on the evening of august 4, 1789, france’s national constituent Assembly gathered at the heart of French power at Versailles to grapple with a wave of unrest. The French Revolution had begun just weeks prior. King Louis XVI had been forced to recognize the authority of the assembly, which commoners had formed in order to reshape French society. But this act of recognition was not enough to keep revolution at bay. The country was now gripped by a panic known as the Great Fear as bands of peasants armed themselves and began attacking the landed nobility.
A raucous and dramatic session unfolded. Commoners had enlisted several sympathetic members of the nobility and clergy to give impassioned speeches denouncing their privileges and to renounce their titles. A cascade of denunciations unfolded as the session crept past midnight. By the early morning of August 5, the assembly had drawn up a series of orders to end centuries of feudal rights, noble privileges, and church tithes that had propped up a system of domination over peasants rooted in noble and church ownership and rights over land. It was the opening salvo of a campaign to shatter the centuries-old system and redistribute land from its old owners to new ones.
A new era in the reshuffling of land ownership and rights had begun. Three months later the assembly seized land owned by the Catholic Church, which had a state-sanctioned monopoly on religion and landholdings that amounted to about 7 percent of the land in the country.1 Local governments began auctioning off church property the following year. The Revolution then took an even more radical turn starting in the summer of 1792. Revolutionaries sought to vanquish the monarchy and the counterrevolutionary pushback from the nobility and church in a second phase of the Revolution. Nobles, clergymen, and wealthy landowners fled in large numbers. King Louis XVI was arrested and guillotined. The new republic’s government seized the large landholdings of wealthy emigrants, another roughly 4 percent of the country’s land, and sold it off.
These reforms radically reorganized French society. By reshuffling the ownership and use of land in France, they reordered the exercise of power.2 With the abolition of feudalism, the breakup of large properties, and the end of noble and clerical privileges rooted in land ownership, France ushered in a new age of emancipation and individual equality, one that not only transformed the country itself but also served as a model for revolution and emancipation elsewhere. Further reforms that reinforced this shift ranged from the abolition of primogeniture and the introduction of a proportional tax on income from land to, in subsequent decades, an initiative that mapped property ownership across France so as to undermine tax evasion and corruption by wealthy landowners.
The Revolution had many famous victims, but it also had many unsung beneficiaries, especially where the reshuffling of land was concerned. Small independent farms came to proliferate across rural France in the aftermath of the Revolution. Subjects became citizens. And eventually they became educated, creating the conditions the country needed in order to take advantage of the coming Industrial Revolution.
The French Revolution was not the first time in history that land power had been reshuffled. Land had been changing hands at an increasing pace for several centuries prior to the Revolution as colonialism spread. European colonizers had been appropriating indigenous lands community by community, first at the fringes of continents and increasingly in their interiors. But the French Revolution stands apart as a mass appropriation of lands from the European gentry. It marked a turning point in human history.
This moment also coincided with an inflection in human population growth. The global population has increased eightfold between 1800 and today, from 1 billion to 8 billion. Much like the moment in human history when the first permanent human settlements emerged, this period stands out as a new era. Accelerating population growth put unprecedented demand on access to land. Human beings spread out across continents, tilled over the prairies, and felled the forests at an unparalleled rate. Some long-settled areas, especially in Europe and parts of Asia, faced pressure as never before. In many places land became scarce for the first time in human history. Land’s connection to power became ironclad.
That scarcity of land and the resulting conflict over it set off a Great Reshuffle that came to France at the turn of the 1800s and that has repeated itself time and again across the globe ever since. At a scale simultaneously grand and rapid, countries undergoing the Great Reshuffle were forced to make decisions about who should own land and therefore who has power. This transformation was fueled by the spread and consolidation of nation-states and conflict for power, and it was made possible by more powerful standing armies and more formidable bureaucracies than the world had ever seen before. The Great Reshuffle came to different countries at different times, and in some places it is still ongoing.
in the years since the human population began increasing with stunning speed, what has made all the difference is not whether land power would be reshuffled, but how. Who gets the land, who loses it, how it can be used and shared, and how society will keep track of it has had profound consequences for prosperity, equality, and sustainability.
The winners and losers shifted as the reshuffling of land ownership made its way through time and space. Perhaps the most familiar pattern is the one that was most common at the outset of the Great Reshuffle: the taking of indigenous lands on a massive scale, which were then awarded to settlers. But this was just the beginning. Everywhere that land had become concentrated and scarce, people wanted more of it. That made land reallocation a popular, and at many times a populist, political move.
By the time of the French Revolution, governments were taking land not only from the indigenous population but also from some large landowners and reallocating it to others, often landless rural inhabitants. The reshuffle had turned within societies. No one was immune from it. In some cases, governments negotiated land purchases from landowners and sold or gave out the land in parcels to rural workers. But the classic examples of this approach to the Great Reshuffle, as in France, involved taking large estates by force.
Within the twentieth century alone, roughly half of countries around the globe at some point set about snatching the landholdings of large landowners and reallocating them to the landless or land poor.3 This affected around 2 billion people and continues to leave a mark on billions more. Massive land reallocations in China after its civil war, in Russia and Mexico following revolutions, and in many Eastern European countries under the shadow of the Iron Curtain are among the many examples of governments opting for a dramatic break with the past.
But the story doesn’t end with the reshuffling of the land. How the new landholders use their land and power has far-reaching effects on a nation’s future. The decision to take land from large landowners and give it to the landless is often accompanied by impassioned ideological justifications that revolve around fairness, equality, and even reparation. Relatedly, the choice to take indigenous land and give it to settlers is justified by arguments about prosperity, individual liberty, and opportunity. But before the yeoman farmer plows his homestead for the first time, and before the first harvest on a newly fashioned communal farm takes place, a great number of social consequences have already been locked in by the choices that were made about how the land can be used. Good intentions, dearly held beliefs, and impressive rhetorical justifications themselves do not ensure that the reshuffled society will be more free and less unequal.
There are four distinct types of land reallocation policies that have shaped the future of societies in distinct ways. These are settler reforms, collective reforms, land-to-the-tiller reforms, and cooperative reforms. Countries sometimes adopt mixed reforms that blend these types, but most frequently they choose a single path. Although these approaches to land reallocation are often seen as completely separate, if we view them together we can begin to make sense of the world they created.
We live in a world shaped by choices made during the Great Reshuffle. To have any hope of addressing today’s most pressing and persistent problems, we need to come to grips with the consequences of shaking up who owns the land.
SETTLER REFORMS
European powers started to explore and settle far-flung lands starting at the time of the Renaissance and the conclusion of centuries-long campaigns to expel Muslim populations from the Iberian Peninsula. Great Britain, France, and Spain in particular built sprawling empires that spanned continents. They fought dozens of wars contesting control over their new territories and bought and sold vast tracts of land knowing little about what these lands contained.
There was one thing that these lands all had in common, however: they all had indigenous peoples already living on them. Europeans viewed these people with both fascination and disdain, often relegating them to the category of inferior, uncivilized “savages.” While early colonizers periodically struck deals with indigenous peoples to stand out of their way, more often they pitted indigenous peoples against one another, sought to destroy or enslave them, or aimed to Christianize and civilize them.
Indigenous populations resisted where the newcomers posed a threat to their existence. Though initially outnumbered on the ground, imperial powers eventually deployed their greatest weapon to control and expand their empires: settlers.
Settlers served to populate newfound areas with subjects that could facilitate imperial territorial control. They also helped to fill government coffers by sending back resources from abroad. At the vanguard, colonial powers would send war veterans and social misfits to new territories. Other groups with a wider range of motivations later followed. The outflow of undesirable or volatile populations from the home country to the colony helped to relieve potentially threatening militarism, social and religious conflict, crime, and demographic pressure at home, though such settlers were prone to ignoring orders from their home country. In return for putting themselves on the front lines of empire, they became the beneficiaries of the first major land reallocation policy: settler reforms.
As we’ve seen, most of the land in the world was stewarded by indigenous peoples as of 1500, but by 1800 it was becoming difficult to avoid the incursions of modern imperialism. Indigenous groups continued to resist, but the Great Reshuffle cranked up the pressure. Settler reforms started by nibbling at the fringes of continents. Examples include the settlement of New England and Quebec along the Saint Lawrence River in North America, the tip of South Africa, and a few pockets of Latin America. But soon enough they began to spread across the globe and move deeper inland. Throughout the course of the 1800s, settler reforms accelerated rapidly and swept across vast swaths of territory around the globe.
Settler reforms typically involve land taken from an indigenous group, often in a frontier area, which is then granted to new settlers. Many of the most rapid and complete settler reforms have targeted hunter-gatherer communities in sparsely populated areas. These communities are especially vulnerable to dispossession because they inhabit territorial areas rather than fixed plots of land, making it easier to begin encroaching on their lands. Encroaching on indigenous lands often weakens those communities and creates conflict with settlers that can be used as a pretext for further removals. The culmination of these settler reforms are massive checkerboard arrangements of private land ownership where no such pattern previously existed.
Settler reforms are accelerated by aggressive and permissive settlement policies. The 1862 Homestead Act in the United States and similar programs have generated land rushes among settlers eager to lay claim to cheap or free indigenous lands that a government classifies as in the public domain.
There is no more jarring example than the 1889 Oklahoma land rush. As the early United States expanded its frontier from its foothold on the Eastern Seaboard, it began forcibly removing Native American peoples. Many were relocated to “Indian Territory,” a large expanse of land in the central United States that shrank over time into what eventually became Oklahoma. In 1866, the government moved the “Five Civilized Tribes,” which had been removed from the Southeast in the 1830s, to the eastern part of Indian Territory to make room for Plains Indians who faced ongoing removal.4 It left a 2-million-acre buffer of land “unassigned” in central Oklahoma. At noon on April 22, 1889, the government put this land up for homesteading by settlers. Some 50,000 settlers gathered at a starting line, and with the shot of a gun by a federal official, they rushed out in a dusty frenzy, each hoping to claim a 160-acre plot of land for a small registration fee. By the end of the day, nearly all 2 million acres had been claimed by settlers. Whites outnumbered Indians in what had been “Indian Territory” within a year. Settlers grabbed millions more acres of former Native American land in the territory by land run, land allotment, and auction over the next fifteen years.
great britain built one of the largest empires in history on the back of colonial land settlement. Three of the early crown jewels were its American, Canadian, and Australian colonies. At first hundreds, and then thousands, of British migrants crossed the oceans to start a new life in the colonies. Many arrived free. Others arrived as indentured servants, or, in Australia’s case, as convicts.
These colonies differed fundamentally from some of Britain’s other colonies, such as Egypt, India, and Jamaica. There the focus was on establishing a small administrative elite to extract resources from local populations rather than to conquer lands for new British settlement en masse.
As the American, Canadian, and Australian colonies expanded, settlers decimated indigenous populations through land appropriation, war, and the spread of new diseases. And they opened their doors to broader European immigration, especially after gaining independence from the British. Waves of Irish, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and Eastern European migrants arrived on their shores.
The initial divide between settlers and indigenous populations as “civilized” versus “savage,” Christian versus heathen, and white versus Indian shifted with these migrations and with the changing landscape of racial ideology. Settler and immigrant identification as “white” versus “non-white” became more common even as other European identities remained nested within the white category. This dichotomy built rather neatly on prior dichotomies and eventually came to structure society into a racial hierarchy with whiteness at the privileged top of the pyramid.5
The Spanish and the French replicated these British patterns through colonial land settlement elsewhere. The Spanish appropriated indigenous land in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Colonizers and the Catholic Church teamed up to seize territory, extract resources through forced indigenous and imported slave labor, and spread Catholicism and the Spanish language to indigenous peoples who were viewed as inferior. In small pockets of the Americas, such as northern Argentina and parts of Costa Rica, initial land settlement was considerably more egalitarian. Many settlers in those places received smaller plots of land that they farmed or ranched on their own rather than relying on indigenous labor. Those areas underwent spurts of development more like the northeastern United States, eastern Canada, or eastern Australia than like Mexico or the Peruvian or Bolivian highlands.
In North Africa, the French confiscated land from indigenous North Africans as part of an ambitious colonial project and granted it to French settlers who were viewed as more productive, deserving, and civilized than local Muslim populations. This racial lens came to infuse every aspect of colonial governance in North Africa. And it endured until France’s colonies won independence in the decades after World War II. The French took a more extractive settlement approach in Indochina, focusing on drawing resources out of the territories through a small French administrative elite rather than settling large numbers of French citizens as farmers on the land.
While the British, Spanish, and French empires perfected the art of settlement through colonialism, many countries have since replicated this pattern through domestic settler reforms. Some of them are the very same countries that won independence from these three European colonial masters. The United States, Canada, Australia, and Mexico are but a few examples of countries that continued settler reforms long after gaining sovereignty. Still other countries have pursued domestic settler reforms that undermine indigenous communities and indigenous ethnic minorities, including China in Xinjiang, Israel in the Palestinian territories, and Indonesia in West Papua.6
Unsurprisingly, building a society on land taken by force is unlikely to lock in equitable outcomes in the long run. Settler reforms buttress racial hierarchies that place settlers in a superior position to indigenous peoples. Political narratives construe settlers as entrepreneurial, hardworking, and deserving, while indigenous peoples are construed as backward, premodern, and undeserving. And settler reforms have historically expanded gender inequity by privileging men over women in awarding land claims.
National prosperity is not as clear-cut. Settler societies have sharply diverged in their development outcomes over time. Some have grown into wealthy, democratic societies, while others have struggled with poverty and authoritarianism. Ironically, settlers have transformed some of the world’s most resource-rich areas at the time of settlement into the most dysfunctional societies, and converted some of the most spartan territories at the time of settlement into economic dynamos. The difference stems from the specific decisions made at the time when the land was reshuffled.
Settler reforms that concentrate land and labor in the hands of a few settlers for the purpose of plentiful resource extraction may serve to enrich those specific settlers, but they also tend to pave the way for long-term underdevelopment, with the beneficiaries jealously guarding their privileges and monopolizing political power at everyone else’s expense. Dictatorship, elite infighting, civil war, and even revolution are the results.
By contrast, in places where settlers have found fewer resources and where geographic conditions are more conducive to modest small-scale farming, reformers typically distribute land widely and in small parcels to settlers. These reforms attract floods of immigrants seeking opportunity through land and tend to advance economic development. They go hand in hand with the commodification of land and resources, creating markets. And by broadly distributing land to settlers, they spread out power, fostering secure property rights and inclusive political representation among the settlers.
But the effects of even these growth-enhancing reforms on development are uneven and unequal. Indigenous groups are excluded, relegated to the ranks of noncitizens or second-class citizens. National prosperity has a hollowness to it when it is only prosperity for the winners—the settlers.
Settler reforms also wreak havoc on the environment. Settlers typically arrive to new lands with little knowledge of the new environments they encounter. With few resources and no backstop, they have a pressing need to make ends meet quickly. As a result, settlers tend to tear up and deplete virgin soils. They pollute watersheds and exhaust resources. They hunt and trap animals and poison pests into oblivion. Native ecosystems strain and sometimes collapse under their weight.
Settler reforms have become less common over time, particularly where frontiers are diminished and indigenous groups are long since dispossessed. As lands filled in and became more densely settled, competition and pressure spiked among settlers themselves. That same competition dialed up in the lands that humans had settled long ago, and it soon came to infuse domestic political battles around the globe. New forms of land reallocation spread, facilitated by the unprecedented administrative control and military power of consolidating states. Governments could now impose their will on the powerful as well as the weak.
COLLECTIVE REFORMS
If the first century of the Great Reshuffle was defined by settler reforms, the second was driven by a markedly different set of winners and losers. The French Revolution was, in this sense, a harbinger of much more radical reforms to come. This more recent period came to be defined by reforms that take land from large private landowners and hand it over to rural workers.
Perhaps the most electrifying example of the new approach to the Great Reshuffle, and one that motivated many others, took place in the Soviet Union. On November 7, 1917, the communist Bolshevik Party staged a bold uprising in the harbor of St. Petersburg. Tens of thousands of soldiers disgruntled by their brutal service and poor treatment in World War I joined them. The Bolsheviks captured key government buildings throughout the day and forced their way into the seat of Russian government power, the Winter Palace, just before midnight. They overran it in the wee hours of November 8. Later that same turbulent day, a new legislative body enacted Vladimir Lenin’s Decree on Land, abolishing private property and reallocating that land to communes composed of desperately poor peasants who had only been freed from outright serfdom less than sixty years prior.
A decade later, Lenin was dead and Joseph Stalin had risen to power over the new Soviet Union, a country plagued by shortages of food and resources crucial for industrial production in growing urban areas. Stalin adopted a radical five-year plan to change this. The plan outlined a drive to outright collectivize land and all aspects of farming. The Communists sent an army of operatives out into the vast Soviet countryside to tear peasants away from their farms and equipment and to reorganize them according to government central planner diktat. Many peasants called collectivization a “second serfdom,” and while they overwhelmingly opposed it, they had little choice in the matter.7
Other countries followed the Soviet example. China nationalized all land after its post–World War II civil war and organized many millions of people in the countryside into collectives. Cuba collectivized the better part of its rural sector after confiscating large landholdings during the 1959 Cuban Revolution. As in the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, other countries that collectivized land sought to control and micromanage farmers within collectives.
governments that pursue reforms centering on large private landholdings and rural workers begin by targeting specific large landholdings for acquisition and reallocation. Although this could be done by negotiating with landowners and paying them market prices for their land, more often it is done by fiat. Many governments forcibly take land from large landowners with meager compensation or none at all and give them no legal avenue for resistance. This is what occurred in China and Russia after their revolutions and in Zimbabwe in the 2000s.
In collective reforms, the land that is seized is then allocated to groups of rural workers to be farmed as collectives. Landless wage workers, tenants, and other farmers are pooled together and are in many cases relocated to work land as a team and share the profits. Governments often keep large landholdings intact in collective reforms or even combine them.
Collective reforms tend to follow from private land concentration. That can take the form of lord-peasant landholding, landlord-tenant landholding, or hacienda landholding. All of these types of landholding put a big target on the back of large landholders. It is tempting for governments that for reasons of expediency or ideology seek to avoid the disruptions of rewiring land ownership associated with breaking estates up into many thousands of small plots and instead implement a collective reform.
Collective farming can make good sense in the right context with wise and careful management. Collectives have the potential to take advantage of economies of scale in agriculture. They can benefit from efficiencies linked to buying inputs, farming, and selling products at a large scale rather than breaking up the production processes of large estates into a proliferation of miniature farms. There can be advantages to collective ownership of common resources such as plentiful grazing lands that might otherwise be difficult to manage individually. Collectives can protect farmers in situations where individual farming risk is considerable and disruptions can easily force farmers into bankruptcy and land sales. And they can foster community cooperation and common cultural preservation.
But this is not how most collective farming ends up. Governments that embark on top-down collective reforms face the temptation to use collectives as a piggy bank for national projects and as a mechanism for political dominance and even wide-scale repression. They lurk as overlords, managing and monitoring collective decisions and isolating dissenters. They also typically retain ultimate ownership of the land. Worker rights are revocable in these radical reforms and coercion is common. At some point, most of these reforms come crashing down.
Collective reforms tend to drive countries that adopt them into a trap of underdevelopment. Collectivization saps workers of individual work incentives and distorts long-term production. It also generates endemic property insecurity. Everyone from farmers to bankers are wary of investing in them because they do not know what will come of their investment. The result is lackluster output and stagnation seeping into every corner of the economy. Collectives also give governments tantalizing opportunities for social engineering and political control. This can go terribly awry. Government planners tend to trap farmers in collectives in the countryside, stunting urbanization and economic modernization. And any misguided decisions have grave, system-wide repercussions.
The Soviet Union offers a cautionary tale. Collectivization aimed to increase grain production and fuel rapid industrialization. In its first decade, however, it was marked by violence, disruption, resistance, and even several years of devastating famine that cost millions of lives. Peasants quickly realized that the state wanted to increase its take of their production. They resisted by dragging their feet and reducing their work efforts in what Stalin called a “go-slow strike.” Over the course of decades, the Soviets managed to modernize traditional agriculture and use growing surpluses to stoke industry and support its international ambitions. But it again came at considerable cost as the absence of property rights fostered corruption, a lack of trust, and underinvestment. These problems continue to bedevil Russia. Much the same happened in China in the 1950s. Land collectivization drove down agricultural production and contributed to the Great Famine, resulting in millions of deaths.
Some, though not all, collective reforms make an effort to elevate the social and economic position of women in society. The Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, for instance, gave women a greater role in agricultural production as wage workers in hopes of not only enhancing output but also improving their social status. But the progressive effort fell short in practice. Collectives gave women lesser roles than men and paid them less.8 They also often routed actual payments through male heads of household. Meanwhile, men typically commandeer collectives and run them. Women who have sought positions of power within collectives have historically become the subjects of violence and persecution. Governments that adopt collective reforms also routinely fail to sufficiently support the household responsibilities of working women, particularly in childcare.
Collective reforms frequently lead to environmental catastrophe. They generate a tragedy of the commons as collective workers degrade soils and resources without fully internalizing the costs of doing so. Governments shower them with cheap fertilizers and pesticides in an effort to compensate for underproduction, and these, in turn, damage local ecosystems and poison watersheds.
Still, collective reforms have at times demonstrated that they have potential to break down racial as well as class-based hierarchy. Prior to collective reform in Mexico, many people of indigenous descent labored as peons under large landowners. They were forced to work on large local estates with little payment and little recourse against abuse. Estates were commonly owned by whiter families that claimed European descent and could trace their lineages back to the colonial era. Land reallocation severed this racialized relationship of servitude by turning estates over to local communities of laborers. That the form of communal holding harked back to precolonial forms of indigenous community is part of the reason why most land recipient communities later chose to retain communal land ownership when given the choice, albeit in a layered fashion along with private property rights. The government that conducted initial land collectivization simultaneously encouraged a narrative of common racial mestizo mixing and rhetorically shifted to treating workers along class lines as peasants rather than along racial lines while they lifted them up through land grants.
Collective reforms that are not state mandated and state run but instead bubble up from coherent social groups are far less pernicious than collectivization imposed from above. Some governments, such as those of Colombia and Bolivia, allow landless petitioners to request collective rather than individual land grants as part of their ongoing land reallocation programs. These collective grants are not usually centers of strong economic development, but they do tend to be fairly egalitarian, sustainable over the long haul, and more attentive to environmental consequences, largely because the beneficiaries are committed to building tight-knit communities on the land over the long term.
The link between collective reforms and communism, while not ironclad, came to loom large as the Cold War settled in. Simmering communist movements and organizers in the late 1940s in places as disparate as China, Korea, and Italy seized on the grievances of landless peasants and put radical land reallocation at the core of their revolutionary platforms. The United States feared that land inequality and rural poverty would fuel a wave of conflict and spread communism. It settled on another approach, called “tiller reforms,” as a more ideologically appealing alternative and worked to help craft and fund them in countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Italy, Vietnam, and El Salvador.
LAND-TO-THE-TILLER REFORMS
As Europe and Japan lay in ashes at the end of World War II, American officials sought to cut out the taproot of fascism while providing an alternative model to communism. Japan became one of the early proving grounds. The head of the US occupation authority in Japan after the country’s surrender in World War II, General Douglas MacArthur, in a letter to the Japanese government on December 9, 1945, called the country’s landlord-tenant system “economic bondage which has enslaved the Japanese farmer to centuries of feudal oppression.” A thin layer of powerful landlords had presided over a sea of poor renters before the war. The words of a landlord from Yamagata in northern Japan offer a sense of the lofty superiority that prevailed among landlords in those days. As head of the Otaki family, he controlled some 440 acres of prime agricultural land and managed 170 tenants. “As manager and representative of Otaki Saburoemon, owner of 4,000 bales’ worth of land,” he said, “I behave as such and with appropriate dignity. I have to be arrogant.”9
Local landlord associations were amalgamated into one national, federated body that wielded unparalleled political influence. American occupiers viewed them as the pillars of Japanese imperial expansionism and enablers of the right-wing nationalism that had propelled the country to war. A land-to-the-tiller reform was the cure the Americans prescribed, and it dovetailed with nascent ideas among postwar Japanese officials about how to open a new chapter in its history.
The tiller reform marked a radical shift in the country. In October 1947, while still under US military occupation, the Japanese legislature passed a bill limiting the amount of private land that could be held to seven acres. Just over two acres of that could be leased to tenants. The government and local agricultural associations proceeded to buy out any landholdings above those draconian and sweeping limits.
Former tenants—such as those who rented land from Otaki—became landowners in their own right and saw their fortunes quickly turn, as they now kept their income. As one villager from Shinohata in central Japan put it, “Before the war, you could work and work and work and you never saved money, could never eat delicious food, couldn’t eat enough food. Now even with working your guts out you have money left over—well, not that much left over, but enough so that we don’t feel in need—and our everyday life is sheer luxury compared with what it used to be.”10 People began to remodel their houses, purchase better clothing, change what they ate, and acquire more material comforts.
land-to-the-tiller reforms more or less follow this model. They reallocate land from large private landowners to the tillers on that land, and most frequently take place where there is a preexisting landlord-tenant landholding pattern.
Some of the most prominent tiller reforms occurred in East Asia alongside Japan after World War II. South Korea and Taiwan took this path, and even China briefly flirted with a tiller reform before taking a sharp turn toward collectivization. Land-to-the-tiller reforms occurred in parts of India after independence as well, and in South Vietnam under US occupation. One of the earliest tiller reforms occurred in Ireland in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Tiller reforms do not always have to follow from landlord-tenant landholding. They can also occur in the context of lord-peasant or hacienda landholding. In those cases, workers on the land under peonage-style arrangements, or landless wage laborers such as farmhands on the property, receive the land. Italy transformed considerable portions of its land in this fashion in the 1950s, as did El Salvador in the 1980s. What sets tiller reforms apart is that the tillers who receive land get it as individual or family plots. In addition to receiving strong backing from liberal democratic powers during the Cold War, tiller-style reforms gained the approval of international development agencies such as the World Bank, which began to push tiller reforms during the Cold War and continued to do so for the two decades after its end, though they have begun to take a more context-specific approach to reform in recent years.
Unlike settler reforms, tiller reforms can help to level pernicious forms of race- and ethnicity-based servitude and disadvantage. Take, for instance, how the Irish Land Acts of 1870–1909 raised up poor Irish farmers against the British landlords who had long controlled Ireland’s land and helped the British government stamp out Irish customs and language. The Land Acts eliminated abusive forms of land tenancy against the Irish underclass and subsidized tenant purchases of land from their landlords. The Land Acts gave landlords bonuses to sell their land in order to speed up the reform and reduce resistance. Later reforms forced the remainder of landlords to sell out. In their place arose an independent and autonomous class of Irish small farmers that could hold their heads high in the new Ireland.
Tiller reforms can supercharge development. After Japan’s tiller reform, newly empowered small farmers could afford to send their children to school instead of to the fields for the first time in Japanese history. Within a generation, the country became urban and well educated, home to a booming economy. Members from the lower social classes entered the civil service, the military, and the industrial sector in large numbers. The government used surpluses to build export-oriented manufacturing and nurtured it through financial institutions it held on a tight leash. Similar transformations followed tiller reforms in South Korea and Taiwan.11
It would be hard to overstate the impact that these reforms had on the appetite for land reshuffling. Aside from moves by European settlers to appropriate indigenous lands, it wasn’t until the United States began to view land reallocation as a necessary tool to break fascism and undermine communism, in the aftermath of World War II, that it came to be perceived as a powerful and effective policy for economic good. Although land reallocation was politically popular among the landless, it had led to strife and disruption time and again, as well as to stiff opposition by landowners.
But when land reshuffles in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan rapidly transformed them from feudal, agrarian societies into “Asian Tigers,” land reallocation became an object of fascination and even obsession for development economists. Study after study came to show that large landholdings are frequently underutilized and that small farmers, with strong incentives to wring as much as they could from the soil, could produce more per acre. Land reallocation came to be seen as the exceptional policy where greater equality and development could be achieved simultaneously rather than working in conflict with one another. By and large, that simple economic calculation has not changed. The United States began to promote tiller reforms everywhere it viewed landlessness as politically destabilizing and believed that Communists were poised to take advantage of deep rural grievances. The World Bank also started to prescribe it to countries around the globe as a cure for development traps.
The legacy of tiller reforms is decidedly more mixed when it comes to gender inequity and the environment. Many tiller reforms, including in East Asia and Ireland, contributed to gender inequity by granting property titles to male heads of household. Such policies set the stage for multigenerational gender imbalances in household duties, earning capacity, and intrahousehold bargaining power. Men rode the increasing value of their assets to ever greater social and economic power while leaving women behind.
Tiller reforms also tend to degrade the environment. Poor tillers who seek to stand on their own two feet as independent farmers and who now capture all of the earnings from what they produce quickly try to maximize their output. They adopt industrial fertilizers and pesticides where available and often overuse the land, since they cannot afford to fallow it. That strains resources and damages the land and watersheds. Some tiller reforms that take place in contexts of land scarcity, as well as the presence of landless wage laborers alongside poor tenants, can lead to additional uncultivated public lands being doled out as individual plots to the landless. This transforms natural landscapes into more farmland, with negative consequences for biodiversity and environmental health.
Tiller reforms outlived collective reforms and the Cold War, and some of the more recent ones have paid closer attention to gender and environmental concerns. But during the Cold War, many countries that pursued land reallocation and did not want collective reform shied away from tiller reforms. They worried about economic disruptions and loss of political control associated with reshuffling land by creating a sea of new independent landowners overnight. These countries sought a different playbook.
COOPERATIVE REFORMS
The stark differences, and even competition, between collective and tiller reforms provided ample space for other ways to organize and use land. Many countries at the sidelines of Great Power competition during the Cold War chose a third way: cooperative reform.
In a dramatic speech to the nation on June 24, 1969, Peru’s new military ruler, General Juan Velasco Alvarado, announced a land reckoning for the country that would turn it into one of the world’s boldest experiments in cooperative reform. Spanish colonization had concentrated land in a small number of haciendas in Peru, especially in the Andean highlands. The country’s rural population continued to toil on these haciendas for little or no pay and suffered indignities at the hands of wealthy landowners. Echoing the words of the indigenous hero Túpac Amaru, who had fought valiantly against Spanish colonists, Velasco promulgated a sweeping land reallocation, proclaiming, “Peasants, the master will no longer feed from your poverty.” Over the next decade, the government seized most of the large private estates in the country and fashioned them into large cooperatives to be run by peasants.
One landowner from Junín recounted his expropriation in vivid terms: “It hit us like a bucket of cold water. I will never forget it because it was most unpleasant.… I ceased to be an owner of what had been mine for so many years, something that had belonged to my grandparents.” The peasant beneficiaries, by contrast, were thrilled. One hacienda worker in Cañete recalled learning of its expropriation: “People were so happy they cried. They did not believe that they had become the owners of something they had never in their wildest dreams envisioned. To be owners of 500 hectares [about 1,200 acres], when before they did not even have one furrow! That was a real experience of a personal triumph.”12
Peasant ownership, however, was a chimera. The government pushed peasants into cooperatives composed of workers under a single management structure and did not hand over ultimate ownership of the land.13 Peasants who informally held family plots within or alongside haciendas at the time of the reform got to keep them and gained far more autonomy over them. They also contributed their labor to the new cooperatives and shared in their profits. But the cooperatives did not fare well over time. Most peasants did not want them to begin with. They wanted more of their own land and less intervention and management of their affairs. Within a few years most cooperatives fell prey to infighting over work contributions, profits, and management. People wanted out. Once the military government fell, so did cooperatives.
cooperative reforms are similar in many ways to collective reforms. They begin by reallocating large private landholdings to groups of rural workers. In some cases, the large properties remain intact, and other times they are combined or broken into pieces. Workers share in farming the land and buy inputs and sell products as a group. But there is a major difference relative to collective reforms: cooperatives do not work all of the land and share all of the inputs and profits collectively as a team. Cooperative members often farm their own plots and have side jobs. They “top up” that work by dedicating some share of their labor to collective tasks. Governments frequently, but not always, retain formal ownership of the land.
Cooperative reforms were especially popular in North Africa during decolonization and in Latin America during the Cold War. The reallocation of land through cooperative reforms during the decolonization of Africa severed a major thread of the colonial race-based order. In Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, for instance, French colonizers dominated large swaths of the highest-quality land and pushed native Arab and Berber Muslims onto inferior lands at the fringes of these agrarian economies. The large rural Muslim populations were consequently poor and marginalized. Many people worked as permanent or temporary laborers on French-run estates. They faced discrimination at every turn. Independence movements after World War II, and the French government’s withdrawal from its colonial possessions, collided to remove white Europeans from the farming sector. Local populations took the land through farming cooperatives, removing the ugliest racialized components of rural labor.
Countries such as Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Peru in Latin America all conducted cooperative reforms around the same time, between the 1950s and 1980s. Portugal conducted a massive cooperative reform in the south of the country in the mid-1970s. Yugoslavia adopted a cooperative reform after World War II.
Cooperative reforms may light a spark under agricultural productivity in the short term, but more often than not, as in Peru, they soon flame out. As in collective reforms, distorted work incentives, government mismanagement and coercion, and stalled urban transformation are all culprits of this underperformance. Cooperative reforms rarely succumb to the deepest depths of collective reforms in terms of wide-scale famine and death. But that is a low bar to clear. They fall far short of land-to-the-tiller reforms in terms of contributing to economic development.
The governments that adopt cooperative reforms are rarely as ideologically motivated to support the empowerment of women as those that take on collective reforms. Cooperative reforms therefore tend to replicate and deepen existing gender disparities. Men end up dominating cooperatives in large number. That positions them to capture the lion’s share of benefits from the government. And it puts them first in line when cooperatives break up to snatch up their most valuable pieces.
Cooperative reforms behave much like collective reforms from the perspective of breaking down racial hierarchies. These reforms, for instance, broke feudalistic forms of racialized servitude in the South American countries of Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. Peru’s land reform of the late 1960s, as the anthropologist Enrique Mayer put it, “completed the abolition of all forms of servitude in rural estates, a momentous shift in the history of the Andes, akin to the abolition of slavery in the Americas.”14 Cooperative reforms similarly eroded racial hierarchies in North Africa.
Most cooperative reforms result in environmental carnage. Underproduction stimulates the use of fertilizers and pesticides, which wreak havoc on soils and watersheds. These chemicals also damage local biodiversity, killing off native plants, animals, insects, and microbes that are crucial for stable ecosystems. Weak property rights foster resource degradation through overuse.
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the world we live in today is shaped by the choices countries made when the Great Reshuffle arrived on their doorstep. If they chose to steal the land from its indigenous occupants, they bequeathed to their descendants a country consumed by racial hierarchy and gender inequality and diminished by the loss of ecosystems and a heavily damaged natural environment. If the pressure only reached the breaking point in the early or mid-twentieth century, they may have opted to expropriate the large agricultural landholders and collectivize. More likely than not those collectives are already long gone, but the societies that remain still struggle with underdevelopment, corruption, authoritarianism, and environmental wreckage. If a country instead fashioned cooperatives out of large landholdings, then it likely ended up with a milder version of underdevelopment, and authoritarianism and corruption had shallower roots. But the environment paid a similar price and gender relations could be worse. Meanwhile, societies are most likely well-off and agriculture is now far less prominent in countries that pursued a different path by breaking up large landholdings into small family plots. But men continue to rule in the workplace and at home, and pollution and resource depletion are likely to define their environmental landscape.
The four canonical land reallocation paths tend to lock in trajectories that are self-reinforcing and difficult to escape. Governments that reallocate land do not simply step aside once transfers occur. They use land to underpin national projects, win political support, and exert social control. Their chosen path determines how they structure property rights, build infrastructure, enumerate and categorize citizens, and regulate the environment. The consequences continue to mark societies long after urbanization and modernization have diminished the relative importance of agriculture.
Those consequences include some of society’s most intractable problems. Land has helped to construct racial hierarchy. It has deepened gender inequity and made it more durable. Land paved the way to underdevelopment. And it exacerbated problems linked to climate change, resource depletion, and the loss of biodiversity.
To see the futures that these paths lock in, we have to set foot in the places haunted by the land reshuffles of generations past. We have to talk to those marked by the repercussions. Only then can we grapple with land’s true power.