. The reform was implemented within three years, and the tenancy rate subsequently dropped dramatically—from 60 percent to 15 percent in the Mekong Delta, for example. In Taiwan, by contrast, general concern about war rather than war itself served as the principal agent of leveling. Evicted from the mainland by the victorious communists, in 1949 the Kuomintang government embarked on land reform as a means of shoring up local support. Its American supporters likewise urged redistribution to counter communism. Motivation was strong and institutional obstacles weak: the leadership had no obligations to local landlords, and many blamed defeat on the failure of land reform on the mainland. As in South Korea, caps were placed on individual properties, and rents were reduced. After the sale of public land to tenants, in 1953 landlords were compelled to sell excess land in return for compensation well below market prices. As a result, farm incomes rose, the share of tenants declined from 38 percent in 1950 to 15 percent ten years later, and the Gini coefficient of landownership dropped from about 0.6 to between 0.39 and 0.46 during the same interval. The Gini for overall income fell dramatically from 0.57 in 1953 to 0.33 in 1964.9
Land reform in Romania in 1921 may have been an early example of this containment strategy: it benefited poorer peasants and smallholders who received expropriated land and is sometimes thought to have been motivated by the fear that revolution might spread from the neighboring Soviet Union. Fear of communist agitation also spurred reform in Latin American countries. The “Alliance for Peace,” established by the United States in 1960 in response to Castro’s takeover of Cuba, promoted land reform and provided advice and financial support to this end. Chile was a candidate: after timid earlier steps, concerns about electoral defeat in 1964 led a right-wing and centrist coalition to embrace broader land reform with foreign support. By 1970 many large estates had been expropriated, but disbursements were moderate. Allende’s leftist government made more progress until it was brought down by a coup in 1973. Although this halted the process, by then a third of land had come to be held by smallholders, compared to a tenth only a decade earlier.10
Against a background of high inequality and rural violence in Peru throughout the 1960s, the leaders of a military coup in 1968, opposed to the country’s traditional oligarchy and trained in U.S. counterinsurgency principles, opted for land reform as a means of staving off all-out civil war. Within a few years, most large estates had been expropriated, a third of all farmland was transferred, and a fifth of the farm workforce had benefited. Breaking the power of the large landowners benefited mainly the military and middling peasants rather than the poor. Similarly motivated measures were taken in Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. In El Salvador, a junta launched land reform in 1980, one year after the outbreak of guerilla warfare, with American encouragement and financial support.11
A decade earlier, fear of revolution had also helped induce land reform in Egypt. Land had been rather (though not extremely) unevenly distributed, with the top 1 percent of landowners controlling a fifth and the richest 7 percent owning two-thirds. Tenancy rates were high and the position of tenants was poor, akin to that of laborers. In the decade leading up to Nasser’s military coup of 1952, the country had been riven by instability, witnessing a rapid succession of seventeen governments, martial law, strikes, and riots. Members of the ruling class had been targeted for assassination. The new regime launched land reform the year it took power. Just as in East Asia at the same time, the United States provided advocacy and support in order to contain communist influence. The minister of agriculture, Sayed Marei, invoked those fears in justifying reform:
We remember the days preceding the revolution of July 1952; we remember how the Egyptian village became restless as a result of dangerous agitation; we remember the events that led to bloodshed and destruction of property . . . . Would the large landowners have preferred to be left exposed to the wind blowing through this unrest, exploiting want and poverty, until it became a tempest uprooting everything . . . ?
Caps were placed on private landownership, but owners received compensation, and land recipients were required to repay the state over decades in a scheme not unlike that devised in Czarist Russia after 1861. Because these payments were much lower than previous rents had been, this arrangement worked to the peasants’ advantage. The distribution of wealth was less affected than that of income, with about a tenth of land changing hands. In Iraq, coups and Baathist rule had a greater effect, and collectivization greatly reduced inequality of landownership in the 1960s and 1970s. A failed communist uprising in Sri Lanka in 1971 that is thought to have cost thousands of lives prompted land reforms the very next year, providing for the expropriation of private, and later also corporate, land in excess of a given ceiling. Prompted once again by violence, this intervention represented a radical departure from the failure of all previous governments since independence to tackle land inequality.12
All these examples consistently point to the paramount importance of violence, whether applied or latent, in bringing about meaningful land reform. Yet results varied greatly. Indeed, land reform has a poor track record in alleviating inequality. A survey of twenty-seven reforms during the second half of the twentieth century shows that in a large majority of cases (twenty-one, or 78 percent), land inequality either remained largely unchanged or even grew over time. Cronyism might undermine peaceful land reform. In Venezuela in the 1960s, a democratically elected government redistributed a tenth of the country’s farmland—half from expropriations and half from state land—to a quarter of the landless poor. At the time, the country was transitioning from a largely agricultural economy to an urban economy based on oil exports. This allowed the government to pay generous compensation from oil revenue—indeed, so generous that landlords promoted strikes and demands for land by their workers so that they themselves could qualify for expropriation and receive compensation in excess of market levels. Reform along these lines would have done little to mitigate material inequality.13
Sometimes compensation was introduced through the back door. In the course of its expansion across the Italian peninsula, the ancient Roman Republic had confiscated large amounts of arable land from defeated enemies and converted it into public land that was either assigned to settlers or let out for rent. The latter benefited those who could afford to cultivate and invest in large tracts of land and caused public holdings to become concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. After an earlier effort to impose legal limits on access to this type of land, matters came to a head in 133 BCE when a populist reformer from within the oligarchic ruling class, Tiberius Gracchus, pushed through a redistribution program that limited each possessor to a little more than 300 acres of public land. Excess holdings were to be seized without compensation for prior investments and allocated to poor citizens. Assigned fields became inalienable to prevent the rich and powerful from buying out or otherwise displacing the newly created smallholders. Elite opposition to this reform proceeded in stages. Efforts to enhance this program by providing settlers with startup funds cost Gracchus his life at the hands of enraged oligarchs. The redistribution scheme survived its instigator by not more than four years, and in the 110s BCE, rents were abolished and all holders of public land—including those in possession of the maximum allowed amount—began to enjoy it as private property that could be sold. Thus although this program may have created a respectable number of new smallholders (equivalent to a few percent of the citizen population), its longer-term effect on the distribution of landed wealth was likely modest at best.14
In the modern Philippines, the lack of a credible threat of war or revolution allowed landlord elites to drag their feet: even as land reform remained a perennial campaign slogan, for decades, little changed. Even when a more serious attempt was made after 1988, results were modest, just as they had been in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia. In Iran in the 1970s, although most sharecroppers obtained some land through compulsory sales of excess landlord holdings, the process actually increased inequality among smallholders owing to seller favoritism coupled with compensation requirements and the lack of state support, all of which advantaged better-off peasants. The Hawaiian “Great Mahele” of 1848 is a particularly extreme example of peaceful land reform that created unfair outcomes. At that point land, which had been farmed collectively, was shared out among the king, the chiefs, and the general population. Because formal claims were necessary to establish private ownership—something many commoner households failed to make—and because the Alien Landownership Act soon permitted outsiders to acquire land, over time, most of the land not claimed by the crown fell under non-Hawaiian commercial ownership.15
Nonviolent land reform fully succeeded only in the rarest of circumstances. The distribution of common land in late eighteenth-century Spain is at best a partial example. Triggered by riots that forced King Charles III to flee Madrid in 1766—and thus not without violent impetus—it produced substantially varying results that were determined by local circumstances. Frequently only those who were able to afford farm equipment stood to gain. In some regions, the reform failed owing to a lack of funds among rural workers and to manipulative interventions by the elite. It was successful only when the upper class was either not particularly invested in landownership—as in Malaga, which was dominated by commercial elites—or when the relative scarcity of rural workers paired with abundant land limited the bargaining power of landlords, as in Guadalajara.16
In nineteenth-century Serbia, equalizing land reform was made possible by growing independence from imperial rule. The Ottomans had imposed a feudal regime that allocated land to well-connected Muslim beneficiaries. In addition, powerful Turks illicitly established quasi-private property claims by encroaching on Serbian peasants. The local rural population was compelled to pay high rents and render labor services. After uprisings from 1804 onward ushered in a transitional period of dual rule—Serbian autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty—that lasted from 1815 to 1830, illegal property claims were rescinded and feudal landlords and land rents came under pressure. Settlements in the early 1830s ordered most Turks to leave Serbia within a few years after selling their land to locals. Feudalism was abolished, and Serbs acquired private rights in land. Some of the land ceded by departing Turks was distributed to smallholders. Remaining large landowners were required to sell the cultivators’ houses and a certain amount of farmland to the peasants who worked their estates. As a result, large landholdings almost completely disappeared and landownership became extremely widespread: by 1900, 91.6 percent of Serbian households owned houses and other real estate. In this case, inequality was reduced at the expense of a “foreign” elite that was forced out of its traditional position of privilege. Land reforms that targeted former colonial or other captured elite holdings similarly occurred in a whole series of other countries.17
Genuinely peaceful reform often appears to have required some form of foreign control that checked the power of local elites. It worked in Puerto Rico in the late 1940s—and even there it was an outgrowth of equalizing reforms in the United States that had been driven by the Great Depression and World War II and coincided with top-down land reform in Japan under American occupation. Colonial rule was also instrumental in Irish land reform. In the late 1870s, the so-called “Land War,” agitation for fair rents and tenant protection from eviction, involved organized resistance in the form of strikes and boycotts but only very little actual violence. The British Parliament addressed these grievances in a series of acts that regulated rents and provided for loans at fixed interest for tenants who wanted to purchase land from willing landlords. In 1903, the Wyndham Act finally bought peace as the government agreed to cover, out of state revenue, a 12 percent premium between compensation offered by tenants and the asking prices of landlords, thereby subsidizing the privatization of smallholdings. This allowed smallholders to take control of more than half of all Irish farmland by the time of independence in the early 1920s.18
The search for land reforms that were both peaceful and effective has not been particularly successful. The most redistributive interventions were made possible by—often violent—revolution and civil war, as in Revolutionary France, Mexico, Russia, China, Vietnam, Bolivia, Cuba, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia, as well as by other forms of violent agitation, as in Zimbabwe. In other cases, equalizing land reform was the result of war that led to foreign occupation (in Japan, Central Europe, and, to some extent, in North and South Korea after World War II), the threat of war (in early medieval Japan, Prussia, and Taiwan), other war-related disturbances (in Guatemala), concerns of about revolution (in Chile, Peru, Egypt, and Sri Lanka), or a combination of such concerns and actual war (in South Korea and South Vietnam). According to the most recent survey, no fewer than 87 percent of all major land reforms undertaken outside Latin America between 1900 and 2010 took place in the wake of a world war, decolonization, communist takeover, or the threat of communist agitation.19
Peaceful reform might benefit the rich, as in Hawai’i and Venezuela, or be implemented at arm’s length, as in Ireland and Puerto Rico. Evidence for autonomous land reform that unfolded peacefully and resulted in significant leveling is in short supply. This finding is not surprising: in societies at a level of development that made land reform a desideratum, elite resistance was always likely to block or water down redistributive policies unless violent shocks or the threat of violence encouraged more substantive concessions. This helps explain the apparent lack of nonviolent land reforms characterized by high “floors” (the size of new smallholdings) and low “ceilings” (the caps placed on landlord properties).20
This picture does not change if we look farther back into the more distant past. Nominally ambitious land redistribution schemes are repeatedly attested as a feature of state-building, as in the Warring States and Sui and Tang dynasties of China, and in the context of rulers’ struggle to roll back elite wealth, as in Han China: I have already referred to them in earlier chapters. In ancient Greece, land reform and cognate measures, most notably debt relief, were commonly associated with violent coups. Reports extend across several centuries, from the archaic to the Hellenistic periods. When in the seventh century BCE Kypselos, the first tyrant of Corinth, killed or expelled the members of a rival clan, he may have seized its land for redistribution. Around the same time or a little later, Theagenes in the neighboring polis of Megara slaughtered the herds of the rich, which had been put to pasture on the fields of the poor. During a subsequent spell of radical democracy, the wealthy were exiled and their assets seized; the poor were said to have entered the homes of the affluent to extort free meals or engage in violence. Lenders were ordered to repay interest on debt, although there is no sign of outright debt cancellation. In 280 BCE, one Apollodorus seized power in the city of Kassandreia with the help of slaves and manufacturing workers. He is said to have confiscated “the property of the rich and redivided it among the poor and raised the pay of soldiers,” a state of affairs that lasted only four years. In a similar context, Klearchos became tyrant of Heraclea Pontica in 364 BCE touting a program of land redistribution and debt cancellation.21
Peaceful land reform also failed to make much headway in Sparta. As we have seen in chapter 6, landed wealth had come to be increasingly unevenly distributed, marginalizing an ever larger proportion of the citizenry. By the mid-fourth century BCE, the number of full citizens had declined to 700 (down from more than ten times that number a century and a half earlier), about 100 of whom were classed as wealthy, with the others their debtors. Another 2,000 or so Spartan men were categorized as second-class citizens in part because their income had dropped below the required threshold. Extreme inequality within the citizen body, to say nothing about other subordinate strata of Spartan society, paved the way for reform attempts.
The first intervention, meant to be accomplished without bloodshed by king Agis IV in the 240s BCE, aimed for debt cancellation and the redistribution of land in 4,500 equal allotments not only to citizens but also to suitable members of subject poleis. When these efforts were thwarted while he was away on a military campaign, Agis went into exile and the reform failed. The next round was already a little more violent, as King Cleomenes III in 227 BCE staged a coup with the help of mercenaries, killing four of Sparta’s five senior magistrates (the ephors) and about ten others and expelling eighty more. His program was similar to Agis’s, and this time it was actually implemented, accompanied by military reform that was swiftly rewarded with military and diplomatic successes. Finally brought down by military defeat in 222 BCE, Cleomenes fled the country; there is no indication that his redistributions were tampered with. Massive loss of life in this defeat would, however, have greatly reduced the number of landowners. Further military disaster in 207 BCE prompted the third and most radical round of reform, led by Nabis, who freed and enfranchised thousands of “slaves,” probably helots. He supposedly killed, tortured, or exiled wealthy Spartans and gave their land to the poor. Once he had been deposed through foreign intervention in 188 BCE, a reactionary settlement compelled the expulsion or sale of the recently enfranchised helots. This is yet another illustration that the successful implementation of land reform tends to require a measure of violence, and it also shows how this may unleash even greater counterviolence in return.22
”BREAKING THE TABLETS”: DEBT RELIEF AND EMANCIPATION
For all we can tell, land reform that was not associated with violence one way or another has rarely, if ever, been a potent means of combating inequalities of income and wealth. Much the same might be said about debt relief. Debt has certainly been a driver of inequality, forcing farmers to sell their land and cutting into disposable incomes. At least in theory, the reduction or cancellation of debt might have helped to improve the position of poor borrowers at the expense of wealthy lenders. In practice, there is no good evidence that any such measures ever made a real difference. Debt relief programs are attested from the earliest literate societies on record: Michael Hudson has gathered more than two dozen references to the cancellation of interest or debt itself and the freeing of debt-bondsmen in Mesopotamia between 2400 and 1600 BCE, an ancient Near Eastern tradition that is reflected in the semicentennial Jubilee restitutions ordained in the Book of Leviticus of the Old Testament. The royal relief decrees of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians are best understood as an element of the perennial struggle between state rulers and wealth elites over the control of the surplus and the ability to tax and raise troops that I already discussed in the opening chapter. If relief was both effective and recurrent, we would expect it to have been priced into the terms of loans (which might explain documented high interest rates); if it was effective but rare or frequent but ineffectual, it would have had little effect on inequality. Either way, it seems hard to interpret debt relief as a potent instrument of leveling.23
Abolition of slavery might seem like a promising leveling force. In those—relatively few—societies in which much of elite capital was tied up in slaves, emancipation had the potential to compress asset inequality. In practice, however, large-scale abolitionist processes were frequently entangled with violent disturbances. After a failed attempt in 1792, the British parliament passed a ban on the slave trade in 1806 as a measure that initially targeted only non-British colonies and that was meant to serve Britain’s national and, more specifically, military interests vis-à-vis the French during the Napoleonic War. Abolition proper was precipitated by massive slave uprisings in Demerara in 1823 and especially in Jamaica in 1831 and 1832. The Emancipation Act promptly followed in 1833, compelling freed slaves to work without pay for their former owners for several years and offering compensation to slave owners. The required outlay of 20 million pounds was huge, equivalent to 40 percent of the country’s annual public spending and worth $2.3 billion today (or indeed more than $100 billion in current dollars if expressed as a share of the British economy then and now). Although this was less than the market value of the freed slaves—estimates at the time mention 15 million, 24 million, and as much as 70 million pounds—in conjunction with four to six years of unpaid apprenticeship, the total value of the compensation package need not have resulted in a major shortfall. More than half of the payout went to absentee owners and creditors, most of them London-based merchants and rentiers. None of the large-scale rentiers is known to have declined compensation. Under these circumstances, leveling was bound to be very limited at best. Moreover, at a time when British state revenue heavily relied on indirect taxes such as customs and excise duties, the need to take on a large amount of debt to fund this scheme effectively redistributed income from the majority of the population to more affluent slave owners and purchasers of public debt.24
Other instances of emancipation were even more directly linked to violent conflict. France abolished slavery in 1794 at the height of the French Revolution as a tactical measure designed to draw the rebellious slaves of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) back to its side and away from its enemies. This measure was subsequently reversed by Napoleon. In 1804, when Haiti declared independence, former slave owners were expelled and those who stayed behind were killed in the massacre of whites that year. Another violent shock was required to end slavery in the remaining French colonial possessions: the revolution of 1848, part of a Europe-wide wave of unrest, once again brought down the French monarchy and resulted in immediate emancipation. Owners received some compensation in cash and credit, albeit on less generous terms than they had in Britain. War was instrumental in abolition in most Spanish colonies in Latin America. After colonial rule succumbed to local risings triggered by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808, the newly formed states soon passed emancipation laws. In chapter 6 I discussed the violent destruction of slavery in the American Civil War, in which the uncompensated expropriation of slave owners was partly offset by collateral damage to non-elite groups that reduced the overall extent of leveling. Meanwhile, the British suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, essentially an act of state violence, had contributed to the decline of what remained of Latin American slavery. Brazil and Cuba were the main holdouts. In the case of Cuba (and Puerto Rico), it was once again violent conflict that prompted policy change. Revolution in Cuba in 1868 led to emancipation in part of the island during a war that lasted a decade. Reforms curtailed slavery from 1870 until abolition was achieved in 1886. When Brazil continued to import African slaves in breach of diplomatic commitments to the contrary, the British navy attacked Brazilian ports in 1850 to destroy slave ships, forcing the country to prohibit the slave trade. Only the final phase of the process was not primarily driven by violence: slavery was gradually dismantled from 1871 onward, and final abolition in 1888 was not accompanied by compensation to owners.25
Broadly speaking, the more violence was involved, through war or revolution, the more effective leveling was likely to be (as in Haiti, much of Latin America, and the United States), whereas the more peaceful the process was, the more compensation was forthcoming and the better able owners were to negotiate this transition (as in the British and French colonies). Only Brazil represents a partial exception. Emancipations that reduced wealth inequality were thus commonly associated with the violent leveling forces covered in earlier chapters of this book. Conversely, emancipations that were both peaceful and significantly equalizing (in material terms) were rare, possibly even non-existent. More generally, abolition events had an even weaker effect on income inequality, considering that owners regularly retained control of the land and were able to benefit from alternative exploitative labor arrangements, such as sharecropping in the postbellum South.
”ON A SOUND AND PROSPEROUS BASIS”: ECONOMIC CRISES
As we have seen, economic contractions were capable of reducing inequality. Massive downturns caused by systems collapse, discussed in chapter 9, had leveling effects that we can discern from archaeological evidence. Severe economic dislocations in the wake of transformative revolutions could yield similar outcomes, albeit on a less dramatic scale. But what was the role of “peaceful” macroeconomic crises, downturns that were not rooted in violent shocks? For most of human history, the consequences of such crises for the development of inequality are impossible to investigate. An early example is a sustained depression in Spain during which real per capita output fell throughout the first half of the seventeenth century as wool exports, trade, and urban activity declined. Inequality outcomes differed depending on our choice of proxies: whereas the ratio of land rents to wages dropped during this period, suggesting higher returns to labor than to land and thus lower income inequality, the ratio of nominal per capita output to nominal wages remained fairly stable, implying the absence of major change in the distribution of income. This, which may be in part a function of the limitations of the available data, highlights the difficulties of exploring leveling induced by economic forces in premodern societies.26
Substantive evidence is available only for the more recent past. Major economic crises have not had a systematic negative effect on inequality. The most comprehensive survey to date looks at seventy-two systemic banking crises from 1911 to 2010 as well as 100 consumption declines of at least 10 percent from their peak and 101 GDP declines by the same margin between 1911 and 2006. These different types of events overlapped only moderately: for instance, only eighteen of the banking crises coincided with the recessions. Thirty-seven of seventy-two systemic banking crises in twenty-five countries yield useable information. Outcomes were biased in favor of increasing disparities: whereas income inequality fell in only three cases, it rose in seven, a figure that grows to thirteen if one includes cases in which no precrisis data are available. Consumption declines were more likely to produce different outcomes: among thirty-six usable cases, inequality fell in seven and rose in only two. There is no discernible trend for GDP contractions. Among both types of macroeconomic crises, the majority of cases registered very little change in inequality. A separate study of sixty-seven instances of GDP collapse in developing countries identifies ten cases in which these events caused inequality to rise, which indicates that poorer countries may be more vulnerable to this kind of shock. We must conclude that macroeconomic crises do not serve as an important means of leveling and that banking crises even tend to have the opposite effect.27
A survey of sixteen countries between 1880 and 2000 confirms this last finding but adds a temporal dimension. Financial crises tended to raise inequality before World War I and after World War II by depressing lower-level incomes more quickly than they did those at the top. The main exception is the Great Depression, when real wages rose even as the incomes of the most affluent, who were heavily dependent on capital income, fell. The Great Depression was the only macroeconomic crisis that had a powerful impact on economic inequality in the United States: the wealth share of the richest 1 percent of Americans declined from 51.4 percent to 47 percent between 1928 and 1932, just as the top 1 percent income share dropped from 19.6 in 1928 to 15.3 percent three years later—and from 23.9 percent to 15.5 percent over the same period if capital gains are included. Losses among the top 0.01 percent were particularly pronounced: their income share including capital gains fell from 5 percent to 2 percent between 1928 and 1932. The ranks of the wealthy shrank accordingly: membership in the National Association of Manufacturers fell by more than two-thirds between the early 1920s and 1933, and the number of banks declined from about 25,000 to 14,000 between 1929 and 1933.28
The Great Depression’s global effect on inequality was generally more modest. In Australia, the top 1 percent income share fell from 11.9 percent in 1928 to 9.3 percent in 1932 but averaged 10.6 percent from 1936 to 1939, not far below the precrisis level. In France, it dropped from 17.3 percent in 1928 to 14.6 percent in 1931 before recovering slightly, and it dropped from 18.6 percent to 14.4 percent in the Netherlands between 1928 and 1932, where this was likewise followed by a partial rebound. Corresponding declines were weak and brief in Japan and were weaker still in New Zealand. During these years, top income shares remained stable in Germany, Finland, and South Africa and actually rose in Canada and Denmark. The equalizing consequences of the Great Depression thus seem to have been largely confined to the United States. Yet even there it produced mixed outcomes: after a few years of leveling, income concentration held steady until the beginning of the war, whereas different measures of wealth inequality show conflicting trends.29
President Herbert Hoover famously erred in asserting, in a speech given four days before the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, that “the fundamental business of the country, that is the production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But the basis of American inequality may have been sounder than it would soon appear to have been: signs of a rebound of elite income and wealth in the late 1930s should make us wonder how long this trend might have continued had it not been snuffed out by renewed world war. After all, resilience and rebounds of top income shares have also been typical of the more recent past. The stock market crash of 1987 failed to arrest the steady rise of top incomes at the time and the modest equalizing effect of the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and the 9/11 dislocations of the following year had fully worn off by 2004. The same was true of the Great Recession of 2008, whose negative effect on top income shares had also been fully undone four years later. This holds true regardless of whether we consider the top 1, 0.1, or 0.01 percent share of American incomes. Equalizing effects in other developed countries were heterogeneous but likewise modest. Economic crises may be serious shocks but in the absence of violent pressures are not normally capable of reducing inequality all by themselves.30
”BUT WE CAN’T HAVE BOTH”: DEMOCRACY
At first sight, the expansion of democratic institutions may seem like a plausible candidate as a peaceful means of leveling. However, as we have seen in chapters 5 and 6, formal democratization cannot readily be treated as an autonomous development unrelated to violent action. Much as the evolution of ancient Athenian democracy appears to have been intertwined with mass mobilization warfare, the extension of the franchise in many Western countries at specific points during the first half of the twentieth century was very significantly linked to the shocks of the two world wars. For this reason alone, even if democratization could be shown to have had an equalizing effect on the distribution of material resources in those societies, any such process would at least in part have been driven by the pressures of war.31
Moreover, scholarship on the relationship between democracy and inequality has long produced contradictory results. This ambiguity of outcomes has now been confirmed by the most ambitious and comprehensive survey of this problem to date. Drawing on 538 observations from 184 different countries from independence or 1960 (whichever is later) until 2010, Daron Acemoglu and his associates find no consistent effect of democracy on market or even disposable income inequality. An observed negative effect on the Gini coefficient of disposable income distribution does not reach statistical significance. It is true that the lack of precision of many of the underlying inequality measures leaves room for doubt. Yet the lack of a significant relationship is made all the more striking because democracy does have a robust effect on tax revenue as a share of GDP. This suggests that democracy’s role in shaping the net distribution of resources is complex and heterogeneous and that the often presumed association of democracy with equalizing redistributive policies is far from straightforward. Two reasons for this stand out: equalization can be impeded if democracy is “captured” by powerful constituencies, and democratization provides opportunities for economic development that may by itself increase income inequality.32
More specific studies by Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage undermine the notion that democratization in the West constrained material inequality. They find that partisanship—whether governments were controlled by parties of the left or not—had no effect on overall income inequality in thirteen countries between 1916 and 2000 and only a small dampening effect on top 1 percent income shares. Centralized, national-level wage bargaining likewise failed to make much difference. They also explore the relationship between franchise extension and partisanship on the one hand and top income tax rates on the other. Because top rates tend to be negatively correlated with inequality and are often better documented than inequality as such, they may serve as a rough proxy for the period before reliable inequality measures became available. Scheve and Stasavage find that the introduction of universal male suffrage did not have a strong effect on top income tax rates: in fifteen countries, the mean top rate in the five years leading up to universal male suffrage was only minimally lower than in the following decade. Incremental extensions of the franchise, as in Britain between the Reform Act of 1832 and the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1918, also did not raise top tax rates. These rates were driven up by World War I, and electoral reforms followed rather than preceded this rapid surge. Finally, comparison of average top income tax rates before and after the transition to a left-wing government reveals only a small mean increase of 3 percentage points (from 48 percent to 51 percent) between the five year–year periods before and after such events.33
By contrast, the strength of trade unions is in fact negatively correlated with inequality. Yet as I have shown in chapter 5, unionization rates were highly sensitive to the shocks of the two world wars and thus cannot be considered a direct function or manifestation of democracy per se. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once opined, “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” As it turns out, we can indeed have both, at least as long as we define democracy in formal terms rather than in the more expansive substantive sense undoubtedly intended by this eminent scholar. Conversely, even outside socialist countries, the absence of strong democratic government has by no means been incompatible with economic equality: South Korea and Taiwan had an excellent record preserving the equalization gains produced by earlier violent shocks long before democratization gathered steam in the late 1980s, and much the same used to be true of Singapore.34
1 What about the role of ideas—or, more specifically, of egalitarian ideology—in equalizing the distribution of income and wealth? It goes without saying that just like other elements of what we might broadly define as the stock of knowledge, ideologies that cover a broad spectrum from various religious doctrines, abolitionism, and social democracy to hypernationalism, fascism, and scientific socialism have long been deeply enmeshed in leveling processes. Ideologies have both precipitated violent shocks and helped maintain resultant equality gains (most recently in modern welfare states) and have in turn been molded and at times greatly boosted by such shocks (cf. herein, chapter 5, pp. 165–173). Moreover, normative ideas tend to be broadly related to specific levels of development: there are good reasons why egalitarian beliefs are more widespread in foraging and modern high-income societies than among agriculturalists (Morris 2015). However, what matters most for the purposes of this study is whether ideology can be shown to have acted as an autonomous and peaceful means of leveling: whether it has brought about substantial economic equalization outside the context of violent shocks. This has not normally been the case: I discuss a possible exception—recent developments in Latin America—hereafter. A second, related question—whether over the course of the last century or so ideology would have had a chance to do so in the absence of violent shocks—involves a counterfactual scenario that I consider at the end of chapter 14.
2 France and Britain: Piketty 2014: 116–117 figs. 3.1–2.
3 Moyo and Chambati 2013a: 2; Moyo 2013: 33–34, 42, 43 table 2.2; Sadomba 2013: 79–80, 84–85, 88. For Mexico, cf. herein, chapter 8, pp. 241–242.
4 Powelson 1988: 176 (reforms); for the context, see Batten 1986; Farris 1993: 34–57; Kuehn 2014: 10–17.
5 Leonard 2011: 2 (quote), 32–33; Tuma 1965: 74–81, 84–91; Leonard 2011: 52–58.
6 Powelson 1988: 104–105, 109.
7 Powelson 1988: 129–131 (Bulgaria); Barraclough 1999: 16–17 (Guatemala).
8 You n.d.: 13, 15–16; Barraclough 1999: 34–35; You n.d.: 43 table 3; Lipton 2009: 286 table 7.2; You n.d.: 23; and see esp. You 2015: 68–75. Estimates for the 1960s vary from 0.2 to 0.55 but center on the 0.30s: 0.34, 0.38, or 0.39. For the central importance of security concerns and American influence in driving policy, see You 2015: 85–86.
9 South Vietnam: Powelson 1988: 303. Taiwan: Barraclough 1999: 35; You n.d.: 13–14, 16–17, 27; You 2015: 68–69, 75–78, 86–87; also Albertus 2015: 292–297. Chen Cheng, the architect of land reform, expressly defined land reform as a means of depriving communist agitators of “propagandistic weapons” (quoted by You 2015: 86).
10 Romania: see Eidelberg 1974: 233 n.4 for references to this position, not shared by Eidelberg himself (234). Chile: Barraclough 1999: 20–28. See also Jarvis 1989 on the later unraveling of the reform’s redistributive effects, mostly via sales by smallholders.
11 Peru: Barraclough 1999: 29–30; Albertus 2015: 190–224, who emphasizes the rift between the ruling military and the landed elite. Even so, considering that the Peruvian land Gini was inordinately high to begin with (in the mid-0.9s), even robustly redistributive outcomes left it high, in the mid-0.8s: Lipton 2009: 280. Other countries: Lipton 2009: 275; Diskin 1989: 433; Haney and Haney 1989; Stringer 1989: 358, 380. El Salvador: Strasma 1989, esp. 408–409, 414, 426.
12 Quote from Al-Ahram on September 4, 1952, quoted by Tuma 1965: 152. Albertus 2015: 282–287 (Egypt); Lipton 2009: 294 (Iraq). Sri Lanka: Samaraweera 1982: 104–106. Since then, village expansion and regularization of encroachments have been the main mechanisms of adding land to smallholdings: World Bank 2008: 5–11.
13 Lipton 2009: 285–286 table 7.2. Cf. also Thiesenheusen 1989a: 486–488. Albertus 2015: 137–140 offers a more optimistic assessment regarding Latin America, where more than half of all farmland was subject to reform-related transfers between 1930 and 2008 (8–9), but it is telling that some the most successful redistributions occurred in Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua alongside Chile, Mexico, and Peru (140). Venezuela: Barraclough 1999: 19–20.
14 Roselaar 2010, esp. 221–289.
15 You 2015: 78–81 (Philippines); Lipton 2009: 284–294 (South Asia); Hooglund 1982: 72, 89–91 (Iran). Increased inequality in landownership is not an uncommon outcome of land reform: see, e.g., Assuncão 2006: 23–24 for Brazil.
16 Spain: Santiago-Caballero 2011: 92–93. In Guadalajara, its effect on inequality remained modest: 88–89.
17 Zébitch 1917: 19–21, 33; Kršljanin 2016, esp. 2–12. For other cases since 1900, see Albertus 2015: 271–273 table 8.1.
18 Barraclough 1999: 17 (Puerto Rico); Tuma 1965: 103 (Ireland).
19 Survey: Albertus 2015: 271–273 table 8.1 (twenty-seven of thirty-one “major” land reforms, defined as those in which at least 10 percent of cultivable land changed hands over a continuous period with at least one year in which more than 1 percent was expropriated). For two of the other four—Egypt and Sri Lanka—see herein. Of all fifty-four land reforms, thirty-four, or 63 percent, in Albertus’s data set are associated with the aforementioned factors. Albertus himself stresses the critical importance of coalitional splits between landed and political elites that made land reform possible, often under conditions of autocracy (esp. 2015: 26–59). His findings are fully consistent with my own perspective.
20 Lipton 2009: 130. For the reasons given herein, his examples—South Korea and Taiwan—do not qualify as genuinely nonviolent reforms. For problems with land reform implementation in general, see 127, 131–132, 145–146. Tuma 1965: 179 derives this conclusion from his global survey of land reform: “the more fundamental the crisis and the more widespread it is, the more imperative, radical, and likely the reform appears to be.” He also distinguishes between reforms that unfold within a private property framework and are limited in scope, which preserve inequality or may even increase it, and those that eliminate private tenure through collectivization and do eliminate wealth concentration (222–230).
21 For China, see herein, chapter 2, pp. 63–64, 69 and esp. chapter 6, pp. 182–183. For all we can tell, the Solonic reforms in Athens did not involve actual land redistribution, and the nature of debt relief remains obscure. Moreover, they may have been influenced by foreign policy incentives: see herein, chapter 6, p. 192. Link 1991: 56–57, 133, 139; Fuks 1984: 71, 19.
22 Hodkinson 2000: 399; Cartledge and Spawforth 1989: 42–43, 45–47, 54, 57–58, 70, 78. The Greek data also mesh well with Albertus’s 2015 emphasis on the importance of autocracy in implementing land reform.
23 Hudson 1993: 8–9, 15–30, 46–47 (Mesopotamia); Leviticus 25, with Hudson 1993: 32–40, 54–64. See also more generally Hudson and Van De Mieroop 2002. It is astonishing that Graeber 2011, in his global survey of debt, does not properly address this question.
24 Draper 2010, esp. 94–95, 106–107, 164, 201.
25 Schmidt-Nowara 2010; 2011: 90–155 provides recent overviews.
26 Álvarez-Nogal and Prados de la Escosura 2013: 9, 18–21. See also herein, chapter 3, p. 99 fig. 3.3.
27 Atkinson and Morelli 2011: 9–11, 35–42; Alvaredo and Gasparini 2015: 753. Atkinson and Morelli 2011: 42–48; Morelli and Atkinson 2015 find that rising inequality has not been significantly correlated with the outbreak of economic crises.
28 Bordo and Meissner 2011: 11–14, 18–19 (periodization); Saez and Zucman 2016: Online Appendix table B1 (wealth shares; cf. previously Wolff 1996: 436 table 1, with 440 fig. 1); WWID (income shares); Turchin 2016a: 78 fig. 4.1, 190.
29 The top 1 percent income share and the overall income Gini coefficient remained flat between 1932 and 1939: WWID; Smolensky and Plotnick 1993: 6 fig. 2. Wolff 1996: 436 table 1 observes a partial recovery in top wealth shares between 1933 and 1939 whereas Saez and Zucman 2016: Online Appendix table B1 document an ongoing reduction.
30 For the Great Recession see Piketty and Saez 2013; Meyer and Sullivan 2013 (USA); Jenkins, Brandolini, Micklewright, and Nolan, eds. 2013, esp. 80 fig. 2.19, 234–238 (Western countries up to 2009). See also Piketty 2014: 296.
31 See herein, chapter 5, pp. 167–169 and chapter 6, pp. 192–194.
32 Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo, and Robinson 2015: 1902–1909 (literature review), 1913–1917 (data), 1918–1927 (effect on taxes), 1928–1935 (effect on inequality), 1954 (reasons for heterogeneity). The observed effect on disposable income Ginis is small—about 2 to 3 points (1928). Their findings expand on those of more limited earlier studies that likewise failed to identify a connection between democracy and redistributional and welfare policies, such as Mulligan, Gil, and Sala-i-Martin 2004, and represent a departure from some of their own earlier arguments (e.g., Acemoglu and Robinson 2000). For economic growth and inequality, see herein, chapter 13, pp. 368–374.
33 Partisanship and centralized bargaining: Scheve and Stasavage 2009: 218, 229–230, 233–239. Top income tax rates: Scheve and Stasavage 2016: 63–72, esp. figs. 3.5–7.
34 Unionization: see herein, chapter 5, pp. 165–167. Asian countries: WWID.