Colonial Land Policies Research Articles

The Political Origins of Colonial Land Policy: Evidence From British India and French Algeria

Whereas the literature on colonial legacies has flourished in recent years, relatively less attention has been paid to the origins of colonial institutions. What explains variation in the design of colonial institutions? Some scholars have stressed the importance of precolonial factors, arguing that institutions were designed to reflect the environmental and socio-political conditions that the colonizers encountered in the colonies. Others hold that policymaking reflected the colonial powers’ metropolitan identity and aims. We believe these literature have been insufficiently attentive to the colonial state and the political ideals of colonial bureaucrats. Drawing on evidence from British India and French Algeria, we show that land policy was shaped by intense competition between ideologically motivated officials, who disagreed over the uses and aims of state power. Theorizing the role of ideas allows us to explain variation in colonial policies across both space and time while highlighting the indispensability of qualitative methods of analysis.

No Maize, No Life: Conservation, Maize Production, and African Responses in Colonial Southern Malawi, 1920–1960

This study explores the history of maize production to demonstrate the extent to which colonial conservation interspersed with economic expediency stifled African production from 1920 to 1960. Drawing on archival and oral evidence from southern Malawi, it argues that colonial restriction on maize production to conserve the country’s soil fertility was an excuse by the state to achieve various economic interests. What the colonial state in Malawi wanted was to divert the Africans from the production of maize to other crops whose global market demand and value was high. This was critical during the post-depression era when settler agriculture collapsed, and even worse in the post-war period when Britain desperately required African agriculture for its economic recovery. But since maize had become their life-blood, African producers, with the support of some colonial officials who shared similar fears, could not submit to this restrictive policy. By forefronting maize production, the study sheds new light on the socio-environmental historiography which has generically attributed the implementation of colonial conservation policies in Africa to economic depression, drought, demography, the American dust bowl, colonial land policies, and local farming practices.

The land management policy of the Soviet state in Kazakhstan in the 1920s-1930s (based on materials from the Irtysh region)

This article delves into Soviet land policy and land regulation, focusing on the 1920-1930s. It aims to clarify land use standards in the Irtysh region and analyze land assessment processes, structure, and outcomes. The study also addresses overlooked aspects like class-based conflicts and local disputes over land during development. The primary information source is the Documentation Center for Contemporary History of the Abay Region. It augments historical analysis of land matters, social dynamics, and intercultural interactions with unpublished data. Since 1926, Kazakhstan has been a sought-after resettlement destination, akin to the Russian Empire era. The Irtysh region was a key area for seeking additional land resources. This involved lowering norms for livestock farming, and reallocating surplus lands for agricultural growth and population relocation. The Soviet government sought to rectify the disparities in colonial land policy from the Russian Empire era. Initial attempts were made to grant land to those liberated from colonial oppression and to set land regulations while assessing available resources. However, it was later recognized that these measures were not effectively carried out. In particular, the implementation of land reform in the Irtysh region encountered difficulties and advanced unevenly.

The land management policy of the Soviet state in Kazakhstan in the 1920s-1930s (based on materials from the Irtysh region)

This article delves into Soviet land policy and land regulation, focusing on the 1920-1930s. It aims to clarify land use standards in the Irtysh region and analyze land assessment processes, structure, and outcomes. The study also addresses overlooked aspects like class-based conflicts and local disputes over land during development. The primary information source is the Documentation Center for Contemporary History of the Abay Region. It augments historical analysis of land matters, social dynamics, and intercultural interactions with unpublished data. Since 1926, Kazakhstan has been a sought-after resettlement destination, akin to the Russian Empire era. The Irtysh region was a key area for seeking additional land resources. This involved lowering norms for livestock farming, and reallocating surplus lands for agricultural growth and population relocation. The Soviet government sought to rectify the disparities in colonial land policy from the Russian Empire era. Initial attempts were made to grant land to those liberated from colonial oppression and to set land regulations while assessing available resources. However, it was later recognized that these measures were not effectively carried out. In particular, the implementation of land reform in the Irtysh region encountered difficulties and advanced unevenly.

The Transformation of Inter-Ethnic Conflicts in Uasin Gishu in the Post-Independence Era, 1963-2020

This study investigates the historical context of inter-ethnic conflicts in Uasin Gishu County during the post-colonial period right from 1963 when Kenya attained her independence. This study argues that European colonial land policy laid the groundwork for inter-ethnic strife. The land became heavily politicized during this period, as political elites strategically used it to mobilize their various ethnic groupings, thus stoking ethnic tensions and occasionally culminating in conflicts. The goal of this study was to examine the evolution of inter-ethnic disputes in Uasin Gishu from independence through 2020. The historical approach was used in the study, which drew on both primary and secondary data sources. Annual reports, reports from appointed commissions, interviews, court judgments, and official government statistics were the key sources of data. Furthermore, secondary sources were used in the study. It was shown that tensions in the post-independence era were created by how land distribution was carried out after independence, as well as the politicization of the issue. The immediate post-colonial government failed to properly transfer land to people and instead, the political class took advantage to incite ethnic tensions. Successive governments also failed to resolve historical land concerns, worsening ethnic tensions and resulting in violent clashes in 1992, 1997, and 2007. These conflicts generated far-reaching consequences, affecting individuals not only politically but also socially and economically; as shown in clashes between Kalenjin, the Kikuyu, Luo, Abaluhya, and Abagusii, particularly in 1992 and 2007/2008. The study concludes that all parties, both public and private, should take a holistic approach to addressing historical causes and preventing future disputes.

Glorious pasts of forest dwellers: Memories of land in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar, Central Provinces, 1861–1905

AbstractThis article discusses the shifts in rights over land of Binjhal Adivasi people in the wake of colonial rule in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar, located in the British Central Provinces in the eventful period from 1860–1926. Oral narratives and documents preserved by Binjhal villagers juxtaposed with archived records of military expeditions, village surveys, administrative letters, and land settlement reports reveal how Binjhal ancestors lost titled land and offices of headmanship, which, over time, impoverished and diminished them in the rural hierarchy. The research finds that the codification of selective custom as legal rights accommodated colonial land policies to promote social change and agricultural improvement. Environmental histories document how nineteenth-century forest enclosures and agrarian order brought Adivasi areas within state control. Revisionist research highlights historically contingent outcomes of colonial rule. The Adivasi pasts in this article reveal how the interpretations of legal culture by local actors, who transacted with the administration, led to variable outcomes for a pre-colonial land-controlling group. By examining the truth claims in fragments of Binjhal voices and narratives about them, in village memories and archives, through a threefold examination of the past—pragmatic, habitual, and episodic—this article explores the historicity of Adivasi land memories. Here, stories of past glory lead to claims of legal entitlements rather than restitution of ancient rule, and injustices are described in the idiom of disrupted kinship and transgressions of women, illuminating the varied routes through which groups residing in relatively non-agrarian upland habitats became Adivasi.

Empire and Arab Indology

This article focuses on the Chouf-born poet, lawyer and translator Wadiʿ al-Bustani (1888–1954), who called himself a “Lebanese Palestinian,” as he moves from Beirut, to Cairo, Hudaydah, Bombay, Transvaal, and finally Haifa. The first to translate Tagore into Arabic after a visit to his Santiniketan in 1916, Bustani spent his life annotating and translating into Arabic the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and Kalidasa's Shakuntala . Alongside his self-professed and self-funded philological project, Bustani was one of the most important poets and lawyers in British Mandate Palestine, inspiring protest with his verse and litigating against colonial land policies. By focusing on Bustani's relation to British imperial culture, his political commitments in Palestine, and the contours of his indological project, this article uncovers a new history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame, long hidden in the many narrations of orientalism's travel and Palestine's colonization.

Spaces of Conflict and Conflict of Spaces: Territory and Communal Conflicts in Jos, North Central Nigeria

Communal violence, one of the deadliest forms of political violence in Africa, has characterised Jos and other central Nigerian cities since the 1990s. With origins in colonial land and administrative policies at the inception of the city, communal tensions rooted in local elite competition over ‘indigeneship’ and entitlement to political and government positions, access to higher education and land rights have manifested more forcefully in contemporary time claiming over 5,000 lives. This article focuses on the relationship between collective identity, struggle for space and collective violence. It explores persistent attachment to territory by urban communal groups and violent conflicts over those territorial stakes. It does so because emerging research has focused on land rights, neglecting how conflicts structure territory—the living space—and how territory, in turn, shapes conflict. Inspired by the motivation versus opportunity framework, it relies on focus groups, interviews, oral history, archival documents and secondary sources to generate data.

RESOURCE STRUGGLE, RESULTANT REALITIES AND THE FUTURE OF MARAGOLI LAND USE

Land has remained one of the most basic and valuable economic resource right from the pre-colonial to the post independent Kenyan society. The success or failure of every society is always pegged on how prudent the society manages the resources within its reach in the midst of changes, challenges and opportunities that time and space avails every single moment. Being part of the Kenyan society, the Maragoli community has never been left out of the land question that has troubled Kenya over time. The pre-colonial Maragoli society had a land tenure system which was characterized by communal control of land together with its resources and practiced individual land ownership. Though land was communally owned at the general level, it was individually owned and tilled at the family level. The basis of land administration was the customary law executed by the elders who had the overall powers over the production resource. Through colonial policies such as alienation of the Africans’ land, confiscation of livestock, introduction of taxes and the cash economy; all these mechanisms brought about disequilibrium in the Maragoli pre-colonial land use. With this in mind therefore, this paper examined the nature and realities in resource struggle and the future of such struggles especially in regard to land use in the post-independence Kenya, using the case of the Maragoli. Through the articulation theory, this paper demonstrates that the interaction between the pre-colonial Maragoli land use practices and the colonial land policies greatly impacted on the Maragoli socio-economic and political structures. Due to the cash crop economy, the traditional Maragoli communal attitudes towards land as a resource are fading out resulting into individual emphasis on land use. This individual emphasis on land use is the major cause of uneconomical subdivision of land, insecurity and increased poverty. It is from the above perspective that the paper analyses the post-independence Maragoli land situation, some of the key causes of uneconomical subdivision of land and the possible solutions.

Factor endowments on the ‘frontier’: Algerian settler agriculture at the beginning of the 1900s

AbstractThis article examines rural settlement in Constantine, a département in French Algeria, at the beginning of the 1900s. By taking into account the timing of colonial settlement for almost 100 municipalities, it shows how the changing geographical conditions and the relative quantities of land and labour shaped the colonial land policy and settler modes of production. As fertile land grew scarcer on the settlement ‘frontier’, the ability of settlers to participate in the export market was increasingly dependent on the capacity to make use of modern agricultural techniques that required larger fields and intensive labour. Thus, the outcome of rural settlement was determined by the relative abundance of indigenous labour and the adaptation of the land policy to Algeria's agricultural needs. The results demonstrate that—even within a country itself and during the settlement process—the colonial land policy and settler modes of production change significantly, depending on the region being occupied.

John Ruedy 1927–2016

John “Jack” Ruedy was an illustrious historian of Algeria, an inspiring mentor, a teacher of great gifts, the founding director of a long-flourishing M.A. program, and a man for whom principle was not a matter of convenience. A Francophile who came to the study of French colonialism in Algeria as the result of an impromptu sail from the south of France to that country while still a student. Jack then engaged deeply with the Maghreb, an interest and commitment that began with his book Land Policy in Colonial Algeria (1967), and ultimately culminated in the writing of Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation in 1992. This latter book has endured as a seminal account of the theories and practices of settler colonialism in Algeria, often cited and serving as the springboard for much later work on Algerian history. His research interests in colonial land policies also led him to make an early and signal contribution to Palestine studies in a chapter, “The Dynamics of Land Alienation,” he contributed to Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's The Transformation of Palestine in 1971.

Natural Resource Contests and Precolonial Institutions in Papua New Guinea

This paper investigates the role that precolonial institutions play in relation to postcolonial natural resource ownership contests. Papua New Guinea provides a unique case study, as it is recorded as having the most decentralized precolonial political institutions of any postcolonial state. After an examination of its precolonial institutions, colonial land policy and three case studies, it is concluded that persistent highly decentralized customary political units, coupled with customary notions of inalienability of land and overlaid with a state property rights regime, lead to resource contests. It is concluded that resource ownership contests can have serious adverse consequences for resource management and that they are not easily overcome.

Unpacking the Ecological Remnants of Zimbabwe’s Land Reform Using the Ecological Footprint Tool

Land ownership is a central issue to the livelihoods of the predominantly rural population of Zimbabwe. Since 1980, Zimbabwe instituted land reforms to redress colonial land policies. A successful land reform programme should incorporate land use options that galvanise ecological sustainability. Striking a balance among land redistribution, productivity and ecological sustainability is one of the vexing challenges that policy makers in Zimbabwe face. Critics of Zimbabwe's land reform have often characterised this challenge as a remnant of the government's move from the willing buyer willing seller to the accelerated approach. Through case studies and applying the Ecological Footprint tool, this paper scrutinises the ecological implications of land reform in Zimbabwe's resettled areas. Both primary and secondary sources in Chirumanzu District of Zimbabwe provided data for this paper through household questionnaires and key informant interviews. The Ecological Footprint (EF) results portray ecological sustainability. The research concludes that the major shift in the land reform approach since the year 2000 has till retained environmental sustainability.

Land and Colonialism in Mozambique–Policies and Practice in Inhambane, c.1900–c.1940

The land question has been one of the key topics in the historiography of colonial eastern and southern Africa. With a few exceptions, in relation to colonial Mozambique this topic has by and large been overlooked. Little is therefore known on how African use and access to land was progressively curtailed in the first decades of the twentieth century, or how Portuguese colonial land policies such as ‘native’ reserves and a growing settler presence impacted on the lives of rural dwellers. This article surveys the key land policies formulated both in Lisbon and in Mozambique between 1900 and 1940 and places them in their particular historical context, in the process unveiling the tensions and debates that helped shape them. It then evaluates the practice of such policies in the province of Inhambane, where different types of land struggles spanning contemporary Portuguese rule in the region have been documented. By examining these struggles alongside pivotal themes in the history of southern Mozambique, this article makes the case for a closer examination of the land question in the history of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique.

The Land Factor in the Konkomba-Nanumba Crisis Of 1981

In post-independent Ghana, over twenty ethnic conflicts have erupted in Northern Ghana. These conflicts can however be traced as far back to colonial land policies and treatments of ethnic interests of that part of Ghana. The Konkomba, in particular, have been involved in many such conflicts, largely over land and related resource. The period between the 1980s and 1990s were particularly tumultuous due the many inter-ethnic conflicts and armed confrontations. This paper examines one of such conflicts, which occurred in 1981 between the Konkomba and the Nanumba, both of the Northern Region of Ghana. It focuses on the historical antecedents of the war from pre-colonial to date to demonstrate how land has been a key issue. The analysis is informed by the results of an in-depth study that relied on secondary sources, archival materials and oral interviews. The study found that underneath the seemly cordial relations that had existed between the Konkomba and Nanumba in Nanun11prior to 1981 were tensions over territorial claims and land rights. It explains how mis-interpretation of ownership created the conditions for the war. It dwells in particular on the Alhassan Committee Report of 1978 and its role in inflaming the sentiments resulting in the violent outburst of 1981.Key Words: Identity, Ethnic Conflicts, Territorial Claims, Land Policies, Ownership

John Locke, Accumulation by Dispossession and the Governance of Colonial India

This paper proposes a historical framework for examining colonial land policies in India. It argues that Locke's dualistic distinctions between settled agriculture on enclosed land and non-settled forms of livelihood framed basic differences in the ways that the colonial administration conceived of agricultural fields and forests. Locke's dichotomies between value and non-value-producing labour are also traced in early political economy, a discipline that exerted a direct influence on Indian governance, and particularly its land settlements. It is further argued that distinctions between value-producing labour and waste were formative in the development of the Forest Laws in the late nineteenth century, legislation that provided the legal framework for adivasi dispossession for the past century and a quarter.

This Is Our Land: Land, Policy, Resistance, and Everyday Life in Colonial Southern Ghana, 1894–7

The colonial government attempted to implement the Crown Lands Bill between 1894 and 1897 in Southern Ghana. Among other things, it sought to take control of what was described as ‘waste lands’ and later ‘public lands.’ This article focuses on resistance to these bills in which the Aborigines’ Rights Protect Society (ARPS) played a leading role on behalf of Southern Ghana. This was one of many precedents to the build-up of tension between the people and the colonial establishment. Among other things, the article examines the ramblings within a colonial administration that attempted to push through its policies against a background of resolute resistance. This led to reluctance on the part of some colonial officers to enforce the policy. The argument is that there was an effective collaboration between the Western-educated elite and the people of coastal Southern Gold Coast in the resistance to these bills. They used official letters of protests, newspaper articles, editorials, and demonstrations to express their dislike for the colonial land policy. In addition, they sent delegations to the colonial government in their effort to resist the attempt to take over ‘waste lands’ and later ‘public lands.’ Furthermore, this article argues that the conflict had to do with the different conceptions of land. While the colonial government saw it as part of the economic and political trappings of power, the people of Southern Ghana saw land as a cultural and religious resource that gave them the needed connection with the ancestors in their everyday life.

The Property of Empire: Islamic Law and Russian Agrarian Policy in Transcaucasia and Turkestan

At the center of this essay is an analysis of the implementation of discourses on Islam and in Russian colonial policy in Transcaucasia and Central Asia. The essay seeks to analyze how the common (European) language for describing property rights (the language of Roman law) was applied to landholding in the world, and whether that influenced Russian land policy in its borderlands. Briefly, my hypothesis is that Russia's policy on property in its southern borderlands in the 1870s-80s invoked a vision of a normal (European liberal) of absolute private property. Against the background of that model, the Islamic model of landholding was perceived as a deviation. At the same time, however, the perceived specificity of indigenous laws provided an opportunity for local colonial administrators to circumvent norms of property relations: Russian colonial administrators, following the views of certain Orientalists, interpreted the Islamic model of property in accordance with the administration's goals in the region and used this interpretation to enlarge the state domain. This policy of enlarging the state domain by limiting the rights of settled tenants, however, was ultimately rejected by the government as a politically and economically ineffective method of advancing Russia's colonizing goals in its borderlands. Therefore, as I try to prove, the Russian government deliberately refused to accept the of patrimonial state property in its colonies. This article, while focusing on specific episodes of Russia's colonial land policy, addresses a number of broader questions in the history of Russian and European colonialism and law: the problem of legal pluralism, (1) continuity and succession of rule after the conquest; and the problem of taxonomy, classification and translation of legal notions and principles. I also emphasize the role of colonial experience in shaping basic concepts for the empire--that is, the concepts of property (private and state) and possession. Russia's agrarian policy on its borderlands mirrored the specificity of Russian civil law and revealed stunning contradictions between the European legal framework inbuilt in the legislation and the reality of Russia's politics of property. Before I turn to the much-debated issue of law and its integration into the legal system of multinational empires, a few words outlining the structure of this article are in order. To explain the complexity of factors involved in the shaping of property law in the borderlands, I must address various issues that are not obviously connected to one another. Thus the structure of the narrative is as multilayered as the object of study itself. I begin with an analysis of the major differences between the 19th-century European approach to the definition of property and that of legal doctrine; then I briefly address one particular example of how these understandings were reconciled in policy--that of agrarian policy in French colonial Algeria (1830-63). This example is of particular importance to the analysis of Russian legal policy in the former Ottoman provinces of Transcaucasia and Central Asia: as in these newly Russian provinces, in Algeria the French had to deal with the heritage of the Ottoman Empire, and they built their system of land property on the basis of that model. As I demonstrate in this essay, in spite of these similar foundations, French and Russian rulers arrived at different models for the agrarian order. Yet the French example continued to exert great influence over Russian civil legislation on property. Equally important in shaping Russia's attitude to the problem of property in its Muslim provinces was the agrarian reform launched in the Ottoman Empire in 1858. As I seek to demonstrate, a peculiar translation and interpretation of the Ottoman Land Code allowed Russian colonial administrators to install a regime of state property in almost all lands of the conquered Turkish provinces. …

Micro-narrative and the Historiography of the Modern Middle East

Most recent scholarship on the early-20th-century Eastern Arab World (Mashriq) has been preoccupied with locating the words and actions of historical actors into one or more of three overarching and interconnected (post-colonial) themes: colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. As a result, historians have produced very few micro-narratives whose protagonists are individuals from the region and which take as their starting point the prosaic concerns of daily life. What explains this historiographical trend? The relative scarcity of micro-narratives is due to a number of factors, including challenges in using particular genres of Arabic source-materials, as well as the impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism generally and post-colonial concerns about narrative as a mode of representation in particular. Two fragments from the life-story of an early-20th-century Arab soldier are introduced in order to show how these factors play out in the crafting of a micro-narrative. Compared to historians of Europe and North America, those working on the history of the early 20th-century Mashriq (what is today Syria, Jordan, Palestine⁄Israel, Lebanon, and Iraq) have produced relatively few micro-narratives whose protagonists are the people of the region. Where is the level of human detail found in classics such as Alan Taylor’s William Cooper’s Town, or Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre or even ‐ to take a non-Western example ‐ Susan Mann’s The Talented Women of the Zhang Family? This essay tries to explain this absence and tease out its implications. 1 In the 32 years since its publication, Edward Said’s Orientalism has reverberated in each of the disciplines that collectively constitute Middle East Studies, including history. The book had positive effects that those of us in the field know well. It forced us to take seriously the reality of the power relations produced and reinforced by British and French colonialism, and to detect the way in which those power relations are reflected in texts. Partly as a result of Said’s work, most recent historians of the Middle East have produced scholarship that is strongly critical of the British and French colonial projects in the region. These are works that have exposed the power of colonialism to destroy not only lived lives but also imagined futures. Some historians have also shown how the independent states of the 20th-century Arab Middle East were largely continuations, rather than ruptures with, their immediate colonial pasts. And, in general, most recent historians of the Arab Middle East have drawn the lesson that they must steer clear of employing general oppositions ‐ secular vs. religious, traditional vs. modern, Sunni vs. Shi’ite ‐ as explanations for historical events, when these essentializing binaries inevitably collapse under the weight of counter examples. Examples of such works include: Joseph Massad’s Colonial Effects, Elizabeth Thompson’s Colonial Citizens, Toby Dodge’s Inventing Iraq, Jim Gelvin’s Divided Loyalties, Keith Watenpaugh’s Being Modern in the Middle East, Martin Bunton’s Colonial Land Policies in Palestine, Ellen Fleischmann’s The Nation and its ‘New’ Women, and Rashid Khalidi’s

Migration, insecurity and identity: The Nepali dairymen in India's Northeast

The migration of the Nepalis to Northeast India for cattle grazing and dairy farming since the last years of the nineteenth century evolved as a mainstay of later Nepali migrations in the twentieth century. It is significant that this group of migrants enjoyed active colonial patronage, along with the labourers and Gurkha soldiers in the army, but was among the first to face the impact of changing colonial land and taxation policies. Government policies of exclusion and nativist attitudes in post-independence India caused them considerable insecurity about their status in the region. This paper highlights the evolution of the Nepali dairy farmers as an important economic group within the larger group of Nepali migrants in Northeast India, and looks at the issues that led to a redefinition of their relations in the host country and articulations for reassertion/or search for an identity in India.