NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. The value of land in advanced economies alone reached approximately $130 trillion by 2022. See Rudiger Ahrend and Matteo Schleicher, “Land-Value Capture: Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees, It Grows Below Them,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), OECD Cogito (blog), October 7, 2022, https://oecdcogito.blog/2022/10/07/land-value-capture-money-doesnt-grow-on-trees-it-grows-below-them. The real estate company Savills estimates that property values globally, including land, housing, offices, factories, and machinery, had reached nearly $400 trillion by 2022. Global economic output and equities were each estimated at around $100 trillion, and global debt at $130 trillion. Paul Tostevin and Charlotte Rushton, “Total Global Value of Real Estate Estimated at $379.7 Trillion—Almost Four Times the Value of Global GDP,” Savills, September 25, 2023, www.savills.com/insight-and-opinion/savills-news/352068/total-global-value-of-real-estate-estimated-at-$379.7-trillion---almost-four-times-the-value-of-global-gdp.

2. “Rural Population,” from United Nations Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, 2018, at World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.

1 

CHAPTER 1: LAND AND POWER IN HUMAN HISTORY

1. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 10.

2. Roger Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1.

3. Notwithstanding this increase, archaeological evidence indicates that the slow shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture in most societies was associated with initial declines in dietary and overall health, lifespans, and leisure. See Scott, Against the Grain, 10.

4. See, for instance, Arthur A. Joyce, “The Founding of Monte Albán: Sacred Propositions and Social Practices,” in Agency in Archaeology, ed. Marcia-Anne Dobres and John Robb, 71–91 (London: Routledge, 2000).

5. Benjamin Isaac, Empire and Ideology in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chap. 8.

6. This shift occurred earlier and more decisively in agricultural societies that centered on cereal crops than in those focusing on root crops. There is also anthropological and archaeological evidence of gender roles in many societies absent established agriculture and the plow, but those changes still deepened them. Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn, “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 2 (2013): 469–530; Casper Worm Hansen, Peter Sandholt Jensen, and Christian Volmar Skovsgaard, “Modern Gender Roles and Agricultural History: The Neolithic Inheritance,” Journal of Economic Growth 20, no. 4 (2015): 365–404.

7. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean in the Ancient World (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 71.

8. Usage of the term “indigenous” did not become widespread until the period of global decolonization following World War II and is most commonly understood as people whose origins predate colonial contact.

9. Life among these groups was not always egalitarian and peaceful. Some of them developed inequality and hierarchy. However, this stratification was typically due to earned rather than inherited social rank, and there were sharp limits to it. Accumulation was quite limited, and inequality was frequently tempered by norms of reciprocity and gift-giving. See Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

10. For one account of indigenous land and property in early North America, see Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Even many whole communities rarely had exclusive and well-delineated territories. Among many Aboriginal groups in Australia, for instance, there was overlapping land use across groups based on descent.

11. See Greer, Property and Dispossession, 43–55.

12. Colin Scott, “Property, Practice and Aboriginal Rights Among Quebec Cree Hunters,” in Hunters and Gatherers, vol. 2, Property, Power and Ideology, ed. Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn (London: Routledge, 1988), 35–51.

13. Kathleen Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009).

14. A couple of the many thousands of examples include the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land in Australia and the Tsimané of Bolivia’s Yungas region. Clans among the Yolngu have territorial land claims, but these claims have reciprocal implications with other matrilineally affiliated clans and individuals in terms of land access, use, and decision-making. The Tsimané practice subsistence slash-and-burn agriculture supplemented with hunting and gathering. Land is considered joint territory of the community and is not parceled into anything like individual or family ownership.

15. Count Hermann zu Dohna-Kotzenau, quoted in Shearer Davis Bowman, Masters and Lords: Mid-19th Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 176.

16. Baron Theodor von der Goltz, writing in 1896, quoted in Bowman, Masters and Lords, 168. Some Junkers instead spoke of serfdom more along the lines of benevolent patriarchy.

17. Bowman, Masters and Lords, 172.

18. Bowman, Masters and Lords, 33.

19. The figure was 6,500 landlords in the 1870s. See Terence Dooley, Sources for the History of Landed Estates in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), 3–16.

20. Quoted in Anne Kane, “Finding Emotion in Social Movement Processes: Irish Land Movement Metaphors and Narratives,” in Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, ed. Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, 251–266 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

21. William Hinton and Fred Magdoff. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 22. The book is based on Hinton’s exceptional work in northern China from 1945 to 1948; it was originally published in 1966.

22. Hinton and Magdoff, Fanshen, 33, 39.

23. This statement was filed on January 15, 1970, to the Ministry of Agriculture’s regional director of Zone XI of the agrarian reform. Accessed by the author at the Centro Bartolomé de las Casas, Cusco, Peru. The landowner was department prefect of Cusco.

24. This statement was filed on January 15, 1970, to the Ministry of Agriculture’s regional director of Zone XI of the agrarian reform. Accessed by the author at the Centro Bartolomé de las Casas, Cusco, Peru.

25. Market forces and government regulations in many places have nonetheless encouraged agglomeration over time.

1 

CHAPTER 2: THE GREAT RESHUFFLE

1. Theresa Finley, Raphaël Franck, and Noel D. Johnson, “The Effects of Land Redistribution: Evidence from the French Revolution,” Journal of Law and Economics 64, no. 2 (2021): 233–267, 242.

2. This shift nonetheless took time. Amid political instability and resistance, it took several years for feudal rights to be abolished in practice and to sell off church and noble lands. And it took still more time for some pieces of this land to end up in the hands of peasants, because land speculators and ascendant entrepreneurs became involved in some of the initial auctions.

3. Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

4. Paul Frymer, “‘A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours’: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and US State Formation,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 1 (2014): 129–131. The “Five Civilized Tribes” were the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Muscogees (Creek), and Seminoles.

5. The groups constituting these divisions shifted over time. However, early European settlers were consistently categorized as white and Indians as non-white. See, for instance, Jennifer Hochschild and Brenna Marea Powell, “Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850–1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race,” Studies in American Political Development 22, no. 1 (2008): 59–96. See also Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

6. See Lachlan McNamee, Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

7. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–4.

8. Elisabeth Croll, “Women in Rural Production and Reproduction in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Tanzania: Socialist Development Experiences,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 2 (1981): 361–374.

9. Ronald Dore, Land Reform in Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 30–35.

10. Ronald Dore, Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 65.

11. For instance, see Joe Studwell, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2013).

12. Enrique Mayer, Ugly Stories from the Peruvian Agrarian Reform (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 90, 125.

13. There were two types of reform cooperatives. One type was formed of permanent workers managing a single estate, and a second brought together workers from neighboring estates and nearby indigenous communities.

14. Mayer, Ugly Stories, 3.

1 

CHAPTER 3: LANDS DIVIDED BY RACE

1. Author interview with Dr. Sean Milanovich, enrolled member of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, November 13, 2023. Dr. Milanovich comes from a long family line of caring for the land, plants, animals, and the water. He is an advocate for the traditional lands of his people.

2. I follow Agua Caliente conventions in referring to themselves as a band, community, people, or Tribe.

3. Mona De Crinis, “Cahuilla Territory,” Me Yah Whae, Fall/Winter 2021–2022, https://aguacaliente.org/documents/Cahuilla_Territory.pdf, 58–69, 66.

4. Author interview with Sean Milanovich, November 13, 2023.

5. Grants of Land in California Made by Spanish or Mexican Authorities, California State Lands Commission, 1982, available at https://slcprdwordpressstorage.blob.core.windows.net/wordpressdata/2019/09/1982-GrantsSpanishMexican.pdf.

6. The relationship between the two groups was, however, fractious over time. See, for instance, John Booss, “Survival of the Pilgrims: A Reevaluation of the Lethal Epidemic,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 47, no. 1 (2019): 108.

7. Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).

8. Carly Severn, “‘How Do We Heal?’ Toppling the Myth of Junípero Serra,” KQED, July 7, 2020, www.kqed.org/news/11826151/how-do-we-heal-toppling-the-myth-of-juni pero-serra.

9. Quoted in Paul Frymer, “‘A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours’: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and US State Formation,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 1 (2014): 119–144, 124.

10. Quoted in Frymer, “A Rush and a Push,” 124.

11. Sean Milanovich, “The Treaty of Temecula: A Story of Invasion, Deceit, Stolen Land, and the Persistence of Power, 1846–1905” (PhD diss., University of California Riverside, 2021).

12. US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), NARA Record Series 75, Microfilm M-234, Letters received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1881, California Superintendency, 1849–1880, Roll 35 (1856–1857).

13. The US government also directly loaned them credit in the form of bonds. Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (2003): 19–43, 22.

14. Frymer, “A Rush and a Push.” Note that “whiteness” at the time was not always a straightforward or consistent category but an ongoing category of social and political construction.

15. Ross Mattheis and Itzchak Tzachi Raz, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Land: The Homestead Act and Economic Development,” December 31, 2019, available at Scholars at Harvard, https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/iraz/files/Raz _JMP_2019.pdf, 9.

16. The barriers were especially steep for Black Americans, who were still reeling from the legacies of slavery and faced rigid Jim Crow laws in the South.

17. Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “What Drove the Mass Migrations from Europe in the Late Nineteenth Century?,” NBER Historical Paper No. 43, 1992, National Bureau of Economic Research, www.nber.org/papers/h0043.

18. White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption.”

19. D. M. Ellis, “The Forfeiture of Railroad Land Grants, 1867–1894,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 33, no. 1 (1946): 27–60.

20. P. W. Gates, “The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System,” American Historical Review 41, no. 4 (1936): 652–681; P. W. Gates, “Land Policy and Tenancy in the Prairie States,” Journal of Economic History 1, no. 1 (1941): 60–82.

21. Some Agua Caliente took advantage of the stagecoach and early railroad to help transport goods and find employment, but with increasing land competition others were forced into low-wage labor working to construct the railroads.

22. The government terminated one of these reservations (Mission Creek) in 1970.

23. Lowell Bean and Harry Lawton, The Cahuilla Indians of Southern California: Their History and Culture (Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1965), 3–4.

24. “How Desert Became a Checkerboard,” Palm Springs Desert Sun 43, no. 124 (1969), available at University of California, Riverside, Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, California Digital Newspaper Collection, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19691229.2.120.

25. Rachel Dayton Shaw, “Evolving Ecoscape: An Environmental and Cultural History of Palm Springs, California, and the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation, 1877–1939” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 1999), 115, 117.

26. Shaw, “Evolving Ecoscape,” 119.

27. Shaw, “Evolving Ecoscape,” 122.

28. Land access was nonetheless governed by clans with distinct territorial claims.

29. Letter to the secretary of the interior from Pedro Chino and signatories, Agua Caliente Indian Reservation, Palm Springs, California, May 1, 1923, available at US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), National Archives Catalog, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Series: Individual Indian Probate Case Files, Probate File Numbers 92347-20-103168-20 (part), 1920 (1 of 2), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/197708891?objectPage=806.

30. In its abortive effort to strip the Tribe of its culturally important palm canyons by turning Indian Canyons into a national park, the all-white Palm Springs Indian Committee argued that because the community practiced periodic burns in the area (which served to regenerate soils and control fire risk), they should not be trusted to steward the area, and it should be turned over to the parks system without compensation. The Tribal community successfully fought that attempted land grab.

31. Letter to the Agua Caliente from Charles Burke, commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, stamped May 4, 1923, available at US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), National Archives Catalog, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Series: Individual Indian Probate Case Files, Probate File Numbers 92347-20-103168-20 (part), 1920 (1 of 2), https://catalog.archives.gov/id/197708891?objectPage=788.

32. Author correspondence with Moraino Patencio, enrolled member of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, January 4, 2024. The Patencio family has long been involved in Tribal governance.

33. Holders of individual trust lands initially had very restricted property rights and could not sell or transfer their land. Land held in trust could in theory be converted to fee simple ownership with full property rights after twenty-five years had elapsed. Later, after the passage of the Burke Act in 1906, a local Bureau of Indian Affairs officer could convert trust land to fee simple if the officer deemed an individual “competent” to manage the property.

34. Author interview with Moraino Patencio, November 8, 2023.

35. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), press release, June 19, 1957, available at BIA, www.bia.gov/as-ia/opa/online-press-release/department-proposes-equalization-legislation-palm-springs-indians.

36. Arenas v. United States, 322 U.S. 419 (1944).

37. Renee Brown, “History of Equalization of Property Rights by Members of Agua Caliente Band of the Cahuilla Indians,” Palm Springs Desert Sun, April 30, 2023, www.desertsun.com/story/life/history/2023/04/30/history-property-rights-struggle-by-members-of-agua-caliente-band-of-the-cahuilla-indians-has-been-d/70165045007. Additional details from author correspondence with Moraino Patencio, January 5, 2024.

38. Because the land allotments in downtown Palm Springs had become very valuable by this time, this implied assigning large tracts of less valuable land outside the downtown area to members, covering and therefore maintaining the Tribal land base. Author correspondence with Moraino Patencio, January 4, 2024.

39. Shaw, “Evolving Ecoscape,” 122.

40. Author interview with Dr. Sean Milanovich, November 13, 2023.

41. Miranda Caudell, “A People’s Journey,” Me Yah Whae, Fall/Winter 2016–2017: 50–54, www.aguacaliente.org/documents/OurStory-10.pdf.

42. Author communication with Moraino Patencio, November 8, 2023.

43. Journal of the Senate, Legislature of the State of California (Sacramento: California State Print Office, 1961).

44. Arewen Nuttall, “Section 14: The Agua Caliente Tribe’s Struggle for Sovereignty in Palm Springs, California,” American Indian Magazine 20, no. 2 (2019), www.american indianmagazine.org/story/section-14.

45. The evictions largely affected tenants and less so members of the Agua Caliente. A number of the Agua Caliente had established business arrangements around the hot springs and elsewhere and in a few cases had white employees.

46. “Frank Bogert: Palm Springs’ Civic Leadership, Institutionalized Segregation, and Racial Bias, 1958–1966,” Palm Springs City Hall Monument Report, April 28, 2021, available at minutes of the City of Palm Springs, Human Rights Commission, meeting of May 5, 2021, www.palmspringsca.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/78757/6375537 44496070000.

47. Quoted in the exhibit “Section 14: The Other Palm Springs, California,” National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC.

48. Author interview with Moraino Patencio, November 8, 2023.

49. J. David Hacker and Michael R. Haines, “American Indian Mortality in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Impact of Federal Assimilation Policies on a Vulnerable Population,” NBER Working Paper No. 12572, 2006, National Bureau of Economic Research, published version in Annales de démographie historique 110, no. 2 (2005): 17–29, 20.

50. Andrew Mollica and Dominic Parker, “What Makes Economic Growth Inclusive? Evidence on the Role of Ethnicity from Native Americans,” April 24, 2017, available at Projects at Harvard, https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/canada/files/mollica_and_parker _4-24-2017_a.pdf.

51. Ronald Trosper, “American Indian Poverty on Reservations, 1969–1989,” in Changing Numbers, Changing Needs: American Indian Demography and Public Health, ed. Gary D. Sandefur, Ronald R. Rindfuss, and Barney Cohen (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1996).

52. Donna Feir, “The Landscape of Opportunity in Indian Country: A Discussion of Data from the Opportunity Atlas,” Center for Indian Country Development, Research Brief No. 2019-03, April 19, 2019, available at Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, www.minneapolisfed.org/-/media/files/community/indiancountry/the-landscape-of-opportunity-in-indian-country-04-19-19.pdf.

53. Alexia Fernández Campbell, “How America’s Past Shapes Native Americans’ Present,” The Atlantic, October 12, 2016.

54. Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Esha Kamra, Connor Sanchez, Kathy Ramirez, and Rogelio Tec, “Racial Wealth Snapshot: Native Americans,” National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2022, https://ncrc.org/racial-wealth-snapshot-native-americans.

55. Kelli Mosteller, “For Native Americans, Land Is More Than Just the Ground Beneath Their Feet,” The Atlantic, September 17, 2016.

56. “Native Land Law: Can Native American People Find Justice in the US Legal System?,” Indian Land Tenure Foundation, 2016, https://iltf.org/wp-content/up loads/2016/11/native_land_law_2010_MR6.pdf. In this vein, the 2012 HEARTH Act provides tribes an opt-in mechanism for greater autonomy in managing land use decisions. Though the program has been successful, only sixty-nine tribal nations had been enrolled as of late 2021.

57. Wil Del Pilar, “Degree Attainment for Native American Adults,” Education Trust, November 15, 2018, https://edtrust.org/resource/degree-attainment-for-native-american-adults.

58. “Disparities,” Indian Health Services, www.ihs.gov/newsroom/factsheets/dispari ties, accessed May 15, 2024.

59. Rebecca Carron, “Health Disparities in American Indians / Alaska Natives: Implications for Nurse Practitioners,” Nurse Practitioner 45, no. 6 (2020): 26–32.

60. “Leading Causes of Death—Females—Non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native—United States, 2016,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016, www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/2016/nonhispanic-native/index.htm.

61. Mary Findling, Logan Casey, Stephanie Fryberg, Steven Hafner, Robert Blendon, John Benson, Justin Sayde, and Carolyn Miller, “Discrimination in the United States: Experiences of Native Americans,” Health Services Research 54 (2019): 1431–1441.

62. Author interview with Moraino Patencio, November 8, 2023.

63. Moraino Patencio’s father, a former Tribal chairman, first leased out his childhood home when it became too expensive to live in Section 14 and later witnessed it being knocked down to build the Hilton Hotel, which currently stands in its place across from the mineral springs. Author interview with Moraino Patencio, November 8, 2023.

64. “2013–2017 ACS 5-Year Estimates,” US Bureau of the Census, American Community Survey, 2017, www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/technical-documentation/table-and-geography-changes/2017/5-year.html.

1 

CHAPTER 4: THIS LAND IS MEN’S LAND

1. In a controversial omission that remains contested today, the Canadian government never compensated First Nations for the land.

2. Another loophole for women obtaining homestead land opened in 1908 with the Volunteer Bounty Act. Canadian veterans of the Boer War could claim up to 320 acres of homesteading land through the act or name a substitute. Because there were no gender restrictions on substitutes, a small number of women claimed land through the act.

3. Constance Backhouse, “Pure Patriarchy: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Marriage,” McGill Law Journal 31, no. 2 (September 1985): 272–273.

4. Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008), 59.

5. Women did win homesteading rights in Alberta in 1930 when the Alberta Lands Act replaced the Dominion Lands Act in the province. But by this point, the best land had been taken, and then the Great Depression complicated homesteading.

6. Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1991), 10–11.

7. Lipset, Continental Divide, 43. Both British liberal and selected Canadian continental political forces were against many elements of confederation but could not successfully oppose them.

8. The property requirement for the Senate remains in place today, though its impact is close to negligible. However, it periodically resurfaces. One example is the 1997 appointment of Peggy Butts, a Catholic nun who had taken a vow of poverty. She had to have a small parcel of land transferred to her name in order to be sworn into office.

9. Sarah Carter, “‘Daughters of British Blood’ or ‘Hordes of Men of Alien Race’: The Homesteads-for-Women Campaign in Western Canada,” Great Plains Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2009): 270.

10. Carter, “Daughters of British Blood,” 71.

11. These dower rights sought to protect spouses who were not on the title of a homestead property from dispossession without their consent and to enable them to stay on the land in the case of the death of their spouse.

12. “Spinsters Want Homesteads,” Edmonton Bulletin, May 21, 1893, quoted in Carter, “Daughters of British Blood,” 273.

13. Bill Waiser, “History Matters: No Female Homesteaders Need Apply,” Saskatoon (Saskatchewan) StarPhoenix, February 14, 2017, https://thestarphoenix.com/opinion/columnists/history-matters-no-female-homesteaders-need-apply.

14. Binnie-Clark also advocated for the exclusion of foreigners from access to homestead land as the tide of immigration in Canada was rising.

15. Letter to the editor by Reverend R. W. Beveridge, January 15, 1910, published in Winnipeg, read by Roche to Oliver in the House of Commons session, April 30, 1910, in House of Commons Debates, vol. 97, Second Session, Eleventh Parliament, 1909–1910 (Ottawa: Canada Parliament, 1910), 8488.

16. House of Commons Debates, April 30, 1910, 97:8489–8490.

17. Carter, “Daughters of British Blood,” 281.

18. A series of resolutions passed at the United Farmers of Alberta convention sought homesteading rights for women in 1929. See Carter, “Daughters of British Blood,” 283.

19. The act continued to operate in the Northwest Territories, but even that ended in 1950.

20. “Uneven Progress, 1867–1919,” in A History of the Vote in Canada, 3rd ed. (Quebec: Public Enquiries Unit, Elections Canada, 2020), www.elections.ca/res/his/WEB_EC%2091135%20History%20of%20the%20Vote_Third%20edition_EN.pdf.

21. Catherine Cavanaugh, “The Limitations of the Pioneering Partnership: The Alberta Campaign for Homestead Dower, 1905–25,” Canadian Historical Review 74, no 2 (June 1993): 198–225.

22. Cristine Georgina Bye, “‘I Like to Hoe My Own Row’: A Saskatchewan Farm Woman’s Notions About Work and Womanhood During the Great Depression,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 3 (2004): 135–167, 136. Rural women on the American side of Canada’s western frontier border received considerably more state resources than women on the Canadian side.

23. See, for instance, Veronica Strong-Boag, “Pulling in Double Harness or Hauling a Double Load: Women, Work and Feminism on the Canadian Prairie,” in The Prairie West: Historical Readings, ed. R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer, 2nd ed. (Edmonton: Pica Pica Press, 1992), 401–423; Christa Scowby, “‘I Am a Worker, Not a Drone’: Farm Women, Reproductive Work and the Western Producer, 1930–1939,” Saskatchewan History 48, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 3–15.

24. Bye, “I Like to Hoe My Own Row.”

25. Mary Kinnear, Female Economy: Women’s Work in a Prairie Province, 1870–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998).

26. Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Women’s Work, Markets and Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

27. Clarence Lochhead and Katherine Scott, The Dynamics of Women’s Poverty in Canada (Ottawa: Status of Women Canada, 2000), 19.

28. Norah Keating and Maryanne Doherty, A Study of Alberta Farmers (Edmonton: Agricultural Research Council of Alberta, 1985).

29. Statistics are from the 2011 agricultural census. See “Highlights and Analysis,” Statistics Canada, www.statcan.gc.ca/en/ca2011/ha.

30. Ratan Ghosh, “Effect of Agricultural Legislations on Land Distribution in West Bengal,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics 31, no. 3 (1976): 40–46.

31. B. K. Chowhury, “Land Reform Legislation and Implementation in West Bengal,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics 17, no. 2 (1962): 141–151.

32. The limit of five hectares was for irrigated land and the seven-hectare limit applied to unirrigated land. These limits applied to households of five members. Additional family members qualified the household for an additional half hectare each, up to a maximum of seven irrigated hectares.

33. See P. S. Appu, Land Reforms in India: A Survey of Policy, Legislation and Implementation (New Delhi: Vikas, 1996), Appendix IV.3.

34. Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess, “Land Reform, Poverty Reduction, and Growth: Evidence from India,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 2 (2000): 389–430, 401.

35. The maximum was up to 50 percent if the landlord provided all material inputs.

36. Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee, “Subsidized Farm Input Programs and Agricultural Performance: A Farm-Level Analysis of West Bengal’s Green Revolution, 1982–1995,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3, no. 4 (2011): 186–214; Abhijit V. Banerjee, Paul J. Gertler, and Maitreesh Ghatak, “Empowerment and Efficiency: Tenancy Reform in West Bengal,” Journal of Political Economy 110, no. 2 (2002): 239–280.

37. Klaus Deininger, Songqing Jin, and Vandana Yadav, “Long-Term Effects of Land Reform on Human Capital Accumulation: Evidence from West Bengal,” WIDER Working Paper No. 2011/82, 2011, United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), www.econstor.eu/bit stream/10419/53978/1/678366586.pdf.

38. Pranab Bardhan, Michael Luca, Dilip Mookherjee, and Francisco Pino, “Evolution of Land Distribution in West Bengal, 1967–2004: Role of Land Reform and Demographic Changes,” Journal of Development Economics 110 (2014): 171–190, 174.

39. Sonia Bhalotra, Abhishek Chakravarty, Dilip Mookherjee, and Francisco J. Pino, “Property Rights and Gender Bias: Evidence from Land Reform in West Bengal,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11, no. 2 (2019): 205–237.

40. Prashant K. Trivedi, “Reinforcing Exclusions: Caste, Patriarchy and Land Reforms in India,” Journal of Land and Rural Studies 10, no. 2 (2022): 262–277.

41. Furthermore, inheritance of agricultural land occurred under prevailing state-level land reform laws, which were highly gender unequal.

42. Sanchari Roy, “Empowering Women? Inheritance Rights, Female Education and Dowry Payments in India,” Journal of Development Economics 114 (2015): 233–251.

43. On female child mortality rates, see Daniel Rosenblum, “Unintended Consequences of Women’s Inheritance Rights on Female Mortality in India,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 63, no. 2 (2015): 223–248. On female suicides (and a rise in male suicides as well) and wife beating, see Siwan Anderson and Garance Genicot, “Suicide and Property Rights in India,” Journal of Development Economics 114 (2015): 64–78.

44. Until recently, agricultural censuses and household surveys have not collected gender-disaggregated data on ownership holdings. Nonetheless, studies such as Bhalotra et al., “Property Rights and Gender Bias”; Trivedi, “Reinforcing Exclusions”; and others suggest that land reforms, if anything, have perpetuated or even deepened gender biases in landholding and inheritance.

45. Bina Agarwal, Pervesh Anthwal, and Malvika Mahesh, “How Many and Which Women Own Land in India? Inter-Gender and Intra-Gender Gaps,” Journal of Development Studies 57, no. 11 (2021): 1807–1829. These data are from a 2009–2014 survey across nine of India’s states.

46. Yuvaraj Krishnamoorthy, Karthika Ganesh, and Karthiga Vijayakumar, “Physical, Emotional and Sexual Violence Faced by Spouses in India: Evidence on Determinants and Help-Seeking Behaviour from a Nationally Representative Survey,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 74, no. 9 (2020): 732–740.

47. Dana Smith, “More Than a Third of Female Suicides Are Committed by Indian Women,” Scientific American, December 1, 2018. The official numbers are likely a considerable undercount, perhaps by a factor of six to nine. See Anderson and Genicot, “Suicide and Property Rights in India,” 64.

48. Sharangee Dutta, “In 2021, Over 45K Women Died by Suicide in India, 23,000 of Them Are Housewives: NCRB Data,” Hindustan Times, August 30, 2022, www.hindus tantimes.com/india-news/in-2021-over-45k-women-died-by-suicide-in-india-23-000-of-them-are-housewives-101661855990564.html.

49. Yunping Tong, “India’s Sex Ratio at Birth Begins to Normalize,” Pew Research Center, August 23, 2022, www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2022/08/PR_2022.08.26_India-sex-ratio_REPORT.pdf.

50. This episode is reported in detail in Rolando Antonio Velis Polío, “La Reforma Agraria de 1980 en El Salvador: Lucha política, diseño y ejecución,” Revista de humanidades y ciencias sociales 3 (2012): 95–120, retold in Eduardo Montero, “Cooperative Property Rights and Development: Evidence from Land Reform in El Salvador,” Journal of Political Economy 130, no. 1 (2022): 48–93.

51. Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 31.

52. Paul Almeida, Waves of Protest: Popular Struggle in El Salvador, 1925–2005 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 114.

53. Almeida, Waves of Protest, 37.

54. Karen Musalo, “El Salvador—A Peace Worse Than War: Violence, Gender and a Failed Legal Response,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 30, no. 3 (2018): 32–35.

55. Vincent McElhinny, “Inequality and Empowerment: The Political Foundations of Post-War Decentralization and Development in El Salvador, 1992–2000” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2006), 283.

56. Montero, “Cooperative Property Rights and Development,” 56–57.

57. Carmen Diana Deere, “Rural Women and State Policy: The Latin American Agrarian Reform Experience,” World Development 13, no. 9 (1985): 1037–1053, 1041; Cristóbal Kay, “Latin America’s Agrarian Reform: Lights and Shadows,” Land Reform / Réforme agraire / Reforma agraria, 1998/2, https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/323dde22-f6e6-44cd-8244-da9d69c7d51a/content, 23.

58. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León, Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 98.

59. Deere and León, Empowering Women, 98.

60. Deere, “Rural Women and State Policy,” 1046–1050.

61. Fabrice Lehoucq and Harold Sims, “Reform with Repression: The Land Reform in El Salvador,” ISHI Occasional Papers in Social Change No. 6, 1982, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/F_Lehoucq_Reform_1982.pdf.

62. Deere and León, Empowering Women, 98.

63. The group’s name in Spanish is the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional.

64. Morena Soledad Herrera, Movimiento de mujeres en El Salvador, 1995–2006: Estrategias y miradas desde el feminismo (San Salvador: Fundación Nacional para el Desarrollo [FUNDE], 2008), 89.

65. Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution, 314.

66. Deere and León, Empowering Women, 212.

1 

CHAPTER 5: THE DISAPPEARING WILDERNESS

1. Robert Wilson, “Authoritarian Environmental Governance: Insights from the Past Century,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109, no. 2 (2019): 314–323, 317.

2. Robert Marks, China: An Environmental History, 2nd ed. (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 327.

3. Zhang Xiaofang, “The Early Exploration of the Road to Socialist Industrialization in China,” Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Science Edition) 56, no. 4 (2019): 11–20, 17.

4. Marks, China, 327.

5. See, for instance, Robert Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

6. Marks, China.

7. Tenancy overall was roughly 20 percent in the late 1930s. The largest 3–4 percent of landowners held 20–30 percent of the arable land in northern China and 30–50 percent of the arable land in southern China. These rates were not as severe as in nearby Taiwan and South Korea. See Michael Albertus, Property Without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 295.

8. John Wong, Land Reform in the People’s Republic of China: Institutional Transformation in Agriculture (New York: Praeger, 1973), 129–130.

9. Marks, China, 322.

10. Liu Dachang, “Tenure and Management of Non-State Forests in China Since 1950: A Historical Review,” Environmental History 6, no. 2 (2001): 239–263.

11. Marks, China, 1.

12. “Sichuan People’s Surprise Siege of Sparrows,” People’s Daily, March 25, 1958, 7, http://data.people.com.cn.

13. Ruigang Bi, Hanyi Chen, Qinyun Wang, and Xuebin Wang, “Sparrow Slaughter and Grain Yield Reduction During the Great Famine of China,” April 22, 2021, 3, available at SSRN, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3832057.

14. Ruigang Bi et al., “Sparrow Slaughter.”

15. Basil Ashton, Kenneth Hill, Alan Piazza, and Robin Zeitz, “Famine in China, 1958–61,” in The Population of Modern China, ed. Dudley L. Poston and David Yaukey, 225–271 (Boston: Springer, 1992). Land collectivization compounded the mismanagement of agriculture and associated environmental causes of the famine. By divorcing income from work input and eliminating private property, collectivization eroded work incentives and cauterized private investment in agriculture. It was a perfect storm for the human and natural environment. Career incentives and the political radicalism of officials pursuing political advancement also exacerbated decision-making problems. See James Kai-Sing Kung and Shuo Chen, “The Tragedy of the Nomenklatura: Career Incentives and Political Radicalism During China’s Great Leap Famine,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 1 (2011): 27–45.

16. Peter Ho, “Mao’s War Against Nature? The Environmental Impact of the Grain-First Campaign in China,” China Journal 50 (July 2003): 37–59, 41.

17. Marks, China, 327.

18. Marks, China, 328.

19. Naiping Song and Zhang Fengrong, “Re-evaluation of the ‘Grain as the Key Link’ Policy and Its Impact on the Ecological Environment,” Economic Geography 26, no. 4 (2006): 628–631, 629.

20. Jintao Xu, Runsheng Yin, Zhou Li, and Can Liu, “China’s Ecological Rehabilitation: Unprecedented Efforts, Dramatic Impacts, and Requisite Policies,” Ecological Economics 57, no. 4 (2006): 595–607, 597.

21. Liu Dachang, “Reforestation After Deforestation in China,” in Good Earths: Regional and Historical Insights into China’s Environment, ed. Ken-ichi Abe and James E. Nickum, 90–105 (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2009), 91.

22. Marks, China, 329.

23. Sandra Postel and Lori Heise, “Reforesting the Earth,” Worldwatch Paper 83, 1988, Worldwatch Institute, 51–52, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED293701.pdf.

24. Marks, China, 316.

25. Yuxuan Li, Weifeng Zhang, Lin Ma, Gaoqiang Huang, Oene Oenema, Fusuo Zhang, and Zhengxia Dou, “An Analysis of China’s Fertilizer Policies: Impacts on the Industry, Food Security, and the Environment,” Journal of Environmental Quality 42, no. 4 (2013): 972–981.

26. See, for instance, W. L. Zhang, Z. X. Tian, N. Zhang, and X. Q. Li, “Nitrate Pollution of Groundwater in Northern China,” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 59, no. 3 (1996): 223–231. Also see Marks, China, 367–370.

27. “Why Protect the Amazon,” Amazon Conservation Association, www.amazon conservation.org/the-challenge/why-the-amazon, accessed May 16, 2024.

28. “Why Protect the Amazon,” Amazon Conservation Association.

29. Jake Spring, “Amazon Biome Hurtles Toward Death Spiral as Deforestation Jumps,” Reuters, January 27, 2021, www.reuters.com/business/environment/amazon-hurtles-toward-death-spiral-deforestation-jumps-2020-2021-01-27.

30. Kiley Price, “Study: How Years of Wildfires Have Devastated the Amazon,” Conservation International, September 1, 2021, www.conservation.org/blog/study-how-years-of-wildfires-have-devastated-the-amazon. See also Zoe Sullivan, “The Real Reason the Amazon Is on Fire,” Time, August 26, 2019, https://time.com/5661162/why-the-amazon-is-on-fire.

31. “Threats to the Amazon,” Amazon Conservation Association, www.amazoncon servation.org/the-challenge/threats, accessed May 16, 2024.

32. Matt Sandy, “The Amazon Rainforest Is Nearly Gone. We Went to the Front Lines to See If It Could Be Saved,” Time, September 12, 2019, https://time.com/amazon-rainforest-disappearing.

33. One particularly important law was the 1850 Land Law, which legally prohibited land squatting but in practice enabled powerful large landowners to systematically incorporate frontier lands. It also legalized existing de facto landholdings and legitimized pre-independence imperial land grants. See Michael Albertus, Thomas Brambor, and Ricardo Ceneviva, “Land Inequality and Rural Unrest: Theory and Evidence from Brazil,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62, no. 3 (2018): 557–596.

34. Martin T. Katzman, “The Brazilian Frontier in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 3 (1975): 266–285, 276.

35. Gabriel Ondetti, Land, Protest, and Politics: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).

36. Brazil’s landholding Gini was 0.83. See International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Rural Poverty Report 2001: The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press for IFAD, 2001), chap. 3.

37. Michael Albertus, “Landowners and Democracy: The Social Origins of Democracy Reconsidered,” World Politics 69, no. 2 (2017): 233–276. Data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, World Census of Agriculture.

38. Jessica Intrator, “From Squatter to Settler: Applying the Lessons of Nineteenth Century U.S. Public Land Policy to Twenty-First Century Land Struggles in Brazil,” Ecology Law Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2011): 179–232, 187.

39. Lee Alston, Gary Libecap, and Bernardo Mueller, Titles, Conflict, and Land Use: The Development of Property Rights and Land Reform on the Brazilian Amazon Frontier (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 37.

40. Luiz Carlos Kopes Brandão, “A colonização brasileira, do descobrimento ao estatuto da terra,” unpublished manuscript, 2009, 7.

41. The settlements were Goiás (1941), Amazonas (1941), Maranhão (1942), Pará (1943), “General Osório” in Paraná (1943), Dourados (1943), Piauí (1944), and Jaíba (1948). Lucas Felicio Costa and Ricardo Trevisan, “Colônias Agrícolas Nacionais: Laboratórios experimentais de exploração e ocupação do território brasileiro, um arranjo possíve,” Eixo: A construção da cidade sul-americana contemporânea. História e historiografias (Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Asociación de Escuelas y Facultades Públicas de Arquitectura de América del Sur, 2019); Wagner Abadio Freitas and Marcelo de Mello, “A Colônia Agrícola Nacional de Goiás e a redefinição nos usos do território,” Sociedade e natureza 26, no. 3 (2014): 471–482.

42. Martin Katzman, “Colonization as an Approach to Regional Development: Northern Paraná, Brazil,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 26, no. 4 (1978): 709–724, 712.

43. Ondetti, Land, Protest, and Politics, 11.

44. The 1964 land statute law required the country’s land reform agency to issue certificates to beneficiaries in order for them to be able to sell, partition, lease, or mortgage their land. But in many cases it did not issue titles and it did not link them to a land cadaster, leaving beneficiaries in legal limbo.

45. Charles Wood and Marianne Schmink, “The Military and the Environment in the Brazilian Amazon,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 21, no. 1 (1993): 81–105, 88.

46. See Nigel Smith, Rainforest Corridors: The Transamazon Colonization Scheme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 17. Also see Robert Walker, Stephen Perz, Eugenio Arima, and Cynthia Simmons, “The Transamazon Highway: Past, Present, Future,” in Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects, vol. 1, ed. Stanley Brunn, 569–599 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 580.

47. Wood and Schmink. “The Military and the Environment,” 89.

48. Georgia Carvalho, Daniel Nepstad, David McGrath, Maria del Carmen Vera Diaz, Márcio Santilli, and Ana Cristina Barros, “Frontier Expansion in the Amazon: Balancing Development and Sustainability,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 44, no. 3 (2002): 34–44, 37.

49. Aurora Miho Yanai, Paulo Maurício Lima de Alencastro Graça, Leonardo Guimarães Ziccardi, Maria Isabel Sobral Escada, and Philip Martin Fearnside, “Brazil’s Amazonian Deforestation: The Role of Landholdings in Undesignated Public Lands,” Regional Environmental Change 22, no. 1 (2002): 1–14.

50. Jesse Hyde, “The Lawless Frontier at the Heart of the Burning Amazon,” Rolling Stone, September 17, 2019, www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/amazon-burning-bolsonaro-novo-progresso-deforestation-885114.

51. The group’s name in Portuguese is Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra.

52. On limiting urbanization and crime through agrarian reform, see Belén Fernández, Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).

53. On property rights and organization within settlements on privately owned land, see Aldiva Sales Diniz and Bruce Gilbert, “Socialist Values and Cooperation in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement,” Latin American Perspectives 40, no. 4 (2013): 19–34.

54. Michael Albertus, Thomas Brambor, and Ricardo Ceneviva, “Land Inequality and Rural Unrest: Theory and Evidence from Brazil,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62, no. 3 (2018): 557–596. Based on data from the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária.

55. For instance, in 2019 President Jair Bolsonaro passed a provisional measure (MP-910) that allowed individuals to legalize “self-declared” ownership of up to 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) in Amazonia. Ownership is often demonstrated by putting land to use, first by clear-cutting the forest. See Lucas Ferrante, Maryane Andrade, and Philip Fearnside, “Land Grabbing on Brazil’s Highway BR-319 as a Spearhead for Amazonian Deforestation,” Land Use Policy 108 (2021): 2.

56. Karin-Marijke Vis, “The Road Transforming the Amazon,” BBC, November 4, 2014, www.bbc.com/travel/article/20141028-the-road-transforming-the-amazon.

57. Albertus et al., “Land Inequality and Rural Unrest.”

58. Albertus et al., “Land Inequality and Rural Unrest.”

59. Veronica Orellano, Paulo Furquim Azevedo, Maria Sylvia Saes, and Viviam Ester Nascimento, “Land Invasions, Insecure Property Rights and Production Decisions,” Journal of Agricultural Economics 66, no. 3 (2015): 660–671.

60. Stephen Aldrich, Robert Walker, Cynthia Simmons, Marcellus Caldas, and Stephen Perz, “Contentious Land Change in the Amazon’s Arc of Deforestation,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102, no. 1 (2012): 103–128; Claudio Araujo, Catherine Araujo Bonjean, Jean-Louis Combes, Pascale Combes Motel, and Eustaquio Reis, “Property Rights and Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon,” Ecological Economics 68, no. 8 (2009): 2461–2468.

61. Philip Fearnside, “Desmatamento na Amazônia brasileira: História, índices e consequências,” Megadiversidade 1, no. 1 (2005): 113–123; Amintas Brandão Jr. and Carlos Souza Jr., “Deforestation in Land Reform Settlements in the Amazon,” Imazon, no. 7 (June 2006): 1–4, https://imazon.org.br/PDFimazon/Ingles/the_state_of_amazon/de forastantion_land.pdf.

62. Brandão and Souza, “Deforestation in Land Reform Settlements in the Amazon.”

63. Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, Philip Martin Fearnside, Denis Ribeiro do Valle, and Cristiano de Souza Alves, “Deforestation Trajectories on a Development Frontier in the Brazilian Amazon: 35 Years of Settlement Colonization, Policy and Economic Shifts, and Land Accumulation,” Environmental Management 66, no. 6 (2020): 966–984.

64. Yiyun Wu, Xican Xi, Xin Tang, Deming Luo, Baojing Gu, Shu Kee Lam, Peter M. Vitousek, and Deli Chen, “Policy Distortions, Farm Size, and the Overuse of Agricultural Chemicals in China,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 27 (2018): 7010–7015, 7010.

65. Laura Mallonee, “The Lush Billion-Tree Spectacle of China’s Great Green Wall,” Wired, October 10, 2017, www.wired.com/story/ian-teh-chinas-great-green-wall.

66. Jintao Xu et al., “China’s Ecological Rehabilitation.”

1 

CHAPTER 6: THE UNDERDEVELOPMENT PLAYBOOK

1. Alonso Domínguez Rascón, La política de reforma agraria en Chihuahua, 1920–1924 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Plaza y Valdés, 2003), 74.

2. Domínguez Rascón, La política de reforma agraria en Chihuahua, 74.

3. Quoted in Hans Werner Tobler, “Los campesinos y la formación del estado revolucionario, 1910–1940,” in Revuelta, rebelión, y revolución, ed. Friedrich Katz (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1990), 439.

4. The party’s name in Spanish is the Partido Revolucionario Institucional.

5. Quoted in Domínguez Rascón, La política de reforma agraria en Chihuahua, 75.

6. Susan Walsh Sanderson, Land Reform in Mexico, 1910–1980 (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984), 16.

7. There were 11.7 million rural inhabitants and 3.5 million urban ones according to the 1910 census.

8. Sanderson, Land Reform in Mexico, 18, 19.

9. Article 27 followed from a 1915 decree in response to intense pressure from Zapata, Pancho Villa, and other revolutionaries. See Sanderson, Land Reform in Mexico.

10. Emilio Kourí, “La invención del ejido,” Nexos, January 2015, www.nexos.com.mx/?p=23778.

11. A considerable faction of PRI leaders in the 1930s had communist ideological leanings and viewed the ejido as a step toward collectivized agriculture. A set of pragmatists viewed group-based land redistribution as more efficient, rapid, and manageable than individual redistribution. And a group of nationalists viewed the ejido as a unique and venerable link to Mexico’s great indigenous civilizations. See Kourí, “La invención del ejido.”

12. Gerardo Otero, “Agrarian Reform in Mexico: Capitalism and the State,” in Searching for Agrarian Reform in Latin America, ed. William Thiesenhusen, 276–304 (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

13. Over the course of its rule and including postrevolutionary land redistribution in the lead-up to the PRI’s formation, Mexico redistributed 126 million acres of land. Redistribution is closer to 210 million acres when including the recognition or confirmation of communities that already had de facto, relatively autonomous control of their property (reconocimiento or confirmación y titulación de bienes comunales).

14. The Gini index of landholding inequality (which ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 representing perfect equality) dropped from 0.96 in 1930 to 0.62 by the 1960s. For the 1930 figure, see Susan Eckstein, “The Impact of Revolution on Social Welfare in Latin America,” Theory and Society 11, no. 1 (1982): 43–94. For the 1960s figure, see International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Rural Poverty Report 2001: The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty (Oxford: Oxford University Press for IFAD, 2001), 118.

15. Jesus Silva Herzog, El agrarismo mexicano y la reforma agraria (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959); Eyler Simpson, The Ejido: Mexico’s Way Out (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937); Michael Albertus, Beatriz Magaloni, Barry Weingast, and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, “Authoritarian Survival and Poverty Traps: Land Reform in Mexico,” World Development 77 (2016): 154–170.

16. Albertus et al., “Authoritarian Survival and Poverty Traps.”

17. Alain de Janvry, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, and Elisabeth Sadoulet, “Are Land Reforms Granting Complete Property Rights Politically Risky? Electoral Outcomes of Mexico’s Certification Program,” Journal of Development Economics 110 (2014): 216–225.

18. The leveling of wealth through the revolution and radical policy shifts from the 1910s through the 1930s also drove down economic inequality for several subsequent decades. See David Felix, “Income Inequality in Mexico,” Current History 72, no. 425 (1977): 111–116.

19. William Thiesenhusen, Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), chap. 2.

20. Albertus et al., “Authoritarian Survival and Poverty Traps,” 156.

21. Gustavo Gordillo, Alain de Janvry, and Elisabeth Sadoulet, “Between Political Control and Efficiency Gains: The Evolution of Agrarian Property Rights in Mexico,” CEPAL Review 66 (1998): 151–169, 158.

22. Gustavo Perez-Verdin, Yeon-Su Kim, Denver Hospodarsky, and Aregai Tecle, “Factors Driving Deforestation in Common-Pool Resources in Northern Mexico,” Journal of Environmental Management 90, no. 1 (2009): 331–340; Marcela Vásquez-León and Diana Liverman, “The Political Ecology of Land-Use Change: Affluent Ranchers and Destitute Farmers in the Mexican Municipio of Alamos,” Human Organization 63, no. 1 (2004): 21–33.

23. Angus Wright, “Downslope and North: How Soil Degradation and Synthetic Pesticides Drove the Trajectory of Mexican Agriculture Through the Twentieth Century,” in A Land Between Waters: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico, ed. Christopher R. Boyer, 22–49 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012).

24. Gordillo et al., “Between Political Control and Efficiency Gains,” 159.

25. Alejandro Encinas and Fernando Rascón, Reporte y cronología del movimiento campesino e indígena, vol. 5 (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, 1983), 130.

26. One example was the Comité Coordinador Empresarial. See Carlos Arriola, “Los grupos empresariales frente al Estado (1973–1975),” Foro internacional 16, no. 4 (1976): 449–495, 475.

27. Julio Calderón Cockburn, “Luchas por la tierra, contradicciones sociales y sistema político: El caso de las zonas ejidales y comunales en la ciudad de México (1980–1984),” Estudios demográficos y urbanos 2, no. 2 (1987): 301–324; Gordillo et al., “Between Political Control and Efficiency Gains.”

28. Gordillo et al., “Between Political Control and Efficiency Gains,” 158; Albertus et al., “Authoritarian Survival and Poverty Traps,” 158.

29. Eckstein, “The Impact of Revolution on Social Welfare in Latin America,” 71.

30. Gordillo et al., “Between Political Control and Efficiency Gains.”

31. Because of the implications of an entire family losing land access, migrants were frequently members of a larger household, though not heads of household who held agrarian rights within the ejido.

32. Felix, “Income Inequality in Mexico,” 112.

33. Albertus et al., “Authoritarian Survival and Poverty Traps.”

34. Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization indicate that average yields per agricultural worker from 2015 to 2017 for corn, beans, wheat, sugarcane, and cereal grains—the bulk of Mexico’s top agricultural products by planted area—were higher than the 1989–1991 averages on the eve of the Program for Certification of Rights to Ejido Lands (PROCEDE). The vast majority of this production came from small and medium producers. Furthermore, just over 14 percent of the rural population lived below the World Bank’s international poverty line of $1.90 per day in 2014, down from around 28 percent at the equivalent marker in the early 1990s. See Paloma Villagómez Ornelas, “Rural Poverty in Mexico: Prevalence and Challenges,” National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy, Mexico City, 2019, 2, available at United Nations, www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2019/03/RURAL-POV ERTY-IN-MEXICO.-CONEVAL.-Expert-Meeting.-15022019.pdf.

35. Speech by President Hugo Chávez at Santa Inés de Barinas, December 10, 2001, transcript at Todo Chávez, www.todochavezenlaweb.gob.ve/todochavez/2943-interven cion-del-comandante-presidente-hugo-chavez-en-la-promulgacion-de-la-ley-de-tierras-y-desarrollo-agrario.

36. Margarita López Maya, “Venezuela: El paro cívico del 10 de diciembre,” Nueva Sociedad 177 (2002): 8–12.

37. Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 237.

38. It vacillated between about 40 percent and 70 percent of revenue depending on the oil price. See Osmel Manzano and Jose Sebastian Scrofina, “Resource Revenue Management in Venezuela: A Consumption-Based Poverty Reduction Strategy,” 2013, available at Natural Resource Governance Institute, www.resourcegovernance.org/sites/default/files/Venezuela_Final.pdf.

39. Gregory Wilpert, “Land for People Not for Profit in Venezuela,” Venezuelanalysis.com, August 23, 2005, https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1310.

40. Michael Albertus, “The Role of Subnational Politicians in Distributive Politics: Political Bias in Venezuela’s Land Reform Under Chávez,” Comparative Political Studies 48, no. 13 (2015): 1667–1710.

41. The properties targeted included those larger than the regional average and with productivity less than 80 percent of what was possible.

42. Meanwhile, the government asked all landowners to register their property. But because the vast majority could not trace their land title back to 1848, few landowners did so.

43. These examples draw from Michael Albertus, “This Land Was Your Land,” Foreign Policy, November 13, 2015.

44. Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution, 240.

45. Michael Albertus, “The Role of Subnational Politicians.”

46. Land reallocation was not solely responsible for the collapse. A decline in the price of oil, other economic policies, and increasing authoritarianism also caused economic fallout. But land reallocation was part and parcel of the problems.

47. “Will Venezuela’s Dictatorship Survive?,” The Economist, March 9, 2017; Amelia Cheatham, Diana Roy, and Rocio Cara Labrador, “Venezuela: The Rise and Fall of a Petrostate,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 10, 2023, www.cfr.org/backgrounder/venezuela-crisis.

48. Marco Arena, Emilio Fernandez Corugedo, Jaime Guajardo, and Juan Francisco Yepez, “Venezuela’s Migrants Bring Economic Opportunity to Latin America,” IMF Country Focus, December 7, 2022, www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/12/06/cf-venezuelas-migrants-bring-economic-opportunity-to-latin-america.

49. This account is drawn from Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990), 124–125; Paolo Cinanni, Lotte per la terra e comunisti in Calabria (1943–1953): Terre pubbliche e Mezzogiorno (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977), 84–87. Ginsborg draws from both other scholars and firsthand accounts.

50. Giovanni Mottura and Umberto Ursetta, Il diritto alla terra (Milan: Feltrinelli Economica, 1981), 201–202.

51. Ethan Kapstein, Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and US Foreign Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chap. 4.

52. These included the upland region of Calabria in southern Italy, parts of Campania in the center south, the Delta Podano region in northern Italy, Maremma in western central Italy, the Fucino Basin in the center of the country, a broad swath of Lucania, Molise, and Puglia in the southeast, the entirety of the island of Sardinia, and all of Sicily.

53. In practice, relatively little land was exempted from expropriation in this way.

54. The Ministry of Agriculture calculated the cost of land reform over its operative period from 1950 to 1964 at 709 billion lire—a large sum that computed to over 5 million lire per land reform beneficiary family. I converted these figures to contemporary US dollars using an inflation calculator.

55. Kapstein, Seeds of Stability, 119–122.

56. Giovanni Marciani, L’esperienza di riforma agraria in Italia (Rome: Giuffrè Editore, 1966).

57. The size of “self-sufficient” farms varied across region even beyond this range. And given imperfect knowledge of soils and growing conditions, as well as the high demand for land, many of these farms were far from sufficient to support a family.

58. In some regions it was substantially quicker: in the Maremma, for instance, expropriation was largely complete within approximately one year of the land reform law’s passage.

59. Russell King, “Italian Land Reform: Critique, Effects and Evaluation,” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 62, no. 6 (1971): 368–382, 377, 372.

60. Bruno Caprettini, Lorenzo Casaburi, and Miriam Venturini, “Redistribution, Voting and Clientelism: Evidence from the Italian Land Reform,” CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP15679, September 2021, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract _id=3783894; King, “Italian Land Reform,” 372.

61. Ginsborg, History of Contemporary Italy, 135.

62. Ginsborg, History of Contemporary Italy, 135.

63. Calabria and Maremma are not unique in their outcomes. A number of observers anticipated some of the same eventual consequences that transpired in Maremma in other parts of Italy as well. See, for instance, Alessandro Bonanno, “Theories of the State: The Case of Land Reform in Italy, 1944–1961,” Sociological Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1988): 131–147; Guido Fabiani, L’agricoltura italiana tra sviluppo e crisis (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979); King, “Italian Land Reform.”

64. Social and material vulnerability are higher in reform areas. These areas also rank lower on a countrywide index of well-being. See Michael Albertus, “The Persistence of Rural Underdevelopment: Evidence from Land Reform in Italy,” Comparative Political Studies 56, no. 1 (2023): 65–100.

65. The average land beneficiary in the Maremma received about twenty-two acres of land compared with the local average of thirty-two acres. The smaller farms struggled to compete with larger ones, and many of the smaller ones failed to support the large, multigenerational families living on them. Furthermore, many new farm owners took years to learn critical skills relating to crop rotation and fertilizer use.

66. For instance, twenty years after the reform, 90 percent of the original beneficiaries in Calabria and over 80 percent of the beneficiaries in Sicily still held their land. See Ginsborg, History of Contemporary Italy, 131–137.

67. The old-age ratio is about 5 percent higher in the Maremma zone compared with municipalities just outside the zone. See Albertus, “The Persistence of Rural Underdevelopment.”

68. Bonanno, “Theories of the State.”

69. Lorenzo Belotti, “An Analysis of the Italian Agrarian Reform,” Land Economics 36, no. 2 (1960): 118–128.

1 

CHAPTER 7: THE ARC OF HISTORY IS LONG, BUT IT BENDS TOWARD DEVELOPMENT

1. Eric Hobsbawm, “A Case of Neo-Feudalism: La Convención, Perú,” Journal of Latin American Studies 1, no. 1 (1969): 31–50, 35.

2. Author interview with Wilber Vivanco, January 22, 2024.

3. Author interview with Wilber Vivanco, January 18, 2024.

4. Data are from the 1961 agricultural census and the 1961 population census.

5. Author interview with Justina López at a former hacienda in Huarán, June 20, 2014.

6. This hacienda was in Huarán in the department of Cusco.

7. Michael Albertus, Property Without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 213–215.

8. Michael Albertus, “Land Reform and Civil Conflict: Theory and Evidence from Peru,” American Journal of Political Science 64, no. 2 (2020): 256–274.

9. William Long, “Peru’s Big Debate. Novelist Takes on Charismatic Leader: Garcia’s Plan to Nationalize Banks Has Polarized His Nation,” Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1987.

10. Susan Stokes, “Democratic Accountability and Policy Change: Economic Policy in Fujimori’s Peru,” Comparative Politics 29, no. 2 (1997): 209–226, 214–215.

11. Stokes, “Democratic Accountability and Policy Change,” 217.

12. Grigore Pop-Eleches, From Economic Crisis to Reform: IMF Programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 274.

13. Timothy Mitchell, “The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World,” European Journal of Sociology 46, no. 2 (2005): 297–320.

14. The program’s name in Spanish was the Proyecto Especial de Titulación de Tierras y Catastro Rural.

15. Author interview with William Paño, January 20, 2024.

16. The program’s name in Spanish is the Comisión de Formalización de la Propiedad Informal.

17. Pablo Bandeira, José María Sumpsi, and Cesar Falconi, “Evaluating Land Administration Systems: A Comparative Method with an Application to Peru and Honduras,” Land Use Policy 27, no. 2 (2010): 351–363.

18. Author interview with Juan de Dios Condori, January 16, 2024.

19. Marlene Castillo, Laureano del Castillo, Carlos Monge, and Minda Bustamante, Las comunidades campesinas en el siglo XXI (Lima: Grupo ALLPA, 2004), 27.

20. Román Robles Mendoza, “Tradición y modernidad en las comunidades campesinas,” Investigaciones sociales 8, no. 12 (2004): 25–54, 28.

21. Instituto del Bien Común and Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales, Directorio de Comunidades Campesinas del Perú (Lima: Tarea Asociación Gráfica Educativa, 2016), 6–7. More than half of these communities have been recognized and titled since the 1980s.

22. Multi-Dimensional Review of Peru, vol. 3, From Analysis to Action, OECD Development Pathways (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2019), www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/d9afdddd-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/d9afdddd-en.

23. Owen Dyer, “Covid-19: Peru’s Official Death Toll Triples to Become World’s Highest,” BMJ 373 (2021): n1442.

24. Albertus, Property Without Rights, 255–256.

25. Guro Glavin, Kristian Stokke, and Henrik Wiig, “The Impact of Women’s Mobilisation: Civil Society Organisations and the Implementation of Land Titling in Peru,” Forum for Development Studies 40, no. 1 (2013): 129–152, 129–130.

26. John Crabtree, “The Impact of Neo-liberal Economics on Peruvian Peasant Agriculture in the 1990s,” Journal of Peasant Studies 29, no. 3 (2002): 131–161, 140–141.

27. Author interview with Wilber Vivanco, January 18, 2024. Vivanco’s career trajectory as a lawyer working on land titling is a testament to government shifts in titling. He began his career in 1997 with the Special Land Titling and Cadaster Project (PETT), then worked under the Commission for the Formalization of Informal Property (COFOPRI) starting in 2006 as titling competencies shifted there, and again moved to the regional government of the Cusco region in 2011 as competencies again shifted and became decentralized.

28. “Estos son los 68 congresistas que tienen procesos en investigación en el Ministerio Público,” Caretas, November 9, 2020.

1 

CHAPTER 8: ONE SMALL STEP FOR WOMEN

1. Author interview with Elena Antonia Parodis Medina, October 4, 2023.

2. The displaced group, including Elena’s family, won a favorable ruling for restitution in 2011 as there was a new push to restitute land to people displaced during Colombia’s conflict. But it took another eight years before the land was finally granted to Elena’s family and they could go back.

3. Author correspondence with Elena Antonia Parodis Medina, December 13, 2023.

4. Author interview with Elena Antonia Parodis Medina, October 4, 2023.

5. Michael Albertus and Oliver Kaplan, “Land Reform as a Counterinsurgency Policy: Evidence from Colombia,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 57, no. 2 (2013): 198–231, 203.

6. Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 30.

7. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León, Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 43.

8. The group’s Spanish name is Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia.

9. Instituto Colombiano de Desarrollo Rural (INCODER), “Resoluciones Históricas de Baldíos,” 2015.

10. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León, “The Gender Asset Gap: Land in Latin America,” World Development 31, no. 6 (2003): 925–947, 937.

11. Deere and León, Empowering Women, 87.

12. Deere and León, Empowering Women, 87.

13. Another law in 1990 went a further step still in stipulating that the work product in a partnership belonged to both partners equally.

14. Deere and León, Empowering Women, 87.

15. Deere and León, “The Gender Asset Gap,” 937. The figure is 45 percent.

16. João Márcio Mendes Pereira, “The World Bank and Market-Assisted Land Reform in Colombia, Brazil, and Guatemala,” Land Use Policy 100 (2021): 7.

17. Deere and León, “The Gender Asset Gap,” 939.

18. Marcelo M. Giugale, Olivier Lafourcade, and Connie Luff, Colombia: The Economic Foundation of Peace (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003), 581.

19. This mechanism was available for those victimized between 1991 and the closing of the law.

20. Estimates are that about 90 percent of violent conflict deaths were men. See Donny Meertens and Richard Stoller, “Facing Destruction, Rebuilding Life: Gender and the Internally Displaced in Colombia,” Latin American Perspectives 28, no. 1 (2001): 132–148, 133.

21. Octavo informe de seguimienteo al Congreso de la República (Bogotá: Comisión de Seguimiento y Monitoreo a la Implementación de la Ley 1448 de 2011, 2021), 411.

22. This is of the nearly 150,000 people registered as victims of land dispossession or forced abandonment. This figure is considerably lower than the government’s initial estimation that roughly 350,000 families would be eligible to reclaim roughly 5 million acres of land. The figures are likely lower because some victims do not feel safe in petitioning for their land back and because informal possession makes it difficult for some to imagine reclaiming claim or to provide sufficient documentation.

23. “Mujeres lideran la restitución de tierras en Colombia,” Semana, July 25, 2019, www.semana.com/las-mujeres-se-han-convertido-en-lideres-en-los-procesos-de-restitu cion-de-tierras/1047.

24. Octavo informe de seguimienteo al Congreso de la República, 182, 160.

25. Vanesa Botero Blandón and Ana María Serrano Ávila, “Reforma rural integral y construcción de paz para las mujeres en Colombia,” Estudios políticos 62 (2021): 152–182.

26. María Juliana Gómez Mendoza and Luisa Paola Sanabria Torres, “Las mujeres rurales y su derecho a la tierra: Retos de la política pública en Colombia,” Trabajo social (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) 22 (2020): 85–104, 89.

27. That figure hovered from about 80 percent to 95 percent in the 1970s to the 1990s. Giugale et al., Colombia, 569.

28. “Left Undefended: Killings of Rights Defenders in Colombia’s Remote Communities,” Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org/report/2021/02/10/left-undefended/killings-rights-defenders-colombias-remote-communities.

29. For instance, as of late 2020, the Land Fund was providing 10 percent more land to households run by men than by women. The land formalization program benefited households run by men relative to women by a 1.4 to 1 ratio (in acreage). Adam Isacson, A Long Way to Go: Implementing Colombia’s Peace Accord After Five Years (Washington, DC: Washington Office on Latin America, 2021), 55.

30. See, for instance, Zapata Serna, Gloria Estella, Antonio Iáñez-Domínguez, José Roberto Álvarez, and Múnera Antonio J. Pareja Amador, “Mujeres víctimas del conflicto armado: Análisis de su reparación en el marco de la ley 1448 de 2011,” Investigación y desarrollo 28, no. 1 (2020): 157–184.

31. Isacson, A Long Way to Go, 56–57.

32. “Silvia Lazarte, mujer del año en Bolivia,” CIMAC Noticias, December 28, 2007.

33. The full name is the Confederación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas Indígenas Originarias de Bolivia, or National Confederation of Campesino, Indigenous, and Native Women of Bolivia.

34. Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution, 29.

35. Sandra Ramos, Transformaciones en la participación política de las mujeres (La Paz: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2013), 45.

36. In practice, many groups partitioned their grants into family units for farming but did not have title to their plots.

37. Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution, 132.

38. Deere and León, Empowering Women, 43.

39. Deere and León, Empowering Women, 74.

40. The Spanish name is the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, or CSUTCB.

41. Lucila Mejía, with Irma García, Marcela Valdivia, Celinda Sosa, Lidia Anti, Florentina Alegre, Jacinta Mamani, and Bernardina Laura, Las hijas de Bartolina Sisa (La Paz: HISBOL, 1984).

42. Stéphanie Rousseau, “Indigenous and Feminist Movements at the Constituent Assembly in Bolivia: Locating the Representation of Indigenous Women,” Latin American Research Review 46, no. 2 (2011): 5–28, 18.

43. Rousseau, “Indigenous and Feminist Movements,” 17.

44. Deere and León, Empowering Women, 75.

45. The 1996 law did include gender equity criteria in the distribution and administration of land, as promoted by urban women’s movements and NGOs, but these components of the law were minor relative to land titling.

46. The agency’s Spanish name is the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria.

47. Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel, “Land Tenure, Titling, and Gender in Bolivia,” St. Louis University Public Law Review 29 (2009): 193–242, 224.

48. At the same time, in 2002 the Bartolinas charted a more autonomous path from the Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia.

49. Carmen Diana Deere, “Women’s Land Rights, Rural Social Movements, and the State in the 21st‐Century Latin American Agrarian Reforms,” Journal of Agrarian Change 17, no. 2 (2017): 258–278, 262–263.

50. Morales was a family friend of the Lazartes. See Ramos, Transformaciones, 46.

51. Deere, “Women’s Land Rights,” 268. Morales also started doling out state-owned land to peasants in a settler-type reform, as well as reallocating a small amount of privately held land.

52. Deere, “Women’s Land Rights,” 269.

53. Stéphanie Rousseau and Anahi Morales Hudon, Indigenous Women’s Movements in Latin America: Gender and Ethnicity in Peru, Mexico, and Bolivia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 61.

54. Lastarria-Cornhiel, “Land Tenure, Titling, and Gender in Bolivia,” 237.

55. See Deborah Carvalho, “Patriarchy, Culture and Land: Challenges in Securing Women’s Ownership and Titling Rights in La Paz, Bolivia” (master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, Canada, 2012), 47.

56. Quoted in Melissa Camille Buice, “Indigenous Women, the State, and Policy Change: Evidence from Bolivia, 1994–2012” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2013), 77.

57. Deere, “Women’s Land Rights,” 270.

58. Buice, “Indigenous Women, the State, and Policy Change,” 187.

59. Deere, “Women’s Land Rights,” 270.

1 

CHAPTER 9: RECLAIMING NATURE

1. Author interview with Kris Tompkins, December 18, 2023.

2. Kristine Mcdivitt Tompkins, “Protecting Wilderness as an Act of Democracy,” New York Times, February 1, 2018.

3. Author correspondence with Marcelo Mena, December 20, 2023.

4. Michelle Bachelet, “Foreword,” in Pumalín Douglas Tompkins National Park, Tompkins Conservation, 2021, 27, www.rewildingchile.org/web/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Pumalin-Douglas-Tompkins-National-Park.pdf.

5. Ingrid Espinoza and Lorena Valenzuela, “Carbon Capture and Sequestration in the Route of Parks,” Tompkins Conservation Chile, 2020. Carbon concentration in the area, particularly in the soils but also in biomass, rivals and in some aspects surpasses parts of the Amazon basin and the Pacific coast of Colombia.

6. Martín Martinic, La trapanada al Aysén (Chile: Pehuen Editores, 2005).

7. William Norris, Triumph and Tragedy, 1939, Biblioteca Patagónica (Patagonia Bookshelf), Memoirs, 5–6, https://patlibros.org/wn/memoirs.php?lan=esp.

8. Lucas Bridges, Memorias del Baker, n.d., Biblioteca Patagónica (Patagonia Bookshelf), Memoirs, https://patlibros.org/elb/memorias.php.

9. Claudia Sepúlveda Luque and Montserrat Lara Sutulovp, Comunidades y áreas protegidas de la Patagonia Chilena (Santiago: Andros, 2001), 66, available at Educación Ambiental y Participación Ciudadana (Environmental Education and Citizen Participation), Ministry for the Environment, Chile, https://educacion.mma.gob.cl/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Libro-comunidades-y-AP-de-la-Patagonia-chilena.pdf.

10. Martinic, La trapanada al Aysén, 321.

11. Sepúlveda and Lara, Comunidades y áreas protegidas de la Patagonia Chilena, 229.

12. Claudia Sepúlveda Luque, Línea de base social de las áreas protegidas de la Patagonia Chilena (Valdivia, Chile: Programa Austral Patagonia de la Universidad Austral de Chile, 2020), 150.

13. Martinic, La trapanada al Aysén, 156.

14. William Thiesenhusen, Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 90.

15. Thiesenhusen, Broken Promises, 89–90; Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

16. Antonio Bellisario, “The Chilean Agrarian Transformation: Agrarian Reform and Capitalist ‘Partial’ Counter‐Agrarian Reform, 1964–1980: Part 1: Reformism, Socialism and Free‐Market Neoliberalism,” Journal of Agrarian Change 7, no. 1 (2007): 1–34.

17. Elena Louder and Keith Bosak, “What the Gringos Brought,” Conservation and Society 17, no. 2 (2019): 161–172, 165.

18. Author interview with Luisa Galindo, February 5, 2024.

19. Author interview with Luisa Galindo, February 5, 2024, and with Elvis Valdes, whose father was hired to hunt pumas for the cooperative, February 5, 2024.

20. Louder and Bosak, “What the Gringos Brought,” 165.

21. Author interview with François de Smet, November 22, 2023.

22. Author interview with Charlie de Smet, November 24, 2023.

23. Louder and Bosak, “What the Gringos Brought,” 165.

24. Author interview with Charlie de Smet, November 24, 2023.

25. Kris Tompkins, “A History of Valle Chacabuco,” Conservacion Patagonica, blog, August 28, 2012, www.conservacionpatagonica.org/blog/2012/08/28/a-history-ofvalle-chacabuco, quoted in Alzar School, “A History of Parque Patagonia,” November 17, 2017, https://alzarschool.org/history-of-parque-patagonia.

26. Author interview with Kris Tompkins, December 18, 2023.

27. The philanthropist Peter Buckley assisted with this purchase.

28. Sepúlveda and Lara, Comunidades y áreas protegidas de la Patagonia Chilena, 229, 230–231.

29. Bachelet, “Foreword,” 27.

30. Author correspondence with Marcelo Mena, December 20, 2023.

31. Antonio Cerrillo, “Cómo se engañó a Franco para salvar Doñana,” La vanguardia, August 14, 2019.

32. Benigno Varillas, “José A. Valverde, el cientíco que salvó Doñana,” El diario, August 4, 2023.

33. Carlos López, “La repoblación forestal de Doñana,” Huelva información, December 29, 2008.

34. World Wildlife Fund, “Doñana, las raíces del panda,” Panda 145 (October 2019): 11–15.

35. Luc Hoffman, a conservationist who had helped preserve the Rhône Delta and had teamed up with Valverde several years prior, was the WWF’s first vice president and a vocal advocate for preserving Doñana.

36. Cerrillo, “Cómo se engañó a Franco para salvar Doñana.”

37. Francisco García García, Doñana en su historia (Madrid: Organismo Autónomo Parques Nacionales, 2014).

38. Pascual Carrión, Los latifundios en España (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975).

39. The reform built on smaller steps in prior years to settle landless farmers on unused agricultural land. While this mainly gave plots to families, in some cases communities collectively occupied lands. Stanley Payne, The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936: Origins of the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 216–219.

40. Michael Albertus, “The Political Price of Authoritarian Control: Evidence from Francoist Land Settlements in Spain,” Journal of Politics 85, no. 4 (2023): 1258–1274.

41. Gonzalo Acosta Bono, José Luis Gutiérrez Molina, Angel del Río Sánchez, and Lola Martínez Macías, El canal de los presos (1940–1962) (Barcelona: Crítica, 2004).

42. The new towns include Adriano, Chapatales, Maribáñez, Marismillas, Pinzón, Trajano, El Trobal, Vetaherrado, Guadalema de los Quintero, and Troya.

43. Berta Martín-López, Marina García-Llorente, Ignacio Palomo, and Carlos Montes, “The Conservation Against Development Paradigm in Protected Areas: Valuation of Ecosystem Services in the Doñana Social-Ecological System (Southwestern Spain),” Ecological Economics 70, no. 8 (2011): 1481–1491, 1482.

44. Cerrillo, “Cómo se engañó a Franco para salvar Doñana.”

45. One example of corporation conservation is the restoration of the soils and ecosystems of several degraded Doñana lagoons in 2016–2017 by Spain’s Heineken branch, which helped them to retain more water.

46. “Doñana National Park, Spain,” UNESCO World Heritage Convention, 2010, https://whc.unesco.org/en/soc/489.

47. Pedro Zorrilla-Miras, Ignacio Palomo, Erick Gómez-Baggethun, Berta Martín-López, Pedro L. Lomas, and Carlos Montes, “Effects of Land-Use Change on Wetland Ecosystem Services: A Case Study in the Doñana Marshes (SW Spain),” Landscape and Urban Planning 122 (2014): 160–174, 165.

48. “Doñana bajo plástico: Avanza la invasión de los frutos rojos,” World Wildlife Fund, accessed May 27, 2024, www.wwf.es/?51960/Donana-bajo-plastico-avanza-la-invasion-de-los-frutos-rojos.

49. Juanjo Carmona and Pablo Flores, Doñana y el estuario del Río Guadalquivir: Análisis de WWF españa sobre sus problemas ambientales (Madrid: WWF Spain, 2020), 5, https://wwfes.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/analisisimpactosdonana.pdf.

50. Rafael Sánchez Navarro, Environmental Flows in the Marsh of the National Park of Doñana and Its Area of Influence, Synthesis Report (Madrid: WWF Spain, 2009), http://awsassets.wwf.es/downloads/synthesis_report_final_ecological_flows_1.pdf.

1 

CHAPTER 10: THE RETURN OF THE DISPOSSESSED

1. Lulama Xingwana, “L Xingwana: Tenbosch Land Handover Celebration,” speech delivered for the land handover celebration for the greater Tenbosch communities’ claim, Mpumalanga, June 19, 2007, South African Government website, www.gov.za/news/l-xingwana-tenbosch-land-handover-celebration-19-jun-2007.

2. Paul James and Philip Woodhouse, “Crisis and Differentiation Among Small-Scale Sugar Cane Growers in Nkomazi, South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 43, no. 3 (2017): 535–549, 538. Technically, the claims were made by community associations made up of people with verifiable claims to inhabiting areas where the relevant tribal authorities were historically settled.

3. Author interview with Petros Silinda, October 26, 2023. Silinda was chair of the Siphumelele Tenbosch Trust representing the Ngomane Siboshwa community.

4. Author interview with Edward Ndlovu, October 6, 2023.

5. According to RCL Foods, which acquired TSB, as of 2022 about 71 percent of the land growing sugarcane in the Nkomazi region was under Black ownership.

6. Olivia Kumwenda, “New South African Farmers Team Up with Predecessors,” Reuters, April 19, 2013, www.reuters.com/article/safrica-farmers-cooperation/new-south-african-farmers-team-up-with-predecessors-idUKL5N0D61BZ20130419.

7. Author interview with Dawie van Rooy, November 16, 2023. Van Rooy accompanied Minister Xingwana on an aerial tour of TSB’s operations on the morning of the handover ceremony to impress upon her the area’s potential and the importance of the community partnerships to realizing it.

8. Author interview with Dawie van Rooy, November 16, 2023.

9. Great Britain still maintained a degree of influence over South Africa’s foreign affairs until 1931.

10. The reserves were expanded slightly following the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act.

11. Cherryl Walker, Landmarked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2008), 36.

12. Charles Mather, “Forced Removal and the Struggle for Land and Labour in South Africa: The Ngomane of Tenbosch, 1926–1954,” Journal of Historical Geography 21, no. 2 (1995): 169–183. This is where the small-scale growers that partner with RCL now reside.

13. Author interview with Sizwe Mkhulu Ngomane, October 18, 2023.

14. James and Woodhouse, “Crisis and Differentiation,” 538.

15. Edward Lahiff, “Land Redistribution in South Africa,” in Agricultural Land Redistribution: Toward Greater Consensus, ed. Hans Binswanger-Mkhize, Camille Bourguignon, and Rogerius van den Brink, 169–200 (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2009), 170.

16. See James Gibson, Overcoming Historical Injustices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 31.

17. Nelson Mandela, “Speech by President Nelson Mandela at the launch of the Kwazulu-Natal Land Reform Pilot Programme,” March 26, 1995, transcript at Nelson Mandela Foundation Archive at the Centre of Memory, https://archive.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/za-com-mr-s-237.

18. There was also a third track, land tenure reform, that focused on strengthening land rights within former homelands and providing greater protections for occupants of privately owned farms and state land. This track did not entail significant land transfers and has had less impact than the other tracks.

19. Clarissa Pienaar, “Old- and New-Order Land Claims: What to Expect,” AgriOrbit, September 9, 2022, https://agriorbit.com/old-and-new-order-land-claims-what-to-expect.

20. For the figure of 10 million acres, see Johann Kirsten and Wandile Sihlobo, “Land Reform in South Africa: 5 Myths About Farming Debunked,” The Conversation, November 26, 2022. On the difficulties of restitution, murkiness in government statistics on restitution, and reliance on state land, see Lahiff, “Land Redistribution in South Africa,” 172–178.

21. Kirsten and Sihlobo, “Land Reform in South Africa.”

22. This program started out with a main focus on land reallocation to the poorest. It was reconfigured in 2001 to focus more on promoting commercially oriented agriculture. Beyond voluntary purchases, the government has also engaged in expropriation with market compensation since 2007, but this has been very limited and controversial.

23. Grants required a matching contribution from applicants. Grants and matching contributions were then pooled into funds administered on behalf of applicants to purchase private land for them.

24. James and Woodhouse, “Crisis and Differentiation,” 539.

25. Kirsten and Sihlobo, “Land Reform in South Africa.”

26. Malcolm Keswell and Michael R. Carter, “Poverty and Land Redistribution,” Journal of Development Economics 110 (2014): 250–261, 253.

27. For the figure of 6 million acres, see Kirsten and Sihlobo, “Land Reform in South Africa.” On the farm failures, see Noko Masipa, “South Africa: ANC’s Land Reform Shame—75% of Land Reform Farms Have Failed,” All Africa, November 27, 2022, https://allafrica.com/stories/202211270025.html.

28. Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo, Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2.

29. Bernadette Atuahene, “Paying for the Past: Redressing the Legacy of Land Dispossession in South Africa,” Law and Society Review 45, no. 4 (2011): 955–989; Anna Bohlin, “A Price on the Past: Cash as Compensation in South African Land Restitution,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines 38, no. 3 (2004): 672–687.

30. Bernadette Atuahene, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 163.

31. Bohlin, “A Price on the Past.” For a counterpoint on how delayed and meager financial compensation can carry little significant meaning or even represent the failure of restitution, see Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, “Tales of Urban Restitution, Black River, Rondebosch,” Kronos: Journal of Cape History 32, no. 1 (2006): 216–243.

32. Author discussions with RCL and joint ventures, as well as internal RCL employment data.

33. James and Woodhouse, “Crisis and Differentiation,” 541.

34. There are also critics of this deal who argue that TSB and other white-dominated commercial sugar enterprises received handsome payments for land stolen from indigenous Blacks, retained control of sugar operations through their joint ventures, and paid insufficient dividends. And other joint ventures with several communities of this restitution claim (Mhlaba and Lugedlane) not linked to TSB have failed. There are also continuing struggles over governance of the community trusts.

35. Author interview with Edward Ndlovu, October 6, 2023.

36. Nomsa Maphanga, quoted in “Black Sugar Farmers Get a Sweet Deal with TSB,” Independent Online, August 13, 2007, www.iol.co.za/business-report/economy/black-sugar-farmers-get-a-sweet-deal-with-tsb-718385.

37. Author interview with Dave Thomson, December 2, 2023.

38. “Giba CPA’s Redevelopment Plan at an Advance Stage,” South African Government, April 23, 2013, www.gov.za/giba-cpas-redevelopment-plan-advance-stage.

39. Quoted in Walker, Landmarked, 103.

40. Tshepiso Mamatela, “Gqeberha Land Initiative Nears Completion After Three Decades,” Herald Live, June 9, 2022, www.heraldlive.co.za/business/2022-06-09-gqeberha-land-initiative-nears-completion-after-three-decades.

41. For more on the failures, see, for instance, Lahiff, “Land Redistribution in South Africa,” and Eve Fairbanks, The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022).

42. Author interview with Patrick Vilikazi, October 26, 2023.

43. Walker, Landmarked, 37–38.

44. Andisiwe Makinana, “No One Will Be Left Out of Land Claims Process, Says Zuma,” Mail and Guardian, February 27, 2014, https://mg.co.za/article/2014-02-27-no-one-will-be-left-out-of-land-claims-process-says-zuma.

45. Several rural movements sued the government to halt new land claims before the old claims had been entirely resolved.

46. Anthony Albanese, “Eulogy for a Giant,” May 18, 2023, PM Transcripts, Australia, https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-44970.

47. Technically, the land was Crown (public) land, reserved for the use and benefit of Aboriginal people, though the Yolngu had lived there since time immemorial. On their land use, see Nancy Williams, The Yolngu and Their Land (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986).

48. Yirrkala bark petitions, 1963, transcript, available at Documenting a Democracy, Australia, www.foundingdocs.gov.au/resources/transcripts/cth15_doc_1963.pdf.

49. Giovanni Torre, “Gumatj Clan Welcomes Court Win in Land Rights Case Brought by the Late Yunupingu,” National Indigenous Times, May 22, 2023, https://nit.com.au/22-05-2023/6054/gumatj-clan-welcomes-court-win-in-land-rights-compensa tion-case-brought-by-the-late-yunupingu.

50. Author interview with Djawa Yunupingu, June 24, 2024.

51. Josh Nicholas, Calla Wahlquist, Andy Ball, and Nick Evershed, “Who Owns Australia?,” Guardian, May 17, 2021.

52. “DNA Confirms Aboriginal Culture One of Earth’s Oldest,” Australian Geographic, September 23, 2011, www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2011/09/dna-confirms-aboriginal-culture-one-of-earths-oldest. Torres Strait Islanders arrived to the region far later, only several thousand years ago.

53. Author interview with Djawa Yunupingu, June 24, 2024. Songlines are story songs passed down across generations that mark routes across the land and put its features and history into cultural context.

54. Cooper v. Stuart, cited in Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman, “Australia’s Judicial Revolution: Aboriginal Land Rights and the Transformation of Liberalism,” Polity 31, no. 1 (1998): 23–51, 29.

55. Hinchman and Hinchman, “Australia’s Judicial Revolution,” 31.

56. Frank Brennan, No Small Change: The Road to Recognition for Indigenous Australia (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2015), 51.

57. Author interview with Djawa Yunupingu, June 24, 2024.

58. There were weaker statutory land rights for Aboriginals in several other states, such as South Australia and New South Wales.

59. Nicolas Peterson, “Common Law, Statutory Law, and the Political Economy of the Recognition of Indigenous Australian Rights in Land,” in Aboriginal Title and Indigenous Peoples, ed. Louis Knafla and Haijo Westra (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 171–184, 177.

60. Jaclyn Diaz, “A Historic Rainforest and Other Lands Have Been Returned to Indigenous Australians,” National Public Radio, October 5, 2021, www.npr.org/2021/10/05/1043256101/indigenous-australians-get-land-back-queensland.

61. Carli Willis, Dwayne Wyles, and Holly Richardson, “Historic Moment as Daintree National Park Returned to Eastern Kuku Yalanji People,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, September 29, 2021, www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-30/daintree-handed-back-to-traditional-owners/100498982.

62. Lily Nothling, “Historic Land Handover as 360,000 Hectares Returned to Traditional Owners on Cape York,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, September 6, 2022, www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-07/cape-york-land-handover-traditional-owners/101414006.

63. “Land Returned to Eastern Maar People in Victoria’s First Native Title Decision in a Decade,” Guardian, March 28, 2023, www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/28/land-returned-to-eastern-maar-people-in-victorias-first-native-title-decision-in-a-decade.

64. Emily Bissland, “Eastern Maar Traditional Owners’ Land Rights Formally Recognized at Warrnambool,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, March 28, 2023, www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-28/eastern-maar-native-title-formal-determination-warrnambool/102153426.

65. “Land Returned to Eastern Maar People.”

66. Author interview with Djawa Yunupingu, June 24, 2024.

67. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework: Summary Report (Canberra: AIHW, July 2023), www.indigenoushpf.gov.au/report-overview/overview/summary-report?ext=. See also, Francis Markham and Nicholas Biddle, Income, Poverty and Inequality (Canberra: Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research [CAEPR], Australian National University, 2018).

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CONCLUSION

1. Dean Spears, Sangina Vyas, Gage Weston, and Michael Geruso, “Long-Term Population Projections: Scenarios of Low or Rebounding Fertility,” PLoS One 19, no. 4 (2024): e0298190. There are relatively few demographic projections beyond 2100, but nearly all near-term projections anticipate a population peak before 2100 and population declines in Europe and other locations that are at or past peak. See, for instance, United Nations, World Population Prospects 2022, https://population.un.org/wpp.

1