Land Reform Movement Research Articles

The moral economy of land: from land reform to ownership society, 1880–2018

Abstract This article offers a comparative-historical perspective on the moral economy of land. We reconstruct the moral economy of the popular land reform movement that opposed the illegitimate income streams of rentiers and speculators in the early 20th century, tracing the movement’s legacy through a long-run analysis of political party platforms since 1880 in the USA, the UK, Germany and Sweden. We find that the land reformers’ conceptualization of land as a moral good was a key topic in early 20th-century party politics. Parties across the political spectrum called for wide-ranging interventions in unregulated land markets. But despite the movement’s relative success, the new ideal of the ownership society soon gained ground as an alternative to the more radical politics of land decommodification. We find growing multipartisan support for small property owners over time, culminating in the rise of a new moral conceptualization of land as capital. With the recent comeback of the land question, both rural and urban, we conclude that an understanding of historical land reform debates should inform future research toward a much-needed sociology of land.

Contested Heritage: Property Rights on Urban Land in Transition in Post-Socialist Warsaw

For more than thirty years after the end of the Polish People’s Republic, both public and academic debates on property reprivatization in Warsaw has been shaped by the false assumption that the Bierut Decree and the consequent communalization of urban land in post-WWII Warsaw were informed by the hostile Soviet ideology. Based on archival evidence, we argue that the Bierut Decree was to a significant extent shaped by the Swiss urban planner Hans Bernoulli and is deeply rooted in the European land-reform movements of the early 20th century. Furthermore, taking several case studies as examples, we illustrate how the unregulated process of property reprivatization, ongoing in Warsaw since 1989, has reshaped architecture and urban space. We show that land reprivatization reintroduced the problems of urban development that the communalization of land was supposed to cure. We argue that in light of present global challenges formulated in the 2015 UN Goals for Sustainable Development and despite the ideological debate surrounding the Bierut Decree, the common land of Warsaw is a unique policy achievement and a heritage in need of protection.

The Making ofHomo Socialist: The Discursive Analysis of the Ideological Production of Class in China, 1949–1976

AbstractBased on a critique of the history project titled “Oral History of Peasants’ Ordinary Life in the Revolutionary Era of China,” this article provides an analysis of class ideology production from Land Reform Movement to the Cultural Revolution in China. Thirty years of socialist construction in China was based on the craft of making the Homo Socialist. The focus here is on how personal experiences were transformed into state-endorsed conduct via the discourse of class and class struggle. Over the course of the sociopolitical transformations leading to the Cultural Revolution, “class” changed from a socioeconomic designation to a political behavioral metaphor, and in the end a purely symbolic gesture; personal experiences were transformed from hallmarks of class privilege to virtual identification with imagined class struggle. And the peasants went from being “owners of bitterness” to “debtors of bitterness” on the way to becoming “sinners of the revolution”—who gradually submitted themselves to the regime in the name of revolution, liberation, and redemption. These transformations were realized through discursive practices connecting personally embodied experiences with the abstract Marxist theory of class and class struggle. Examining the shifting nature of class ideology production helps to explain how the Chinese Communist Party understood the effects of its governance and how people found class ideology meaningful to them, even when it reached the point of absurdity.

Cadre ethnographer: Chinese land reform novels and the making of socialist history

ABSTRACT Zhou Libo’s Baofeng zhouyu (Hurricane) and Ding Ling’s Taiyang zhao zai Sangganhe shang (The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River), both written in 1948 and dual recipients of the Stalin Prize for Literature in 1951, were largely based on the authors’ own participation in the land reform movements of the Civil War. As socialist realist texts formulated through the ethnographic experiences of their authors – observation, fieldnotes, and first-hand accounts – these novels feature a geopoetics in which a new nation is constructed through the restructuring of its physical spaces. I analyze the land reform novels through their authors’ twin methods of knowledge production: an ethnographic approach to reconstructing the reality of land reform campaigns (the ethnographer) and the theoretical underpinnings of socialist realism as a narrative explication of the policy’s necessity (the cadre). The cadre ethnographer was an author who sought both to obtain knowledge and to effect a transformation of his object of study, a tension which in fact facilitated an embodied philosophy of history. As both inventor and chronicler, the cadre ethnographer reconciled the two halves of “socialist” “realism,” producing the method by which Maoist communism theorized its own historiographic authority as a narrative of socio-cultural transformation.

The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 by Daniel R. Mandell

Reviewed by: The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870 by Daniel R. Mandell John Majewski (bio) Keywords Inequality, Economic equality, Capitalism, Egalitarianism The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870. By Daniel R. Mandell. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 314. Cloth, $49.95.) Historians seeking to more explicitly link the past to current economic and political debates can choose between two basic strategies. One strategy—which the 1619 Project used to such great effect—is to expose [End Page 681] the injustices of the past and trace their impact to the present. The other strategy—which Daniel R. Mandell employs in this thought-provoking synthesis—is to recover ideas and movements from the past that can inspire change and reform in the present. Mandell argues that from its colonial origins, a series of thinkers and activists believed that economic equality—whether achieved through universal education, land reform, or government regulation of market activity—was an important value that profoundly influenced government policy. Mandell seamlessly analyzes a number of different egalitarian traditions with nuance and sophistication. He begins in early modern England, where groups such as the Levelers called for the end of great estates and the redistribution of property. Powerful landlords violently crushed the Levelers, but echoes of the movement survived in a republican commonwealth tradition that that linked economic inequality with political inequality and corruption. That tradition took root in colonial North America, where far higher percentage of households owned land. North American Indians—often portrayed in Enlightenment discourse as noble savages— came to symbolize full economic and social equality. As inequality grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, a revolutionary tradition developed that linked economic inequality with British corruption and aristocracy that influenced the anti-Federalists as well as the opponents of Hamiltonian economic policies. Mandell proceeds to show how diff erent movements in the early republic grappled with inequality through the expansion of schooling, the removal of property requirements for voting, and the rise of workingmen parties that supported higher pay for journeymen workers and a ten-hour work day. While these reform movements achieved some significant political successes, they did not halt the advance of capitalism. The movement to expand education, which received strong support from farmers and workers, often resulted in a curriculum that tacitly endorsed inequality and social hierarchies. Political reformers successfully eliminated property requirements in a number of states, but universal white male suffrage did little to remove the influence of the wealthy and well connected. The workingmen parties sometimes put forth socialist ideas, but the Democratic Party successfully incorporated their attacks on wealth and privilege without “fundamental restructuring of the American economy” (119). In the aftermath of financial panics and economic depression in the late 1830s and early 1840s, more radical critiques found significant traction. [End Page 682] Some focused on developing communal alternatives to capitalism. Albert Brisbane found initial success in organizing cooperative communities founded on the ideas of the French socialists Charles Fourier. The communal enterprises ultimately failed, but managed to attract significant support from political and intellectual elites such as Horace Greeley, giving hope that a message of cooperation over competition might find traction. Founded in 1844, the National Reform Association (NRA) fused land reform, anti-rent rhetoric, and support for a ten-hour workday to put forward a political platform explicitly critical of great concentrations of wealth. The NRA could not find political traction as an independent movement, but its central idea that all government land should become free and open to ordinary farm families eventually found a home in the Republican Party. The failure to redistribute land to formerly enslaved families during Reconstruction marked the limits of the land reform movement. Liberal conceptions of private property triumphed throughout the Gilded Age. Mandell successfully demonstrates that a number of vibrant egalitarian traditions offered important critiques of economic inequality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book represents a deep engagement with a broad array of thinkers, all of whom are put into specific political, cultural, and social contexts. Specialists and researchers will find Man-dell’s sophisticated and insightful analysis deeply engaging, yet the book’s writing is so...

The reception of Thomas Carlyle in land reform movements in Australia and New Zealand, c. 1860–1914

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which the writings of the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) were appropriated by land reformers in Australia and New Zealand. Carlyle argued that the land had been created by God for the benefit of the whole people, and that its possessors thus had a duty to put it to the best possible use. In this sense, work was the sole legitimate title to land. On these grounds, Carlyle was highly critical of the landowners of his era, whom he considered to be grossly remiss in their duties, living a life of idleness and luxury at the expense of their tenants. However, Carlyle did not go so far as to recommend the expropriation of the landlords, leaving open the possibility that they might still reform their behaviour. Ignoring this qualification, land reformers in Australia and New Zealand appropriated Carlyle’s writings, extending his denunciations of the hereditary nobility of Britain to the capitalist sheep-farmers and ‘squattocrats’ of the Antipodes, as well as adducing Carlyle in support of their own proposals for radical reform.

Demobilised Soldiers, Small Holdings Colonies and the Compulsory Acquisition of Land after World War One: Scotland and Canada

This article compares the Small Holdings Colonies Acts (1916 and 1918) for demobilized WWI soldiers in Britain upon which the Land Settlement (Scotland) Act of 1919 was established; and similar small holdings colonies for demobilized soldiers in Canada with a particular focus on provisions for the state to engage in compulsory acquisition of land for this purpose. My research shows in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, colonies and compulsory acquisition of land under the 1919 Act were part of a larger land reform movement (breaking up large estates) and represent progressive advances for traditional occupants – the crofters and tenant farmers – to have rights over their own lands. In Canada, on the other hand, domestic colonies for British soldiers served to displace indigenous peoples from their reserves already vastly diminished compared to traditional territories. The compulsory acquisition of land through surrenders from reserves compounded the problem. As such colonies in Canada had negative impacts on indigenous peoples as part of an ongoing settler colonization process. Thus I show that small holdings colonies particularly when combined with compulsory acquisition of land work in opposite directions normatively and materially in each country.

Saving Ireland in Juteopolis: Gender, Class and Diaspora in the Irish Ladies’ Land League

Abstract First established in New York in 1880, the Irish Ladies’ Land League soon had branches across Ireland, the USA, Britain, Canada and Australasia and represented an unprecedented advance in Irish women’s political activism. In Dundee, Scotland the organization found a particularly receptive environment due to the distinctive gender balance of the Irish community there, with working-class women a large majority. This article analyses how a transnational movement translated into a local setting and how emigrants’ activism was shaped by factors of class, gender and religion. The circulation of mobile agitators and newspapers connected local branches in Dundee with the wider world of the Irish land reform movement, and this article seeks to uncover a more textured picture of the people who collected funds, attended rallies, and who are too often considered in the plural, as anonymous supporters grouped together under ethnic or political banners. The picture that emerges challenges existing views of the Ladies’ Land League as a predominantly middle-class affair. In Dundee the members were overwhelmingly working-class and their harsh experiences in the city’s jute industry shaped their activism. Local Catholic networks and ideas of religious humanitarianism contributed significantly to the branches, yet clergymen did not direct their activities, rather they responded to women’s mobilization.

The Elevationists: Gerrit Smith, Black Agrarianism, and Land Reform in 1840s New York

This article tells the story of the attempt by Gerrit Smith to establish a farming settlement for free African Americans in the Adirondack Mountains of New York from 1846 to 1850. Smith was a white abolitionist and a founding member of the Liberty Party. Over the course of the 1840s, he became increasingly committed to the land reform movement, coming to believe that the small family farm was the key to lasting environmental health and economic prosperity. Smith’s settlement scheme represents an attempt to merge the racial politics of abolitionism with the environmental ideology of Free Soil agrarianism. His plan attracted the attention of some of the period’s most prominent black abolitionists, including James McCune Smith, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass, who came to see farm life as a means to restore African Americans’ health after the damage wrought by slavery and racism. This article traces the discourse of agrarianism that took shape around Smith’s settlement plan, which saw farm life as being capable of elevating both the farmer and the land itself.

“The long‐time requirements of the nation”: The US Cooperative Soil Survey and the Political Ecologies of Improvement

AbstractSoil surveys are one of the most powerful tools of modern statecraft, yet they have received little critical scrutiny. This article examines the early history of the US cooperative soil survey, from its founding in 1899 through the New Deal, and argues that it functioned not only as a tool of agricultural modernisation but also as a technology for the development of white nationalist state power. The founding of the soil survey, for instance, was successful based on its claims to resolve post‐frontier racial anxieties about national vigour. Over the next several decades soil surveying grew increasingly central to the execution of state power and arguably formed the basemap for New Deal conservation and planning efforts in the 1930s. The New Deal's decentralised and democratising projects promoted a more inclusive liberal nationalism, yet still supported the reproduction of white supremacy. This analysis shows how taking racial politics more seriously adds depth to studies of environmental governance, and suggests a model for doing so that highlights the articulation of race, nature, and nation through logics of improvement. Soil surveys remain an important political‐ecological technology today and deserve more critical scrutiny. Political ecologists might also work with land reform and reparations movements to determine if and how soil surveys could be useful for liberatory projects.

Land law, property ideologies and the British–Irish relationship

This article examines the role of property ideologies, and the local contexts in which they were articulated and applied, in shaping English and Irish land law. Despite their shared histories and influences – from the transplant of the common law system to Ireland to traditions of training Irish lawyers and judges in English universities – the politics of property led Irish and English land law down distinct, and sometimes oppositional, ideological paths in the twentieth century. The politics and practices of land tenure, competing economic and property ideologies, and their direct links to the evolution of national identity and statehood in each jurisdiction, shaped the foundational commitments of English and Irish land law. The article traces the complexities of lived experience in regulating the use and ownership of land, as well as the role of global and local forces – from world-system movements (for example, the influence of European political developments in 1937 on the Irish Constitution) or bi-lateral relationships (for example, the impact of the Irish land wars on the English land reform movement, or the ongoing trade dependency between Britain and Ireland into the twentieth century). Our analysis reveals the multiple competing, and at times overlapping, property ideologies that shape property systems; and the powerful role of events and externalities in contextualising the practical, political, social and symbolic meaning and content of the law as it has evolved in local contexts, and in determining whether, and when, the status quo prevails, or a tipping point for law reform is reached.

Helen Taylor’s work for land nationalisation in Great Britain and Ireland 1879–1907: women’s political agency in the British Victorian land movement

ABSTRACTThis article explores the contribution made by Helen Taylor to the Victorian land reform movement, 1879–1890. It concentrates on her political agency after 1882 to evidence that the importance of Taylor was three-fold. She was a leading activist in all land reforming groups and drew large audiences; she had independent means which enabled her to fund the organisations she was involved in and exert influence on them; and her background as John Stuart Mill’s step-daughter and intellectual collaborator put her in the position of being able to introduce the leading players in the 1880s land campaigns to one another. Taylor introduced Henry George and Michael Davitt to the leadership of the British land movement and thus enabled their involvement. Davitt’s and George’s importance in British land campaigns has been documented by historians but the woman who was instrumental in facilitating their involvement has been largely forgotten.

‘The Clach’: Alexander Mackenzie and the Land Question in the Late-Nineteenth Century Highlands and Islands

This article uses the career and writings of the Highland land reformer Alexander Mackenzie, to shed new light on the evolution of Highland land reform in the years leading up to the Crofters' Act of 1886. Mackenzie's output as a writer and journalist shows that his early experiences of living and working on the land are vital to understanding his approach to the land question, and led him to focus not on abstract or ideal principles but on building popular consensus to secure the most pressing reforms. This moderate and pragmatic approach was not universally popular though, especially among Mackenzie's more radical reformist contemporaries. The tensions these disagreements created are symptomatic of the problems that beset the ‘Crofting Community’ in the 1880s and ‘90s: problems that would eventually cause the land reform movement to split. Nevertheless, Mackenzie's influence on the Crofters’ War was huge, and deserves greater scholarly recognition.

The political economy of land struggle in Brazil under Workers' Party governments

AbstractThis paper analyses the agrarian policies of the governments of Presidents Lula (2003–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016) in the light of the contradiction between the historical support for land reform and agrarian social movements by the Workers' Party (PT) on the one hand, and the PT's more recent electoral and political alliances with agribusiness on the other. After more than a decade of progressive administrations, key government programmes have only accounted for marginal gains and in some cases setbacks, symbolized by the failure to expand the expropriation of new land and settle landless families on an adequate scale. The collapse of those alliances and 2016's impeachment process of President Rousseff marks the end of that cycle, highlighting strategic and policy failures. The paper examines government actions, the historical causes and roots of land conflicts, and struggles for land and territory, as well as the difficulties of mobilization. The paper focuses upon political disputes, particularly new processes of criminalization, economic disputes, surrounding the role of agribusiness, and the challenges related to struggles for land and territorial rights in a situation ruled by a progressive party and governments.

The transatlantic world of Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91)†

This article explores the transatlantic world of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish home rule and land reform movements and the Irish Parliamentary Party in the parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at Westminster between 1877 and 1891. Based on hitherto unused sources and reviewing existing material, it adopts a longer timeframe than previous studies. The American heritage of the Parnell family is examined, in particular how their American relatives, the forebears of Parnell’s mother Delia Stewart, engaged with the emerging American republic. It reveals how a transatlantic familial network became an intrinsic part of Charles Stewart Parnell’s political and social world, influencing his rhetorical and political stance on Ireland’s destiny. Parnell’s transatlantic links provide an important key to understanding both his political outlook and his sense of personal identity.

Beyond the Agrarian Reform Policies in Brazil: An Empirical Study of Brazilian States from 1995 Through 2011

The main land reform movements in the world are taking place in Brazil, where various social groups have coordinated their efforts to acquire legal possession of unproductive estates. Although the results achieved over time regarding this dispute are viewed as progress in terms of social inequality, there is no knowledge about the performance of these various movements to date. Based on this context, the main objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the Brazilian states and the last four presidential terms in Brazil in minimising social conflicts over land and efficiently converting occupations into settlements.

An Eclectic Demystification of Operation Barga.

Professed by the Left Front government as one of the cornerstones of their erstwhile regime in West Bengal, their ostentatiously pro-poor objectives have over the years elicited a fair share of attention, both positive and negative, from different sections of the Indian polity. One of the major vehicles which the Left Front employed extensively so as to ensure that the aforementioned objectives reach fruition was a slew of land reforms wherein they targeted the rural poor, especially the marginalized peasants, by distributing vested land and establishing ‘graam panchayats’ (local village/rural bodies) so as to empower one and all. In this regard, Operation Barga was one of the most prominent land reform movements to emerge from the stables of the Left government, with the core ethos of the movement being the introduction of a paradigm shift to the tenancy norms in rural West Bengal and abetting in the pecuniary emancipation of the bargadars (cultivators). The project was extremely successful and achieved an increase in the fraction of registered sharecroppers from 23% to 65% (1978 – 1990), which in turn synchronized perfectly with the proverbial renaissance in agricultural practices witnessed by that period to enhance the state’s agricultural productivity immensely. These changes translated ultimately into improved human development indices for the population sample under consideration, with West Bengal bearing witness to a very minimal number of peasant starvation or suicide instances, quite unlike the other states of India. This article intends to adopt a rather discursive approach in analyzing the movement so as to eventually extract relevant policy directives that could prove to be beneficial for key decision-makers.

Multi-functional landscapes from the grassroots? The role of rural producer movements

Around the world, agricultural landscapes are increasingly seen as “multi-functional” spaces, expected to deliver food supplies while improving rural livelihoods and protecting and restoring healthy ecosystems. To support this array of functions and benefits, governments and civil society in many regions are now promoting integrated farm- and landscape-scale management strategies, in lieu of fragmented management strategies. While rural producers are fundamental to achieving multi-functional landscapes, they are frequently viewed as targets of, or barriers to, landscape-oriented initiatives, rather than as leading agents of change. In reality, however, rural producers in many areas have embraced elements of multi-functional land management. In this paper, we explore the role and recent evolution of producer movements in influencing multi-functional farm and landscape management. We explore these roles through six case studies, including a land reform movement in Brazil, indigenous territorial development in Bolivia, conservation agriculture associations in Canada, environmental cooperatives in the Netherlands, indigenous and biocultural heritage associations in Peru, and Landcare groups in the Philippines. These experiences suggest that producer movements are playing pivotal roles in supporting landscape multi-functionality, not only through agroecological farming practices but also through off-farm efforts to conserve ecosystems and support multi-stakeholder landscape planning. On the other hand, interests of producer movements are not always fully aligned with multi-functional landscape management approaches. The contribution of producer movements to multi-functional landscapes depends on these movements including farm and landscape stewardship in their values and goals, and having the political support and capacity to engage meaningfully in multi-stakeholder processes.

Of crofters, Celts and claymores: theCeltic Magazineand the Highland cultural nationalist movement, 1875-88

This article examines the cultural nationalist movement in the Scottish Highlands during the period 1875–88, through the lens of the Celtic Magazine, a source which has been overlooked by historians. The cultural nationalist movement resulted from the intertwining of the crofters' land reform movement with a Celtic cultural revival. It was propelled by intellectuals who promoted the distinctive Celtic nature of the Highlands and demanded recognition from the government. An imagined Highland nation, distinct from the rest of Scotland, arose from the cultural nationalist movement but fitted within a wider ‘unionist-nationalist’ identity.

中国一九五〇年期土地改革における「階級」と農村社会

中国一九五〇年期土地改革における「階級」と農村社会