Political Economy Of Land Research Articles

The Political Economy of Farmland Taxation in Colonial and Postcolonial Zimbabwe, 1914–32 and 1980–c. 2018

This article contributes to the existing literature on the political economy of Zimbabwe by focusing on a hitherto understudied area, land taxation. While scholars have written extensively on the political economy of land in general, not much is available on debates around its taxation. Those that have written on the land question have paid less attention to its taxation. Similarly, recent works on the colony’s fiscal system lack the scope for a detailed examination of the land taxation question. By analysing how different governments of the country operating within distinct historical contexts approached the question of land taxation reinserts land taxation in conversations around the political economy of both colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, particularly how politics and economics intersected in shaping policy formulation and implementation. During the colonial period, the main idea behind the imposition of land tax was to force absentee landowners and those who occupied land for speculative purposes to sell their land or develop it; however, the situation changed following the Fast Track Land Reform Programme in 2000. At that stage, the main objective for land taxation shifted from encouraging the selling of land for redistributive purposes to making resettled farmers utilise their land. In either case, land taxation and contestations around it provide another way of looking at the dynamics of state making in settler colonial and post-settler colonial contexts. The article relies on a wide range of sources that include parliamentary debates, newspapers, archival sources, and other political pamphlets and documents. A close analysis of archival sources shows how arguments for and against land taxation changed or persisted across the colonial and postcolonial historical epochs.

The Ottoman archive and methodological Ottomanism in the history of Iraq

This article explores how Ottoman sources can help us reconsider geographies of belonging in the history of Iraq. Focusing on two figures often excluded from conventional histories of Iraq – Mubārak al-Ṣabāḥ of Kuwait, and Khaz‘al bin Jābir of Muḥammara – it investigates how late imperial belonging was tied to the consolidation of property in land and how the political economy of land was tied to an emerging international system. The article reads these sources alongside non-state sources to understand how competing conceptions of Ottoman space and identity together shaped political and economic belonging in the ‘Gulf of Basra’. At the same time, the article argues that historians should be wary of the pitfalls of ‘methodological Ottomanism’ in using the Ottoman past to rewrite the histories of Ottoman Iraq. The ‘Ottoman’ should be treated as an open question, and bringing together multiple Ottoman archives is one way to do that.

Rethinking “Disinvestment”: Historical geographies of predatory property relations on Chicago’s South Side

As vacancy in Rust Belt cities becomes a focal point of planning and policy efforts, Chicago planners and private institutions attribute it to “disinvestment” and seek to remove barriers to real estate investment in order to unlock the market’s purported ability to bring land to “productive use.” Drawing on findings from an analysis of nearly 10,000 postwar property records in the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, this article demonstrates that vacancy stems not from disinvestment but from predatory and hyperextractive investments in housing that derive economic feasibility and legal sanction from property’s historical articulation with race. I argue that racial regimes of ownership are endemic to the operation of real estate markets and function as central modalities for the appropriation of ground rent. As an analytical lens into the political economy of land, racial regimes of ownership expand urban geographers’ capacity to address the mechanisms that mobilize difference to accommodate capital’s circulation and, more broadly, to account for the racial logics that configure the terrain of contemporary land struggles.

Knowledge Production and Land Relations in the Bioeconomy. A Case Study on the Brazilian Sugar-Bioenergy Sector

National bioeconomy strategies aim for a comprehensive transition from a fossil-based to a biomass-based economy. One common feature of the strategies is the optimistic reliance on technology as main tool in order to overcome the socio-ecological crisis. From the critical perspectives of political ecology and the political economy of research and innovation, technologies and technological innovations are not neutral solutions to the problem; they are generally socially embedded. Against this backdrop, we contextualise the technological innovations that support a more climate-friendly production of ethanol on a sugarcane basis, building on a field research in the more recently developed cultivation areas in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. In doing so, we explore the co-production of the green framing of the sector in combination with technologies for a more climate-friendly agriculture and the political economy of land. Our investigation shows that the bioeconomy in the sugar-ethanol sector perpetuates the socio-ecological problems associated with the agricultural sector. These socio-ecological problems range from the increasing concentration of landownership to the negative impact of agrotoxins.

The Political Economy of Land and Reparations: The Case of Reparations for African Americans in the 21st Century

AbstractThe global interest in research on the political economy of reparations has been rekindled by recent developments in the United States of America, but much of this renewed investigation is misinformed, distorted, or limited to recycling what is already known. Recent work by Darity and Mullen is an exception. They have contributed eloquently to age‐old debates on reparations for emancipated enslaved Africans. This essay examines their work in the context of historical movements against economic apartheid in the United States, its origins, and how it can be overcome. The focus of this essay is on how reparations should be considered as a response to the entire history of racism‐cum‐discrimination, which has consistently blocked economic opportunities for African Americans. Reparations , if adhered to, will either directly or indirectly modify the economic injustices that continue to face African Americans in their adopted nation (America). Central to any new case for reparations is the power of land, which offers to breathe new life into the broken, old promise of “forty acres and a mule” as a means of addressing long‐term social stratification in modern America.

Race, Entitlement, and Belonging: A Discursive Analysis of the Political Economy of Land in Zimbabwe

The access, control, and ownership of land and the means of production is an enduring frontier of conflict in post colonial settler states. Whilst racially tinged, colonialism created “structures of feeling” that sanctioned epistemic violence and created an economy of entitlement and belonging that sustained imperial designs. Zimbabwe’s independence meant the redistribution and proprietorship of land became a central leitmotif of cadastral politics. The article explores the interplay of the contested tropes of race, entitlement, and indigeneity as they informed the highly polarized land redistribution discourse. The discussion takes stock of the dominant narratives of post-colonial state predations, patronage, populism, and megalomania in contradistinction to the various ways in which whiteness and its prejudices and stereotypes nurtured some hubris of entitlement and belonging that retrogressively not only perpetuated colonial settler values and identities but also entrenched racial distance and indifference. The polarized contestations on land redistribution discourse coalesce around concepts such as restitution, indigeneity, nativity, patriotism, race, and class. Therefore while critiquing state excesses that have masked the honorable intentions of land redistribution, the article underscores the complex ways in which white Zimbabweans contributed to the enduring crisis by obdurately fixating their energies on colonial settler entitlements, values, and identities.

Speculation

Abstract From the beginning of the twentieth century, new urban housing forms, including social housing, land pooling, and building syndicates, began to emerge as products of housing rights and labor movements. Yet this emergence cannot simply be accounted for by a history of workers' rights and housing movements but must also take into consideration the political economy of land and housing created by new forms of real estate speculation. This article situates the history of urban speculation and the new fiduciary innovations pertaining to urban land and housing markets within the scholarship on the development of architectural and town-planning theories during the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on Calcutta and Bombay—two central cities of the British Empire—as case studies, I will trace the history of how the housing market became a tradeable object of speculation through colonial policies that disentangled housing from its singular history and abstracted it out of its nonmonetizable attachments. Indeed, it is by understanding how the land and housing market became a site for future investments and ultimately was structured through new social relations and values following World War I that we might get a fuller understanding of how we arrived at our contemporary “residential capitalism” and landscapes of accumulation and homelessness.

‘Waste’ to ‘use’? Making of ‘Narela’ in periphery of Delhi metropolis

This paper studies the process of urban development and expansion by using a theoretical lens of conceptualisation of waste. Applying from the literature on the political economy of land as a resource, urban planning and labour geography, I analyse the ways in which transformation of the value of land from ‘waste’ to ‘use’ or vice versa; as conceived by state agencies and planners; have implications on human lives, particularly working-class. The paper deals with the qualitative question(s) of how the planning policies transform urban landscapes by imagining the potential of space and in turn marginalises people, hence creating a huge pool of labour reserve to achieve greater surplus accumulation. In such conditions, I show that how this marginalised section, particularly working class, built their living environment. The research further reflects upon the labouring practices in the peripheral town of Delhi metropolis, which is largely built by gentrification of labour from the core of the city. The exploratory study is ethnographically inspired and deploys qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and Focussed Group Discussions to capture nuances of the field.

From Company Town to Post-Industrial

This paper considers what effects a universal basic income could have on disrupting social and economic inequality in the tensions of urban/rural divide. She frames her inquiry on the political economy of land and labor in the collapse of coal industry “company towns” and its structural aftermath in Central Appalachia.

The Political Economy of Land and Water Grabs

The Political Economy of Land and Water Grabs

Review: Technology and the Economy, the Key Relationships, Cities and New Technologies, Managing Community Growth: Policies, Techniques, and Impacts, Regulation for Revenue: The Political Economy of Land

Review: Technology and the Economy, the Key Relationships, Cities and New Technologies, Managing Community Growth: Policies, Techniques, and Impacts, Regulation for Revenue: The Political Economy of Land

The Political Economy of Land: Urban Development in an Oil Economy

The Political Economy of Land: Urban Development in an Oil Economy