Today’s headlines buzz with chatter about the coming revolution in AI. Companies like Microsoft and Nvidia are now valued on par with the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom, the sixth-largest economy in the world and the home of one of the globe’s largest financial hubs. But as technology, finance, and industry attract capital and attention, it is easy to overlook the centrality of land to the way that societies work, even after a large portion of their populations leave the countryside.
My new book, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, shows that the biggest problems in societies around the globe today, from economic inequality to environmental degradation, racism, and gender inequality, are deeply rooted in past choices about who should get land and how they could use it. In a similar fashion, escaping these problems is impossible without incorporating land as part of the solution.
Because power is so often fused with land, reshuffling who owns the land can radically shift political power dynamics and the trajectory of societies in enduring ways.
As land has become scarcer and more valuable over the last few hundred years with population growth, who owns the land – and what is on it, such as housing or natural resources – has determined who holds power. Land ownership in societies across the globe came to shape social hierarchy, freedom, and bondage. And it came to mark citizenship, political clout, and who is rich and who is poor.
Land has long been, and today remains, the world’s most valuable asset. It underpins much of the value of housing, especially in the most desirable places to live. Vast areas of land are needed to feed populations, and its resources are critical for sustaining modern life and creating next-generation technologies. Land also confers identity and a sense of belonging. A connection to land provides people a sense of who they are in the world and the communities that they belong to. You can see that in the pride that people have in their hometowns, their connection to landscapes, and their sense of rootedness in place.
Our Past on the Land Defines the Present
The overwhelming majority of the human population has long lived on the land from the dawn of humanity through the rise of settled agricultural towns some 7,000 years ago and well into the 19th and 20th centuries. Only in 2007 did the global population living in cities come to outnumber the population living in rural areas for the first time in human history.
Over the last several centuries as humans came to crowd the land, the choices that societies made about who owns the land and who doesn’t cut deep ruts across populations and set the stage for trajectories of development, the likelihood that democracy would take root, and patterns of social inclusion or exclusion along lines of race, gender, and class.
This pattern has repeated itself across societies ranging from the plantation slavery and Jim Crow era of the American South to fascist interwar Germany and early post-independence Canada to contemporary Brazil.
The United States is a case in point. Early American history was rooted as much in southern plantation slavery and Indian removals as it was in New England smallholder farming. After the Civil War, efforts to grant emancipated Blacks land through the Forty Acres and a Mule scheme crumbled at the same time that western homesteading was pushing Native Americans off their lands and onto reservations.
Today’s battles over urban zoning, gentrification, and housing access are a transformed struggle over the historic exclusion of Blacks from land access, seeded by the failures of Reconstruction and the subsequent Great Migration northward. The same is true of efforts by Native American communities to gain greater control over federal land management.
Over the last several centuries, population growth, state-making, and social conflict have all accelerated.
Canada’s history of land allocation tells another revealing story. Canada’s Dominion Lands Act of 1872 doled out millions of acres of land to settlers well into the 1900s. But unlike the US Homestead Act of 1862, on which it was modeled, it didn’t allow single women to homestead. Patriarchal social norms and fears that women wouldn’t be as productive as men on the land held women back.
The result was that men won almost all of western land through Canadian settlement as it was stripped from indigenous populations. It was one of the largest and most lopsided giveaways of land to men in human history. We see that gender disparity replicated in health and income statistics many decades later in prairie women in Canada, and some of that has been brought to cities.
Reshuffling Fates Through Land
Because power is so often fused with land, reshuffling who owns the land can radically shift political power dynamics and the trajectory of societies in enduring ways. This has occurred repeatedly around the world since the French Revolution as time and again, through what I call the Great Reshuffle, countries have seized land from some people and granted it to others.
It’s hard to overstate how concentrated land became in places like Europe, Latin America, and parts of East Asia a few centuries ago. Over the last several centuries, population growth, state-making, and social conflict have all accelerated. Demand for land has increased along with the ability of governments to reallocate and reassign it. That has sparked dramatic upheavals in who holds the land in societies across the globe.
In South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan after World War II, reforms that reallocated land from landlords to renters transformed these countries, enabling small farmers to send their children to schools rather than into the fields. Within a generation, these countries urbanized, industrialized, and became wealthy while inequality radically declined.
Societies around the globe are now grappling with the consequences of past land power.
In Colombia in the last twenty years, the government began granting and titling land to women and to partnered men and women jointly, which has empowered women within the household and made them upwardly mobile within society.
In South Africa, land restitution to dispossessed Blacks since the end of apartheid has led to a far more inclusive and just society, even as it continues to struggle with legacies from its past. I have walked these lands, talked to people impacted, and heard stories of how their lives were transformed through these initiatives.
There are just as many examples of land reshuffles that concentrate power and sow inequality and authoritarianism. Mexico reallocated half its privately owned land to peasants in the 20th century but withheld property rights from them for political reasons. That underpinned authoritarian rule and hobbled the country’s development.
Russia summarily abolished private property after the Bolshevik Revolution and forced peasants into collectives, turning agriculture into a piggy bank that could be raided to fuel industrial and authoritarian Communist ambition on the world stage. It’s hard to conceive of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and modern Russia without that. China nationalized all of its land after its Civil War and followed Russia’s path to collectivization, wreaking devastating human catastrophes like the Great Famine.
Many Western countries such as the US, Canada, and Australia dispossessed indigenous groups en masse as they consolidated their territorial power. In doing so, they marginalized these groups and constructed rigid racial hierarchies where indigenous peoples were systematically mistreated, abused, and exploited.
Contemporary Land Reshuffles and a New Global Order
Societies around the globe are now grappling with the consequences of past land power. Countries like India and El Salvador are trying to increase land access for women in order to rectify their historical exclusion from land ownership.
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Australia and Canada are experimenting with land returns and shared stewardship as a way to redress the prior dispossession of indigenous groups. Chile and Spain are restoring environmentally damaged lands from prior exploitative land settlement patterns.
As land and housing prices rise inexorably and climate change accelerates, pressing questions have emerged about who will own property and who will rent, who can access affordable home insurance, and who will be forced to relocate. Climate change, the search for minerals critical to emerging technology, and the erosion of the post-World War II global order are also raising the prospects of a new era of territorial land grabbing.
Global competition over Arctic land and waters is heating up. Russia is pushing an aggressive campaign to annex Ukraine’s land and China is building up outposts in the South China Sea. President Trump has forcefully advocated for US acquisition of territories like Greenland, Gaza, and even Canada.
Crafting a Better Future on the Land
As for past generations, land is again an engine of social change. Who owns it and how they will manage it will determine whether the future is defined by opportunity and inclusion or another version of the inequalities and hierarchies of the past.
Governments, communities, and individuals around the globe are turning to innovative new arrangements on the land to craft a better future. Any durable arrangements will have to accommodate climate change and the major human displacements that come with it, as well as the coming peak global population crunch before the end of the century and possible subsequent population crash.
Increasingly, this means turning away from traditional conceptions of exclusive and individual ownership in favor of alternatives like shared land use, partial common ownership, land stewardship layered over private property, conservation and other easements, and community land trusts. These arrangements balance the benefits of ownership and economic growth with environmental management, land and housing access, and inclusion. In doing so, they offer a path forward that, like the past, is rooted in the land.
