I grew up in Texas, two generations off of a farm where my ancestors tilled potatoes for three hundred years. My people raised me on a steady diet of religious instruction about love, justice, and mercy for all. I was thirty when I heard about the farmer suicides in the global south, and they pierced my heart. Because I could not turn away, I turned my work towards a history of peoples’ movements for land tenure. I read World Bank reports, searched the archives of the UN, and went to New Delhi to visit a collection of the records of participatory meetings around the world. I present to you the result: the story of the Long Land War, the century-long struggle of poor people for control over their territory.
The story of colonial violence is very long. From the sixteenth century to the twentieth, conquest the seizure of land form part of the story of every continent visited by European powers. Exploitation, genocide, and permanent apartheid followed.
One story about international networks to repair that damage begins in Ireland, where Roman Catholics could not own or inherit property for many years.
After a famine in which one third of the nation perished, some newspaper reporters began to preach new ideas. They argued that an indigenous Irish title existed that protected poor tenants from eviction and displacement. They argued that the colonizer, England, owed reparations to the colonial Irish. They threatened England with continuing terrorism, assassinations, and arson. They argued that violence would only stop when reparations were paid to the Irish in land.
The Irish fought for their land in a series of momentous struggles over the course of the nineteenth century. Peasants staged ‘rent strikes,’ refusing the rent owed to landlords, even when attacked by police, as in this picture. The National Land League staged peaceful marches, counted eviction, and invented the boycott. International newspapers republished the stories of the movement’s progress, often carrying images like this one. American Irish sent money to continue the fight. Ireland’s Land War would bring an empire to its knees.
The 1881 Land Law created a totally new institution, a Land Court, which would set rent controls and limit eviction, and eventually empower peasants to purchase their tenancies, whatever the landlord’s position. Parliament passed a law creating compulsory land purchase to benefit marginalized people. It was the first time in the world.
The Irish land law also inspired other movements around empire. In India, Gandhi and his followers led rent strikes and stages a ten-year pilgrimage in the name of voluntary land turnover from landlords to peasants. Around the world, other movements appeared. In Mexico, Obregon announced that colonial holdings in land would be distributed to peasants and indigenous people.
Peasant resistance also tilted international opinion. As the United Nations and its agencies were being formed after the second world war, observers at the Food and Agriculture Organization began to regard land reform as inevitable. The response in much of Europe and the United States, through the 1970s, was to provide technical aid to national movements.
As nation after nation passed legislation to redistribute land from the rich to the poor, UN technicians supported those nations in drafting new laws. The agencies convened leaders from the postcolonial world, employing Indian economics and geographical practices. They published maps, seed catalogues, and bibliographies to support the proliferation of best practices around land tenure reform and land redistribution.
It really was a revolution. A global redistribution of land occurred — not merely in communist states like Russia, China, and Cuba — but across Mexico, most of Latin America, most parts of Africa and Asia. From 1881 to 1974, legislation after legislation, court after court, and institution after institution effectively redefined land not as private commodity to be bought and sold, but as a special kind of property: a property whose value was defined by inhabitation.
There were many categories of land reform: nationalist, communist, capitalist international, free market, and participatory. In the 1960s, some agencies formed to support indigenous rights, recognizing common forms of tenure. The politics of the struggle played out mainly in the form of which mechanism was suggested, by whom, to whom: a push and pull of different ideologies and donors.
But this push-pull negotiation was cut short in 1974 by the U.S. in a power grab. In 1974, under World Bank president Robert McNamara, the Bank yanked funding from the UN’s arm that supported land reform, the Food and Agriculture Organization or FAO. A Bank report declared that there would be no more land ceilings, only land floors. From that point forward, the World Bank would only assist in so-called “free market” land reforms that brought title and enabled land grabbing. The international movement for occupancy rights was effectively assassinated.
The coup, of course, is not the only problem that land tenure movements had to worry about. One perpetual difficulty was delay. A soil map of the world was designed by UNESCO and the FAO at the request of India. It would have supported land redistribution. The map took twenty years to make. By the time the map was published, the political will for land reform had vanished in much of India. In the Long Land War, there is always a risk that publishing becomes a priority over other struggles.
In the book, I review the eight poisonous principles that distorted policy into a weapon against the weak. I won’t detail all of them, but I will point to some perennial fantasies: the delusion that the deregulation of markets will land to be distributed to those who need it most, or the concept that single-owner proprietorship is the only tool we need. When you hear these statements, call them out: they are poisonous. They are also untrue.
Part of my analysis is about validating what I call the “techniques” by which peoples’ movements have organized for change. These include action from below like marches and rent strikes, but also national policies like reparations and rent control, technical systems like cooperatives, participatory maps, and small-scale technologies, and international organization and governance, as well as attitudes (like empathy) and intellectual frameworks (like a sense of the history of the movement). The ILC was founded as a knowledge-sharing network, and the array of techniques from storytelling to watershed management on display this week prove that techniques are still evolving.
In the years since the assassination of the FAO, the networks of peasants and their advisors around the world were not idle. They have advanced and invented participatory methods. They experimented with new common forms of ownership that validated indigenous and nomadic rights. They advanced the case for the ownership of land by women. They advanced the inclusion of Dalits, nomads, of women and indigenous groups in political processes. They experimented with water, farming, and forestry techniques, essentially an infrastructure of maintaining property in an age of climate change. These techniques sought brought the benefit of land tenure to communities that were excluded by land reforms executed at the national level.
To sum up this story: over the past two hundred years of global resistance to empire, peasant and anticolonial movements challenged power. International ties made them strong. Bureaucrats working in solidarity tried to support them. Together, they redefined property law so that the rights of the many could be recognized in western courts. They redistributed resources. Together, they fought a war that united landless people, smallholders, and urban renters into one people.
Understanding the history of land tenure movements doesn’t give us a road map for the future. But it does underline the shared history and challenges that face the communities of the International Land Coalition (ILC) and other landless workers, urban or rural.
History tells us that there are limits to the power of informal networks and UN agencies. Historians believe that the limits on international agencies date from the era after the second world war. The US and Europe decided to limit the power of the UN. They feared that former colonies would develop the networks to challenge the interests of powerful states.
Perhaps the most important limit is that they do not control their own budgets or the rule about trading the currencies in which those budgets are written.
Because of the limitations required by the US and Europe, international agencies and networks came to compose something like a “shadow government.” Like real governments, these shadow governments represent communities that convene to debate, negotiate, and pass resolutions. Like real governments, these shadow governments have collected data and provided maps. But unlike real governments, shadow governments lack power on a fundamental level.
Today, members of networks like the ILC continue to operate as a shadow government. Like governments, they write policy documents. They survey land. They assert rights. They pursue education. They hold planning meetings.
They are very much like a government — except that they lack power over their own finances. They cannot set their own budgets. They cannot compensate the workers who gather the data. They cannot set penalties for those who pollute, threaten, or murder.
Today the World Bank invests less than 1% of its total budget in land. Under the current rules, a shadow government cannot request World Bank support, even if that shadow government holds the keys to solving climate change.
The long land war is not over, and it is still a war.
For more, see The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights (Yale 2022) (on Amazon, from Yale)
