there was a time when nobody owned the land. when humans were sparse, land was abundant. Hunting and gathering defined life in the early days of human history. Small bands of humans foraged on the land to survive and moved as needed in response to the seasonal shifts of critical resources. Times of plenty were both exceptional and brief, and the tools to replicate and elongate these moments were rudimentary, ensuring that human populations remained small. Only a few million of our Homo sapiens ancestors roamed the earth as recently as 12,000 years ago.
In the absence of land ownership, there was no meaningful political power to be obtained in land. Yet humanity’s relationship to the land still defined the nature of life and society, such as it was. With populations constrained and resources limited to what could be foraged seasonally or stored, human lifestyles were ecologically sustainable out of necessity, and the social, economic, and racial stratification we see today simply did not exist.
A shift began to occur around 10,000 BC. In a few isolated pockets of the world, sedentary communities and cultivated plants emerged. The act of a community settling into a particular place was most notable in wetland areas near the migration routes of fish, birds, and other larger animals.1 After another 5,000 years, permanent agricultural towns were taking hold, relying mainly on planted crops and domesticated livestock.
Key to these transformations were abundance and surplus. Living in a single place year-round was only sustainable if humans harnessed natural local abundance or created it through agricultural production and animal husbandry. Prime lands easily suitable for generating this kind of abundance were limited, and the ways in which that land and its surplus would be used were consequential. So it was that in these early societies, small as they were, land began to shape power.
Those who controlled the land controlled the surplus, and therefore valuable resources that could be used in support of further accumulation and social status. This principle explains why the earliest administrative cuneiform tablets, from the city of Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia circa 3300 to 3100 BC, are lists of grain rations and taxes as well as labor and slaves. The Treaty of Mesilim, a stele inscribed in cuneiform from the region dating to 2550 BC, provides some of the earliest evidence of a conflict over land between two warring city-states. By around 2300 BC, scribes in the region were recording details about the land on clay tablets, most likely as properties were sold or boundaries disputed.2
The importance of land only grew with the passage of several thousand more years as some human societies, mainly in parts of the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, began to grow larger. The gradual building of knowledge and trade as well as agricultural and other technologies sustained an increase of over thirtyfold in human populations by the year 0, when nearly 200 million humans walked the earth.3 There is clear archaeological evidence from ancient Greece and Rome of systematic divisions and demarcation of land by this time. Rome even opened an archive in 78 BC for the deposit of property maps and associated documents. The first proto-states had formed, shunting surplus from agriculture into the creation of priestly classes, tax collectors, medical specialists, and standing armies. Those who controlled the land and its surplus used these new specialists to gain privileged access to the afterlife, extend their lifespans, and conquer neighboring groups to appropriate their resources and labor.
Land had acquired enough influence on power by this point that it began to spark some of the first documented attempts at revolutionary land redistribution. Land concentration advanced for several hundred years during the height of the Roman Republic. Roman aristocrats and provincial elites busily gobbled up conquered territories, slave labor from conquered lands, and the smallholdings of modest farmers, who were progressively forced into seasonal or wage labor. Some landholders sought ever greater wealth through lucrative tax farming contracts, while others chased power in the form of political office, such as senator or magistrate. Starting in 133 BC, this elite class faced an unprecedented challenge. First Tiberius Gracchus and then his brother were elected as tribunes by the Roman plebeians, the common folk who owned little or no land but were nevertheless afforded the vote. The brothers used their power to challenge the basis of aristocratic power through legislation aimed at land reallocation in favor of poor farmers. The reaction was swift and decisive. Each was put to death in turn.
Around the same time, half the world away in the Oaxaca Valley in southern Mexico, land had become coupled with power among the Zapotec at Monte Albán. This complex society formed one of Mesoamerica’s largest settlements. A small but powerful group of Zapotec nobles resided at a complex of temples and ceremonial sites at the leveled top of a mountain that commanded a towering position over the agricultural fields of commoners in the extensive valley below. The nobles conducted ritual practices, wore elaborate clothing and adornments, honored their dead with lavish burials, and waged war to capture the territory of neighboring groups, while commoners had to sacrifice their labor and a portion of their harvests to them.4
Land power was producing societies, cultures, and wealth, but it was also entrenching inequality. Social and economic stratification deepened in unprecedented ways as these societies grew. Small sets of wealthy elites rose as rulers, while the ruled lost basic freedoms and autonomy that their ancestors had taken for granted. Those societies that grew large enough to contain racial and ethnic diversity, such as ancient Greece and Rome, produced nascent or proto-racial and ethnic hierarchies linked to social status—which, in turn, derived from land.5
With the advent of established agriculture and technologies such as the plow, gender roles transformed.6 Men worked more in the fields, while women spent more time in the home processing harvests and doing housework. Higher fertility rates meant that women spent more time in child-rearing. In ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, the adoption of the plow between 6000 and 4000 BC converted men from hunters and herdsmen into farmers and pushed women out of the fields. The result was a shift toward male domination of society and beliefs, including a transition from female to male gods and priests.7 As the plow slowly spread across the world over the course of several thousand years, male domination followed it.
The pursuit of abundance could also bring destruction. In the early years of human history, populations were so small that environmental damage was minimal and quickly reversible. But growing populations had the power to despoil the land at a rapid clip, particularly as rulers encouraged subjects to cut down forests and till an ever greater extent of the land in order to increase surplus. The extensive upland peat bogs of Ireland stand as a monument to a growing early farming and agricultural population that cleared the island’s forests from about 3000 to 500 BC and acidified the land, pushing agriculture into every usable nook and cranny. Nearly half the world away and several hundred years later, a northern Chinese population boom during the Han dynasty drove deforestation of most of the North China Plain and serious degradation of the local environment. Still another millennium after that, the newly established people of Easter Island deforested their land between the start of a population increase in AD 1200 and the end of the seventeenth century, driving plant and animal life to extinction and triggering war and societal collapse.
The sixteenth century brought a new innovation that supercharged the link between land and power: the creation of the nation-state. Over the course of several hundred years, France, Britain, and Spain firmed up their borders, established a monopoly on the use of force, and raised standing armies and centralized bureaucracies. Germany, Italy, and most of Europe and Latin America followed suit by the nineteenth century. The power of land had swiftly transformed the world into something that would have been unrecognizable to early hunter-gatherers and sedentary communities.
All the while, human populations ballooned. Humanity numbered 1 billion by the early nineteenth century. In a world where agriculture remained the economic engine of the newly formed states, land was simultaneously more valuable, and under more demographic pressure, than ever before.
Land defined and conditioned virtually every aspect of social life. The ownership and productivity of land determined the houses people lived in, the work they did, the food they ate, the debts they owed, the social relationships they maintained, and the annual and daily routines they performed. Many people scraped by, tilling the soil for others and living impoverished lives of subservience. A far smaller share of the world’s population owned the land either as autonomous farmers or as large landowners who profited from the labor of others.
For the world’s new states, delineating the ownership of specific lands became critical to defining borders, administering populations, and collecting taxes. Professional bureaucracies began systematically mapping and tracking land ownership and sharing that information with tax collectors. The creation, stabilization, and standardization of currencies enabled the surplus from land to be easily exchanged in various ways and translated into different kinds of coercive, market, and political power. Britain established a national bank in 1694 and adopted the gold standard in 1816, and over this time the supply of currency and confidence in it increased. France reestablished the franc as a national currency in 1795 and created a national bank in 1800. Bureaucrats and tax collectors could now translate harvests of wheat and barley into pounds and francs and deposit the revenue in banks that could be tapped to fund roadbuilding, wars, and empires. Power could be projected in new and profound ways as communications and transportation advanced. Leading states sought to control more land and could do so across the globe through colonization funded on the back of surplus.
Who held power in this world depended on the land they held. Kings, lords, and other rulers from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries consolidated vast tracts of land and resources while others in society struggled as landless paupers. Landholding came to define citizenship and political power. It helped to define and prop up male-biased gender norms. It shaped racial and class hierarchies and structured opportunities and freedoms. And land became mismanaged and overexploited, with irreversible consequences for biodiversity and environmental health. The increasing pressure would eventually cause the entire system of land ownership to explode. A great reshuffle loomed, and it would usher in the world we live in today.
landholding and its connection with power did not evolve the same way across all societies. There were regions of the world where hunter-gathering and small, long-standing, sedentary communities remained largely untouched. And as landholding and power evolved in lockstep in early states, it settled into different patterns shaped by culture, climate, and the exercise of social and economic control.
Five major patterns of landholding predominated after 1500 and into the 1800s: indigenous landholding yet to be perturbed by nascent nation-building or expanding empires; lord-peasant landholding; landlord-tenant landholding; the hacienda system; and independent smallholder farming. With the exception of most indigenous and smallholding societies, all of these concentrated land in the hands of a few people in unprecedented ways. These modes of landholding encouraged, created, and allowed our most persistent modern problems—racism, sexism, climate change, poverty, and inequality—to take root.
Indigenous groups still occupied and stewarded the majority of the land around the globe at the dawn of the 1500s.8 Western Europe at this point was dominated by large landowners and poised to build nation-states and empires. The dominant pattern within the Americas, Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, and northern and central Eurasia was one of dispersed populations and plentiful land and resources. There were exceptions, however. Some, such as the Aztecs, Incans, and Hans, settled in specific locales and built villages, cities, and even empires, establishing agriculture. Land had become linked to power in these complex societies through the control of agricultural surplus, labor, and territory.
But most indigenous peoples continued to live nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles as hunter-gatherers or lived in small, relatively autonomous sedentary communities.9 Their relationships with the land were intimate, complex, and variable, but in no case did they hold Western European notions of exclusive, individual, and alienable property ownership.10 Land held value in its support of vital resources, such as plants and game, as well as for its spiritual and cultural significance. But it did not enable the personal use and exercise of power at a grand scale.
The Innu of Quebec, for instance, prior to French contact in the early 1600s, lived in small groups tied together by kinship, subsisting through hunting, fishing, and gathering. They seasonally followed the harvest of native plants, the eel run down the Saint Lawrence River, and shifting groups of animals.11 The nearby eastern Cree of James Bay lived in a similar fashion. For this group, a special link to the land came through hunting grounds. Despite extended kin group “control” over certain areas, that control was permeable and limited, in practice resembling stewardship more than ownership as commonly understood today. It could accommodate other people who were mainly or seasonally affiliated with different hunting grounds.12 Farther south, in coastal New England, the Wampanoag and others combined hunting and gathering with the seasonal cultivation of crops such as corn, beans, and squash. These practices shaped a semisedentary lifestyle punctuated by periodic relocations. Control and authority over land was layered and in constant flux. Some areas were used collectively and others individually, and land was also subject to the claims of and relations with a local chief.13
For these indigenous peoples, the years ahead would be riven by the disruptions of European colonialization, which amounted to a mass appropriation of the land they lived on and its reallocation to potentates, ambitious and rapacious explorers, and settlers. Some indigenous societies nonetheless managed to remain intact well into the 1800s as states formed in Europe and then the Americas. Most hunter-gatherers and independent sedentary communities in western North America, inland Africa, Europe’s northernmost fringes, the steppe and mountainous regions of Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia and Australia survived the early formation of states and the onslaught of European colonization. Communities in the deep forests and mountain folds of the Americas and Eurasia, the uplands of Southeast Asia, and interior Africa prevailed into the twentieth century, and a few survive in the present day. Some of these indigenous communities began to adapt their livelihoods and links to the land following initial contact with settlers. But land relations typically retained traditional aspects, and few, if any, groups entirely adopted Western property rights unless forced to do so.14
In much of the world, however, by the dawn of the nineteenth century many indigenous communities had been stripped of their traditions and customs and incorporated and assimilated into the growing economies of modern states and empires. Centuries of feudalism, colonialism, and statecraft had made land ownership extremely unequal, drawing a tight link between land and power in most of the world.
lord-peasant landholding predominated across most of eastern, central, and southern Europe and Russia between 1500 and the 1800s as well as in prerevolutionary France. In these places, a small number of elites owned large tracts of land while peasants eked out a living farming that land at the landowners’ pleasure and direction. Landowners even owned the peasants themselves in some places through serfdom. The ownership of land, its products, and its people gave landowners enormous power and rendered peasants essentially powerless from cradle to grave.
East of the Elbe River, in what is now eastern Germany and western Poland, and was then Prussia, a classic story unfolded. Knights’ estates dominated the landscape throughout most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in several centuries prior. Estate owners known as Junkers derived aristocratic legal and political privileges from their control over local and provincial government. They rang in the dawn of the nineteenth century as feudal lords who had almost complete control over their workers and received compulsory dues and labor from them. As one local count put it, “The dependents were chained indissolubly only to the authority of the Rittergut [estate], whose owner could sell the estate to a new lord without hindrance and, with it, the dependents.”15 Conditions were characterized by “harsh treatment and oppression” by landowners and “hate, recalcitrance, ignorance, [and] brutality” on the part of serfs.16
In 1807, after the Junker-dominated military led Prussia to an embarrassing defeat against Napoleon, Prussian leader Baron vom Stein abolished serfdom, calling it “the last vestige of slavery.”17 But landowner backlash and weak enforcement enabled forced labor to continue until mid-century. Even after that, landowners remained lords for another seventy-five years. Peasants continued to toil for them, first as resident estate laborers who performed work at low rates under poor conditions, and then as hired local or migrant wage laborers. Landowners continued to use the power that derived from their land to resist and dodge reform and persist in exploitation long after nominal reform.
Prussia’s most famous Junker, Otto von Bismarck, was a product of this structure. Born into an upper-class landowning family, he rose through Prussia’s political system, which heavily favored landowners. He eventually unified the disparate lands into a single Germany in 1871 and turned it into a European powerhouse. During the 1840s, as his political career began, Bismarck supervised two family estates. One, spanning about 1,260 acres, employed numerous on-site contractual laborers and smallholders who performed traditional unpaid labor services for the family. The other, which produced grain, wool, and potato whiskey over 1,390 acres, housed 44 contractual workers in thatched-roof huts.18 Bismarck’s properties were far from the largest in the area; some estates were over 100 times that size, encompassing over 190 square miles. They operated nearly as kingdoms in their own right.
landlord-tenant landholding defined life in much of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Ireland, and India into the 1800s. While this pattern dated back to 1500 in many of these locations, it spread in the 1600s and 1700s with colonialism in places as far-flung as Ireland and India. Landlords owned the land in these arrangements and leased it out to tenant farmers. This practice gave landowners the power to set rent payments and evict disfavored tenants. Many tenants consequently lived in fear of landlords, owed them sizable debts, and had little recourse against abuses. The concentration of land in these societies further empowered landlords by granting them disproportionate economic and political power, which they used to set favorable rules and regulations.
Take the case of Ireland. For centuries, the Irish toiled as an exploited underclass of tenants in their homeland. By the 1870s, fewer than 10,000 British landlords controlled the vast majority of Irish land and profited from the labor of millions of Irish farmers. The Irish living under these arrangements suffered from poverty, famine, and the elimination of their language and customs.19
An economic downturn and a set of failed harvests then sparked the tenant-led Land War, with Irish tenants, particularly in the poorer western regions, bridling under the poverty and indignity of their subordinate positions. A grassroots movement of land activism swept the country. Activists and organizers gathered thousands of tenants in hundreds of meetings. At one meeting in Milltown, County Galway, on June 15, 1879, a land advocate named Thomas Hastings vividly recalled witnessing a local landlord, Lord Sligo, forcing his tenants to drop their rights to land improvements and agree to unfair land valuations: “I remember… my indignation to see those miserable slaves crouching down in the dust before the landlord, and signing away the last particle of right, which secured them a guarantee for their daily food.” Underscoring the inequity of the landlord system at the same meeting, one of the leaders of the Land War, Michael Davitt, called it “a vampire system… which sucks the very life-blood of a people.”20
Seventy-five years later and half the world away in Long Bow village in Shanxi, China, the Irish situation found a parallel. Although the population was relatively poor overall and there were no cultural differences among villagers, those who owned more land lived comfortably, while those who rented from landlords, or who worked for landlords because they did not hold enough of their own land, struggled even to survive. As one of the rare accounts from the time put it, “The poor who rented land or worked out as hired laborers got less than half the crops they tilled, while the rich got the surplus from many acres. That is why some were able to build enormous underground tombs marked for eternity, or so they thought… while others when they died were thrown into a hole in the ground with only a reed mat wrapped around them and a few shovelfuls of the earth to mark the place.”21
The wealthiest landowner in town, Sheng Ching-ho, held about twenty-three acres of land, some pigs and sheep, and a distillery. He operated as a loan shark to poor villagers in desperate need, snapping up their land and tools when they could not repay on the terms. One poor farmer, named Shen, borrowed $4 from Ching-ho to buy medicine for his sick wife and indentured his son Fa-liang to him for seven years to guarantee the loan. At the end of seven years, because of interest, deductions for broken tools, and paying for replacement labor when Fa-liang was sick, Shen owed more than the original debt. He had to rip out and sell the timbers in his roof to recover his son. As Fa-liang told it, “All the years I worked for Ching-ho I never had a full stomach. I was hungry all the time. Every day he ate solid enough food but he gave me only a little soup with millet in it. You could count the grains that were floating around in the water.”22
an entirely different way of dealing with land, called the hacienda system, prevailed in Latin America under European domination. As Spain and Portugal colonized the Americas beginning in 1492, they doled out enormous tracts of land to European colonizers, along with the right to tax and demand labor from the indigenous inhabitants living on the land. By the 1500s this practice evolved into an estate system characterized by forced labor and a glaring disparity between powerful landowners of European descent and their impoverished indigenous workforces. Plantations in the southern United States, the Caribbean, and parts of Brazil that ran on slavery echoed the hacienda in important ways but were a sort of variant. One major difference was that plantations imported their forced labor from Africa rather than relying on local indigenous communities. The hacienda system endured well into the 1800s, and in many cases into the mid-1900s or even later. Traditional plantations ended in the United States after the Civil War but endured in a modified form under sharecropping and Jim Crow laws into the twentieth century. In a similar fashion in the Caribbean, the foundations of the plantation system shook with the abolition of slavery in the 1800s but did not crumble in many places until the 1900s.
One prototypical example of the hacienda is Huarán, nestled at 10,000 feet above sea level in Peru’s Sacred Valley some forty-five miles from Cusco. The hacienda spanned nearly twenty-five square miles and incorporated hundreds of people who lived on and worked the land, serving the owner in semifeudal fashion over many generations up until 1971. When a military government came to power in 1968 and promised to dismantle haciendas, Huarán’s workers seized the opening and rained down a hailstorm of petitions for relief to the Ministry of Agriculture.
In a letter on January 15, 1970, a group of poor peasants petitioned to the ministry: “We have worked the hacienda [Hacienda Huarán] from a young age and following our parents, without any payment and under conditions of servitude, suffering a series of abuses in the form of orders that we are forced to comply with in an exacting and inhuman manner.… We all work irregular and long hours, even during the night. We have served as shepherds, farmers, irrigators of extensive croplands, and more, which has given us sicknesses and prevented us from any time to educate ourselves. We are all illiterate, drowning in ignorance and servitude.… We want justice.” They also explained how the link between the owner’s land and political power kept them silent: “These abuses and the permanent submission we were subjected to by the powerful owner of the hacienda, who himself has been Department Prefect, prevented us from denouncing him and forced us to live under a permanent threat of reprisals if we were to go to any authorities to claim unpaid salaries or appeal against abuses.”23 They stamped the letter, written by a representative on their behalf, with their fingerprints because they could not write.
That same day, a group of small farmers neighboring the hacienda sent another petition to the ministry. It recounted, “As neighbors and just like the workers we have suffered a permanent form of abuses from the Hacienda Huarán of Oscar Fernández Oblitas, who keeps neighboring communities of small property holders practically asphyxiated for having the audacity to not sell him our lands for the continued growth of his hacienda.”24
Other workers at Huarán reported being pushed to smaller and smaller pieces of land for personal use while paying exorbitant fees for land access, being entirely dispossessed of their land, having animals stolen or killed by Fernández, contracting illnesses from unknown agrochemicals, being denied educational opportunities, suffering arbitrary arrest and incarceration in a prison Fernández himself ran, being denied social benefits when they could no longer work, and having personal property stolen by Fernández.
For all of their differences, in societies defined by lord-peasant landholding, landlord-tenant landholding, or the hacienda system, a very small percentage of the population owned most of the land. In many of them, the largest 5 percent of landowners owned 80 to 90 percent of the land or more. This reality colored almost every aspect of daily life for the vast majority of the population in these societies, where cities were in their infancy and industrialization lay decades ahead.
Large landowners commanded large groups of workers, dominated business and the economy, and held the most important national and local political offices. Economic and political inequality intersected with social inequality: landowners were predominantly men, and they came from racially privileged backgrounds in societies that were diverse. Meanwhile, most rural inhabitants eked out a living working for large landowners, frequently through relationships of servitude, or rented their land from large landowners at often unfair rates.
in stark contrast to societies defined by lord-peasant landholding, landlord-tenant landholding, or the hacienda system, there were also outposts of independent smallholder farming in places such as the northeastern United States, eastern Canada, northern Argentina, eastern Australia, and the southern tip of Africa. European powers, beginning in the 1500s and 1600s—and in the late 1700s in Australia—doled out small tracts of land to European settlers in these areas, where the land was not conducive to large-scale agriculture and where malaria and other endemic diseases were limited, rendering them habitable. As with the land, power within smallholding societies was far more widely distributed than in lord-peasant, landlord-tenant, or hacienda societies. Far more people within smallholder societies became literate, won the right to vote, and were the masters of their own destinies.
The New England region of the United States is among the best-known examples. After initial settlement in the early 1600s, small-scale farming became a mainstay of New England’s economy in the colonial era. Settlements were initially laid out as fairly compact townships with modest plots of land to enable farmers to support themselves. The public land survey system systematized settlement at the end of the 1700s and stipulated a method for subdividing townships into sections and lots. Land speculators and companies built a business model on carving up large territories into family-sized plots to sell to the growing ranks of settlers and their many children. This model eventually expanded to the Midwest and it was replicated through the 1862 Homestead Act, which granted settlers 160 acres of land in exchange for a promise to farm it. Widespread small-scale landholding fostered local self-government and common investments in schools and infrastructure. Early political figures—such as Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveholder and plantation owner—and observers (notably Alexis de Tocqueville) underscored how the dispersion of political and economic power associated with smallholder farming was a bedrock of democracy.
My own family history in part traces this pattern. My maternal ancestors left Freiburg in what was then Baden, a territory within the German Confederation, in 1820 and sailed to Philadelphia. From there, they trekked to northwestern Pennsylvania, where they bought 170 acres of unimproved land from the Holland Land Company and set to farming. Within a few generations they became store owners and engineers, and a few eventually moved to the Detroit area to work in the auto industry and for General Electric.
Ancestors on my father’s side were less fortunate. They struggled under the thumb of lord-peasant landholding for generations in southern and eastern Poland. Southern Poland was long a poor and economically isolated outpost of the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburgs abolished serfdom following a wave of revolutions that swept Europe in 1848, and peasants came to own small plots of their land. An uprising in eastern Poland against Russia delivered farmers from serfdom shortly after, in 1864. But the shadow of generations of serfdom was dark. Grinding poverty persisted, and the brutality of World War I finally drove my grandfather and his father to migrate to the United States. They soon made their way to Detroit, the elder one taking a job driving a metro train.
* * *
over the past two centuries, landholding has shifted in tectonic fashion. Driven by political and economic forces, and under increasing demographic pressure as populations grew, country after country has reallocated land within their societies. Some countries appropriated land from indigenous communities and gave it to settlers. Some seized land from large landowners and gave it to their workers. Some started 200 years ago, and some are still tinkering with the formula and awarding new tracts of land today. But few countries and landholding families have weathered the Great Reshuffle unscathed.
The appropriation of indigenous lands for settlement dates back to the early days of European colonization, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it reached a fever pitch as new nation-states sought to populate and dominate their territories and decimate or assimilate minority groups. The most familiar examples of this kind of land reallocation have defined the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and much of Latin America. Elements of this type of settlement continue today in places such as the West Bank and Xinjang, China.
The reallocation of land from large landowners to workers began in the modern era with the French Revolution and spread across Europe with the 1848 revolutions, the world wars, and the introduction of communism in Eastern Europe. The end of World War II brought the Great Reshuffle to East Asia, and decolonization sparked land reallocation in the Middle East and North Africa in the following decades. Latin American countries reallocated land in the context of military coups and revolutions throughout the twentieth century. Some countries today, including Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa, continue to conduct this kind of land reallocation at a large scale.
How land has been reallocated has had profound consequences for life in every society touched by the Great Reshuffle. It determines a society’s winners and losers for generations, and it can encourage prosperity or snuff it out, flatten hierarchy or entrench it, map out a green future or pave the way for extraction. In Mexico, for instance, in the decades after the country’s early twentieth-century revolution, the government reallocated nearly half of privately owned land to collective groups of peasants. Male heads of household won nearly all the land. Weak property rights hampered productivity, and when the government tried to correct by pushing productivity-enhancing chemical fertilizers and pesticides on farmers, it wrecked ecosystems, soils, and watersheds. Even though over 80 percent of the population now lives in urban areas, Mexican land reallocation’s legacy of gender inequality, underdevelopment, emigration, and environmental damage still hobbles the country a century later.
Some forms of landholding have survived the Great Reshuffle, while others have been made obsolete. Indigenous landholding was severely diminished, targeted in most parts of the world by settlers. Yet the smallholder farming that predated the Great Reshuffle flourished as many settlers adopted aspects of that model, and as more contemporary states experimented with alternatives to mass collectivization.25
Lord-peasant landholding, landlord-tenant landholding, and the hacienda and plantation systems collapsed in many places through land reallocation. Even in the places where they managed to escape reallocation, the forces of modernization and the fears of potential reallocation transformed them. In some cases, large landowners modified their relationships with workers while continuing to dominate them; in other cases landowners mechanized their production and expelled workers; and in still other cases landowners began to hedge their bets in agriculture by diversifying their investments into industry and finance. Because large landowners did not lose their land in this process, they did not lose their power. Sharp inequalities from the countryside reproduced themselves in cities, and land power continued to shape social life for generations.
The holdings of the British monarchy today are the transformed remnants of a bygone era of lord-peasant landholding. For centuries, British monarchs held a vast collection of landed estates that operated on feudal principles and provided royal revenues to them from a legion of peasant workers. Eventually the British Parliament forced the surrender of that revenue. But the Crown Estate persists today as a massive agglomeration of nearly 200,000 acres of tenanted farmland and urban real estate along with vast marine holdings, forests, and more. Its management funds a considerable portion of the House of Windsor’s activities.
The United Kingdom has managed to achieve a peace of sorts between its old landed aristocracy and the parliamentary democracy that currently prevails, but the United States exemplifies a far rockier transformation. The United States today lives and breathes the consequences of failing to fully reckon with the southern plantation system. The debate over plantation slavery drove the country into civil war in the 1860s. After the North’s victory, in what became known as the “Forty Acres and a Mule” scheme, the Union Army and US government sought to reallocate land from white plantation owners to formerly enslaved Black workers in a band spanning about thirty miles along the coast running from northern Florida to South Carolina. But President Andrew Johnson, who took office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and gathered support from white southerners, quickly peeled back this policy. Whites who had lost land recuperated nearly all of it. Many Blacks were forced into sharecropping and wage labor, often on the same land where they had been enslaved. Jim Crow laws blanketed the South with a racial apartheid that denied Blacks basic freedoms and opportunities, and segregationist real estate and banking practices ensured that land ownership would remain out of reach for many Black Americans long after mid-twentieth-century efforts at reforms had come and gone.
Our lives today are determined by the choices that were made when the land shifted hands during the Great Reshuffle. As every country’s most valuable tangible asset, land, and its uses and management, seeps into every social, economic, and political layer of society. It lingers there even as the economy and society change. To have any hope of grappling with humanity’s greatest problems, we must first decipher how the Great Reshuffle shaped the world we are living in.