The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights 9780300264869

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Yale Agrarian Studies Series James C. Scott, series editor

t h e a g r a r i a n s t u d i e s s e r i e s at ya l e u n i v e r s i t y p r e ss

The Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press seeks to publish outstanding and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural society—for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question existing paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived experience of rural people are especially encouraged.

—j a m e s c . s c o t t , Series Editor James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight Edward Dallam Melillo, Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the ChileCalifornia Connection Kathryn M. de Luna, Collecting Food, Cultivating People: Subsistence and Society in Central Africa through the Seventeenth Century James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the First Civilizations Loka Ashwood, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America Jonah Steinberg, A Garland of Bones: Child Runaways in India Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti Christian C. Lentz, Contested Territory: Điên Biên Phu� and the Making of Northwest ˙ Vietnam Dan Allosso, Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West Christian Lund, Nine-Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia Shaila Seshia Galvin, Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian Himalaya Michael Dove, Bitter Shade: The Ecological Challenge of Human Consciousness Japhy Wilson, Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon Aniket Aga, Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India Ruth Mostern, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History Brian Lander, The King’s Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit yalebooks.com/agrarian.

The Long Land War

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Th e G l oba l Str uggl e for O ccupancy Righ t s

Jo Guldi

new haven and london

Copyright © 2021 by Jo Guldi. All rights reserved. Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. An online version of the work is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by Integrated Publishing Solutions, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN 978-0-300-25668-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2021937260 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

We could always spend huge budgets on what used to be called the “conquest of space,” but we would succeed at best only in transporting a half-dozen encapsulated astronauts across inconceivable distances, from a living planet toward some dead ones. The place of the action is here below and right now. Dream no longer, mortals! You won’t escape into space. You have no dwelling place but this one, this narrow planet. —Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia (2017) There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. —Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever” (1995)

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Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Techniques of Occupancy  1 1. A Parade for Empire’s End  36 Part I Decolonizing; or, The Rome Consensus and t h e P e a s a n t O r i g i n s o f W o r l d G o v e r n m e n t  53 2. Something Like a Global Government of Land  57 3. Can Land Redistribution Scale with Population?  97 P a r t II Cartophilia; or, Building I n f o r m at i o n I n f r a s t r u c t u r e s  127 . An Information Pipeline  131 4 5. On Failing to Make a Map in Time  152 6. The Questionable Effectiveness of Bibliography  179

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Against

P a r t III B u r e au p h o b i a ; o r , T h e R e v o lt G o v e r n m e n t a n d t h e “ T h i r d W ay ” 207

7. The Peasant’s Calculator  209 8. China and the Battle over Memory  229 9. Racism, Skepticism, and the Cloak of Science in U.S. Debates About Land Redistribution  258 10. A Neoliberal Rebellion in Britain  284 P a r t IV R e s i s ta n c e ; o r , A D e m o c r at i c P r o g r a m f o r O c c u p a n c y  307 11. Techniques of the Mystic: The Long Walk of Vinoba Bhave 311 12. The Technique of the Squat: The Origins of Squatting After the Second World War  334 13. The Technique of the Map: Indigenous Title, Rent Control, and Pollution  354 Epilogue: Why Land Redistribution Matters in the Age of Climate Change  383 Appendix: A Note on Methodology and Terminology  411 Timeline 433 Notes 435 Index 557

Preface

I was only twelve when an aching and often silent worry about our planet began to smolder, indelibly impressed upon me by a science teacher at the elementary school of my Texas suburb. Gesturing toward the terrarium enclosed by glass where the classroom lizard resided, she explained how the glass of human greenhouses was designed to produce a warmer environment where plants could sprout. As the teacher told us that carbon emissions were turning the entire planet into a greenhouse whose warming might create unanticipated and uncontrollable disasters I began to feel dizzy, as if the room were tilting. In the face of our climate crisis, many historians have offered timely and important perspectives focused upon the history of carbon emissions and other forms of pollution. These accounts provide important insights into the challenge of building a political consensus around scientific facts and highlight the heroic efforts of grassroots groups, writers, and scientists in fighting earlier episodes of the environmental struggle, such as DDT, acid rain, and the ozone hole. Some of the most pressing questions about the work ahead regarding the climate require a different kind of storytelling. Reading the newspaper in recent years, many people have asked themselves: How is it that nations can collaborate on projects of global proportions when the interests of the developed and developing world seem so at odds? How long does a scientific and rational response to an emergency take? Can carefully wrought international plans survive ideological revolutions in which world leaders suddenly decide to rebel against voluntary accords? And is order ultimately a matter only for scientists, or do ordinary people have a role to play in deciding how the

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resources of this sphere will be allocated? What efforts will save the many from rising sea levels, forfeited livelihoods, and the threat of becoming climate refugees? Whether or not the stories in this book provide answers, they at least offer to the questioner a distant mirror showing these problems. In the story of the struggle for occupancy rights, traditions longer than the fight against climate change reflect back to us our questions about planetary coordination and the plight of the poor. If the stories look quite different from other environmental histories, that might be because it took me a long time to see the problem, and part of the understanding was wrapped up in an effort to recover a silence from the domains of the university that still taught about small farms in the 1990s. One summer afternoon when I was in college, my cleverest friend (a philosophy major whose Vietnamese parents had left him to feast on a diet of great novels and board games in suburban San Jose) took my arm and dragged me into a hall, dimmed by blinds despite the humid day outside. As my eyes adjusted to the shadowy gloom, the first sensation I took in was the sound: clickclick, click-click. Professor John Stilgoe’s remote control was causing two slide carousels to churn; the images that appeared on screens at the front of the hall punctuated his lecture about the fences and barns that marked different waves of immigration to the Atlantic seaboard. The images portrayed scenes of daily life as wonders: ordinary farms, train stations, and suburban houses—the familiar scenes of my youth—were turned into icons of history, and in the process, the hidden structures of the past were revealed. Superficially, the lecture related to cultural artifacts of everyday life— the postage stamp, the layout of the suburban house—but the threads of these, once pulled, caused the invisible forces that structure government and gender to break apart before the viewer’s eyes. In the gloom of the summer lecture hall, those precise, illuminated images of the familiar formed a kind of kaleidoscope, rendering the motionless blocs of ordinary landscapes into the visible motion of historical change. Clad in a formal bow tie, shirt, and suit coat, Professor Stilgoe lectured with his sunglasses around his neck, as if signaling that at any moment he might leave our stately campus and return to the wilds of the ordinary world, which his lectures had catalogued with the meticulous precision of a butterfly collector. Over the next several years, I would learn, under his tutelage, to identify the ethnic origins of American barns and fences, to discern the patterns of colonialism and planning that ordered the grids on which American cities sprawled,

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and to regard even such artifacts as B movies and horror flicks as icons that enshrined the collective cultural creations of an America whose creators were often inarticulate or even unaware of the structures within which they labored. Stilgoe’s careful attention to the history of railroads, post offices, and electrification in American history would strike a spark in me that shifted my hitherto canonical tastes in literature toward cultural artifacts that lacked an interpreter. Something dry inside me caught fire from that spark. Perhaps it was the raw material from a childhood in Texas spent hiking amid the ruins of CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) encampments, asking my parents why, sometimes, a hearth and chimney appeared in the middle of the forest—the scene of some unrecorded ejection of the past. Perhaps it was the echo of family conversations between adults about my aunt’s bankrupt dairy farm, or more distant memories of economic struggle on the farm in Long Island where my English ancestors had constructed barns and dug potatoes for four centuries. My family remembered displacement, however hazily. I would spend the next decade taking pictures that documented the reality of historical change to the landscape: ghost towns in California, boarded-up apartments in military towns that marked the eviction crisis of 2010, abandoned steel mills in the Midwest, and squatter-occupied houses in Berlin. With my camera in my hands, I could catalogue and render knowable the present-day evictions playing out around me. The power of weaving a story out of silences thrilled me. The longer I gazed at landscape, the more something else began to smolder: concern about the environment, about toxic forms of agriculture, and about what a changing climate might mean for the livelihoods of the planet’s inhabitants, mixed with a certain confusion—which many of my students today share—about how or whether the efforts of ordinary people matter in the face of global challenges. In 1999, there were few opportunities for involvement: community gardening, perhaps, or recycling, or Greenpeace. I had already begun to glimpse other narratives about how the economics of ecosystems might be organized. I had friends who had grown up on back-to-the-land farms planted by their parents in the 1970s. I became curious about what that moment in the 1970s signaled—whether a rebellion against modernity itself or a forward-looking encounter with technology, soil, and local markets, fashioned to create sustainable livelihoods capable of surviving scientifically predicted ecological shocks. Because all I had to guide me at that point was a sense of curiosity and wonder, I undertook a pilgrimage, which began with a sojourn in France and continued in California. I briefly became a WWOOFer—a Willing Worker on

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Organic Farms—volunteering my labor to weed carrot beds, shovel manure, and milk goats in return for the wisdom of experience. Sleeping in barns and dining on simple repasts of salad, bread, and cheese— most of it produced on the land we worked by day—I was still chasing a question I had glimpsed in Professor Stilgoe’s theories about how human beings worked out their existential questions in the way they inhabit the earth. My hosts in France and California were back-to-the-landers, some of them PhD students in the social sciences who had despaired of modernity, others poor workers or recovering alcoholics who turned to farming for a healthier life. It was the French back-to-the-landers who prompted my first questions about the role of international relations in agricultural policy. I was visiting France when José Bové pushed a shopping cart through the windows of a McDonald’s to protest American influence in French agricultural policy. The farmers who fed me were angry at America and about the prospect of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) disrupting the ecology of their fields in the same way that pesticides had a generation before. I thought I wanted to become a farmer, but my new friends told me that this was idiocy, given the privilege of my status as an American. Go back to the United States, said one, and tell them that what they’re doing is wrong. When I returned home, in 2002, I found that very few Americans knew about GMOs or cared about the fate of French organic farming. It seemed that the prudent thing to do, for a while at least, was to return to study, trying to understand something about the histories that Stilgoe’s lectures had unlocked for me once long before: how social movements use their occupancy of the land around them to remake their world, how powerful is the sway of governments in these changes, and how many are the questions about wherein justice consists. The clues from landscape history were running out, so I turned my study again to more traditional topics: the history of modern nations, the evolution and exclusions of democracy, the history of Europe’s imperial expansions and their consequences around the globe. As I read, I struggled to connect those best-known events of political and economic history to the environment. It was too early, of course, for me to benefit from the scholars who have published on that topic in glorious material detail since then (Aidan Forth, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Andreas Malm, Venus Bivar, Rohan de Souza, and Robert MacFarlane among them; we had Mike Davis, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Dolores Hayden, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebvre, who provided much insight, but only a rough outline of the historical intersection of the built environment with capitalism). I wondered how the

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changes that nation-building left in the built landscape might have been noticed by ordinary people—a line of questioning that lay behind my first book, Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (2012). Meanwhile, the conversations around me were turning toward two subjects—climate change and eviction—with alarming regularity. What I really wanted to know was whether stories of the ordinary landscape could tell us something about the ability of ordinary people to remake their world, and the way in which those stories of occupancy intersected with a history of the environment. As I searched for answers, I began to come up against the historical debates that had launched the generation of Stilgoe’s teachers into their excavations into farms and fences: the question of what size a farm should be. I began to see questions of landownership and the viability of small farms wherever I turned in the literature of the humanities and social sciences of the 1960s and ’70s, but I had no idea why, and little of what I read connected those debates to land redistribution programs in the developing world—or to contemporary questions about the fate of small farmers in America. It was a hopelessly alien mystery of intellectual battlegrounds, embedded in a labyrinth of agricultural economics, sociology, and political theory. I learned from a great many interlocutors in the process of telling this story—including law school faculty and political scientists; historians of Guatemala, Japan, and China; and specialists in mapping—but ultimately, one of the challenges of a story so grand as this one is that it touches on a thousand stories, and it is sure to get some of them wrong: the burden of both omission and error hangs on me. I have written a very different environmental history from the biographies of chemical pollutants or of monsoon, mosquito, grain, and dust bowl that have proved so informative over recent years. In an era of climate refugees, stories about the making of scientific consensus or about the material genesis of erosion may be less relevant than accounts of how the consequences of dust bowl and flood on humanity were managed—or not. Telling the story of land management requires attention to the material mechanisms that Stilgoe taught me to study as well as to the history of intellectual debates and embattled institutions. The realm of history that I explore in this book—a history of economic policy, empathy, and mapmaking—is conceived as a political map of the negotiations over an environmental experience. Loam, erosion, and plant genetics are therefore mentioned only in passing, while equity for the poor and strategies of land management are examined on every page. What kind of an environmentalism would such an environmental history support? An occupancy-focused environmentalism would be one that takes

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seriously not only the scientific knowledge of the earth’s resources but also the politics of equity. It would prioritize the right not to be displaced, despite the dramatic shifts of famine, drought, pandemic, flood, weather, and fire that scientists tell us are intensifying against the backdrop of a destabilized climate. Such an environmentalism would necessarily take questions of property and ownership very seriously: environmentalism in tune with the history of occupancy would necessarily also encompass technical variations in property law, such as squatting, indigenous title, and commons-type administration of shared land and water. It would be rooted in the understanding that non-­ Western forms of property are essential to protecting ordinary rights to inhabit a place without fear of displacement. This book discerns a tradition of thought, tactic, strategy, and sometimes paradox that forms the long story of occupancy rights in the past. If I have done my work well, perhaps these stories can support a conversation about occupancy-engaged environmentalism in the future.

Acknowledgments

Arguments that range over time and space necessarily take an author far beyond her specific training. The only way to pursue such a project with any level of responsibility is through the help of engaged friends and colleagues, whose expertise in China, Mexico, India, and North America made it possible for me to get a firm enough footing in fields well beyond my own to begin to weave a narrative. Many books begin with notes of thanks for colleagues, but in the case of this book, conversations with colleagues are as much a source as any archive; I therefore owe a great debt. This project thrived because of conversations, detailed and wide-ranging, with a great number of friends. Fredrik Jonsson was a constant interlocutor and inspiration about how to write and think about history in the Anthropocene. Rosalind Williams planted the seed of thinking about appropriate technology in world history. Early conversations with Paul Readman, Nick Cullather, Al McCoy, Emilio Kouri, David Nirenberg, Alexia Yates, Grace and Barry Mazur, Rachel Stern, Matthew Desmond, Jess Gilbert, Tim Hitchcock, Desmond Fitzgibbon, Vanessa Ogle, Adam Tooze, Chloe Cockburn, Fred Turner, Lisa Gitelman, Abhisheck Kaicker, Amy Offer, Ian Klaus, Jennifer Burns, Joshua Cohen, Neil Brenner, Olivier de Schutter, Brett Christopher, Andrew Sartori, John Gillis, Jed Purdy, David Grewal, Winnie Wong, and Jacob Sider Jost helped to steer the wide orientation of this project. Mats Fridlund, Finn Arne Jørgensen, and members of the Humlab in Umeå University also provided early interlocutors, when I had only just begun to contemplate writing on the longue durée. Emma Rothschild, Amartya Sen, and Noah Feldman were exceptionally generous interlocutors as I pieced my way through the larger issues around empire, law, and economy that structured this book from the

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beginning. At Brown, readers of early chapters and conversation partners included Tim Harris, Vazira Zamindar, Jennifer Page, Hal Cook, Beshara Doumani, Faiz Ahmed, Cynthia Brokaw, Alex Gourevitch, Damian White, and Amanda Anderson. Daniel Rodriguez guided me through the literature on Mexico and Latin America. Cynthia Brokaw helped me to understand the significance of the various phases of Chinese land reform and their interpretation. Ashutosh Varshney steered me through Indian land reform, and Wendy Wolford was an early sounding board and general inspiration. I wish that there were more room and time for the enormous questions about the legacy of the Ottoman Empire that Beshara and Faiz (and later Sabri Atesh) helped me to glimpse, but this book is already long enough, and I have had to leave these important matters for another writer. Conversations with Liz Barry, James Minton, Dorn Cox, Severine von Tarschner Fleming, and David Meyers—tireless advocates of tenants, farmers, and participatory rights to land—inspired some insight on almost every page of this manuscript. Rebecca Tankersley put Walter Brueggemann into my hand at a crucial point, and Katherine Rose pointed me to William Dever. Later conversations with Chaim Bertman, Fouad Jaber, Ben Dueholm, Rafael Heiber, Andrés Lomeña Cantos, Sheila Jasanoff, Lara Putnam, Tore Olssen, Jessie Zarazaga, Jill Kelly, Ken Hamilton, Ken Andrien, Andy Graybill, Sabri Ates, Ariel Ron, James C. Scott, and the rest of the Agrarian Studies group at Yale challenged me and kept me going. In the final hour, Ed Countryman pushed me to extract the implications of a history of occupancy for American questions about indigeneity and race. Rowan Dorin cast light on the deep history of evictions in the ancient world and Middle Ages. Macabe Keliher coached me through the revolutions of twentieth-century China. Correspondence with Sunil Amrith—who was generous enough to respond to a cold call—steered me through the context of debates in twentieth-­ century India. Debbie Coen helped me to draw out the portions of the argument of greatest interest to STS readers. No training or reading, however deep, truly prepares the writer to cover matters of present concern in light of global history; only the generosity of one’s peers makes such wide-ranging connections possible. This manuscript benefited from several early audiences who helped me to examine the diverse material one stage at a time. Audiences at Stanford, Harvard, and Yale heard early drafts of the chapters on participatory mapping, squatters, and mapping projects at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Conversations with Sam Moyn, Nils Gilman, and the anonymous reviewers at Humanity helped me to understand how to craft the arguments

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about maps, neoliberalism, and squatting. At Southern Methodist University, Dan Orlovsky, Larry Winnie, Ed Countryman, Jill Kelly, and Ariel Ron participated in a workshop on an earlier version of this manuscript, joined by ex­ ternal readers Chris Morris, Duncan Kennedy, and John Rennie Short, with Alison Bashford participating by correspondence. The INTH conference in Stockholm generously gave me room in the form of a keynote address to work out early thoughts about the relationship between land redistribution and climate change. I owe enormous debts of gratitude to those who helped me believe that such a project would be both worthwhile and possible, especially James C. Scott and my wonderful editor at Yale, Jean Thomson Black. I am particularly grateful for the detailed comments of the generous readers who reviewed this manuscript on behalf of Yale University Press, which resulted in a much stronger text. I also profited from detailed notes from Ed Countryman, John Clark, Macabe Keliher, Dougald Hine, Zachary Gates, Nils Gilman, Rafael Heiber, Anna Rotman, and three anonymous readers from Cambridge University Press, whose insight helped me to craft the arc of the story in important ways. Chaim Bertman’s editorial and proofreading talents deeply improved the manuscript, and Ed Countryman and Maria Popova (through her book Figurings) talked to me about the craft of writing with such warmth and inspiration that it utterly transformed my editing process in its final throes. The wide and deep readings that went into this book were generously supported by a Mellon Fellowship at the University of Chicago, a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, a fellowship at the Humanities Center at Brown University, a short-term fellowship from the Brown India Initiative, a fellowship at the Neubauer Institute at the University of Chicago, a post-tenure research year funded by Dedman College, and by a year of writing funded by the National Science Foundation Grant (IBSS 1822091). The Clements Center at Southern Methodist University provided a book workshop, and I am deeply indebted to Andy Graybill for helping me to carve out the space to work on so voluminous a project as this, as well as the encouragement to pursue a project larger than the scope of the traditional British post for which I was officially hired. I am also grateful to Dr. N. Narayanasamy for use of the figure on page 377. For the figure on page 156, I am grateful to the Geographical Review of India, and especially to Professor A. R. Ghosh and an enormous string of other correspondents whose goodwill and international connections helped me to initiate the process necessary to secure permissions, even while the University of

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Calcutta was closed because of the coronavirus, and a typhoon had devastated Bengal: especially Sanjukta Das Gupta, Sunando Bandyopadhyay, Lakshmi Sivaramakrishnan, Lakpa Tamang, Ben Martin, Christopher Robling, Anil Gulati, Ajit Srimal, Sunil Gulati, Guru Reddy, Ilangovan Kuppusamy, Priya Satia, Rajani Sudan, Gunnel Cederlöf, and Iqbal Mutabanna. I owe a great debt to those who helped me through the diverse archives that contain some of the work of the occupancy movements and institutions covered here. Rajesh Tandon welcomed me to his archive in New Delhi; Fabio Ciccarello showed me through the FAO archives in Rome; Robert Chambers, Jane Harvell, Karen Watson, and Rose Lock opened up the archives of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex for me; LaDonna Brown of Heritage Preservation, Chickasaw Nation generously consulted on details of Chickasaw land claims when I inquired; at the University of Wisconsin, Herman Felstehausen, Jim Riddell, Jeff Dorsey, Jean Ruenger-Hanson, and Jess Gilbert were enthusiastic and enlightened guides to the archives of the Land Tenure Center and the “gray literature” (unpublished papers) that it collected. Jess Gilbert is owed an especially deep debt, for it was Jess who bequeathed to me a collection of Wisconsin books on land tenure at a crucial moment in the research of this book, lavishing conversation and insight upon me with a hospitality that frequently returns to my thoughts. At the Ford and Rockefeller Archives, Lucas Buresch and Tom Rosenbaum helped immensely, and Tom provided especial encouragement. I am also deeply grateful to the late Elinor Ostrom, whom I had a chance to interview shortly before her passing, for opening her papers to me. Nicole Todd and Julie England helped to show me around while I was visiting Ostrom’s center at the University of Indiana. As I began my own longue durée inquiries into connections between land politics in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, David Armitage read my cartolini from the Roman archive and assured me that one could write a long-term history of two hundred years. As a result of conversations when this project was in its infancy, David and I wrote a book, The History Manifesto (2014), about the ethos of writing for a public, some of which suggested the significance of conclusions that I was already forming about the history of land politics. Conclusions we hazarded in polemic form about the effectivity of the longue durée, the eclipse of the historical narrative by economics, and the decline of support for smallholder economics are spelled out with greater detail, more evidence, and less rhetoric here. This project would not have been possible without David’s encouragement of a bold vision and a straightforward

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consideration of the advantages of long-term, transnational, and technological history—and indeed without the encouragement and ongoing conversation of many colleagues around that work, in particular Rick Locke, Prerna Singh, Bhrigu Singh, Jill Kelly, Liz Friend-Smith, and Benjamin Martin. In the background, helping me refine my ideas and to experiment with new methods, were dozens of students and research assistants at Harvard, Brown, and SMU. Stephanie Buongiorno, Doron Shiffer-Seba, Katie Parker, Givens Parr, Sophie Soloway, Mara Freilich, Elizabeth Oakley, Richard Salame, Lance Gloss, Kanika Gandhi, India Ennenga, Abhilash Medhi, Sebastian Clark, Grant Meyer, Beau Feeny, Simon Strikeback, Kate Diedrick, and Michael Murphy were tireless, precise, and deeply engaged with this project. Like the little-­ acknowledged contributions of the women bibliographers of international development, their work was an invisible labor behind my own. Their creativity and willingness to engage the subjects of research here have inspired me at every stage of the process. Will historians of the future acknowledge that the author of this book, in the final months of writing, sought to define the poles of ownership while typing in the bedroom? So loud was the noise of video games, so widespread the papier-mâché and beading projects strewn around the house during quarantine. Will they acknowledge, perhaps, the intense concentration that a person must muster to instruct a four-year-old in touch-typing and simultaneously ingest the scholarship of the Russian Revolution? Reader, perhaps these labors—like those of so many of the social scientists described in these pages—are destined for the dustbin of history, but they have been no less a matter of toil because of it. Know that every syllable on the modern information state was forged out of the crush of noise and stew of inattention that flooded through American houses during the pandemic of 2020. I am all the more grateful, therefore, to my parents, Christine and Richard Guldi, whose childcare and constant encouragement during the pandemic provided a luxury intensely envied by most of my working friends. Their assistance throughout the entire process and their modeling of concerned engagement with the world are at the root of any success the project may have. For putting up with the family conflicts that inevitably arose as a result of my writing, for comfort when I needed it, for support in the travels that uprooted our family, for covering for my peregrinations, for careful copyediting, and for pushing me harder than anyone in my life has ever done before, this book is dedicated to Zachary Gates, whose approaches to the world span the material, the quantitative, and the transcendental. Zachary, now my husband,

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was, when this project began, a newfound friend turned research assistant and hiking companion in Sussex and Delhi, who took months away from work of his own to help me to scan activists’ archives, the interpretation of which would afterward fill years of work. Without his constant encouragement, companionship, and willingness to talk, read, and edit, this book would be much less than it is. Earlier versions of chapters 10 and 12 appeared in the journal Humanity, and an earlier iteration of chapter 13 was published in Public Culture; I am deeply grateful to the boards and editors of those journals for allowing me to republish those arguments here.

The Long Land War

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Introduction Techniques of Occupancy

Struggles over land are as old as human history. Even in the midst of health and busyness, human beings dance with death. In woodcuts crafted when the plague was still a vivid memory for many Europeans, Hans Holbein rendered the tragedy of loss as an inevitable reality. It is a grim sentiment, but also one that—in the course of a pandemic unprecedented in modern times—has become familiar again. Contemplated at a slant, however, the details of Holbein’s image begin to stir. In another frame from the same series, Death is the human’s friend and helpmeet. Death even joins in heavy labor, using his skeletal arms to push a makeshift plow. Death toils alongside Adam and Eve, whom Holbein represents as exiled farm workers whose rags evidence their fortune in life. Unlike the Nobleman, the laborers accept Death as a fact, even as an ally. The farmers know that their days are numbered, and they tend to the land, using it to care for their children while they can. How different is the mindset of the Nobleman who, in his arrogance, believes Death to be a companion whom he can escape. Let us willfully read the images another way. Perhaps the Nobleman is dancing not with Death, but rather with a poor man, whom fate has reduced to a skeleton before his time. Rich and poor pull close and push away, caught in an inescapable dance. If death comes for rich and poor alike, then why has the Nobleman dedicated his life to amassing wealth rather than to service, whereby he could save his brother? Is inequality as ineluctable as death? Several philosophers have held, over the centuries, that like inequality, the eviction of people from their homes is both perennial and inevitable—and just as we must eventually accept mortality as a companion to life, so must we also resign ourselves to the gap that divides human fortunes. In contrast, some

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Hans Holbein, “The Nobleman,” from The Dance of Death, 1523–25 (Museum of Fine Arts Budapest)

observers today insist that metrics of violence, learning, and wealth indicate that progress in the human condition is inevitable.1 Reader, beware of caustic pessimism and untempered optimism alike! Only history promises a sober review of the facts. To engage questions of this kind, we need a wider history of justice and collaboration, elite will and popular action. The story of the global struggle for occupancy rights—that is, the right not to be evicted—offers a powerful set of parallels for our present condition. Struggles over land have a recent history whose mixed record of success is bound up with the uncoordinated work of poor people, who attempted to sway justice with nothing except the arguments made by their own bodies, assembling in marches and demonstrations or squatting on unused land or in housing, or by documenting pollution and other threats to their land through unprofessional maps drawn in the dirt. In the course of the twentieth century, the concerns of millions of peasants strug-

i n t r o d u c t i o n    3

Hans Holbein, “Adam Tills the Soil,” from The Dance of Death, 1523–25 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

gling against eviction would become the subject of collaboration at a planetary scale, before the consensus around their defense would shatter on the rocky shoals of delay, racism, and ideology. The tortuous debate over how best to allocate rights to land is in no way novel. The ancients took sides on the subject with passions equal to the interlocutors of today, and they found no more room for agreement than we do. While Plato advocated property held in common, Aristotle praised private property. While many ancient religions affirmed compassion as their central message—as when Buddha directed kings to order their realms so as to prevent famine—monarchs themselves, with few exceptions, favored control over generosity. During the time of the Assyrian Empire, more than a million persons were forced from their homes into exile—and it became a common trope, persisting even today, for rulers to use displacement to intimidate their colonial subjects. Other communities abjured such tactics; Jewish law mandated

4  i n t r o d u c t i o n

a “jubilee”—a regular turnover of debt and inequality, marked by the redistribution of land—every seven years, enabling the poor to remake themselves and the earth anew. Drawing on Jewish law, Jesus promised that the meek would inherit the earth—even if, when he blessed the poor, some heard that same speech as a pledge to the “poor in spirit,” suggesting a quid pro quo— blessings in return for obedience. The diversity of interpretations of sacred texts that touch on inequality reflects how divergent our feelings about the matter remain today. Holy anecdotes and laws did not banish displacement as a strategy of power. By the Middle Ages, exile returned as a powerful technique of enrichment and control, wielded by rulers who deported hundreds of thousands of persons—mainly Jews and Muslims—from their lands. Property rights and teachings of compassion rarely came to the exiles’ aid.2 Over recent centuries, eviction has mainly intensified in both frequency and scale. Perhaps the most famous episode is known as “the enclosure movement,” which began as early as the fifteenth century, when European aristocrats began to confiscate the common lands previously used by peasants. By the nineteenth century, rural laborers were still losing their rights to the forest, and with it a reliable source of fuel and food. Enclosure spelled hunger and misery in the countryside. It spurred peasants to abandon their homes for Europe’s cities, where many would toil on starvation wages in the booming factories of the industrial revolution. In his youth, Karl Marx analyzed contemporary struggles over peasants’ rights to the German forest, concluding that enclosure was the “original sin” of capitalism: the one mistake that precipitated what was, in his mind, an epic fall into an era marked by constant struggle.3 Displacement indelibly informed the experience of most European commoners in the era when both capitalism and empire were new. It lay at the very root of Europe’s overseas expansion. The cottages of laboring Scots were burned to the ground by landlords fascinated with new agricultural models. The victims moved to the Appalachian foothills, Canada, or farther abroad, to the Pacific. Sometimes the result was that indigenous people across the Americas and the Pacific were forced from their homes, abused, and murdered by these embittered victims of involuntary expatriation. Soldiers and judges soon joined the exiled newcomers, hastening the displacement of natives and declaring their land claims null and void. Indigenous territories were divided, mapped, taxed, rented, and sold at a market price, which, with every capital improvement, appreciated beyond the grasp of an ever growing majority. The world of European expansion mirrored the human condition, as explained by Dante

i n t r o d u c t i o n    5

Alighieri, where displacement was the permanent state of affairs after Eden: “You will leave behind each thing beloved most dearly.”4 Evicted from their land, many native peoples were enslaved and forced to till soil that belonged to others. By the nineteenth century, neither urbanization nor industrialization had halted the pace of eviction. In the United States, the birth of the interstate highway saw waves of Italian American, African American, Polish American, and Latino families fleeing their neighborhoods. Mumbai and Shanghai received refugees from the countryside who, displaced by dams and industrial farms, constructed homes from scrap on abandoned land, only to be evicted in the name of newer improvement schemes. Around the world, some 400 to 800 million persons were evicted as dams created power for cities. More recently, tent cities were built to house refugees from drought-­ afflicted regions in Somalia, Darfur, and Iraq, where ethnic violence compounded climate-driven scarcity.5 In the twenty-first century, eviction and displacement appear as an immutable fact, the reflection of an iron law that economic opportunities exist for some but not for others. In Mumbai and London, states gift special affordances of land to corporations, even while poor families are displaced, especially those marked by indigenous heritage or other ethnic status. So many are the transactions of this kind that social sciences have classified them as “land grabs” or “the new enclosures,” with reference to earlier mass displacement.6 The intensifying exploitation of the earth has marked several hundred years of modern history, displacing inhabitants on the scale of thousands and then millions of persons. “What greater sorrow than being forced to leave behind my native earth?” asks Euripides’ Electra.7 Alongside the pulse of eviction, however, another rhythm has been beating. The tempo of enclosure was disrupted by several modern revolutions. To varying degrees, each disruption renewed a cultural conviction of the harm wrought by eviction. Another philosophy began to be articulated—the notion that, in the past, the laws governing land upheld not merely rights of ownership, but also rights of occupancy, and that these rights could be reinstated, once again, in the future.

Undoing Displacement In the era of occupancy rights, enormous changes to the policies of nations began to realign the fact of landownership with the needs of inhabitants. After

6  i n t r o d u c t i o n

a half century of struggle against landlord evictions, Irish farmers were rewarded with frozen rents and mortgages for the land their families had rented for generations. British veterans returned from two world wars to see public walking paths and “homes fit for heroes.” An entire generation of construction projects funded by the U.S. Congress after 1933 produced public forests and hiking trails, after 1937 created public housing for people who had previously lived in shacks without running water, and after the GI Bill of 1944 subsidized middle-class mortgages for whites—investments in broadening the quality of life that would come to define the “American Dream.”8 The emergence of occupancy was incipient and incomplete, since no contemporary government named occupancy rights for the Wampanoag or Cherokee of North America, the Khoisan of South Africa, or the Adivasi of India. America’s GI Bill did not extend inclusion, let alone reparations, to the African Americans or Latinos whom land had been first promised to, and then summarily confiscated from, decades earlier. Before the century was over, the descendants of those communities would be evicted from their farmland or townhouse or rental property a second, third, or fourth time, suffering under racialized omissions of justice that any contemporary civil rights attorney today would make haste to address. It was not the shape of justice. But a turn toward occupancy rights was emerging, all the same. Around the world, occupancy rights were being established as part of the era of geopolitical change that followed the Second World War. Landless farmworkers became landowners in postwar Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Affordable housing is a right for every citizen of modern Singapore. Peasants became owners of collective farms and proprietors of family homesteads across Latin America, with nearly 321 million acres (1.3 million square kilometers) of land receiving new owners in a series of transfers that peaked around 1970.9 In regions where land redistribution occurred, inequality between rich and poor was diminished. Rising incomes overall raised the status of both. The modern movements for land redistribution—frequently named in national historical traditions but rarely organized into a historical arc—spelled the reversal of enclosure, a powerful moment for justice in world history. In many parts of the world, working-class people became able to afford a home or a piece of land.10 For a brief time, from so many quarters around the world, the occupiers of the earth breathed a sigh of relief. To fully understand the promise of occupancy, we must acknowledge how remote a vision of land redistribution once seemed; only then can we really appreciate how complex, and powerful, and intransigent were the forces, both

i n t r o d u c t i o n    7

external and internal, that ultimately undermined it. Occupancy rights appeared in urban areas and rural ones alike, propagated through a variety of techniques such as rent strikes, squats, national policies, and international mapping programs. The genealogy of those techniques—and how those techniques altered the idea of property as the right to exclude—is the subject of this book.11

Europe’s Contribution to the Global Law of Land If we desire to look carefully at which ideas changed, however, we must choose a time period for further examination. Many accounts of occupancy rights begin early in the Middle Ages. The earliest gestures against displacement took the form of riots that negotiated freedoms, as in the medieval struggles over rights to the forest that culminated in England with a document called the Charter of the Forest (1217), which protected peasants’ use of the woods for the gathering of fuel and grazing of animals. The charter reinscribed rights contained in another document, the Magna Carta (1215), which in turn formed the basis for the general protections given property and personhood in the Constitution of the United States. In later centuries, modern nations around the world would choose the U.S. Constitution as their model, and with it, the tradition of covenanting to recognize certain rights to property. Despite the existence of documents such as these, rights to forest and field had to be defended again and again. In early modern Europe, peasants clung to a sense of their right to territory, challenging landlords who raised the rent or evicted their neighbors: sometimes marching or rioting, sometimes disguising themselves and kidnapping or jostling the rich with the ceremonial assaults described as “rough music.” Peasants insisted on a right to occupancy through riot, violence, and assassination. Empathetic intellectuals argued against displacement as early as 1516, when the Tudor adviser Thomas More published his famous diatribe against landlords evicting human families to make room for sheep.12 Some scholars credit the undoing of displacement to new theories about the individual and individual property rights that were articulated a century and a half after More. Writing at a time when enclosure had become rampant—and after enclosure, by some accounts, had nearly torn England in two during the Civil War—the philosopher John Locke asserted a new theory that attributed individual labor on land as the basis of property rights, and located property— rather than fealty to the crown—as the basis of modern states. Locke’s ideas

8  i n t r o d u c t i o n

have been viewed as the foundation of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ambitions for America as a nation of independent landowners, and thus some read them as the origin of twentieth-century legislation that secured homes for the American middle class.13 But Locke’s proposition placed no limits on individual acquisitions of property. Locke instead wrote to encourage his contemporaries—the landlords of seventeenth-century England—in their ambition to render the earth profitable, an ambition that Locke and many of his contemporaries deemed to be a mission appointed by God.14 Locke does not, in other words, explain where modern theories of occupancy originated, or how government-backed mortgages, rent controls, or land redistribution programs became so popular on a global scale in the twentieth century. Locke’s historical contribution was, rather, an argument for the superiority of one form of ownership—the ability to exclude—over other traditions of property in English law that recognized a right not to be displaced, or a right to hold land in common. Even in his time, Locke’s ideas were used to nullify native and collective versions of property holding around the world. In the following generations, Locke’s arguments would be used by the English to elevate the interests of a tiny minority of elites, who would instrumentalize Locke’s theory of property in the name of profit, both in England and around the globe.15 Locke’s theory thus offers little by way of an explanation of the later historical moments when broad movements of working men, colonized subjects, women, and indigenous people demanded a system of justice that restored rights that they had lost as Lockean property came to dominate world affairs. Global movements to redistribute land have sometimes been credited to another set of legal precedents associated with the actions of European monarchs in the eighteenth century. In Prussia and Denmark, enlightened monarchs redistributed land to rich peasants with the aim of choking aristocratic power and thereby establishing their own sovereignty. During the French Revolution, aristocrats were not compensated: their land was seized in the name of the state by peasants who kept it, claiming it in return for unlawful abuses of their ancestors. Over the century that followed, similar reforms redistributed land in Sweden and Russia, where new laws made two-thirds of the farmers owners by 1920. Such laws left places such as Britain and Italy exceptional islands of feudalism in a widening sea of equity.16 The European reforms were certainly admired in Britain, where careful philosophers were willing to overturn Lockean dogma and attend to the experi-

i n t r o d u c t i o n    9

ence of nations where small farmers flourished. In The Principles of Political Economy (1857), John Stuart Mill applauded Prussia, where Frederick II had redistributed land from aristocrats to rich peasants, creating a permanent middle class. Mill could easily identify other cases where nations had radically redistributed their land. “Three times during the course of French history, the peasantry have been purchasers of land; and these times immediately preceded the three principal eras of French agricultural prosperity,” Mill wrote.17 Carefully analyzing the way that widely distributed ownership of land protected the citizens of other nations from poverty, Mill paved the way for a broader conversation about the challenges that Britain would face in the generations to come. Through the writing of Mill and others, a wide-ranging conversation about property began to spread across Britain. By the end of the nineteenth century, the need for widespread landownership—at least among white men—was becoming a subject of consensus among many educated elites across Europe and America. When a British census of landowners in 1876 showed that most of England’s land remained in the hands of a tiny elite, many agreed that the situation required a political remedy.18 Some observers, meanwhile, looked enviously to America as a nation where democracy could flourish because broadcast landownership (among whites) created a barrier against privilege. From early settlements forward, colonial land policies encouraged white settlers to claim land through a variety of mechanisms. In the early nineteenth century, working-class white Americans clamored for extended opportunities to own land, arguing that with property came economic security and political independence. In 1862, the first Homestead Act allowed white settlers to claim millions of acres, so long as they could demonstrate their cultivation of the soil. Under the auspices of the act, some 270 million acres (1,092,651 square kilometers) were turned over to 1.6 million homesteaders. Contemporary observers argued that the Homestead Act opened the gates of opportunity to poor immigrants of every class. Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America in 1860, directly linked broadcast landownership with the opportunity to rise, arguing that land distribution created a system with “no true aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor.”19 Tocqueville, of course, ignored the fact that freedoms for poor whites grew from land cleared by the massacre of native peoples, made profitable upon the backs of enslaved people. It was harder to ignore the limits of European property theory in Europe’s colonies, where land had been confiscated through violence. One corollary of Locke’s faith that God had appointed Britons to manage and make profitable

10  i n t r o d u c t i o n

the nations of the earth was that non-Britons would be reduced to laborers on fields owned by others. In many colonies around the world, European laws actually forbade native subjects from owning land. In those places, ideas about redistributing the land and installing a right to occupancy heartened the hearer with an aspiration unmatched in Europe. Such ideas would mean contriving an economy where all had a right of occupancy, and each had the economic opportunity that land implied. Thus it was in Europe’s colonies—not with Locke, Mill, or Tocqueville—that ideas about landownership would come into full flower, for it was there that the prospects of owning or inheriting land—still illegal for many—possessed an even greater significance than they had in Europe.

The Contribution of Europe’s Colonies to the Global Law of Land In 1794, when news of the French Revolution reached France’s colony of Haiti, unrest exploded. Formerly enslaved persons began a bloody, decade-long battle, which ended as they wrested their freedom from tyranny, declaring Haiti’s national independence in 1804. Next, the victors intended to distribute land and to farm it, following the path of republicanism established by France itself. What followed, however, proves the impossible terms that former colonies were up against. After besting French soldiers and winning the land with their blood, the formerly enslaved persons were nevertheless asked to pay remuneration to France. In general, military victors do not pay reparations for land they win. But France demanded that Haiti pay for its land. From the viewpoint of the French, France had an irrefutable claim to the territory of the island, uprising or no uprising. It was white settlers who had cleared a wild landscape, and they therefore owned the land, which could not be claimed by indigenous persons because they had died off in such numbers that their claims were extinct. (The same line of reasoning was being made in the contemporary United States by white settlers.) Thus Haiti had to pay. To add insult to injury, the French claimed that the Haitians should compensate their former slaveholders for their lost chattel. That is, the free nation of Haiti had to pay the price of each member of its republic, according to the price assigned by French slave masters.20 Haiti did pay the reparations. The results of the Haitian settlement were crippling for the island, and they presaged a wretched future for any other

i n t r o d u c t i o n    11

former colony eager to rebel. “Year after year,” writes one historian of the Haitian rebellion, “Haiti’s population watched as money that could have been used to build roads, ports, schools, and hospitals simply vanished.”21 Today, Haitians have made claims to remunerations that would reverse the formerly enslaved peoples’ payments to France for their land and persons. Indeed, indigenous land claims are at the heart of a present-day controversy over Haiti’s long-standing payments to France and demands for compensation.22 Haiti, like other places throughout the greater Caribbean and Pacific, was a site of double exile: enslaved persons were carried by force from Africa to work land blood-soaked by an earlier genocide. Where enslaved persons worked, the land had first been cleared of its indigenous occupants, who had been decimated by smallpox and enslaved by the Spanish. The land was transferred from one population to another, in a process of violent encounters backed up by judicial rulings and paper transfers now dubbed by anthropologists “settler colonialism.”23 In a world where indigenous land rights are increasingly recognized and the history of intermarriage between enslaved Africans and indigenous people is well understood, few lawyers would back France’s claim to land. To decode why indigenous or post-colonial claims seem so fair today—and why, by contrast, they seemed impossible to ratify in 1804—we need to review the violent history of European empire and understand some of the ways in which it was being challenged in the nineteenth century. The Haitian story demonstrates a problem with narratives that describe occupancy rights as a product of the English Civil War or the French Revolution. The stakes around property were higher in general in the colonies than in Europe. Settler colonial landscapes like Haiti—where indigenous people survived in scant numbers, having been enslaved or murdered—were historically the most impervious to claims about land justice. In Canada, Australia, and the United States, few cases effectively defended native rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.24 In settler colonial colonies, no Magna Carta stayed the hand of the colonizer; no rights whatsoever protected the inhabitants of the earth. Even when former slaves paid the price of blood for their freedom, European law recognized no possible claim to land. It was in a different set of colonies—where no claims could be made about the “extinction” of indigenous property by genocide—that occupancy rights were finally brokered on behalf of colonized peoples. In Ireland, India, and Mexico, native peoples still worked the land in enormous numbers, despite laws penalizing tenant labor and, in the case of Ireland, prohibiting Catholics

12  i n t r o d u c t i o n

from owning land. In colonies farmed by large numbers of indigenous peoples, systems of colonial farming depended, first, on rent and taxation: the rent going to furnish European mansions, the taxes going to build roads, railways, and canals to connect the new plantations, ferrying the cotton, jute, tea, and wheat extracted from the land to ports and markets around the world. Ireland, India, and Mexico were not, primarily, settler colonial landscapes. They were colonies where the land had been surveyed and put up for sale even while it was being tilled by the original inhabitants, now reduced to tenants stripped of their traditional rights. It was in such environments that arguments for occupancy would become fiercest. In what I shall call indigenous labor colonies, the historical claims of native inhabitants to the land were evident: the descendants of the land’s original stewards were still present everywhere, tilling the soil claimed by the colonizers. It was therefore in the context of indigenous labor colonies that arguments about occupancy first appeared.25 The situation in those colonies was miserable, and the contemporary economy of land provides one of the major reasons why. By design, European taxes and rents in indigenous labor colonies only went up, never down, even when the rain failed or the flood destroyed the harvest. The unflinching tempo of rent by which imperial agents tried to collect their revenue departed from merciful traditions of forgiving rent in such circumstances, once embraced, for instance, by native rulers in India. It was inevitable, and perhaps part of the design, that peasants in both Ireland and India would struggle to pay in years of plague and famine; and what followed was debt, which would lead to eviction, and often starvation.26 Claims for a new version of property rights—a right of occupancy—began to appear in the context of nineteenth-century reactions to famine and mass suffering. A discourse of occupancy rights—the right of the land worker not to be evicted—arose in the context of the starvation of millions, as the imagination of an alternative to a system that seemed impossible to counteract except through recourse to an attack on empire’s very history and its definition of property. Facing the accumulation of injustice, conscientious individuals in the colonies began to write. Furious words, cataloguing abuse, expanded into a critique of empire and the systems of landholding that underpinned it. Incisive tracts traveled from colony to colony and capital to capital across oceans and continents, sometimes accusing empire of the theft of land, sometimes provoking movements to claim constitutions, congresses, and national independence, throwing off empire’s yoke for good.

i n t r o d u c t i o n    13

Boldly, dissenting writers claimed anew the ownership of the earth still occupied by native subjects. In India and Ireland, journalists, jurists, organizers, and politicians began to prepare alternative policies in which a central recommendation was the redistribution of land. Journalists argued that the evils of empire were so great that violence would continue until grievances were addressed through reparations. Occupancy rights alone, they argued, would provide security against debt, poverty, and starvation. In Ireland, India, and Scotland, popular movements and politicians called for new laws governing property and rent, demanding reparations in land to correct the legacy of colonial inequality.27 “Occupancy,” not “property,” offers the uniting thread running through the movements that followed, even though that term itself was rarely used. The evolving language of land redistribution since 1880 instead underscored a set of values that I have tried to understand through careful readings of intellectual and social movements of the time. Land, argued peasants in Ireland and India, should belong to the “tiller of the soil”; returning servicemen needed “homes,” argued squatters in London. The point was clear: those who lived in a place should possess a right to stay there. Claiming a right of occupancy in a world marked by faith in property was no simple matter. Only when those voices mounted to a steady scream and joined into a global pitch did more than a handful of administrators pause. The official reaction in Britain was to silence those voices: censoring the press, outlawing public meetings, those charged with empire brutally punished rebels through torture and imprisonment. To handle starvation and dissent, British leaders set up concentration camps across India and prisons across Ireland.28 From 1879 to 1886 in Ireland, a prolonged struggle against England took the form of a period of simultaneous vigilante violence and parliamentary campaigning that contemporary radicals described as a “Land War.” The epithet “land war” further brought home the import of decades of pamphlet writing about reparations in land: the Irish dispute was about more than resentment or empire; it was a concerted and focused struggle by which the colonized tenants of Ireland demanded title to the land they had worked for centuries.29 The Irish Land War would be fought in marches, rent strikes, boycotts, arson, and even assassinations. Rechristening such diverse and guerrilla actions a “land war” elevated peasant struggles to the status of a border dispute between standing armies. The very language of land warfare made a focused political and historical argument, branding peasant marches as merely the latest episode in a long-term standoff between colonizer and colonized. Identify-

14  i n t r o d u c t i o n

ing individual battles as part of a longer “war” also conveyed a threat: Irish resistance toward empire would not dissipate merely because imperial interests censored the press or temporarily restrained Irish freedom to gather in public places. As the Irish speakers in Parliament explained, Irish violence would stop only when the land was returned to the people.30 Here was a new contention that empires around the world would ignore to their peril. Where the matter of a “land war” was land, the only way to halt hostilities was by redistribution. Conflict could be suppressed or postponed, but land wars over occupation could never really be ended by anything other than occupancy. Ireland’s Land War would bring an empire to its knees. Buckling in response to Irish resistance, Britain’s Parliament passed a series of laws protecting the right of occupancy in Ireland: one enacted protections for tenants as to the cost of their investments (1870), another created rent control (1881), and other measures entitled tenants to buy their right to land from landlords (1881, 1886, 1903). In 1881–86, Britain oversaw the creation of a system of “land courts” designed to install rent control in Ireland. It was the first rent control in the world, and it had the explicit intent of ratcheting back the price of rent after thirty years of appreciation.31 In Ireland, the struggle for occupancy produced new laws. The reforms would transform Ireland from a colony of oppressed tenants to a nation of landowners. Tenants who so wished could remain on their land, freed from the threat of eviction, paying reasonable rents mandated by an official court. They would gain the right to purchase mortgages on land they had previously rented. Landlords would be compensated at market rates for their losses in land. Most landlords, whatever their complaints, eventually took their compensation and departed for new frontiers—for instance, to California, where they could invest in land anew. Ireland, victorious, became a colony populated by smallholders, and finally an independent nation. It was a success, although it took decades to effect, and the economics of the undertaking remained questionable.32 The techniques the Irish used to secure their land were rapidly copied by individuals in other places. Irish tactics soon appeared in India, England, and Egypt, just as Mexican tactics appeared across Latin America. One pattern of resistance begot another, and an evolutionary cascade of techniques for asserting rights of occupancy followed. In a world connected by telegraph and newspaper, wires transported images of Indian and Irish resistance, until the phrase “Land to the Tiller” echoed across oceans, as stories were quoted and recited in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, in China, India, and the United States.33

i n t r o d u c t i o n    15

Irish rent strikes were reported in Indian newspapers and intentionally copied by Indian organizers, the technique refined over generations, until it reappeared in 1951 as part of a national spiritual pilgrimage dedicated to giving land to the landless. Irish-style land reform represented an aristocrat’s truce with an anti-colonial rebellion: it granted a major concession—final owner proprietorship—to formerly colonized people, even while satisfying the aristocrat’s grudge in terms of repayment. Irish reform—coordinated, legalized, typified by compensation— seemed to plot a course that no one could disagree with. Some places would secure legislation resembling Ireland’s. In other places, such as India and Scotland, only partial measures were put into effect. In 1885, legislation resembling that of Ireland was passed for Bengal in the colonial government’s Tenancy Act, although meaningful action there had to wait for independence—or later. In 1910 in Mexico, the fury of peasants who had been cheated out of their land exploded into a revolution that created a redistribution for workers that honored indigenous land claims as well.34 European intellectuals at the League of Nations embraced occupancy as part of their civilizing mission to the world, albeit in a sometimes adulterated form and with mixed results. Early twentieth-century “land reform” policies in Kenya and Tanganyika were actually a form of settler colonialism, whereby white farmers, protected by the state, displaced indigenous populations. Other enactments sought to solve a wide variety of perceived problems through settlement policies. In the case of Israel, advocates of resettlement in Palestine suggested that the Jewish people would merely be reclaiming their ancient land rights.35 In a general sense, the rationale for Jewish settlement thus ran in parallel to the arguments about the need for land reparations for colonial Ireland to amend the situation of the Irish. Yet settlement logic carried with it a bitter irony that later generations would reject. In settlement land redistributions such as these, reparations for one community required the deracination of another. In the years after the Second World War, however, thinking about the role of international government in enforcing occupancy rights would change dramatically. Land redistribution became a theory about poverty, taught in economics programs and sociology courses around the world. By the 1930s, American development experts could actively look to the recent agrarian reforms of Mexico as a successful story and model for land redistribution across the American South.36 British agrarian theory, precedents, and social history helped to make the revolution comprehensible to American social scientists.

16  i n t r o d u c t i o n

Land redistribution was also embraced as a tool for fighting communism. During the 1940s, America presided over land redistribution programs in Japan and Korea in which the government compensated landlords. In Amer­ ican textbooks of the 1950s and ’60s, these transactions appear as “willing buyer, willing seller” land reform, suitable for American-sponsored development, a sound alternative to violent revolution—as well as an invaluable weapon against communism.37 Meanwhile, the policies that first appeared in Ireland were being promoted elsewhere by policy makers, lawyers, and social scientists. Across the Irish Sea, English socialists—the Fabians—preached land reform as an object lesson in the need for an expanded state to protect working people from the depredations of landlords. Fabian tracts on rent popularized Irish ideas for a working audience. Across Scotland and England, people were joining in the clamor for a right of occupancy. Meanwhile, ideas about rent control spread as well: to the northern cities of England, to London, to Australia, to parts of Africa, to New York, and finally to Singapore, where the government continues to set housing prices to this day. Rent control and tenancy reforms are hard to generalize about, in part because there are so many policy variations.38 The first round of rent controls, however, presented the urban face of nineteenth-century claims about the right of occupancy. As European and American social scientists joined an international conversation about economic “development”—the idea of creating a common path to prosperity that all nations could follow—some of those writers placed distributed landownership at the center of this mandate.39 Some came to be directly influenced by the writings of anticolonial intellectuals in India, Ireland, and other places, where social scientists, journalists, and mystics had already established landownership as a crucial point in any undertaking designed to remedy the situation of the four-fifths of the earth’s population that lived and worked in the countryside. Soon after the end of the World War II, social scientists both from the West and from the decolonizing world began to convene in Rome, where a new institution had been established in association with the United Nations—the Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO. The FAO followed directives from the newly independent former colonies of empire, many of which embraced land redistribution and similar programs to support small farmers. Following the directives of Indian economists, among others, the FAO housed social scientists who laid plans for disseminating seeds, soil maps, peasant-owned co-

i n t r o d u c t i o n    17

operatives, calculators, pamphlets, and bibliographies around the globe: a system of information designed to fight poverty.40 A global fight to enforce the concept of occupancy rights—that is, the idea that states and international institutions have an obligation to protect the inhabitants of a place, even if they are not landowners—helped slow the tempo of displacement for roughly a century. Sometimes, the Irish model predominated. In the United States, Australia, and across Europe, government-backed mortgages and rent control programs created a world affordable to the middle class. Elsewhere—for instance, in India, much of Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa—similar land redistribution schemes were embraced as part of the mandate of new nations struggling to establish post-colonial economies different from the ones left by European empires after their departure. The post-­ colonial revolution of the late twentieth century had vast consequences for the law of land.

The Varieties of Land Redistribution and What They Accomplished Focused on occupancy rather than productivity, nations like India came to expand England’s celebrated definition of property as the individual’s right to exclude. In place of a culture of eviction, they proposed an ideology of occupancy. Across the former colonies of Europe, ideas and patterns of resistance spread. In India, Turkey, Tanzania, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela, the rural poor gained the right to vote, and programs for land redistribution soon followed. In many post-colonial nations, it was Ireland that set the pattern for later redistributions, which included compensation for landowners, typically using government bonds whose worth depended on the flourishing of the nation as a whole. Land redistribution with compensation offered the best of all worlds— land for landless peasants and payouts for landowners, thus preserving traditional rights of ownership alongside the new right of occupancy. Elsewhere, however, unbearable desperation encouraged peasants to seize land without compensation, overturning the concept of private property altogether. In communist nations, including the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, revolution created an unprecedented turnover of land marked by the abolition of private property. This book treats the communist land reforms only lightly,

Table 1. Land Redistributions up to 2000 Nation Ireland Mexico Russia Japan Taiwan India China South Korea Egypt Bolivia Philippines Chile Peru Nicaragua Zimbabwe El Salvador Brazil

Dates

Area

Beneficiaries

1885–1921 1910–70 1917–38 1946–50 1946–75 1946–80 1947–57 1945–70 1952–80 1952–2000 1940–85 1960–73 1969–92 1979–90 1980–2000 1980–2000 1988–2000

47,000 km2 594,137 km2 4,219,000 km2 20,000 km2 2,350 km2 91,460 km2 467,000 km2 5,770 km2 3,900 km2 97,920 km2 10,920 km2 95,170 km2 85,990 km2 31,860 km2 23,710 km2 4,010 km2 131,000 km2

316,000 2,525,851 45,000,000 4,300,000 383,000 19,900,000 300,000,000 1,646,000 438,000 237,000 1,511,000 58,000 375,000 172,000 40,000 95,000 266,000

Sources: Information about area distributed is mainly from Klaus Deininger, Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2003), 144. Area redistributed and beneficiary counts for Ireland come from Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London: Profile, 2004), 62–63, 159, 315. These numbers may be underestimates; higher figures for certain redistributions appear in Ruth Dudley Edwards and Bridget Hourican, An Atlas of Irish History (London: Routledge, 2004), 166. Area redistributed and beneficiary counts for Mexico come from James W. Wilkie, Measuring Land Reform (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1974), 3, and the number of beneficiaries is given as a number of “families.” Deininger gives much smaller numbers: 133,750 km2 and 3,044,000 households as beneficiaries. For the Russian Revolution, I count the family reforms alone. If the total area collectivized under Stalin to 1938 is used instead, the numbers become higher. For area, Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power (New York: Norton, 1966), 36–37, 176. For beneficiary counts, see Mary E. A. Buckley, Mobilizing Soviet Peasants (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 30, 32n22. Area redistributed and beneficiary counts for India come from adding together the sums from several sources for India’s land ceilings, tenant licensing, and voluntary land reforms, and they are likely underestimated. For voluntary land reform, Parag Cholkar, “Revisiting Bhoodan and Gramdan in the Context of Land Rights and Social Transformation,” in Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly, ed., Land Rights in India (London: Routledge, 2016), 231. For

i n t r o d u c t i o n    19

for these nations’ experiences are beyond the scope of Britain’s former empire. Even so, the communist redistributions left a memorable mark. Some observers embraced the pessimistic idea that land redistributions of any form might render property rights null and void—potentially ushering in an era of political and economic instability. Assessing the success or failure of any single nation with regard to land redistribution is no easy matter, as the interpretation of accomplishment itself is heavily influenced by the political bias of the observer. Consider, for instance, the land redistribution schemes of postwar India—which are frequently referred to in twenty-first-century accounts as failures, both because plans for centralized land redistribution in India after 1947 were never fulfilled, and because India’s tribal and untouchable populations remain in grave danger of eviction and displacement to this day. Despite the consensus of general failure, India nevertheless created more beneficiaries through its partial redistributions than any non-communist regime in the twentieth century (table 1).41 How shall we generalize about the cascade of redistributions that followed when even partial successes are most poignantly remembered in terms of what they failed to accomplish? Because of the voluminous work done by political scientists and economists on the conditions of poverty over the past three decades, it is possible to summarize the results of twentieth-century land redistribution, even though such simplifications necessarily miss much of the nuance of national cases. We have a great deal of research, for instance, about the kinds of conditions that prompt effective land reforms. Retrospective studies have suggested that land reforms could only grow out of “extraordinary” conditions, including violent post-colonial clashes (in Ireland, Mexico, and Russia), nonviolent peasant organization (in some parts of China, Kerala, and Brazil), or the establishment ceilings, see Hari K. Nagarajan, Songqing Jin, and Klaus Deininger, Land Reforms, Poverty Reduction, and Economic Growth: Evidence from India (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2007), 5. For tenant reforms, see Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize, Camille Bourguignon, and Rogerius Johannes Eugenius van den Brink, Agricultural Land Redistribution: Toward Greater Consensus (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2009), 245. Area redistributed and beneficiary counts for China come from sums for the family farm reforms documented in Roy Prosterman, Tim Hanstad, and Ping Li, “Land-Scale Farming in China: An Appropriate Policy,” RDI Reports on Foreign Aid and Development, no. 90 (1996), to which I have added an approximation of the land added under collectivization from Peter Tang, Communist China Today (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1957), 304.

20  i n t r o d u c t i o n

of dictatorships (as in the case of many Latin American reforms). While some social scientists emphasize the way that dictators have used land redistribution to solidify their political power, broader overviews of history suggest that authoritarianism is only one face of occupancy movements. Taken as a broad set of phenomena, what all such movements have in common is the expression of the grievances of the dispossessed—typically a reaction to grinding poverty, where lack of access to water, housing, or the means of farming provokes poor people to action.42 The post–World War II period features—in the form of national and international movements concerning land redistribution—some of the best examined development strategies for fighting impoverishment. In general, evidence from political science and economics suggests that land redistribution reverses poverty at a local and national scale. A report in 2007 argued that land redistribution was one of the few tools known to redeem the condition of the absolute poor: “Two-thirds of the world’s poor are constituted by the rural poor. . . . Effective control over productive resources, especially land, by the rural poor is crucial to their capacity to construct a rural livelihood and overcome poverty.”43 A survey of twenty-nine countries finds that where land redistribution is linked with other policies designed to connect small farmers and boost their productivity, dramatic poverty reduction was ensured for both rural and urban populations. More recently, ethnographies of urban displacement have underscored that eviction compounds other forces such as race or lack of education, dramatically setting back individuals in their struggles for employment or family stability.44 For all such reasons, tools that guard occupancy rights remain an important part of the policy tool kit. The history of debates about whether small farms can support a growing economy is one in which voices from the developed world are often neglected— a problem I seek to repair. Contemporary comparative studies nevertheless proliferate and should provide certainty about the past. Yet researchers have addressed production in a myriad of ways. Is farm productivity best measured in terms of revenue, in bushels per acre, or in revenue or bushels per laborer? Some researchers think such measures of productivity as these are altogether wrong. They ask instead what happens when we measure food productivity in terms of “food security”—the community’s security against famine. Studies that profile the diverse rewards of small-scale farming have linked intensive farming of small plots to both food security and ecological benefits.45 Even the measure of raw production has been hotly debated, however. There

i n t r o d u c t i o n    21

is little evidence that larger farms produce more crops by raw measures. In fact, one study of farms across Brazil found that small farms were 1.5 to 5.6 times more productive per acre than large ones. One comparative report ­presented a large volume of evidence that “a farm structure based on owner-­ operated units is more efficient than one based on wage labor.”46 The principal advantage of large-scale farms seems to be their relative invulnerability to fluctuations in weather, which can severely set back small farmers.47 Many political theorists of the postwar era asserted that land reform would lead to desirable ends; conversely, advocates of free markets sometimes claim that land redistribution without strong property rights engenders failed states. More recently, land inequality has been linked to the reduced ability of states to provision public goods, suggesting that nations with land redistribution programs find it easier to summon political will behind other state programs as well. One magisterial survey points to the success of midcentury land reforms in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, where total land redistributions, imposed on the nations’ elite after war, resulted in programs of stabilization. The outcomes have been less hopeful in the cases of Latin American nations: in several ineffective regimes, elites divested of land in one generation seized control of the government in another, prompting unending cycles of warfare. Such studies highlight a hazard of international comparisons: land redistribution has been an attribute of violence and authoritarianism. Some authors believe that violence in the context of land redistribution is understood best as a symptom of underlying grievances that could be solved through earlier democratic land redistributions.48 Studies of this kind suggest that land redistribution can produce democratic states only where measures are sufficiently robust to diminish the political power of local elites over poorer populations. Successful land policies therefore typically include strong measures for supporting rural families, creating courts, and ensuring democratic mechanisms for contesting the law. As one scholar has argued, the broadcast peasants’ and indigenous peoples’ movements of today come from groups whose claims to property were overlooked in the postwar era. Many of those populations—for instance, India’s tribal peoples—were excluded from traditional land redistribution programs because their claims were bound up with customary law, the lineaments of which became more familiar to researchers after the prodigious efforts of political scientist Elinor Ostrom.49 A growing level of familiarity with indigenous and commons-based tenure systems today makes land reform increasingly plau-

22  i n t r o d u c t i o n

sible as a policy solution in an international framework: a lever to reverse inequality and poverty, to promote growth, and sometimes to ensure political stability and democracy, if applied in such a way as to limit the power of elites. The stories of this book engage contemporary debates about productivity, farm size, technology, democracy, and poverty, but the book as a whole concentrates on neither property rights nor political stability. Instead, it asks what can be said about the long trail of displaced persons and bureaucrats who worked toward an end to a culture of displacement. It aims at a social as well as an intellectual history of movements, both elite and common, that contemplated the tools for securing freedom from displacement. Undeniably, the land redistribution movements covered in this book had enormous success in recognizing the possibility of economic systems that devolve rewards and protections onto the many. By the middle of the twentieth century, many people around the world recognized the fact that European theft of land had left the formerly colonized nations in a state of economic incapacity. Many believed that the only possible repair for injustice at a planetary scale was worldwide reparations in land so that every peasant had a right to shelter and the means, through a small plot of land, to ensure subsistence. By engaging ideas from the Global South, FAO officers helped to forge international policies that were aligned with peasant movements in Europe’s former colonies. Social scientists outlined plans for programs of infrastructure and cooperatives that had been proven to make small peasant farms as lucrative as larger conglomerates. Programs of this kind illustrate a rare moment when international governance was in accord with the rights of the planet’s poor.

The Challenge of Writing a Global History of Twentieth-Century Property Modern world systems that came into being in the twentieth century largely defy attempts to be characterized through individual personalities or through the fascinating dynamics of nation-states. The narrative of this book coasts the decaying British Empire, spending little time in the canonical sites of the twentieth century—Moscow, New York, and Shanghai—or in examining notable personalities like those of Stalin, Hitler, and Truman. British Empire is only one possible route into a world increasingly defined by transnational migration and transoceanic communications, but stories set around Britain’s disintegrating empire have the advantage of potentially bridging hemispheres, including former settler colonies like North America as well as sites of coloni-

i n t r o d u c t i o n    23

zation through taxation like India, and linking nineteenth-century empire with the history of international governance, in which British leadership played so major a role. Following the idea of occupancy from place to place, my story necessarily cuts across categories that typically structure analyses of this kind. Mainly following exchanges in the United States, Britain, and India—three nations that shared a common past—the narrative promiscuously crosses regional boundaries, moving from Ireland to Britain to India, and later to the United Nations and United States, before catching up again with Britain and India. Urban and rural accounts appear side by side because rural laborers and impoverished workers in the city both turned to rent strikes and squatting in the postwar world. Individual property rights appear beside indigenous landholding and communal landholding practices as variations on a spectrum whose lineaments were better understood as the century wore on. Developed world and developing world narratives similarly appear side by side for two reasons— because tactics used in Ireland and India influenced activism and policy in Britain and the United States, and because issues of equity for indigenous people, ethnic citizens, and the working class remain at the fore of politics today even in wealthy nations. To sketch the shape of a world where land issues were truly dynamic, thoroughly global, and ever evolving, case studies from Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Tanzania, China, and Indonesia supply a portrait of the diversity of violent and nonviolent struggles over land and the reactions they inspired in Rome, Mumbai, New York, and London. To sketch the global reach of the conversation, I make further mention, if only in passing, of movements and projects in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Ethiopia, Nairobi, South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Thailand, Nepal, South Korea, and Japan. In my concentration on Britain, the United States, and India, however, much of the detail of politics in those places has necessarily been left out. The major shortcoming of such a strategy, of course, is that the vast diversity of possible sites threatens to overwhelm the narrative. The remedy for this, perhaps, is an organizing question or series of questions. The narrative that follows tracks a typology of governance in the twentieth century: from state-led land redistributions to market-based retitling schemes to the eventual creation of techniques of participatory organization. The order is chronological, but succession should not be taken as an index of progress. Instead, I make an endeavor to treat each innovation fairly, examining the rec­ord of each movement’s origins, ambitions, and limits. State-led redistributions often involved coercion—for instance, in the seizure of property from

24  i n t r o d u c t i o n

landlords in Mexico, Russia, and China. Market-based land reforms, such as those in Guatemala and Thailand, aimed to avoid coercion, but Guatemala’s was accomplished by a violent coup that undermined democratic government, while experiments in Thailand touched off a spiral of developing world debt. Meanwhile, nonviolent and voluntary programs, like the land donation program that Vinoba Bhave promoted after 1951 in India, accomplished much but were limited in scope. Examining extremely different approaches side by side allows us to acknowledge the contradictions of the successive ideologies that shaped the governance of land in the twentieth century. In the narrative that follows, there is an explicit question—how the history of occupancy fared in different regimes of governance—as well as an implicit question about technology, technique, and the life of information. To organize so wide a survey as this, I have used the history of technology to guide my collection of moments when land redistribution defined the success of its enterprise in technical terms: maps, hoes, and statistics. I broaden my examination of the life of information to include manifold forms of social organization and communication, an approach that I call the history of “technique.” The techniques of the book thus include not only actual surveys of peasant plots, but accounting practices employed at the World Bank, as well as the organizational strategies of rent-striking peasants and squatters, which were passed from community to community as individuals began to assert property rights from below. Finally, I carefully follow the information infrastructures built to mobilize the transmission of maps, statistics, and participatory mapping, watching how modern information shifted the possible scale of land redistribution. Such a genealogy of technology, technique, and infrastructure allows me to generalize across national borders by following a selection of prominent patterns that structured resistance, information, and governance. Aligning categories in this way breaks with the form of analysis typical of contemporary political science, instead raising questions about what made the modern right of occupancy possible, how ideas and tactics spread, and why.

A World Government of Land and Its Transformation What follows is a tour through the rise and fall of occupancy rights that tracks conversations across the former British Empire. At the edges of empire in the 1880s, Irish and Indian revolts set a new model for legislation and launched a series of questions about state, market, and society. Those ideas deeply influenced several prominent British social scientists, whose ideas about

i n t r o d u c t i o n    25

development diverged from American models in important ways. The ultimate collapse of consensus around land politics, both in Britain and the world, took increasing prominence after Friedrich von Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, reflecting the spread of a new ideology of the market and critique of state planning, frequently associated with the United States. A revolution began in Britain’s colonies and moved to the United Nations. After chafing under British rule for centuries, colonized peasants in India and Ireland rebelled against the British Empire, setting the scene for a serious conversation about the role of land in reversing historical exclusions. After decades of struggle, British parliamentarians surrendered to liberal and radical voices that located a permanent solution in broadcast landownership in Ireland by the Irish. The recipe for a peaceful program of land redistribution was forged. British reformers instituted new systems of courts and policies that questioned eviction and affirmed the right of occupancy. They passed legislation that carved small-scale farms out of the plantations of empire, compensating landlords for their losses through the creation of state-backed mortgages. Eventually, British and Irish politicians would oversee the construction of peasant cooperatives to support Ireland’s small farmers. The Irish formula would have a long tail in the twentieth century, when it would provide a multiplicity of observers with answers about how to approach rural poverty throughout the former colonies of the world. In the years after the Second World War, most impoverished people worldwide were agricultural workers on colonial land, or in recently decolonized nations, in places where the legacy of empire was the ownership of most land—and capital—by a tiny elite. In 1950, 82 percent of the so-called third world lived in the countryside, and the predominantly agricultural economies of new nations were generally farmed by peasants who owned nothing themselves. By the time of Indian independence in 1947, land redistribution was front and center for many colonial leaders who anticipated throwing off the yoke of empire. Economists in India published new theories and overviews of a plan of action, tailored from Indian experience and Indian intellectual traditions. The teachings of Indian economists and geographers would shape policies at the FAO—the organ of international governance entrusted with supporting the economies of developing world nations. In 1952, Egypt passed a law that began the process of land redistribution. By 1955, many Egyptian intellectuals had begun looking to the British experience

26  i n t r o d u c t i o n

to guide their own land reform. The National Bank of Egypt invited Doreen Warriner, a development economist and one of midcentury Britain’s leading intellectual lights, to give a series of lectures. She began with the “historical” and continued through the “economic,” “demographic,” and “political” facets of land reform, so that her theories about appropriate ways to govern Egypt were grounded in a review of recent events in Mexico and Eastern Europe. “Land reform is the most important social change now taking place in the world,” she explained to an audience in Cairo.50 As peasants across Latin America, Asia, and Africa demanded the redistribution of their land, FAO social scientists recognized an opportunity to lend support. Much of their strategy consisted of ideas about the broader distribution of technology and information. They proposed that the FAO operate in the service of the developing world, implementing strategies that built upon the work of international social scientists. Much of their writing directly highlighted and identified with the anticolonial aims of new nations, underscoring the importance of challenging traditional elites and redistributing their holdings in land. FAO bureaucrats aimed to become the allies of civil servants, government experts, and popular leaders who agitated on behalf of peasant and popular rebellions against oppression. Many of them drew directly on intellectual traditions from around the developing world, promoting plans for land redistribution, peasant cooperatives, and small-scale technology that, they believed, would forge a new kind of capitalism capable of challenging the rigid forms of hierarchy that came to dominate much of the world under European empire. As European empires in Asia, the Americas, and Africa began to dissolve, many people hoped to see broadcast ownership mandated around the world. Social scientists in both developing countries and the West began to theorize the conditions that would make such a future possible. At the FAO’s headquarters in Rome, propositions for post-colonial flourishing were drawn together into an ambitious set of policies and programs of support. Some of the most important ideas that marked the “Rome Consensus” revolved around the role of technology in the post-colonial world. Small farmers, given tiny plots of land, could grow rich, theorized the social scientists, by intensively working the soil with the right tools and seeds and support from local cooperatives. Some believed that small farmers, thus supported, could become entrepreneurs and industrialists if they were encouraged to manufacture tools of their own. Many analysts believed that the right combination of technology and infrastructure would empower poor people’s

i n t r o d u c t i o n    27

movements around the world by enabling them to make the land productive and thereby securing their rights to it. Only a few years after meeting with Indian economists to discuss their ideas, administrators at the FAO boldly proclaimed that they would construct an ambitious initiative explicitly designed to support India’s widely anticipated land redistribution program—as well as similar programs that might be required of other new nations. The FAO would become the distributor of smallscale technology, which would profoundly transform peasant plots of land— not only making it productive, but allowing every farm laborer, potentially, to become an entrepreneur. The FAO would map the world’s soils and thus support Indian planners (and others) in rationalizing the distribution of land, which would give all future farmers a fair chance to make their plot productive. The FAO would aggregate the best of research on irrigation, seeds, prices, and cooperatives, thus providing a monster advising scheme that would equip the economists of every new nation with the best advice that science could offer. The FAO program was also designed to permanently abolish the accumulation of debt in the developing world—a feature of colonial experience in most nations that had represented a permanent brake on development. Armed with this gleaming vision, social scientists at the FAO set about creating a system designed to promote that technology: a massive network for distributing small-scale interventions in labor and economics with the potential to reconfigure poverty around the world.

Why Land Redistribution Schemes Disappeared Despite this illustrious beginning, the history of global landownership in the twentieth century is marked by a paradox: global land redistribution, in 1945, was at a crescendo, destined to transform the rights of persons around the world. But the wave of redistributions seems not to have lasted. To what do we attribute this apparent swell and ebb of the tide of occupancy rights? Some economists have theorized the collapse of land redistribution in certain postwar nations as a reflection of the unchanging laws of property, which all societies must revere; some historians have characterized this moment as part and parcel of the aggressive imperialism of postwar America, whose policy makers were enchanted with the mythology of the yeoman farmer.51 Such theories do have some explanatory power, yet they do little to account for the experience of peasants and squatters and the political interventions that they staged, in enormous numbers, in the decades after the Second World War, or

28  i n t r o d u c t i o n

for the intellectual genealogy of ideas about land redistribution that issued from Bengali economists or indigenous activists in Peru. Too much focus on American ideas about property leaves less room for the global pattern of debate over occupancy rights and their effective instantiation, a debate that retains a central place in the history of most of the world’s nations. The apparent crescendo of land redistribution and then its sudden collapse thus remains a mystery. Yet the puzzle can be largely explained by reinserting, in our history, the role of the FAO itself, as a hub of international exchanges around the economy of land. In the conversations of the Rome Consensus, solving the problem of occupancy rights for developing world farmers was viewed as the fundamental issue on which hung the prospects for global political stability and economic flourishing. Looking at the biography of the FAO and its officers can provide answers about why the United Nations’ plans for a global redistribution of land to small farmers seem to have collapsed. Some of the failures are attached to the limitations of the United Nations itself, which was, from the beginning, designed for international governance but invested with only so much binding authority over the great powers. Other problems, however, were internal to the FAO. Its increasing focus on producing paper bibliographies, seed catalogues, and maps was perhaps overly ambitious in scope, and at the same time hopelessly general in comparison to what most farmers needed: workable land and the implements to farm it. The first explanation for the decline of the Rome Consensus and the failure of the FAO to institute a global government of land relates to the work of paper. Sweeping faith in small-scale technology gradually metamorphosed into a new creed: the promise that information itself, widely circulated, could cure poverty for good. “Cartophilia,” or the love of information (and maps in particular), characterized work at the FAO in its defense of global peasants in the phase after 1951 when the institute invested its resources in the lightest of appropriate technologies: the paper bibliographies, maps, and reports that many social scientists and administrators trusted to reassess and improve the economics of the developing world. The land revolutions of the twentieth century came to depend on a world of technical reports, annual reports, learned journals, and bibliographies covering every variety of policy making, land law, and agricultural practice, much of it manufactured by the FAO. In theory, this voluminous production of research would provide a knowledge infrastructure capable of lifting peasants around the world out of poverty. The consequences of politics in the United States—a nation increasingly

i n t r o d u c t i o n    29

dominant on the world stage—are inescapably part of the story of why land redistribution seems to have disappeared. The plans for land redistribution laid by democratically elected governments in Indonesia and Guatemala would be derailed by coups motivated by American ideology and U.S. corporate interests. In America, a foreign policy network was increasingly marked by anti-­ communist purges that would touch several of the major thinkers and institutions of this story. American influence precipitated factionalism elsewhere. In India and Latin America, state-led land redistributions crumpled, undermined by competing factions of elites.52 The FAO’s social scientists were doomed to play a smaller and smaller role in international development in the decades to come. In the climate of disillusionment and skepticism that accompanied U.S. activities in Vietnam and Guatemala after 1954, many intellectuals began to seriously mistrust policies whose roots lay in peasant movements, looking instead to quantification, to the science of population, or to improved seeds as a means of intervention. Many individuals would look to markets, rather than states, as an avenue for implementing social policy. The era saw a massive counterreaction against modern bureaucracy that grew out of a broader conservative movement against the state. Neoliberals attacked the “red tape” of modern government. They argued that market exchanges represented a more rational approach to modeling human society, as distinct from the oppressive and irrational management of the state. A new era was marked by government from the “private” sphere, characterized by the expanding presence of NGOs in every initiative connected to development and poverty.53 As prominent voices in the United States began to target the spread of communism worldwide, many began to attack land redistribution as a form of communism in disguise. With the withdrawal of U.S. support, the brave visions that had emerged at the FAO began to founder.54 Astonishingly, the FAO’s powers to shape world events would become minuscule beside those assumed by the World Bank. In 1974—the same year Hayek received his Nobel Prize— the U.S.-led World Bank issued a new report, Bank Policy on Land Reform, which condemned the land-to-the-tiller redistribution programs that the FAO had done so much to support. The bank announced a moratorium on further development funding that subsidized land turnover.55 In its place, the World Bank promoted land programs engineered to work with the market, rather than the state, wherein the government’s role was limited to the official description of ownership in places where the title was obscure. It is also possible to link the history of anti-communism in the United States

30  i n t r o d u c t i o n

and the final withdrawal of U.S. support for land redistribution initiatives at the FAO to the historic shape of American racism. Even while American intellectuals were shouting down land redistribution, African American, indigenous, and Latino populations had made calls for redistribution in North America, some of which were recognized and lauded by an international audience. This book therefore asks to what degree the failure of a project for global land redistribution reflects the incomplete work of anti-racism in the United States. The timing of the conversation is damning, if circumstantial, for it was only from the moment when vulnerable populations in the United States began to make their case for redistribution that America began to retreat from international conversations about occupancy. One further reason for the apparent collapse of land redistribution strategies was an emergent creed, which emerged on both the left and the right, that state action could be dispensed with. Adherents of this system of belief held that popular movements, uncoordinated by the state, or markets, freed from state regulation, could spontaneously allocate resources to needy parties. The problem of occupancy remained in 1974, as it is today, a feature of poverty and immiseration around the world. It would become the subject of mysticism, of grassroots coordinated schemes, and of participatory organizing. It would inspire the efflorescence of anarchical, decentralized utopias of all kinds. In contemporary Britain, advocates of the market preached brave alternatives to state-funded housing—for instance, squatting, which they identified as a kind of entrepreneurship. Britain initiated the privatization of public housing. Meanwhile, private development agencies took up ideas that had originally appeared in the context of a plan for global land redistribution—for instance, the concept of distributing small-scale technology around the world had originated in India as a set of ideas for enabling investment in small farms without encumbering farmers with debt. From 1968, when E. F. Schumacher began to rearticulate FAO ideas about small-scale technology in a guise more friendly to private manufacturers, visions of small-scale technology were retooled to emphasize how implements could turn developing world farmers into proto-­ capitalists. America’s Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC), for instance, sent Indian farmers objects such as the Curta—a small mechanical calculator—with promises that such a device would transform illiterate farmers into entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, other ADC projects promoted industrial agriculture, U.S. agrobusiness equipment, and improved varieties of seeds, the adoption of which required farmers to borrow large sums of money. Rather

i n t r o d u c t i o n    31

than supporting small farmers, the ADC’s version of small-scale technology put farmers out of business. What filled the vacuum created by the collapse of global land governance— when former colonies utterly failed to redistribute their land, as was the case in India, or only partially redistributed their land, as was the case in many places in Latin America—was a series of existential questions about whether land redistribution and international government were appropriate strategies for fighting global poverty at all. When global plans for land redistribution collapsed, individuals who believed in a right to occupancy often had no other choice but to take matters into their own hands. Even as state commitments to redistribution collapsed around the globe, indigenous people, peasants, students, and activists worldwide continued to organize.56 Working without the support of the state forced actors to invent new approaches to organization, administration, and technology. Not everyone shared the faith that FAO administrators placed in centralized information and nation-states. Grassroots groups across the world, their faith broken by corrupt or distracted governments, turned to documenting the landscape for themselves, taking up the cause of redistributing land where states were unable or unwilling to act. Across India, Latin America, and Canada, participatory movements began to accomplish what the FAO aimed to effect but could not in its midcentury phase of experimentation—but might have if it had known how: they created the tools for ordinary people to govern the land themselves. In India, the mystic Vinoba Bhave, a former apostle of Mohandas K. Gandhi, collected voluntary donations of land to be handed over to the poor. In Canada, indigenous people began to collect oral testimony as a basis for prosecuting claims to their ancestral lands. Different approaches to organizing in the absence of the state were employed. Some advocates, such as Vinoba, favored public processions and spiritual encouragement. Others, like the indigenous and Indian creators of the participatory map, reinvented the technology of land administration on their own terms, keeping up with a world in which no international land redistribution was going to rescue them. Meanwhile, the failures of centralized land redistribution increasingly forced peasants into cities ill prepared to welcome them, where many became squatters on land to which they held no title. For a short time, radical legis­ lation in London and New York allowed organized squatters to pursue rights to the places they illegally occupied. According to legal scholars, the actions

32  i n t r o d u c t i o n

of the squatters catalyzed a new body of legal commitments to the right of occupancy.57 Defying a world governed by the individual claims of white settlers, indigenous peoples began to work collectively to create tools for pursuing the mutual ownership of natural resources like air and water. Data-driven maps made by many hands were presented to judges and courts, defending the right to occupancy free from pollution or displacement. Peer-to-peer maps allowed grassroots movements to make claims to property directly, without the aid of an intermediary within the state bureaucracy. In pioneering the shape of what some have called “democratic ecology,” they demonstrated how ordinary people can collect information about the landscape to enable them to come to their own consensus about how to distribute land or protect it from pollution.58 Pilgrims, students, peasants, and grassroots organizers alike were asking similar questions. Does one really need a state to remedy the condition of the poor? Will markets, local grassroots movements, or mystical revelations do just as well? In forging alternative systems designed to promote the rights of those who had been ignored or ejected, grassroots movements pioneered the shape of a radically inclusive democracy. By developing their own infrastructures for sharing information within a structure that invited participation, native peoples, women, and other minorities could argue for the protection of their land.59 In a final assessment, one answer to the conundrum of why the global conversation about land redistribution apparently disappeared is that the disappearance happened only in a limited sense. After U.S. interests increasingly rejected land redistribution as a suitable course of action around 1974, land reform vanished from the history books of the Anglo-American world. Land redistribution schemes were dropped from the set of meaningful solutions entertained by policy makers in Washington, D.C. They disappeared from many policy schools and social science programs at public universities that had once trained young people in the service of occupancy. A second answer to the riddle, however, is that land redistribution schemes didn’t, in fact, go anywhere—they only appeared to. Today, land redistribution measures are under way to address the evils of apartheid in South Africa, lasting inequalities in Colombia, and the residue of ancient feudalism in Scotland. Land redistribution measures, in their present iteration, offer a pattern for dealing with climactic change and the contemporary rise of climate refugees. If policy makers come to look to this suite of tools as the basis for new reforms, it will become clear that the world of land redistribution and rent con-

i n t r o d u c t i o n    33

trol is not, by any means, a garden from which we have been banished forever, as Adam and Eve were cast out from Eden; it may, rather, represent a destination in the labyrinth of policy to which we are bound to return.

Why Land Redistribution Matters Today Understanding the creative abundance of approaches to occupancy rights in the twentieth century brings the student of history face-to-face with an enormous efflorescence of human strategies for protecting what is sacred— including the invention of rent control, squatters’ rights, and the making of schemes to house and feed the many through universal rights to land. Some of those strategies came from the developed world, some from the developing world. Some were centralized and international, others were anarchic and executed at the grass roots. The variety of techniques employed by advocates of occupancy—and the success of some, collapse of others, and adaptation of still other strategies to new environments—offers a template for how any quest for justice adapts to the changing situations that form the pattern of history. Historians have amassed a growing catalogue of global efforts to improve the human condition that failed: among them, dams that resulted in displacement, midcentury efforts to limit population that mandated forced sterilizations, and varieties of “thirsty” improved seeds, the water bills for which made it impossible for small farming to compete, thus forcing billions of farmers around the world from their land.60 The ambition and reach of schemes undertaken at the FAO should offer inspiration for those who fight against displacement and similar evils in our own time. Any moralizing tale such as this one, of course, comes with world-weary cautions. The failures of the FAO and other forms of international governance were real. Their story provides warnings about the limits of state power and the persistent influence of economic ideology. Contemporary reactions to international governance reaffirmed an alternative to expert policies in the form of a “participatory” ideology that aimed to contrive development projects where all voices matter. Land redistribution, of course, is not the only way to mitigate poverty or promote ecological justice. But as far as international efforts to improve the condition of the rural poor go, land redistribution programs were particularly ambitious in their efforts to solve poverty, and uniquely poised to counter the legacies of empire and racism. In terms of length and persistence, they also had a good arc; from 1881 (the date of the most sweeping of the Irish land

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redistribution measures) to 1974 (when the World Bank denounced land reform as a waste), land redistribution was among the plans to improve the condition of humanity whose pursuit was most systematic, most international, and most attuned to the shape of popular movements. The story of land redistribution— in both its failures and successes—can offer a parable for understanding almost any other initiative for improving the human condition. Perhaps learning from such a history could help us succeed in other such endeavors. The historical problem of coordinating a global solution for land redistribution also mirrors questions raised by the present global climate refugee crisis and its implications for the future of human habitation. Apprehending the tremendous shock of displacement, pollution, and poverty portended by sober models of climate change, some visionaries have proposed solutions scaled to the size of a planetary crisis. Environmental pollution, they propose, will be solved by some combination of national commitments to limiting carbon emissions, an international court defending property claims and rights of occupancy, nation-states taxing pollution at their borders, and citizen groups actively agitating in solidarity with one another around the world. Housing and food rights must be solved either by the protection of human rights in an international court or by commitments to food justice worked out nation by nation. Poverty, according to many of these theorists, would be ended by data-­ guided private philanthropy.61 The range of contemporary solutions—international, informed by science, state-based, market-based, and voluntary—mirrors the spectrum of answers developed during the rise and fall of a movement for international land redistribution. They are, therefore, solutions whose strengths and weaknesses we can understand best by looking backward. While this book recounts the story of the long war over land and offers a defiant interpretation of that atavistic dance with inequality, it also tells the story of the manifold tools that protect the rights of countless people even today. Throughout this book, I review the diverse techniques of the occupier as well as information infrastructure—these facets of the struggle over land evolved alongside one another. A focus on the history of techniques—from rent control and land redistribution to international governance, land titling, and participatory mapping—potentially makes the story of occupancy of interest to a wider public than that concerned strictly with the state planning of democracy or GDP. Effectively, the questions that midcentury people asked about land redistribution are general ones about the nature of governance and poverty, and how far it is possible to remake the world around us, whether through

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statecraft, revolution, organizing, or merely refusing to leave an otherwise empty house. Most historians who aim to support contemporary accounts of climate have concentrated on the material residue of pollutants: the smoke from coal, the acid rain, or the DDT emitted by industrial nations and regulated with the help of scientists from the late nineteenth century forward. In this account—a different kind of environmental history—I look to the precedents for a shared administration of land and water in historical questions about how to support the poorest people of the world through addressing questions of injustice bound up with the history of landholding and empire. Does it matter who makes the map that governs food production or pollution? In answering that question I have chosen to concentrate on the intersection between the environment, inequality, and democracy. The twentieth-­ century debates about these questions offer a biography of the issues with which humankind is fated to struggle in the twenty-first century. When history is critically focused on both the mechanisms of change and the dynamics of inertia—reviewing the successes and failures of personalities, ideologies, and institutions—it can produce an audit of past attempts to establish justice. One hopes that such an account may contribute to a contemporary discussion of strategies that might protect the almost unimaginable multitude of people whose fates are potentially threatened in an era of climate change.

1  •  A Parade for Empire’s End

In Ireland in 1879, farmers marched, four abreast, with green sashes across their chests, carrying a banner of red satin stitched on white canvas that read, “The Land for the People.” They were mainly renters, like almost everyone in Ireland, where laws from the seventeenth century forbade Catholics from owning or inheriting land until 1778. A century after that date, the imprint of racist policies still structured the landscape, where enormous Georgian manor houses loomed over stone or earthen hovels. Economic divides were carved into the landscape itself.1 That glaring division, wherein the labor of the many returned luxury to the few, was exactly what the tenant farmers hoped to overturn. In England, Scotland, Ireland, and India, jurists, organizers, journalists, artists, local politicians, and parliamentary representatives had begun to envision regimes built on the reversal of empire and the redistribution of land. Occupancy rights alone, they argued, would secure the world’s working poor against debt, poverty, and starvation. They rallied behind political theories of property and rent, demanding a “land reform” to turn property rights over to colonized subjects.2 In their discourse, words like territory and land came to indicate participation in a global critique of empire and a demand for alternatives. To speak of land was to denounce empire. Imagine a movement that calls for food, shelter, and water for all: a democratic ecology movement. Its ranks of marchers swell the streets: women and men, rural and urban, students and workers, bureaucrats and intellectuals; some stride in bleached overalls and some in dark suits; their skin is brown, dark, or pale; their bodies are worried by calculation or tanned by labor in the sun. Banners wave everywhere, reading, “The earth for human beings.”

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Land League protest, Limerick, Ireland (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

This book tells the story of such a parade, a march over decades and continents, its ranks collected from movements from every inhabited continent, some from the farm and others from the university, all insisting on the idea of a global revolution that would bring food, water, and shelter to everyone. Indeed, the parade was real, although divided across decades and continents. In a march of tenant farmers in Ireland, a parade supporting squatters in postwar London, a holy pilgrimage in India, and a solidarity protest in London in support of indigenous squatters claiming land rights in Peru, the people marching through their respective cities and decades were not oblivious to other parts of the procession, and many recognized that they were jointly celebrating the end of empire. The marchers asserted that human existence had only one limit: humans require a place to lay their heads, typically in proximity to other humans, where they can work and find something to eat. Space is limited on a planet of three dimensions, and technology expands arable earth and inhabitable shelter only slowly. In a free market, available space is easily monopolized by those with wealth, especially where the gap between rich and poor is very wide. But how meaningful is a parade—even one so diverse and vast as this— given the arc of human history? When empire began, it moved people around the earth by force. Enlightenment thinkers contrived to fill Europe’s hungry

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mouths with the products of the labor of the enslaved, brown and black persons evicted from their homes elsewhere, while the acres thus cleared were meanwhile sold to white settlers, busying the idle hands of Europe’s poor.3 The modern exploitation of the earth depended on an unbroken file of displaced persons, refugees on the scale of thousands, and then millions, of persons, cascading from their homes onto boats and roads and trains, bound for who knows where. Assembled into one place, the victims of exile would form a line hundreds of miles long. The land parade aimed to stem that flow, calling free persons to join in a march against displacement. To trace the unfolding episodes that composed the land parade is to invite challenging questions about the historical significance of what some scholars call “resistance” when faced with the challenge of a world system that depends on the exploitation of both soil and labor. The reader should recognize the seeming futility of any kind of protest, given the global scale of exploitation. How could peaceful marchers, tracing the land by foot, reverse the forces uprooting bodies from their homes, millions at a time? What hope could they possibly have that mere banners and slogans would reverse the trajectory of the entire world?

A Parade in Ireland The events in Ireland, known collectively as the Land War, introduced a new pattern of resistance: one part economic intervention, one part political protest against empire. The Irish effort won several key pieces of British legislation— in the form of rent controls and land redistribution measures—that set a pattern that many observers thought might offer a remedy for poverty in other parts of the world. It raised the possibility of using the power of the state to redistribute property—or at least to alter the price of land—in the name of reversing economic inequality. Why did the Irish get what they demanded? They succeeded, as several historians have recently and forcefully demonstrated, because of the remorseless, coordinated tempo of high politics, on-the-ground protest, and media spectacle that the Irish engineered over the course of decades.4 From the seventeenth-century seizures of Irish land until Catholic emancipation in 1778, Irish Catholics had been forbidden to inherit land. As a colony, Ireland was administered by absentee landlords working through intermediaries known as land agents who, under the influence of new ideas about capitalism, were charged with consistently raising the rent and evicting tenants

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who were unable to pay. By the nineteenth century, Ireland was known as a nation of impoverished tenants periodically prone to outbursts of anonymous violence against the landlord—a state of affairs bemoaned by novelists like Maria Edgeworth, who complained of the misery “to which an Irish estate and Irish tenantry [are] degraded” when landlords “abandon their tenantry to oppression and their property to ruin.”5 In 1845, the potato famine fell heavily on those tenants; over the seven lean years that followed, two-thirds of them either starved or emigrated.6 Once the famine was over, Irish journalists and historians set to work. They faced down the history of English rule over Irish land, piecing together and boldly damning the system, characterized by concerted mechanisms of absentee government, high rents, and evictions. They reviewed, in detail, the history of English seizures of property, suppressions of the press, suspensions of habeas corpus, and other travesties. The logic they eventually turned to was that of historical reparations—a set of laws that had been used since the days of ancient Rome to reward conquering armies by dispersing land. In the simple formula of one Irish writer, “Some atonement is due for past wrongs.”7 Only by such means, they reasoned, could the English repair the harm rendered over innumerable generations when owning property had been illegal for Roman Catholics—and only by reparations could the English possibly expect an end to violence. Parliament could end the Land War only by undoing, economically and morally, the sins of the empire. Meanwhile, Irish farmers gathered to support a parliamentary lobby, onthe-ground marches, and a coordinated program of rent strikes. These agitations took the form of vivid occupations of public space. In County Cavan in 1850, six hundred people signed their names to a petition asking Parliament to reconsider the relationship between landlord and tenant, and hundreds more arrived too late to add their names to the document. They erected a platform ornamented with flowers; the crowd carried banners urging “Tenant Right.” Speakers recounted the history of escalated rents and falling prices for Irish butter, eggs, and meat. Other spokesmen called for the abolition of landlordism and the intervention of the state to buy out Irish landlords and keep rent steady. One speaker urged that the government’s recent tax valuation might be used as a metric for assessing what rent would look like without appreciation.8 By 1879—the date when the banner was stitched for the parade—Irish journalists had been complaining for decades about the system of colonial rule, and specifically the role of landholding therein. Irish crowds, parades, and other

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gatherings were skillfully coordinated so as to attract the eye of journalists wiring home stories of Irish crowds and Irish political campaigns. Charles Stewart Parnell, the movement’s leader in Parliament, was an unprecedented master of manipulating the news cycle. Within a few decades, resistance to landlord control in Ireland had swelled into another kind of movement: one distinctively national in shape, marked by large-scale spectacles like parades, and backed by quantitative information about Ireland’s crisis of eviction and rents, collected by the Irish tenants themselves.9 In Ireland, parliamentary speakers proposed the case for reparations in land in the 1880s, decades after it was first suggested by Irish pamphleteers. Irish representatives and their liberal allies called for stringent laws protecting tenants from eviction, ultimately designing mechanisms for rent control and mortgages to help tenants become owners.10 By the 1880s, Ireland was a hotbed of new tactics for shifting the conver­ sation about land. The signature technique of the Irish was the rent strike: a coordinated effort of neighboring families who agreed to stop tendering the rent to the landlord or his agent until the landlord agreed to negotiate its price. Rent strikes proliferated, rechristened “boycotts” in honor of the resistance on Achill Island against Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a rent collector in County Mayo who was particularly hated for his methods. After the neighbors agreed to refuse to pay their rent, to shun contact with Boycott, and to avoid neighbors who broke the strike, including those who merely conversed with Boycott, the land agent’s name became a metonym for collective action more generally. Tactics such as these drew the eye of international journalists, who covered the rent strikes and evictions for both the English and North American press, to the increasing embarrassment of the British state.11 Through accounts spreading across the ocean—words relayed over telegraph wires and images reprinted in newspapers—tales of the Irish insurrection spread. “Boycotting” would later come to refer to protests that depended on coordinated strikes to protest injustice in other domains around the world. Yet the original spark that transformed the consciousness of ordinary people, helping them to organize their power against a common target, was a battle against high rent. One family refusing to pay the rent means nothing, but a dozen families refusing to pay, and a hundred families refusing to work with rent collectors, amounts to a regional change of economic policy. And a thousand families marching, singing songs, and telling stories about rent strikes might amount to a revolution.

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The economic message sent by the strike was about opportunity and the possibility of an even playing ground. Historically, the difficulty of negotiating rent has been one of monopoly over information: a small number of elites negotiate with a larger number of tenants or workers, which gives the former the power to coordinate prices.12 By coordinating the bargaining to occur at a single moment in time, rent strikes broke a seemingly intractable problem, suddenly allowing laborers to negotiate with landlords over one of the major factors that govern economic inequality. Rent strikes were backed up by dozens of related actions, all of them publicizing the struggle for land and shelter in one way or another. The Irish had techniques for creating a spectacle designed to attract public attention to an event. In Kildare, tenants burned their leases to signal their collective rejection of rents determined in a climate of economic inequality, where the rich bargained for territory with more power than the poor. Poets composed eulogies for evicted families, memorials to the “shattered gables” of homes turned into ruins by bailiffs seeking redress on the landlord’s behalf.13 The Irish also experimented with techniques for compressing time and space in the service of storytelling. Maud Gonne, later remembered as the aristocratic patroness and romantic interest of the poet W. B. Yeats, went on the road in Ireland to draw aid to the movement in another way. She traveled with lantern slides. Towering images of burned-out houses far away, projected onto the sides of urban buildings, turned the city into a temporary public memorial of eviction. The meaning was clear to the public, even its illiterate members. In the small town of Knock, a local priest experimented with lantern slides, creating a “vision” of Mary that was interpreted by locals as a sign of God’s blessing on the land war, a signal of divine encouragement to persist.14 Meanwhile, a new strategy was in play to encourage families to keep up the strike, despite the threat of homelessness. Charles Parnell’s sisters—Anna and Fanny Parnell—led the Ladies’ Land League and reengineered the larger movement after Charles Parnell and the movement’s male leadership were thrown into prison. The Parnell sisters recruited American funding and began organizing the construction of “land league huts” to rehouse rent strikers when they were evicted and their former homes torched to prevent their return. These land huts enabled families to squat on nearby land. Monetary aid poured in from Irish Americans, many of them mill girls and other poorly paid laborers, who donated significant sums of their earnings to fight the English colonizers in Ireland.15 Thanks to the Parnell sisters’ interventions, families with small children

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could join the rent strike, secure in the knowledge that they would have a place to sleep that night, even if the police forced them from their home. The capacity to coordinate strikes with other actions so they carried over the scale of space, carrying the word further, and the scale of time, making the strike last longer, contributed to the success and notoriety of the Irish rent strikes. The Parnell sisters were not the only women whose advocacy of a right of occupancy had a strong impact on history.

A Parade in London In 1946, soldiers returning from the front joined students and women workers marching through London carrying banners, one of which was emblazoned with a slogan that might have resonated with the Irish half a century before: “Homes for Everybody Before Luxury for the Rich.” Despite the similarity of the message, the march in 1946 targeted not empire but rather the result of war. Germany’s campaign of air raids had destroyed fully 2 million homes in Britain, leaving seventy thousand people homeless in London alone by the war’s end.16 Since early in the twentieth century, the British state had promised to build homes to repair its overcrowded slums, scenes of disease and misery associated with the nation’s industrial revolution. Both Conservative and Labour politicians had promised some kind of land redistribution on the Irish model. In 1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George had promised that the government would provide conditions “fit” for soldiers returning from World War I, a pledge later summarized as “homes fit for heroes.”17 Even after another world war had drawn to a close, however, the promise remained unanswered. Since the late nineteenth century, British socialists had imagined that legislation and taxation of land could form a weapon in the hands of the poor to break the power of landlords to charge high rents for slums. They believed that taxes on land could force the rich, who lived in higher-taxed neighborhoods, to support the cost of the majority of infrastructure. Wise managers would apply these high taxes to careful coordination of infrastructure—for instance, train lines, sewers, and frequent investments in new housing for the poor. In such a way, improvements to housing stock and neighborhood connections would be constantly made; the poor would no longer be squeezed into the worst-connected or least-repaired corners of town. Through the 1960s, thinking of this kind—which emphasized the occupancy rights of poor people

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Veterans returned from the war marching in London to support a right to housing (Keystone/Getty Images)

and the work that collective infrastructure could do to support them—ran in parallel to theories of economic and international development.18 As in Ireland, a proliferation of techniques marked the campaign for homes in London. While students marched, in other parts of town, men and women were breaking into government buildings and former war offices, converting them into temporary shelter for housing. Contemporaries in Paris and Amsterdam were doing the same. They called themselves “squatters,” a reference to Australian and American colonists who, occupying territory not their own in the previous century, were defended by laws protecting settlers—as the new squatters believed they too should be. The London squatters, like the Irish protesters before them, had a bold view about what their collective action could accomplish. Workers and soldiers, young families and old couples, all faced a housing shortage; together, they understood that politicians had publicly committed to ensuring a right to housing for all. Having studied anarchist politics on the front, a number of squatters concluded that they could enact housing policies on their own—simply waiting for politicians to bless their actions. Many of the original squatters were women who had worked in armaments factories for low pay, but in 1946, they were joined by former soldiers returning from the front to a bombed-out London. Some soldiers took over former military bases, rewiring and plumbing the Nissen huts to make them fit for living.19 The London squatters courted publicity to win the public to their cause. The takeover of government offices was not designed to be overlooked; the squat-

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ters made front-page news, by design. When students marched in solidarity with a banner reading, “Requisition All Empty Mansions and Luxury Flats!” it distilled a logic about economic thinking that mirrored the Irish intuition that a few rich individuals, by setting rents high, could make a world unaffordable to the many. Like the Irish, they called on the state to combat the monopolization of real estate and the artificial inflation of rent. The spectacle of the parade worked, drawing headlines and stoking a public debate about the nature of political commitments to housing after the war in light of the needs of working-­ class families. Under pressure, the government began to build housing, recommencing a political program of state-built housing.20 Two protests, separated by the Irish Channel and spanning seventy years, nevertheless resonate, united by common features of thoughts about land. Irish peasants, working for independence from empire, had preached that native subjects had an implicit right to property that was never voided by the fact of empire. They urged modern Britain to redistribute land, and so to create economic opportunity and the possibility of healing old wounds of race, otherwise impossible to resolve. Later, English working-class families in towns and cities, some of them returning soldiers, some of them factory workers, called attention to the fact of poverty in the city, and called upon the state to provide housing for the masses. The movements were divided by race and identity, and by the uses they sought land for: one group rural and agricultural, seeking land for subsistence farming as a reflection of economic opportunity, and the other urban, seeking rooms and flats to shelter families that worked in factories or shops in town. They were divided by rhetoric and identity: the former Catholic, nationalist, and aggressively Irish; the latter sometimes anarchist, communist, or Labour. Despite these differences, the two movements were unified in their assertion of a right to shelter. Both saw lack of access to land and housing as a fundamental feature that defined poverty, created artificially through a system that rewarded the wealthy at the expense of the rest. Both movements anticipated that together, ordinary people could call on the state to redistribute land; that space enough existed for everyone; and that access to space would remedy the wounds of poverty.

A Solidarity March for the Developing World The marches in Ireland and London continued to resonate, producing historical repetitions in the form of later movements that took up similar causes.

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Twenty years after the close of the Second World War, students were protesting in London with slogans that echoed those of the postwar squatters. They marched through a London that was suffering an acute crisis, where another generation of squats had begun to appear. But this march was held not in honor of England’s squatters but in solidarity with those in the developing world—where the concerns of landless indigenous people echoed those of the Irish a century before. In March 1968, British students assembled in London’s Hyde Park and marched to the Peruvian embassy. They were rallying for the sake of another revolutionary, the Peruvian activist Hugo Blanco, who had led land uprisings of indigenous squatters claiming their right to land, had subsequently been jailed, and was now awaiting a firing squad. The movement behind the London march was mobilized using the media available. In the decades after the close of World War II, British and American students could pick up cheap pamphlets and paperbacks detailing the coming revolution in land. One pamphlet summarized the details of landlessness in Peru, where 3 percent of the owners possessed 83 percent of the farm area. The introduction explained that the 1,200 daily calories a Peruvian peasant consumed was “on a comparable level with a Nazi concentration camp.”21 The pamphlet profiled a heroic battle by peasant unions against forced labor for landlords, led by Blanco, a son of a lawyer in Peru, who was motivated by early anticolonial writers to lead a land revolution in Latin America. Blanco learned Quechua and began to organize peasants toward a Trotskyist rebellion that took land as its first aim. The pamphlet detailed his organization tactics among the Quechua, and his later detainment, trial before a military judge, forced confession to murder under torture, and refusal to betray his collaborators. Sentenced to death, Blanco began to recount the history of the peasant struggle for land in Peru. Blanco shouted at the judge that he would die “contentedly” because of “everything I have done for the peasants.”22 It was the judge who would have blood on his hands, Blanco said. As the audience began to clamor, Blanco began chanting, “Tierra o muerte!” (Land or death).23 The hearing had to be suspended until the following day. When the judge returned, swarms of peasants were crowded at the courtroom door. Blanco’s death sentence was commuted to twenty-five years in jail. Blanco responded with a prophesy of future land struggle, and he and his fellow defendants again began to chant, “Tierra o muerte,” a phrase soon taken up by the audience.24 Stories of Latin American land reform began to spread, not only between Latin American countries, but also between Latin America and the student

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movements of the West. For students who had read Richard Tawney’s history of peasant uprisings against the landlords as a prelude to the English Civil War, or for contemporary students of political scientists like Doreen Warriner, the trajectory of freedom must have seemed clear: the world was witnessing a global peasant revolution, and the turnover of the land from empire to indigenous subjects and the tillers of the soil was inevitable.25 Pamphlets described an international movement for solidarity with the ­Peruvian peasants, including a petition signed by Albert Schweitzer, among others. An Italian campaign was organized through the Socialist Party and its affiliates; a French campaign came into being through the National Union of Students; other marches and assemblies happened in Cuba, Greece, Sweden, Mexico, Canada, India, Nigeria, and Brazil—countries proud of their land reforms as well as newly independent nations struggling with land reform policies in the present. A London campaign for Blanco was organized with Bertrand Russell as honorary president. Russell wrote personally to Blanco in prison expressing his solidarity. The Peruvian ambassador in Paris wrote to Jean-Paul Sartre to assure him that Blanco would not be executed.26 The London pamphleteers who republished Blanco’s narrative also made clear their own role in the world struggle for land. International sympathy was a tool, as was publication. “We would urge all who read this small pamphlet to help us in our work of helping the victims of repression,” they wrote.27 The help they had in mind was further protests and press releases, all supporting an expected international revolution. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, a similar message was being preached.

An Indian Pilgrimage India had followed Ireland on a plan of rent strikes as a prelude to independence. In London, Indian intellectuals met with veterans of the Irish confrontations to share strategies. Rent strikes spread across the north of India, their organizers sometimes consciously borrowing Irish tactics. Although Western accounts have tended to emphasize nonviolence and resistance to British taxation in general, a major thrust of Indian activism at the time—and of Gandhi’s work in particular—concerned rights of occupancy. By 1916, Gandhi was visiting rent strikes in Bihar, where organizers followed a tradition of refusing rents, drawing on the Irish model imported to India a generation before.28 Two years before David Lloyd George announced “homes fit for heroes” for the English, Gandhi was already imagining a livable India for Indians.

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Vinoba Bhave (Photograph by James Burke; Getty Images)

Gandhi’s writings about empire and resistance questioned the structures of dependence and debt that characterized farm work under British rule. Plotting an alternative economy for an independent India, Gandhi argued that India needed an essentially new model of political economy, one that emphasized strategies for supporting small farmers free from debt, for example, through collective investments in relatively small-scale technology. Gandhi’s acolytes in the mission—preaching nonviolence to reduce the rent—included India’s future president and prime minister Rajendra Prasad and Jawaharlal Nehru, and the future leader of a pilgrimage, Vinoba Bhave.29 The Indian sociologist Radhakamal Mukerjee would translate both the tradition of land reform and similar socialist ideas into a call for a strong, independent bureaucracy supporting Indian farmers. As Mukerjee explained in his Comparative Economics (1921), the system of colonial government that India inherited from Britain “introduced landlordism with proprietary rights, and the free transfer or alienation of land,” to the detriment of rent-paying farmers.30 Under the heading “Blight of Capitalistic Government,” Mukerjee argued that India’s traditional relationship with land distribution had been corrupted by Western powers.31 Western rule resulted in “landlordism”—the control of governance by landlords—and “revenue-farming,” or the selling of land to the

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highest bidder.32 The alternative, he argued, was local self-government and the organization of small farmers into cooperatives.33 Mukerjee, Gandhi, and Vinoba together contributed a peculiarly Indian tradition of thought about land, shaped around principles such as the problematizing of debt and the promotion of local self-government. In 1951, an apostle of Gandhi began leading a pilgrimage across India to dramatize the plight of landless laborers who had agitated for decades for relief from high rent. The son of a weaver, Acharya Vinoba Bhave was only a boy when he first heard Gandhi speak. Returning home, he gathered the certificates that proved his success in school and fed them to the flames at his cottage’s hearth. Vinoba announced that he would devote his life to his country. He joined Gandhi’s ashram at Ahmedabad, then left a few years later to start his own.34 After independence, India’s freedom struggle—or satyagraha, literally, endeavor for truth—was identified no longer with resistance to the British Empire, but rather with fostering economic structures that created opportunities for Indians regardless of race or ethnicity. After Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, Vinoba became the national figurehead of satyagraha and its major prophet, preaching a national future based on spiritual renewal. Whereas Gandhi had engaged with multiple forms of resistance, under Vinoba, land rights became the central and most visible aspect of India’s struggle. Vinoba’s decade-long pilgrimage across India rallied landlords, whose forefathers had managed enormous tracts of land on behalf of the village, to consider the plight of the ordinary men and women who farmed the land; many were on the cusp of starvation. He urged the nation to redistribute land—and when that movement failed, Vinoba pressed individual landlords to donate their land to the poor in one enormous holy act. The Indian pilgrimage, in a sense, was an echo of a long tradition of critique of British Empire in India. Indian property rights, like those in Ireland, had been confiscated by the British in some cases, or commuted into tenancy in others, with gruelingly high rents imposed by state taxation policies meant to punish native idleness and defray the cost of making Britain’s empire a profitable investment.35 India had expected rent controls and land redistribution since at least 1881, when those policies were established in Ireland by British law. After independence, India seemed poised to embark on the plans that had been laid over previous decades. India was the harbinger of post-colonial movements that soon would follow in Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Tanzania,

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and South Africa, many of which demanded new legislation to protect the poor by providing shelter and food for all through the redistribution of landownership. The Indian land redistribution scheme faced unexpected delays. Congress passed a major land redistribution bill for the nation—only to have the new law struck down by the courts, which left redistribution as a matter for the states to decide. Thus stymied, land redistribution became a question for local politicians and local activists. It was in such a context of political shifts that Vinoba organized a long pilgrimage, during which he exhorted landlords to voluntarily surrender a share of their property to the poor, thus realizing a dream of India as a site of opportunity for all.36 The Indian pilgrimage bore similarities to the marches in Ireland and London. Like those demonstrations, Vinoba’s pilgrimage was carefully orchestrated for maximum political effect, utilizing the media. In the many photos taken by international journalists, Vinoba was shown surrounded by acolytes and politicians, many of whom imagined putting Vinoba’s ideas into practice as the fulfillment of Gandhi’s vision of an independent India characterized by opportunity for all. Like the Irish movement, the Indian pilgrimage was wrapped up with nationalism and the promise that independence from the British Empire would bring an era of enlarged prospects for poor laborers. The demonstrators in both places promised a living to families that had, for generations, tilled the earth for others, profiting landlords in Calcutta and stockholders in Britain. As had the Irish peasants and the London squatters, the Indian pilgrims relied on modern forms of publicity. As was the case with Peru’s squatters, the Indian pilgrimage attracted British students, who joined the procession and studied Vinoba’s philosophy. All three movements shared a common orientation to the economic salience of land rather than wages, votes, or property in general. Vinoba’s pilgrimage was also, in many ways, a Cold War event. While Vinoba preached voluntary land redistribution, meanwhile, across the border in China, peasants were forcing landlords to abandon their farms, sometimes with the barrel of a gun, backed by the endorsement of the Communist Party. To distinguish his nonviolent campaign from the violent land turnover sometimes associated with communist states, Vinoba stressed the principle of voluntary land donations from the rich to the poor: his would be an anti-communist, strictly pacifist land redistribution, which nevertheless insisted on the sanctity of a right to shelter. Despite their differences, however, Vinoba and China’s Communists shared certain major outlooks in common. Both preached a doc-

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trine that land represents a basic share in a modern economy, and that the earth should be tended in such a way as to provide shelter and subsistence for all. Even more than a gesture against communism, Vinoba’s pilgrimage was a mobilization of anti-colonial values in a post-colonial nation. Launched in the aftermath of India’s decades-long struggle for national sovereignty, Vinoba’s peaceful pilgrimage offered a program for self-governance that would provide equity without recourse to the violence that had characterized revolution elsewhere. With Vinoba, Indian ideas about local legal traditions and political independence would form the basis for a new political discourse where activists worked toward a revolution whose success depended on voluntary participation. In this sense, Vinoba’s pilgrimage partook of other postwar efforts to define a new world order marked by both coordination and voluntary assent—the foremost of which was the United Nations itself.

Land as a Cause for Global Governance In the same year that Vinoba began his procession, a new campaign was announced at a gathering of the Federal Council of Churches in America. The new director general of the FAO—the UN initiative charged with land administration—was an American, Norris Dodd, a recent veteran of the New Deal. Dodd began a speaking tour in which he announced his theme as a new vision for the former colonies of the world, now turning into independent nations, each administering a land redistribution of its own. He believed the United Nations would support these movements around the world, offering technological advice and policy counsel. The slogan for Dodd’s vision, the subject of a speech in 1951, was “The Earth for Man.” The phrase suggested that land redistribution—in giving everyone a home, and supporting that right across all the nations of the earth—offered an alternative to nationalism of the kind that had recently annihilated millions during the Second World War. In the postwar world, the United Nations played a major role in promoting and supporting land regimes around the globe, although its activities were ultimately cut short by challenges that presented the market—rather than the state—as the appropriate sphere for adjudicating land­ ownership. Dodd’s understanding of how the earth might devolve to the tillers of the soil was skewed by a projection of a single arc of history, a unique path to progress. He nevertheless believed that the devolution of land to peasants was inevitable: a force of history in his time.37

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Dodd created no public protest and inspired no pilgrimage, although the bureaucracy that he helped to organize sent agents around the earth in support of pilgrimage, creating a steady stream of policy recommendations, bibliographies, and maps to member governments of the United Nations to reinforce land redistribution schemes.

Connecting the Parade Absolute unity should not be the criterion for seeing connections between actors as diverse as the ones presented here. In a parade, the ideas of individuals may be masked as they march behind the same banner: so too with the movements for redistributing land. Here we might reflect on a recurring theme of this book: accurately tracing the flow of land movements requires mapping out a diversity of actors and the threads of empathy, orientation, and technique that connect them. In the land parade, not only squatters and students and mystics but many bureaucrats as well imagined that they, too, were converting the earth from empire into the service of peasants around the world. Studying the diversity of modern individuals in the parade tells us something about the nature of power, which crystallized out of hybrid cross-class and cross-race alliances, through the work of bureaucrats like Norris Dodd and student protesters like those in London in 1946 and 1968, who found international meaning in the struggles of peasants and indigenous people half a world away. Identifying the diversity at work in the land parade raises problems for how one might otherwise frame the history of a right to occupancy. That right, in the modern era, was reinvented through techniques composed of more than the actions of peasant or working-class “resistance” to power. Supporting occupancy also took the form of research, bibliographies, and the organization of international institutions. Did those relationships also cause tension, or even create opportunities for co-optation of the movement? Tangible but untold connections between movements and ideologies were already operating on a global scale in 1920. By 1945, when the FAO was founded, those interconnections were intensifying in a way that would have enormous consequences for the decades to come. In the puzzle of diverse actors who shared this context and exchanged experience and strategy, a new portrait of the century emerges, connecting various movements that shared an orientation toward the mystic unity of territory, born out of international conversations.

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In the postwar world, many observers on the international scene became convinced, if they were not already, that land reform was destiny for the world, having made connections of a similar sort themselves. It is to their vision of a global movement, and the possible work of a global government coordinating the world’s diverse actors, that we now turn.

Part I Decolonizing; or, The Rome Consensus and the Peasant Origins of World Government

v Global, diffuse, but palpable nevertheless, the problem of displacement became geographically restructured by world empires. Indigenous peoples in Ireland, India, and elsewhere were subjected to rules governing who could own property and how. Native populations were kept in an endless cycle of poverty, near starvation, by these laws. As territory after territory rebelled, Western intellectuals thought they recognized a pattern: peasants were rebelling, demanding that those who tilled the land should own it. Intellectuals across Europe and North American theorized that peasants would revolt around the globe unless land were redistributed fairly, creating a culture of opportunity for all. The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck’s best-selling novel published in 1931, captures the seriousness of the generation working on global land problems over the decades that followed. The book’s abundant details of rural peasant life reflect conversations with Buck’s then husband, John Lossing Buck, who would later become one of the world’s authorities on land redistribution. In its vivid examination of the constraints that kept one family impoverished, the book offered readers in the West a portrait of the grinding poverty that left a hard-working family of farmers close to starvation. The grim scenarios that Pearl sketched suggested, in between the lines, the reality of the limits that constrained farmers around the world, who could do little to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so deep were the structures of the poverty in which they labored. Pearl did not describe the remedy, but the

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details of her novel hinted at it: the Chinese peasant needed roads, technology, and capital. The full theory Pearl alluded to would be published six years later in the form of a monograph by her husband with the title Land Utilization in China (1937). His ideas would shortly be taken up at the FAO, where he became chief of the Land and Water Use Branch. Lossing’s ideas, as well as Pearl’s, formed part of the new Rome Consensus, where Westerners and post-­ colonial intellectuals collaborated in devising theories for combating poverty in the developing world. The adventures of Pearl and Lossing form one segment of the intersecting paths of the individuals who would help to forge the Rome Consensus. During the Second World War, some of the figures who later theorized the importance of global land redistribution worked to supply Britain with food. Another headed to Prague to ferry Jewish refugees to safety. At the war’s close, many social scientists across Europe would turn toward land redistribution as a panacea for oppression and suffering. Land redistribution, properly pursued, seemed to promise everything: an end to hostility, a homeland for refugees, an end to poverty for the masses, and a chance to reverse the racist legacy of European empire. At the end of the Second World War, landownership became central to debates about the legacy of empire, what policies post-colonial nations needed to correct the enormous poverty within their borders, and what sort of an international partnership could support them best. In 1945, eight days before the official founding of the United Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organization—the institute that would become the United Nations’ first branch—was founded with the charge of overseeing land rights and nutrition for the newly independent developing nations of the world. John Boyd Orr, the founding director general of the FAO, framed the problem ahead as a challenge to white privilege. As former colonies rebelled against empire, ensuring economic opportunity for all meant that white nations and peoples would have to relinquish their claims. A new slogan captured the imaginary of how a single superstate would trigger an end to nationalism, colonialism, classism, and white supremacy: not “America for Americans” or “Germany for Germans,” but rather “The Earth for Man.” What would it mean, reformers asked, if the planet were recast as home—a place that everyone had a right to? Meanwhile, Indian economists questioned the theories of leading economists in the West, notably eschewing plans that required large-scale investments in technology, and challenging the theory that overpopulation doomed the developing world. Indian economists collected their own facts around pop-

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ulation, underscoring the promise of cheap technology to feed India’s growing population. Study after study showed that appropriate investments could render tiny plots of lands as profitable as large ones. On the basis of such ideas as these, FAO administrators began to design a plan to bring small-scale technology to the developing world—creating an infrastructure for improved agriculture that even poorer nations could afford without significant debt. If their dream was destined to fail, it was not be for want of trying among the people who worked there.

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2  •  Something Like a Global Government of Land

In 1951, the officers of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the FAO, as it was commonly known, gathered in Rome to contemplate their role on a global scale, as they had done in Washington, D.C. —the institute’s former home—since 1945. Their challenge was to help peasants in developing nations farm economically and thereby maintain control over their own land. Other offices of the United Nations clustered in Geneva or New York, but the FAO was moving from Quebec to Rome, a city much closer to the capitals of the developing world.1 The move was symbolic of the desires of the FAO’s founders to serve the decolonizing nations of the world. Two years after U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt defended “freedom from want” as one of the primary values that the United States would realize in the world, delegates assembled in Hot Springs, Virginia, to spell out the work of the future United Nations. The Hot Springs conference took place in 1943, nearly thirty years after the earthquakes of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions—the first of which had redistributed colonial estates, and the second had abolished private property. It took place only twenty-two years after Ireland had broken from the British Empire, and only sixteen years after the Chinese Nationalist Party had declared as one of its chief policies an “equal distribution of land.” Even as the delegates convened, the apocalyptic horsemen of famine and war were riding the globe. British, American, and Indian soldiers clashed with the soldiers of the Third Reich, whose land settlement policies were framed against the philosophy of lebensraum, or “living space”—the conceit that a growing German population would require more land, the subjugation of other peoples, and the creation of farms in colonized territory where German

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FAO headquarters, Rome (Archivi Alinari, Firenze)

peasants would settle on expropriated land. Germany had imagined the world locked in a zero-sum game for territory, where the flourishing of Germany required earth fertilized with the blood and bones of many. Meanwhile, millions of Bengalis were starving in the latest iteration of the famines that had plagued the subcontinent under British rule; up to 3 million individuals perished in Bengal alone in the year 1943, and dozens of millions more had perished in the foregoing century of British rule, during which the Indian landscape was squeezed dry and devastating famine became a regular figure, visiting at least once a lifetime, and sometimes more. In contrast, the designers of the United Nations would try to imagine a world of plenty, where the Indian peasant ate as well as the Briton—even if it meant that Germans and Britons would be required to make sacrifices. Throughout the 1950s, advocates of redistribution at the FAO therefore labored to create something unique in history: an international organization largely concerned with land, invested with an unprecedented power to advise governments around the world and with the authority to construct grand plans. Embodying this remarkable mandate, the FAO (pronounced by those working at its headquarters in Rome to rhyme with “now”) was given the Latin motto Fiat Panis, or “Let There Be Bread.” The FAO would be charged with the explicit mission of defending, as well as feeding, peasants around the world. Two years after the Hot Springs conference, in 1945, an international body of delegates gathered again, this time in Quebec, where the FAO was officially established at a new conference where the issue of feeding the hungry nations of the formerly colonized world remained at the fore. The concerns of former

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colonies would thereafter dominate the conversation both in Quebec and at the Washington office. It was, after all, a moment of radical change in the political map of the globe. One day before the Quebec conference, the fifth Pan-­African Congress had opened in Manchester, England, convening ninety delegates to discuss independence for African colonies. Two days before the gathering, the Indonesian People’s Army declared war on the Netherlands. Eight days later, the United Nations was officially established in San Francisco, with its charter ratified by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and twenty-eight other nations, many of them the newly independent countries of the developing world: Egypt, Chile, and the Philippines among them. The geopolitical remapping that followed was planetary in scale. In the same year as the conferences that founded the FAO and the United Nations, Indonesia achieved its independence from the Netherlands and China’s Communist Party began an era of land redistribution focused on creating family farms. Within seven years, both Guatemala and Egypt would pass land redistribution schemes modeled on those in Ireland, whereby landlords would be compensated for the loss of land. Hence the move to Rome: a move south, away from the halls of contemporary power, but toward the emerging power centers of New Delhi, Cairo, Moscow, Beijing, Jakarta, and Manila—and symbolically, at least, toward Mexico City, Santiago, Antigua, and Lima. What made such a radical conversation possible? Many of the delegates who congregated in Quebec had been participants in a wide-ranging wartime conversation in Britain about hunger, agriculture, racism, and opportunity. Social scientists such as Doreen Warriner—an advocate of land redistribution who had spent much of World War II organizing the rescue of Jewish families from the Holocaust—preached a message based in Britain’s experience with Ireland: political stability would emerge only when empires agreed to surrender their land. By 1945, the inevitability of world land reform was clearly signaled for Warriner and other social scientists of the 1940s by events in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Warriner and her colleagues would spend the years immediately after the war stressing the need for a global government of land, and the FAO would become the enshrinement of their ideas. Their work would draw to them the intellectuals of many post-colonial nations, whose ideas would be embraced on equal footing with ideas from Europe. Later, the Washington Consensus would dominate world affairs, but in 1951, the conversation that mattered most in many parts of the world was the consensus taking shape in Rome. Because of the United Nations’ obligation to support member nations in the

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developing world, administrators at the FAO based their strategy on the historical arc of peasant struggles for territory, not on a free-standing commitment to capitalism, economic growth, or some other abstraction, even while those abstractions sometimes entered into discussions of where land redistribution might lead. Charged with this sense of the past, administrators at the FAO came to believe that their institution might guide the coming revolution in land toward the most efficient and rational outcome possible. The bold vision of race, land, and justice in world history mobilized by the Rome Consensus motivated much of the work of the social scientists and administrators assembled at the FAO. Administrators proposed a daring vision of what a bureaucracy could accomplish. The advocates of land redistribution believed that an international strategy was necessary to enforce occupancy rights around the world. In their view, the FAO would house a new kind of bureaucracy—an international government charged with challenging the traditional elites of the world who still insisted on clutching the privileges of race and class. Civil servants and social scientists would become the servants of peasant revolution. In Rome, the FAO officers inhabited a marble-clad palace, but their work would be focused on the livelihood of peasants. Designed by Vittorio Cafiero in 1938, the marble building that housed the FAO had once served another office: the imperial government of colonial Africa under fascist Italy. The building’s life thus mirrored the story of the land administered by the FAO: for centuries, land had been the domain of empire, but all around the world, it was now being turned over to international officers on behalf of peasants. Through the FAO’s building in Rome flowed a mighty river of ideas, a confluence of diverse streams of thought—from the social sciences, contemporary accounts of world history, and even mystical sources. Charged by the United Nations to work with agriculture in the developing world, FAO administrators became increasingly active in calling for and justifying land redistribution in the 1950s and ’60s.

A Global Tide of Land Reform To many midcentury observers, world events since 1881—the rent strikes and related events in Ireland, India, and Britain, and their corollaries in Mexico, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe—formed an obvious chain of world history: they united the distant corners of the decaying British Empire into a single march for justice.

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This arc of history was also echoed in similar peasant uprisings around the earth: in Mexico and the rest of Latin America, where peasant-led rebellions turned over haciendas—the colonial ranches of the aristocracy—to indigenous peoples and rural laborers; in the Philippines, where the United States presided over a land redistribution to break up ancient estates and create small plots of land; in China, where the Communist Party challenged peasants to put their leases—and their landlords—on trial; and in Soviet Russia, where the state seized large and medium-scale farms in the name of the peasant; and in Taiwan, Japan, and countless other nations.2 Land redistribution—usually described as “land reform” or “agrarian reform” in these policies—seemed to be happening in every part of the globe. Advocated by both capitalist and communist nations, the concept was embraced not, in those years, as an ideological position regarding abolition of property, but rather as an appreciation of a shared global destiny. By the time that the FAO’s Edmundo Flores visited farmers in a remote village in the Bolivian Andes in 1952, he found peasants there quoting the slogans associated with Mexico: “Viva Zapata! Land and Freedom! Death to the landlords!”3 At first, Flores thought the slogans were evidence of Marxism, but eventually, he discovered another answer: tiny movie houses had started up in the villages, and among the favorite films were Hollywood reels that retold the story of the Mexican Revolution. Cast in the role of Emiliano Zapata, Marlon Brando took up the cause of the native rights that should have belonged to peasants, battling evil landlords along the way. Just as newspapers and ballads had spread stories of the Irish land reform to North America and Australia a generation before, cinema conveyed the legend of the Mexican Revolution across Latin America. Whether amplified by film, oral tradition, or literature, the slogan “Land to the Tiller” soon spread not only to Bolivia but even to Honduras, Colombia, and Peru.4 Modern technology— carrying an ideology of land redistribution born of a shared experience of colonization—was uniting the peasants of Latin America.5 Carried on this wave not only of politics but also of cinema, global redistribution of land seemed inevitable to many observers in the 1940s and ’50s. As these movies began broadcasting the message of a right to occupation around the globe, Flores concluded that the fictionalized depictions of Mexico’s revolutionary peasants, male and female alike, “convey more of a message than, say, the Communist Manifesto ever has.”6 Flores’s observation was particularly cutting, in retrospect, as it voiced his conviction that land reform is a force that worked in opposition to the Commu-

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nist Manifesto: peasants would not need to create a dictatorship of the proletariat, he suggested, if democratic movements were able to redistribute land and thereby create a fairer economy. Flores was not alone in this observation. As we shall see, a broad consensus in North America and Europe held that land redistribution was inevitable; the only question was whether the program executed would be capitalist or communist in nature. In Mexico, there had been a turbulent history around these issues. Under the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1877–80 and 1884–1911), peasants found their claims to land illegally annulled, as subsidies and protections for landowners encouraged the uncompensated enclosure of peasant lands. In 1911, after decades of injustice, angry sugarcane farmers from Morelos followed the farmer-­turned-general Emiliano Zapata into war. The Mexican Revolution thus represented not a war to overturn property rights, but rather a war to uphold property rights in the name of the peasant.7 Like Ireland, Mexico had been a colony where native land had been seized by colonizers and then farmed by indigenous persons who were categorically forbidden as a class from landownership. Through the disputes of the nineteenth century, the legal claim to the soil by the natives who worked it was increasingly evident in both places. Nineteenth-century writers began to challenge these seizures, claiming that reparations in land were due, and threatening that Irish riot and assassination would continue unimpeded until the land war was won. Ireland was far from the only example. As Flores wrote, violent land redistributions in the Soviet Union and China were coming into view. To Flores, as to many others, it appeared that a revolution in land was destined for former colonies everywhere in the world.

The FAO’s Founders As Europe’s power on the world stage declined, a growing number of social scientists and policy makers familiar with the history of European colonies came to believe that a global redistribution of land was imminent. These forces were soon united in the marble bunkers housing that international authority charged with a program of land redistribution. Many of the ideas in the FAO bunkers came from the British social scientists who had been tapped to lead the organization at its creation. More than half a century earlier, since at least the 1880s, British historians had investi-

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gated the history of enclosure and peasant evictions as an explanation for Britain’s growing confrontations with colonial land policies in Ireland and India. British social scientists, seeped in the history of enclosure, were soon called upon to develop a theoretical framework encompassing the post-colonial condition and to construct an international institution charged with fighting hunger in the developing world.8 Many of the theories incubated over these years emphasized the tangible reality and inevitability of post-colonial peasant revolution around the globe. The elaboration of these theories of imminent peasant revolution owes a great deal to Doreen Warriner. The daughter of a Staffordshire farmer and granddaughter of an exiled Irish radical, Warriner earned her PhD specializing in the transitions in Eastern Europe, the site of land turnovers both peaceful and violent. Although she began a quiet career teaching at the University of London, Warriner consulted her conscience as news reached London of Chamberlain’s accommodation of Hitler. In 1938, she turned down a pres­ tigious fellowship in America and instead flew to Prague, where she had researched peasant agriculture eight years before. On her return, she began to learn the stories that had not yet reached the West. Social-democratic leaders were being sent to concentration camps; Jewish families were disappearing. As the war raged on, Warriner organized camps and trains for a thousand working-­ class anti-Nazi dissenters and Jewish families, coordinating safe transport for them to small plots of land in Canada where they could settle as farmers.9 Returning home after the war, Warriner plunged into the problems of poverty with renewed zeal. She joined forces with Paul Lamartine Yates, author of a study of food production in six European nations.10 Yates had activism in his blood. Both his parents were campaigners for public housing and women’s rights in the early years of the twentieth century. A photograph taken in January 1912, when Yates was three, shows him playing in his mother’s garden while she attended to frail suffragettes, weakened from participating in sustained hunger strikes, by which they protested the lack of voting rights for women. The memory must have made an impression, for among Yates’s first appointments in his twenties was as a junior member of Seebohm Rowntree’s committee on British Agriculture, which published in 1938 a report called British Agriculture: The Principles of Future Policy that demonstrated the connection between hunger and poverty in Britain. The report revealed a systematic relationship between poverty, underconsumption of food, and ill health, and prescribed a mandate for the state taking a further role in directing food production and remedying the conditions of workers.11

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A decade later found Yates writing about agriculture with Doreen Warriner, then joining forces with other experts on nutrition to found the FAO. Warriner and Yates felt certain that the major challenge ahead was in transforming the plight of impoverished peasants around the world: a population that, like the peasants of Eastern Europe, had only undergone a “very recent emancipation from serfdom.”12 Looking to the Irish model, Warriner argued that small farms could offer a sustainable life for political and ethnic refugees like those she had helped in Prague. She also believed that land reform more generally offered a path to democratic prosperity. In her many books on land reform, Warriner regularly invoked the family farm system of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as evidence that broadcast land settlement created stable democracies. By the 1940s and ’50s, many Western intellectuals, including the ones who worked inside those marble bunkers in Rome, were following events around the world that seemed to show a growing impatience for land redistribution. Land redistribution was a central focus of peasant movements in Ireland, India, and other places where racial underclasses had been denied the possibility of owning land for centuries, laboring as underpaid, uneducated tenants or sharecroppers. Wherever these movements erupted into organized revolutions, redistribution of land was a primary demand; if anticolonialism succeeded, the descendants of enslaved persons and sharecroppers and tenants might thus become landowners in their own right. To Warriner and Yates, the rise of authoritarian governments represented a clear threat to these humane objectives. Reflecting on recent clashes in Eastern Europe, they warned that land redistribution, while ameliorating the economic burden of the peasants, might be used to impose authoritarian rule—as it had in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Such initiatives could thus facilitate the rise of “military cliques and semi-fascist dictatorships.”13 The idea of land redistribution as a peaceful path, or “third way,” between market exploitation and dictatorship grew out of such reflections on Eastern Europe. What was needed, Warriner and Yates argued, was not merely land redistribution but also economic independence, such that farmers could actively engage and defend a democracy that reflected the range of their interests. They argued that planned economies were best positioned to create economic security and thus seed the conditions for democracy: To avoid authoritarian control, new states would need to create opportunity rapidly; and this required economic planning—especially the coordination of prices and markets and

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programs to teach peasants about technology. They recommended a system of cooperatives and shared technology supporting small, economically independent farmers who could then make up their own minds about politics. Such plans would provide new states with comprehensive economic programs for both cities and towns, ensuring “economic conditions under which the peasants can greatly increase their outputs,” and both urban and rural workers could look for “a steadily rising level of incomes.”14 Warriner and Yates theorized that planned economies were most vital for rural workers due to the nature of the agricultural cycle. Peasants, they argued, were economically vulnerable in an industrial economy where workers with wage increases were likely to spend more of their money on manufactured goods than on food. Modern states could cushion peasants from the inherent vulnerability of agricultural enterprise, which, unlike manufacture, couldn’t be planned several months or even years in advance, and couldn’t be easily scaled to adjust to new information from the market. According to Warriner and Yates, because fluctuations of this kind were so poorly understood, peasants had been the last in society to benefit from progress in health, education, or welfare. State programs could ameliorate human misery, they argued, and governments should adopt measures to protect agricultural workers; such sound engagements, they reasoned, could inoculate peasants against the political promises offered by would-be despots. They wrote: “Man is beginning to realize that he can exercise control. . . . Peasants in their economic lives are still at the mercy of the rest of the community which exploits them, but this state of affairs need not continue for ever.”15 Coordinated expenditure and management by a centralized bureaucratic state could enable a new economy—one marked by “economic conditions under which the peasants can greatly increase their output,” even supplying a “steadily rising level of incomes.”16 Economic planning thus lay at the root of a general revolution to increase prosperity and economic security while ensuring a path to democracy in which peasants would not be easily wooed by authoritarian forces. According to Warriner and Yates, by setting farmers up with individual plots of soil, land redistribution would be a key element of economic planning in most nations. In a later book, published in 1955, Warriner laid out a plan premised on recent UN reports that, in her words, “put forward the contention that land reform . . . must be regarded as a condition of economic development.”17 Soon after describing these schemes in print, Warriner and Yates would each have opportunities to realize them in reality. While Warriner went on to

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advise a variety of post-colonial nations, Yates would help to found the FAO, working alongside John Boyd Orr, another veteran of the British crusade against hunger. Unlike Yates the activist, Orr was a professor turned adviser to the state. Experiments published by Orr in 1927 proved that Scottish schoolchildren given milk grew stronger than their peers. He was the veteran of a campaign to remedy the condition of Britain’s working classes by providing cheap access to food. His 1936 report, Food, Health, and Income, argued for an increased role by the state in the nutrition of the poor. In the decade that followed, Europe was wracked by food shortages, and Orr’s work offered a model for European policy.18 In 1945, Orr appeared in Quebec at the FAO conference as an unofficial adviser whose scientific expertise allowed him to make the case for an international organization with the executive authority to fight human undernutrition around the globe. Despite having been excluded from the official British delegation, Orr electrified the conference with a sermon in which he condemned political inaction about nutrition in vivid terms. “The people wanted bread,” said Orr, “but were given statistics.”19 The next year, Orr was selected as the FAO’s first director general.20 Orr, like Yates and Warriner, believed in the power of state planning to level human disparities. Orr had already spent a decade publishing books that envisioned a top-down food board for Britain whose mission would be to collect information on where food was grown and where it could be sold, and to advise farmers about what to grow. At the FAO, Orr would style the same dreams on a global scale. Orr’s agenda for the FAO was therefore threefold: creating the institution as an independent, policy-making institution capable of recommending global strategies; combating the worst consequences of poverty by supporting a worldwide food program (a “World Food Plan”); and challenging the long-term consequences of racism in Europe’s former colonies. All three objectives were marked by a profound faith in the importance and inevitability of coordinated management, and the third strategy strongly implied land redistribution around the world: it emphasized the importance of coordinated planning of technology, education, and welfare programs by social scientists, and highlighted the role that international and national organizations could play in reversing long-term injustice.21 Orr’s view of how a coordinating institution could support society was, if anything, even grander than that of Warriner and Yates. He wished to level the

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divide not merely between rich and poor or rural and urban, but also between different races and different experiences of empire. Addressing the fate of former colonies in the postwar world, Orr recast a phrase that Kipling had used in a very different sense when complaining of the “White Man’s Burden” to educate and civilize the backward races of the world through violence and conquest. Nearly fifty years later, not all British elites were so sanguine about exploitation. Orr’s book The White Man’s Dilemma, published in 1953, warned of the widening gulf between the “haves” and “have-nots.”22 That tension, he believed, would “end in holocaust” unless a “world authority” provided “environmental conditions which would enable [the poor] to attain their full inherited capacity for physical and mental ability.” Such a world authority, he argued, would effectively eliminate all “difference between the ability of men of different races.”23 Orr’s prophecy bears quoting at length: The natives of Asia, Africa, and Latin America would become the equals of the white man, and as these continents became industrialized the Europeans and their descendants, the Americans, would lose the control of the world they gained in their 300 years of conquest from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This, then, is the white man’s dilemma. He can attempt by force to maintain military and economic supremacy . . . the final outcome of which will be the downfall of Western civilization. On the other hand, he can . . . join the human family and use his present industrial supremacy to develop the resources of the earth to put an end to hunger and poverty, with resulting world-wide economic prosperity.24 The White Man’s Dilemma, in other words, was whether to choose racism or whether to cooperate in achieving global well-being. Worldwide flourishing, Orr suggested, would necessitate hard choices by rich nations and individuals. Laying the groundwork for cooperation required extreme sacrifice on the part of white nations and individuals; but only visionary sacrifice could support the infrastructure required to prevent violent confrontations for generations to come. The sacrifices he coyly alluded to were nowhere specifically spelled in his book, but as the work of others at the FAO made clear, the primary sacrifice required of whites was their claim to land. Although his work has been largely forgotten today, Orr embodied an impressive optimism regarding the real potential of social science and interna-

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tional governance to remedy long-term inequalities on a planetary scale. In part because of the breadth of his vision, Orr was chosen to lead the FAO from 1945 to 1948 as its first director general; and in 1949, for his advocacy of a “world food plan” and his work to create the FAO, Orr received the Nobel Peace Prize.25 Working alongside Yates and Orr was Frank Lidgett McDougall, a rugged Australian settler turned seasoned diplomat. In his youth, McDougall claimed, he cleared eighty acres to plant fruit trees before joining the Australian agricultural lobby in London as it negotiated for preferential trade terms with Britain and the outside world. He became a forceful advocate of income redistribution. He considered himself an “artist at propaganda,” and he was described by his contemporaries as a master statesman, skilled at concealing his agenda while he brought others on board.26 If the credentials of Orr and Yates were those of civil servants with an activist streak, McDougall’s were capitalistic and pragmatic. Like that of Orr and Yates, McDougall’s work was inspired by discoveries in the relatively young science of nutrition. But where Orr and Yates saw opportunities for state reform to relieve the poor, from McDougall’s point of view, the discovery of undernourished populations and concerned governments in Europe meant promising new markets for Australian produce. Unlike Orr and Yates, McDougall understood firsthand how a former colony might struggle for fair terms of trade. He offered a capitalist perspective that overlapped with a colonial one: a line of asking questions about the opportunities for former colonies opened by science under a new world order. In underscoring the anti-racist and anticolonial bias of the FAO’s founders, we should not lose sight of the founders’ own racial privilege. As white men who were British citizens or subjects, Yates, Orr, and McDougall enjoyed privileges that many of their colonial counterparts did not. McDougall’s perspective on colonial opportunity was that of an Australian citizen, not a Kenyan or an Indian. Persons of color, however distinguished, would not have enjoyed the same opportunity of appointment as did Yates, Orr, and McDougall. Orr’s anti-racism was distinctly ahead of its time, standing in direct contrast to the prognostications of contemporaries such as John Russell—the former director of Britain’s Rothamsted Experimental Station, the country’s major center for agricultural research. Russell believed that decolonization among uncivilized peoples would lead to the economic collapse of their nations.27 Even though his vision had been forged in Britain, Orr was an exception to many contemporary currents alive in the contemporary husk of British Em-

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pire, where the legacy of racial injustice was still abundantly clear to anyone who looked. Even while the FAO was just settling into its offices in Rome, the sway of British Empire persisted around the globe, its rule marked—as it had been for centuries—by a general hostility to native land claims. In 1952, Kenya’s British administrators learned of native movements to reclaim the traditional landholdings on which the Kikuyu people were now nominally “squatters” on white-­owned farms. The British rounded up the Kikuyu into concentration camps, tortured and massacred them, and summarily suppressed the paper trail that resulted. British administrators, still clinging to empire, were terrified of the conversations happening elsewhere about the shape of justice and the legacy of land confiscation around the world.28 The Kikuyu incident was a graphic illustration of the reluctance of whites to relinquish their privilege, as Orr had suggested. British Kenya was far from the only colony where the power of a white population rested on continued acts of theft and intimidation of indigenous people. In South Africa, Australia, and the United States, white populations continued to tyrannize natives and minorities, while land redistribution remained a subject beyond debate. In the context of the racial prejudice common to the Western nations that exerted the most influence at the United Nations’ founding, white privilege meant access. Speaking with world leaders at the Homestead Hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia, in 1943, it was Yates, Orr, and McDougall who formed the lobby that persuaded the gathered nations of the benefits of possible cooperation around agriculture, well before the United Nations was officially in operation.29 With their expertise in nutrition as an item of national security, their representation of opportunity in the relatively innocuous case of Australia’s agricultural lobby, and their pragmatic focus on diplomacy and capitalism, the founders could gain access and persuade world leaders of the necessity for setting up an international organization. Privilege was matched with opportunism. It was McDougall who caught the significance for future nations of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proclamation of “freedom from want” in a speech in 1941.30 It was also McDougall’s swift mind that snared Roosevelt in turn, a year later, when the Australian proposed “an international agency for food and agriculture” as a UN activity that would be bold in intent, but realistic in terms of diplomacy—“not too controversial,” McDougall promised.31 Further diplomacy gained the agency a budget— almost one-third of which was supported by the United States—a headquarters,

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a staff, and a growing mandate to solve the potential troubles of nutrition, population, and agriculture associated with the developing world. Forged by privilege, science, and cunning in equal measure, the FAO was a work of art in the genre of diplomatic craft. The progressive mindset of its founders set the FAO on a track distinct from that of other international institutions in Washington, New York, or Geneva. As early as 1948, the FAO’s second director general, Norris Dodd, would embark on a tour of India where he would meet with Indian economists whose ideas would be interwoven into policy at the FAO. In 1956, the FAO would gain its first director general from the developing world in B. R. Sen, an Indian diplomat. The World Bank, in contrast, would not have a director from the developing world until 2012, when it appointed Jim Yong Kim, a South Korean. Through its founders’ commitments to anti-racism and economic opportunity in the developing world, the FAO would become the institutional pivot of ideas about land redistribution and post-colonial emancipation. Between Yates’s commitments to land redistribution, Orr’s vision of an international agency dissolving racial difference, and McDougall’s dedication to economic opportunity for developing nations, a new kind of government emerged. The FAO was not as powerful as some would have liked, but it was a government all the same, charged with reconfiguring the map of inequality around the world.

The Global Outlook of the Rome Consensus The emergence of an international superstate appeared, to adherents of the concept, to be the natural unfolding of European ideas about rights and the protection of individual liberties that had been debated since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when European statesmen gathered to close the Napoleonic Wars and plan a lasting peace. In the years since then, however, issues of economics loomed increasingly large in discussions of international governance. By the early twentieth century, both Soviet and American plans for international order emphatically promised to end famine permanently.32 Debate about international governance changed again as former colonies declared their independence from Europe. Many newly independent nations were largely composed of impoverished agrarian populations still reeling from decades of genocidal famines and droughts. Some nations proposed a suite of reforms, for instance, India, which insisted that any international agreements to which the former colony assented would necessarily entail the reversal of the sins of empire. The chief weapon of extortion under most European empires

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had been colonial landholding, and most former colonies wanted to undo the consolidation of landownership in the hands of a few wealthy absentees, which had entailed the suffering of a majority of the population: those who tilled the soil in abject poverty so that Europeans abroad could enjoy the profits of colonized labor. The United Nations was convened as an advocate and a force for egalitarianism, an entity that might give equal access to all international players on the world stage. Concern with fairness was on the table from the beginning—and with reason. In 1943, 2.1 million to 3 million individuals would perish in Bengal alone from a devastating famine; endemic famines were part of the legacy left to the developing world by colonial rule, in which entire systems of in­ frastructure concentrated on exporting food from starving nations rather than feeding poor farmers when tragedy hit. In the same year, agricultural leaders from the West—including Orr, Yates, and McDougall—would convene to discuss whether a coordinating institution could play a role. McDougall was part of the interim committee that met to discuss the future shape of the FAO; exporting food from rich nations to famished ones was part of the agenda.33 In part, the debate around exporting food to famished subjects demonstrated the representatives’ concern for protecting markets for rich nations. But how to relieve Bengal’s famine remained a subject of earnest attention, as did the issue of fair representation for poorer nations. As the United Nations took form, decision making took shape around an ideal of fairness—one nation, one vote—that allowed the voices of former colonies to matter.34 The program for managing the world supply of food did not remain as a developed world agenda, handed down by followers of Franklin Roosevelt and John Boyd Orr. Much of the FAO’s remaining agenda would come from the former colonies of the developing world; and the post-colonial nations themselves would demand the FAO’s commitment to land redistribution. Agents at the FAO consulted with various post-colonial nations about how the organization’s advice could be most useful; and these conversations frequently centered around the reallocation of land to peasants and how to make it profitable. Their ideas spread through meetings with post-colonial leaders, conferences with U.S. officials, and even textbooks that circulated in U.S. universities. Research by Indian economists directly influenced FAO policy objectives aimed at minimizing developing world debt and prioritizing economic development on terms dictated by the developing world. FAO agents would thus play a major role in digesting and reformulating a strategy for land redistribution around the globe.

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Deferring in this way to member nations in the post-colonial and developing world, the FAO’s agenda, from the beginning, focused not simply on food markets but also on justice. The charge of participation and fairness was written into the FAO’s mandate, for the conference in Quebec in 1945 that founded the organization had urged its offices “to develop and maintain such economic conditions in agriculture and in related industries as will steadily better the conditions of farmers and rural populations, and provide them with a full share in the fruits of the expanding world economy.”35 According to Gunnar Myrdal, one of the foremost contemporary international observers of economic development, the FAO was tasked with the administration of equality itself, as it presided over the fate of 700 million peasants worldwide—most of them landless agricultural workers. From this perspective, there was, perhaps, no better way to support the former colonies than by setting up works to ensure their livelihoods.36 FAO leaders almost immediately began to advertise their organization as a key player in the global redistribution of land. In 1951, Norris Dodd, the American civil servant who followed John Boyd Orr as director general of the FAO, gave a speech to the Federal Council of Churches that negatively compared Nazi ideas of the homeland and the divisive slogans that had defined Germany and Poland as territories for the “master race” with the promotion of “America for Americans.”37 In place of such polarizing slogans—which invoked fresh memories of genocide during the last world war—Dodd proposed a “uniting” values system, summed up by the title of his speech: “The Earth for Man.”38 Dodd’s slogan signaled the FAO’s commitment to combating hunger, disease, and poverty—the same values that President Harry S. Truman had defined as central to U.S. ambitions in his “Point Four” speech three years earlier. Dodd recast Truman’s fight against poverty in materialist and ecological terms: “Can we use the resources of the earth well enough so that all people everywhere can have, or see clear hope for, a decent life?”39 The FAO’s mission, Dodd indicated, was to encourage the nations of the world to deploy knowledge, technology, and policy in a way that ensured that racism, exclusion, and nationalism would never have an opportunity to rise again. Redistributive justice remained at the forefront of messages articulated in the FAO’s agenda for at least its first ten years. In 1953, Dodd addressed a conference of the leaders of young persons’ movements, who gathered in Rome under the aegis of the World Assembly of Youth, the UN branch dedicated to promoting youth organizations for the cause of democracy and leadership. This was the kind of event designed to inspire visions of international collab-

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oration and a trajectory of improvement. If Orr had been coy about land redistribution, Dodd put the issue front and center. “In many countries the land-­ owning, land-holding, land-renting laws and customs do not provide the farmer with security of tenure on his land,” he declared.40 Dodd articulated a plan for land redistribution that involved rethinking landlord and tenant relationships. “These laws and customs cannot very well be changed—even slowly and carefully as they should be, in accord with the traditions of the country—unless people also come to understand and agree with the changes that should be made,” he explained.41 As Dodd went on to show, global progress depended on the worldwide education of young people about land reform—its history and its potentiality—and he was prepared for his organization to support that challenge, with the help of member nations. The livelihood of peasants and security against displacement structured a significant portion of the FAO’s organization. The land redistribution agenda shaped the general organization of the FAO down to the directives handed to individual agents. In 1951, a major FAO report laid out a roadmap for global economic development and food production, targeting land monopoly as a subject for reform: both holdings that were too vast—and therefore wasteful— and holdings too small for subsistence agriculture should be targeted and reformed. Both represented a residue of colonialism, according to the report, that in an advanced era needed to be reformed. Single-owner proprietors must be supported by an array of state provisions of institutional infrastructure, including secure land tenure policies, freedom from eviction, the titling of owned land, and credit at reasonable rates. The FAO would target the redistribution of land from large landholders to smallholders as the most effective policy for states to pursue economic growth while developing a political environment suited to democracy.42 The 1951 report also directly responded to the demands of developing nations. Here the FAO explicitly pledged to undertake the creation of regional centers in Brazil, Thailand, and Iraq that would concentrate on land problems. To accommodate an expanding list of client states pursuing land redistribution and related programs, the FAO would have to form new branches of its administration. Later that same year, as their offices were relocated from Washington to Rome, the Rural Welfare Division received the aid of a new technical wing: the Agriculture Division, which encompassed several “branches”: Animal Production, Plant Production, Land and Water Use, Rural Welfare, and Agricultural Institutions and Services.43 Over most of the 1950s and ’60s, the FAO’s agenda, forged around ending

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hunger but extended to the redistribution of land by developing nations, continued to align with policy ideas in Britain and the United States. American policies and land redistribution programs in Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Latin America were compatible with ideas at the FAO, and reflected the earlier ideas of Warriner, Yates, Orr, and Dodd. Throughout these decades, the U.S. Department of State sponsored international conferences on agriculture stressing land redistribution as a key component of international development. In 1961, in sympathy with Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, Latin American countries vowed, in the Declaration of Punta del Este, to encourage “programs of comprehensive agrarian reform.”44 This easy alignment, however, was not destined to last. The United States began to pursue a fundamentally different vision of rural development—one aligned more with elite interests than with the ideas then emerging in the developing world. The limits of the FAO’s long-term effectiveness would be structured by certain elements of its founding principles that limited the organization’s ability to navigate a treacherous tension among the United Nations’ member nations. While the leading powers of Europe and America relinquished a measure of control to the votes of newly independent nations, they remained chary of giving up control over issues related to sovereignty. Like the League of Nations before it, the United Nations found its role defined, therefore, as an “advisory” body (as opposed to a legislature or court system). No UN branches had the power to compel, and neither did the FAO. The FAO, therefore, was charged with merely advising member nations in developing their own ministries of agriculture and their own agricultural policies. In fact, early ambitious programs proposed at the FAO—such as Norris Dodd’s international clearinghouse for agricultural commodities, which would have used weighted contributions from member nations to solve food crises around the world as they emerged—were shuttered by leading nations hungry for control over markets.45 Within these constraints—a limited authority to compel or to create, and a larger capacity to advise and to support member nations—the administrators of the FAO constructed a theory of how to facilitate a transformation in the historical course of landownership. Considering the scope of their dual charges— the mandate to end hunger, dictated at its founding, and the objective to support land redistribution, handed down by developing world member nations—that they accomplished as much as they did reflected both the profound commitment of the organization’s founders and administrators, and their powerful grasp of long-term historical trends and the futures they signaled.

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A Theory Built on History In Norris Dodd’s vision, the FAO would aid nations in the process of implementing “necessary reforms in agrarian structure,” a task for which individual nations would ultimately bear responsibility.46 Many advocates of land redistribution at the United Nations believed that land redistribution should precede and undergird other forms of economic development—including education and technical assistance. Dodd believed that the developing world faced the question of what exactly would entail the “full and wise development of the basic national resources of land and water.”47 In his correspondence with member nations, F. T. Wahlen, director of the FAO’s Agricultural Division, left no doubt about the FAO’s commitment. Agrarian reform was the “first step” in implementing all other forms of economic development.48 Writing as the director general’s special assistant, McDougall asserted that land redistribution was crucial to “all the issues of human rights, etc.”49 Administrators at the FAO frequently presented land redistribution as an essential step for all nations undertaking a universal path to development in the transition from imperial domination to independence, democracy, and growth. In the early decades of its existence, the FAO expanded its mandate to cover a widening realization of the diverse aspects of land redistribution problems, and the organization attracted the world’s most distinguished social scientists to its ranks. In 1947, the FAO founded both a Land Use Branch (renamed the Land and Water Division later the same year) and a Rural Welfare Division, the former to study land tenure and allocation and the latter to deal with education and institutions that would support farmers’ efforts to improve their holdings— a provision particularly important to small farmers, who could rarely afford to consult with scientific expertise on their own. Innumerable readjustments to the structure would follow until 1968, when the Agricultural Division was reorganized into the following branches: Cooperatives; Marketing; Agricultural Education; Agricultural Extension; Development Institutions and Services; Cooperatives; Credit and Rural Sociology; and Land Tenure and Agrarian Reform— the names of which, to varying degrees, underscored the centrality of land redistribution to the FAO’s work.50 From the beginning, both the Rural Welfare Division and the Land and Water Division were staffed with agrarian experts whose experiences gave them a direct relationship to the plight of small farmers in the developing world. Directing the Rural Welfare Division was Horace Belshaw, a British grocer’s son turned New Zealand economics professor and specialist in land redistribu-

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tion. Belshaw had taken a lead role in government efforts to provide housing and opportunities for the Maori and preached a model of development based on careful surveys of local populations. Leading the Land and Water Division was J. Lossing Buck, an American land utilization expert who had completed a survey of land use in China. Buck’s ex-wife, Pearl, had recently published The Good Earth, a best-selling novel written during their time together in China. Both Lossing’s book on China and Pearl’s portrayed a world where hardworking farmers almost never ascended, so choked were their efforts by the hoarding of resources by the rich.51 Under those leaders worked individuals whose experiences with displacement were even more vivid. Under Lossing Buck was Erich Jacoby, who had fled the Holocaust in Germany via the Philippines, where, before joining the FAO in Rome, he had composed a study of the plight of landless agricultural laborers and their demands. After his tenure at the FAO, Jacoby went on to write prescient critiques of the influence of corporations on agrarian policy around the world. Answering to both Buck and Jacoby was the son of a leftist refugee from the Nazis, Rainer Schickele, author of several textbooks on the coming revolution of land redistribution to small farmers.52 The United Nations’ founders shared the view that modern economic policies should be dictated by an understanding of agrarian history. Addressing a group of agricultural historians in 1949, Dodd wryly explained the role of history in advising international policies about land: “Our ‘new’ institutions are in reality but a stage in human development, having antecedents in other institutions, pushed up by force of circumstance, fostered by the determination of men of strong purpose.”53 Elucidating the work of such visionaries, he argued that history had a powerful role in development: “A knowledge of the past of an organization is essential to an understanding of its present character and to an intelligent charting of its future course.”54 Economic histories of peasant rebellion were woven into the fabric of the United Nations. These histories formed the basis for the United Nations’ research agenda, and the organization’s major undertakings were structured around them. They also fashioned how the United Nations talked about itself, and how it developed its agrarian projects among the newly liberated former colonies of the world. The FAO recruited social scientists who interpreted recent events in world history as a signal of a coming revolution in land redistribution. In the postwar world, an understanding of the role of peasants in world history lent a framework for social scientists of territory to argue for the necessity of ratio-

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nally driven land redistribution. They came to see land redistribution as in­ extricably or intrinsically linked to the course of racial justice in history. Social scientists insisted that the experience of land and the need for shelter defied divisions of race and class, and that land as an entity therefore fundamentally transcended politics. For those who looked back over the recent revolutions in Ireland and Mexico, the lesson of the twentieth century was that access to land must be broadened. The moral lesson of peasant struggles, as recorded in history books and social theories, was that the state must intervene in landownership to overcome the abuses of the colonial past. Social scientists wove historical understanding into a theory of the inevitability of world land redistribution. The European social scientists who participated in conversations about development often identified distributed landownership as the very fulcrum of economic opportunity and political justice.55 FAO agents recited the teachings of contemporary social science: the enclosure of the peasant commons represented a major crime, and the redistribution of land by the British state after the 1880s represented a major victory. This tradition, they believed, offered a path toward democracy for developing nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Several individuals with a deep conceptual background in the history of the European peasant commons found their way to the recently founded United Nations. Swedish agrarian economist Folke Dovring, a historian of medieval agriculture, became an administrator at the FAO from 1954 to 1960. After Dovring’s departure, the FAO was joined by John Higgs, an Oxford history graduate who had specialized in the history of English common holdings in land. One of the founders of the scholarly journal Agricultural History Review, Higgs joined the FAO in the 1960s; after 1974, he became a deputy director of research, writing reports on farming and practice in Mexico, Algeria, Egypt, Peru, and Tunisia.56 Social scientists at the FAO in the 1950s and ’60s often generalized from the long history of peasant claims on land to contemporary issues of famine, hunger, and class equality. Folke Dovring surveyed the recent history of land reform around the world, outlining the process of state-guided breakup of large estates, anti-consolidation taxation policy, and the creation of local commons in various European nations. He offered land management guided by European experts as a model for other nations, urging a program of small farms clustered around commonly held lands. Dovring stressed that land redistribution was one of the most pressing issues facing postwar Europe: “Agrarian

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problems are basic to any discussion of social problems even in modern Europe,” he wrote in a 1956 study of peasant history.57 At one conference in 1964, social scientists working with a variety of historical case studies listed the appropriate policy responses: written contracts and registered titles; fixed ceilings or upward boundaries for rents; compensating tenants for “enduring improvements made on the land”; and, where possible, creating government-backed mortgages to allow tenants to become owner-­ occupiers of their farms. This was almost exactly the same formula created in Ireland from 1881 to 1903—a perfect encapsulation of the critique of landlord government leveled by Irish radicals and validated by J. S. Mill nearly a century earlier, now distilled from utopianism into history—and, once again—into social science.58 In 1970, Elias Tuma, a scholar who regularly consulted for the FAO, proposed a history of land redistribution that encompassed peasant struggle since the failed rebellion of the Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome. Dozens of similar works were produced around this time, surveying the history of land reform and of peasant insurgencies in Western and Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the United States among the indigenous and the poor, over a long continuum of time.59 In its broadest outlines, the story of land redistribution began with feudalism and ended with post-colonial revolution. In postwar social science, a shared sense of history often appeared as an assumption about the inevitability of and necessity for land redistribution. The relative importance of land redistribution varied by field—more central in the case of agrarian economics, rural sociology, law, or history, less central in the case of macroeconomic theory or policy studies. In one exhaustive survey of the field of agrarian economics as a whole, experts detected a tripartite goal held in common by almost all practitioners in the field: the “redistribution of land, a reorganization of agricultural producing firms, and the development and extension of supporting services to the reformed and to the existing small farm sectors.”60 In historically centered disciplines, land redistribution was frequently acknowledged as a policy for addressing the consolidation of power among elites, the problem of race and civil rights, and other such legacies of empire that threatened newfound democracies. To many observers, an expectation of imminent land redistribution implied a future in which this epochal change would fundamentally heal the grievances of the past, eliminating the politics of race and class. The story of the FAO’s use of history to guide its work to support developing

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nations complements a very different story of contemporary development initiatives in America. Historians today generally discuss “the birth of economic development” in terms of ideas about the history of Western Europe that began to influence American leadership in the 1960s. This trend was canonized by Columbia economist W. W. Rostow in a classic article and the book that expanded on it, The Stages of Economic Growth (1960). Rostow argued that the peasants of the developing world literally needed to experience an agrarian revolution before an industrial revolution, just as England had done. Rostow’s theory of growth created a single-track model for developing nations, an inflexible set of economic ideas, based on the British experience, against which developing nations would be judged. In theory, Rostow’s vision was compatible with making small-scale initial investments, but it also emphasized industrialization as the superior destiny for all global economies. Meanwhile, scholars such as Barrington Moore began publishing macrohistorical overviews of the agricultural and industrial revolutions in Britain and America. Moore’s subtitle to The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, explicitly acknowledging continuities with the land struggles of medieval and early modern Europe. Both scholars implied that land redistribution could avert revolution by addressing peasant grievances at their point of origin.61 U.S. theorists’ fascination with long-term history grew out of two main sources. The first was a long line of British writers whose works about enclosure and the peasant commons pointed to English aristocracy as the vestige of a feudal past; both Moore and Rostow followed British Civil War historian Richard Tawney in emphasizing the role of peasant grievances against landlords as fundamental to an understanding of historic triggers of unrest. The second influence was the work of French historians such as Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, who understood the long-term past as a means to grasp the essence of national and regional similarities and differences. Influenced by both sources, Rostow and Moore worked to extrapolate “models” in which Western experiences such as land redistribution and industrialization offered a peaceful path to prosperity and democracy—a “model” codified by experts that other nations could follow, which would result in a process proponents called “modernization.”62 Models offered a convenient repackaging of historical theories for policy makers. American development agencies, more than any other entities, prescribed the “modernization” model for the developing world to guide aid, trade, and loan schemes. Conformity with binding rules generated from the model—

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typically presented as capitalist, pro-democracy, and open to partnership with U.S. industry—became the basis for securing the loans needed for industrialization. In practice, the U.S. modernization model created a standard for American-friendly policies that undercut American support for developing world initiatives, especially land redistribution and support for small farmers.63 The “modernization” model and the “land redistribution” model had much in common. Both looked to history as the guide for present-day policies. Both enshrined economic opportunity, political stability, and democracy as replicable virtues that could be encouraged through the correct amalgam of policies. Both functioned through essentializing principles of the Western model that could be applied across the developing world to good result—a reductionist technique which, to borrow the words of Arturo Escobar, tended to take on a “labeling” function that reduced “the whole reality of a person to a single feature or trait (access to land, for instance).”64 The land redistribution model, however, could not be further from the modernization model in key features of its treatment of history and its application. Land redistribution theory looked to the history of empire, exploitation, starvation, resistance, and reform—an unexpurgated story that acknowledged the suffering of colonial nations, where peasants were imagined with an active role in remaking their nations. Theorists such as Warriner described resistance and violence as inevitable—unless nations followed Ireland’s example and redistributed land to the many, using government-backed mortgages to settle the issue of compensation with landlords. The modernist story, on the contrary—at least as adopted as a model for policy—focused primarily on a history of technology centered on the accomplishments of Western inventors and investors, suggesting that the rise of developing nations depended solely on the improvements associated with historical and contemporary Western technology. In this conception, developing nations would act for their own benefit chiefly by copying innovations created elsewhere, and their poorest and most rural populations would not be authors of their own liberty. In the land redistribution model, liberation was expected to proceed from the poorest and most “backward” of nations and classes. It was those populations that would invent new techniques in the pursuit of values they shared with peers around the world. The modernization model, in contrast, expected liberation from each nation’s elites, copying and importing technologies and ideas from the West. One could argue that a tacit theory of Western superiority informed the modernization model, but not the land redistribution model.

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Proponents of land redistribution diverged from modernization theory regarding the role of American investment and economic power in the developing world. Advocates of land redistribution at the FAO rejected plans that would saddle developing world farmers with debt owed to the developed world. In contrast, land redistribution arguments were “anticolonial,” and they categorically resisted any loan program that would install a new imperium that directly taxed or profited from small farmers in the developing world. Land redistribution, in other words, was rarely a strategy for enriching those who invested in conquest.65 Technology was another feature that marked the divergence of modernization theory from land redistribution. Emphasizing the role of Western technology in economic growth, modernization theorists frequently looked for a silver bullet that would unlock economic potential in the developing world— whether intervention came in the form of hydroelectric power, birth control, or the improved seeds and irrigation schemes dubbed by American agents the “Green Revolution.” In contrast, land redistribution theories were less focused on investment opportunities associated with any particular technology than on the general conditions of innovation, for which they drew extensively on the history of farmer cooperatives in Ireland and Europe. In theory, state-supported interventions like the creation and support of cooperatives would allow peasants to adopt milling machines or tractors, potentially becoming entrepreneurs or inventors in the process—a natural evolution of diverse commercial activities that already had a long history in Asia by the 1950s. Leaders at the FAO, convinced of Warriner’s doctrine, designed a global information infrastructure to convey technology to peasants around the world. At the heart of the gulf between these models was the different location in which each placed virtue: for modernization, virtue was identified with economic growth; for the land redistribution theorists, virtue was instead connected to human dignity. Unlike the modernist model, the land redistribution model was ultimately agnostic about the benefits of economic growth and economic stability. Indeed, in places such as Ireland and Mexico, land redistribution had created economies with relatively small divides between rich and poor, coupled with relatively low rates of growth. Low growth, however, was not a necessary effect of land redistribution. Some versions of a land redistribution program defined the terms under which a nation of small farmers could pursue economic growth comparable to other nations. But growth was not prescribed as an essential judge of the fitness of the redistribution model; rather,

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justice in terms of opportunity was understood as the defining virtue that motivated post-colonial nations.66 Land redistribution was thus at the center of a major global school of thought about economic development theory, utterly distinct from the modernization model with its teachings about Western superiority. Staffed with experts whose ideology echoed the story of peasant rebellion against landlords, the FAO was wonderfully poised to administer land issues, working as the adviser and facilitator of post-colonial nations around the world.

Empathy and the Expert What allowed so many international agrarian scientists to seek common cause with the peasants of the earth? One answer can be found in the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel closely associated with their work. Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth was a saga about the remorseless suffering of small farmers whose hard work is rewarded in good years, but who have no social supports to tide them over in times of famine and drought. Buck presented a narrative of individual rise and fall, depicting a society in which fierce competition for one estate keeps a community in a state of constant infighting. The poor farmer protagonist, Wang Lung, works hard enough to buy land, but during years of drought and famine, he is able to keep his family from starvation only by moving to the city, squatting, and working a rickshaw while his wife and children beg. Suddenly, an accident makes Wang Lung one of the wealthiest farmers in the village. He puts his wealth into land, and the harvests from his estates make him wealthier still. The reward for his success, however, is isolation: uncles and sons vie with one another for the riches that Wang Lung has amassed, and their disagreements ultimately leave him alone and unhappy. Buck’s fiction mirrored her husband’s work on China, which portrayed a nation where many peasants subsisted just above starvation level. Buck sketched a system in which the many go hungry and the few have more than they know what to do with. Her account of Wang Lung’s sudden enrichment—which leads him to sneer at peasants of the very class he emerged from, and sets his family members against one another—poignantly shows how competitiveness and individualism were part of a larger problem rooted in the way a particular society managed its resources. Buck’s novel became a best seller. A generation of American readers identified with Wang Lung’s struggle for survival. Many American families had be-

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come small farmers thanks to the provisions of the Homestead Act of 1862 and remained farmers until a later era; it was only in 1920 that the U.S. Census recorded that America was a majority-urban nation for the first time. Buck’s fiction was also a portrait of the cycles of hope and despair familiar to many American readers. In the year Buck’s novel appeared, U.S. farmers from Texas to Nebraska were unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, their topsoil dispersed by the sandy winds of the Dust Bowl. For American audiences, Buck’s novel remained a touchstone of peasant suffering and the need for reform at home as well as abroad. Part of the book’s power was lodged in Buck’s ability to talk about the issues of poverty and eviction that were determinative of so many recent revolutions and other world events. In 1938—the same year that Doreen Warriner moved to Prague, where she would dedicate herself to saving Jewish families from the concentration camps—Buck won the Nobel Prize in literature for her novel. Within a few years of its publication, The Good Earth was circulating in a nation that had chosen to make collective investments in farming through agricultural education programs, price controls, and technological innovations associated with the New Deal. For readers sensitive to economic theory, The Good Earth had its own special meaning utterly distinct from the literary merit noted by reviewers and prize committees. Thanks to her time spent traveling through China with her husband, John Lossing Buck, and later the couple’s postgraduate studies at Cornell, Pearl Buck was immersed in the world of academic theories then being woven around the peasant economies of the world. Six years after the publication of The Good Earth, and one year before Pearl won the Nobel Prize, Lossing published his own study of Chinese agriculture, a book that overlapped in both content and ideology with Pearl’s, and that would be, much like hers, a herald of things to come. In Lossing’s Land Utilization in China (1937), the agricultural economist recommended a program of development for China that featured community advising and shared technology, designed on the basis of scientific research. Lossing’s recommendations differed from those of the English historian of the peasantry, Richard Tawney, who had visited China in the previous decade and recently published his own assessment of the Chinese agricultural economy. In Tawney’s Land and Labour in China (1932)—written for the League of Nations—the historian had offered the leading statement on the need for land redistribution, comparing twentieth-century China to England on the cusp of its civil war. Tawney argued that land redistribution was inevitable in China, implying a historical continuity running between England, Ireland, Mexico,

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Russia, and China. But Lossing disagreed. Where Tawney measured change with stories, Lossing had tallied families and mapped resources, and his data showed that there was no way land redistribution would work in China: there were simply too many people and not enough land. Developed in the same years as Lossing’s book, Pearl’s The Good Earth offered a lightly coded commentary on the theories of her husband. The novel sketched the same world as the treatise: a landscape of tiny farms where only a few landed estates in China were lucrative enough to keep families from starvation in times of drought and famine. Indeed, many of Lossing’s observations about the Chinese economy and farmers’ need for services would appear, in miniature, in the details of peasant life described by Pearl in The Good Earth. Wang Lung’s first instinct—as soon as he acquires money—is to hide the silver under the floorboards and behind loose bricks in the walls of his house. Lossing believed the common Chinese practice of “silver hoarding” was responsible for driving up agricultural prices so much that farmers’ earnings were continually sinking relative to the cost of corn in the previous season.67 Hoarded silver proved the need for a coordinated system of state-backed credit, such that earnings could be reinvested in the land. The Good Earth’s depiction of the omnipresent “village quarrel” had a corollary in Land Utilization’s discussion of water rights.68 Pearl’s literary genius aside, The Good Earth offers an incisive depiction of ideas about the importance of collective investment in land developed by two authors during eighteen years of marriage. The collective investments in farming they recommended would be carried forward by Lossing after 1946, when he became an administrator at the FAO. Whereas Pearl sketched out the struggle to plow such farms, and the misery of the refugees who fled their land in search of relief when drought set in, Lossing gave a theory of what needed to change. Because of the small size of most farms, Lossing argued, China needed a different path to modernity than the one charted by Ireland and Mexico. Land redistribution alone would not work in such a populous nation as China. Lossing’s solution was land redistribution accompanied by technology. Lossing emphasized China’s need for a coordinated program of infrastructure and support, similar to the work being done to aid contemporary farmers in the United States. Raising the Chinese peasant out of misery, he explained, could only be accomplished by a program that paired land redistribution with scientific land reclamation, forestry, agricultural credit, and highway building—in other words, a New Deal for China. Pearl’s novel shared with Lossing’s treatise an emphasis on the backward

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state of technology in China and the opportunities that agriculture abroad presented for improvement. The Good Earth presented Chinese poverty as an allegory about the importance of collective investment in infrastructure, education, and welfare of the kind that America was shortly to make in the New Deal. Lossing had implied in his treatise that Chinese peasants would fare better in a community that shared common implements like hoes, oxen, and machinery, investing together in technological progress and social welfare. In Pearl’s novel, the Chinese village occupied by Wang Lung and his family did not share implements in this way, although the few instances of sharing—a handful of beans passing between farmers in the midst of famine—are all that enabled the protagonist’s survival. Pearl’s book thus suggests what Lossing’s directly asserts: collective investments in technology alone could save the starving farmers of the earth. We can anticipate at least one case where an agricultural economist might have been a position to read The Good Earth as a cipher for academic theory. Ardron Lewis, an agricultural economist, met Pearl when he was an undergraduate and she a postgraduate researcher at Cornell. He had studied with Lossing there, afterward working under him as an agricultural economist at the FAO, on whose behalf he had traveled the world as part of a global program of soil mapping. Decades later, as a professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, he took a bus to Connecticut—a pilgrimage to visit Pearl on her farm.69 Lewis’s attachment to Pearl highlights common threads between her fictionalized Chinese farmer and the real-life details observable in the biographies of many agricultural economists. Lewis spent his childhood on a sheep farm in Maine, an experience of poor farming that was not so far from the life of Chinese farmers in the first half of Buck’s novel. Like Wang Lung’s family, Lewis’s too had lived close to the land, and the monotony of the seasons was punctuated mainly by the birth of children who grew up playing with plants and farm implements as their toys.70 Lewis’s story differed from that of Wang Lung only by degree: the nearly inconceivable scarcity that Pearl witnessed and described in her novel was severe enough to drive women to murder their own children. Lewis’s experience of rural hardship was tame by comparison; and yet, many American and European social scientists of his generation had their own grim memories of rural struggles for survival during dustbowl and drought. It would have been easy for rural Americans and Europeans like Lewis to identify the history of the Chinese or Indian peasantry as their own: a story of hard-working families

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lured into competing for large-scale plots, although such families did best when they tended their own garden and when collective undertakings allowed them to succeed.71 Lewis’s work at the FAO helped to create a global service of educational and scientific advice for peasants around the world. It was exactly the kind of service that could have saved peasants from starvation in the China Pearl knew—if it had existed, it might have helped the fictional Wang Lung’s community escape from the vicious cycle of competition that sealed the protagonist’s fate. Agricultural economists like Lewis—working under the spell of The Good Earth— might well have imagined their careers as an attempt to undo a world wracked by the war of each against each. Lewis’s experience suggests a distinctive mindset operating among the experts who worked at the FAO. Unlike imperial experts in plant botany or U.S. experts in pesticide and mechanization—who are typically imagined as working at a distance, promoting an ideology of progress and Westernization—the FAO experts were marked by experiences that gave them an emotional connection to the peasants in whose service they labored. Experts they might be— but rather than proposing models for modernization and collaborating with diplomats to force developing nations to conform, many had personal experience of agricultural hardship, forced displacement, and anticolonial struggle that lent them direct empathy. For some of the bureaucrats who worked at the FAO, empathy was more than a happy coincidence: it was, in fact, a prized expression of the higher consciousness felt to be a key instrument for unlocking economic development around the world, a theme that the agricultural economist and FAO officer Rainer Schickele would draw upon at length in his 1968 book, Agricultural Revolution and Economic Development. Pearl’s novel, too, was woven through with calls for emotional resonance with the plight of Wang Lung and his family. The American success of The Good Earth suggests that many readers were willing to imagine that Chinese peasants might sweat, labor, aspire, and experience defeat much like themselves. But empathy also had its limits. For Lossing and Pearl, the period of incubation that led to the publication of both of their first books and their emergence as academic and popular experts on development nevertheless produced, on a personal level, a dynamic that was nothing short of toxic. In China, Lossing had openly embraced affairs and developed a reputation for behaving salaciously with his female students. When in a rage, Lossing called Pearl names and hit her. Meanwhile, Pearl was losing faith in the Pres-

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byterian missionary work that had originally brought them together. In 1935, four years after the publication of The Good Earth, she drove to Las Vegas, where she divorced Lossing for “cruelty” and married her literary editor on the same day. It was a victory for her independence of mind, and the beginning of a period of her life when she would challenge a series of cultural shibboleths, one after another, especially the Presbyterian missionary culture into which she was born. In the decades that followed, Pearl’s unhampered creativity would gush forth in the form of a new book almost every year.72 Despite this acrimonious ending, the relic of Pearl and Lossing’s common thinking about agriculture permeated her later novels—and through them spread to the rest of the American public.

World Homeland: Anti-Racism in the Ideology of One FAO Agent Did Pearl and her new husband drive back to Connecticut through the American Midwest, one wonders? By 1939, the highway in Missouri would be crowded by another rent strike. In a message that echoed the themes of Pearl’s novel, the strike’s leader, the black preacher Owen Whitfield, said, “Take your eyes out of the sky because someone is stealing your bread.”73 The crowds that Whit­ field led alongside the highway—African American laborers campaigning alongside whites—were leading a campaign to abolish sharecropping in America. In the United States, a new chapter in the struggle for occupancy rights was just beginning. As Pearl and her former editor were settling into connubial bliss, meanwhile, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Rainer Schickele, future author of a treatise that classified empathy as a necessary component of successful economic development, was brooding over the question of race. Despite—or perhaps because of—his German birth, Schickele had no patience for American racism, before or after his tenure at the FAO. In 1941, Schickele, then a researcher at Harvard, wrote to the governor of Oklahoma to protest the trial of two African American defendants accused of affiliation with the Communist Party. He sent money for their legal counsel— an act that would be inspected carefully.74 Support of communism became highly suspect in America after 1938, the year when the U.S. Congress appointed a committee to investigate acts of alleged disloyalty and subversive activities. In 1941, Schickele’s support of African American communists made him a

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potential target, and soon after sending money to support the Oklahomans, he received a letter informing him he was a person of interest to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rather than back down, Schickele sent another letter, this one to Congress, denouncing loyalty tests of all kinds as a danger to intellectual freedom itself. The letters were stored in files that would later come into the hands of the McCarthyist committees that policed government and international agencies for evidence of communist interference. The existence of such letters—and the review process that followed—would have cowed many; some academics, asked to testify against their friends and colleagues, were driven to perfidy or to suicide. But Schickele defended himself successfully over the next ten years, buoyed by a remarkable confidence in the true and the good. The allyship that Schickele had demonstrated in 1941 was the emblem of an interior constitution marked by an unflappable faith in the power of conviction and collaboration to succeed in the end. Of this Schickele was sure: a new world was possible, given support that was both sincere and sufficient. And in this world, the former colonies of the globe would provide land—and a home—for everyone. Indefatigable optimism about the power of collaboration to create a better world seems to have marked the character of many of those who assembled after 1945 to work at the FAO, which Schickele would join in 1953, becoming thereafter one of its most lyrical spokespersons and energetic evangelists. Like John Boyd Orr, Schickele embraced a critique of empire and racism that had first been articulated by the inhabitants of European colonies. Schickele would laud, for example, the model set by Lázaro Cárdenas, the president of Mexico in the 1930s responsible for nationalizing oil and overhauling agricultural organization in the name of the ejido system. He revered Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet who offered post-colonial Africa the concept of “negritude” and became in 1960 the first president of the new Republic of Senegal. He also endorsed the model set by Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s prime minister and implementor of its land redistribution scheme.75 By 1968, when he published his treatise on post-colonial economics, Schickele would weave together these post-colonial stories into a theory of development grounded in a history of anticolonial heroics. The agents of change whom Schickele celebrated included individuals of all nations who had put their own privilege and education in the service of the poor. Like Doreen Warriner and Erich Jacoby, Schickele’s personal experiences of Nazism equipped him with a permanent and bitter aversion to racism and nationalism. It was partly because of those beliefs that Schickele became, in

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the 1950s and ’60s, one of the guiding lights of policy at the FAO as well as one of its most distinctive public intellectuals. Schickele’s Agrarian Revolution and Economic Progress: A Primer for Development (1968) combined a story of anticolonial peasant movements with a manifesto for a plan of economic development.76 It reflected a larger social science consensus at the FAO about the history of peasant struggle. It also imparted Shickele’s personal conviction that world history would be shaped, in the twentieth century, not by white men like himself, but by heroic men and women of all races—be they African American communists or Indian economists— wherever the struggle for freedom was fiercest. Schickele believed that individuals such as Cárdenas, Senghor, and Nyerere were the embodiment of a historical force against which rich nations warred in vain. Individuals who embodied the power to change history, Schickele argued, were created by their circumstances. Their character was often forged in “a state of deep and widespread poverty,” Schickele wrote. Poverty roused individuals to take action to correct injustice in the world around them. The spirit of such individuals, Schickele wrote, “is energized by the vision of man coming into his own, an individual on equal terms with all the brethren of all races, creeds, and nations, with equal opportunities to develop his talents, to apply his productive efforts, and to be treated with respect by other persons and by his government.”77 In other words, it was the rare ability to choose empathy and solidarity with the poor, wherever they might be—in a world that often rewarded choices made from self-interested considerations—that marked the hero from the rest of humankind. In Schickele’s theory of development, international agencies like the FAO had a duty to listen to the voice of experience, however it was embodied, rejecting the expertise of elites. Only an individual exposed to everyday suffering and poverty by dint of race, gender, or class, Schickele argued, could speak on behalf of universal values like justice. Schickele urged his peers at the FAO to look beyond the ranks of university-educated elites of all nations; the true expert, he wrote, “appears as an Indian farmer, overlooking his fields parched by the drought of the failing monsoon, with his wife, children and grand-parents. Where will the food come from to keep his family alive? He appears as an office clerk in Nigeria who was fired by the manager to make room for a cousin, and who cannot find another job because he comes from the wrong tribe. He appears as a woman, in a textile factory in Malaysia, a fisherman in Haiti, a blacksmith in the Northeast of Brazil—and whenever some little thing goes wrong he is down and out.”78 In the modern world, Schickele asserted, it was

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these individuals—not educated elites or landlords—who would produce cataclysmic change, tilting the world toward justice. The only flicker of elitism in Schickele’s theory of development was in its ethos of sacrifice; Schickele reserved his most lavish praise for individuals who set aside their privilege and deliberately chose a life of advocacy. Schickele reminded the reader, for instance, that “Gandhi, whose father and grandfather were chief ministers of several Indian states,” nevertheless “shared the life of the poor voluntarily in the service of their cause.”79 Sacrifice, of course, is a model of bravery available only to those who have something to sacrifice. Was Schickele thinking of himself? The intensity of Schickele’s lifelong campaign against racism and colonialism reflected the direct experience of racial hatred in his childhood in Europe just after the Second World War, when blame for the deaths of the First World War loomed large in the imagination of France and Germany. Rainer Schickele was the son of René Schickele, an anti-Nazi novelist and mystic from Alsace. The elder Schickele wrote about landscape, inquiring into the notion of what his son called “cultural ground for the idea of man to thrive.”80 Ousted by the Nazis, René Schickele—a writer about land whose political exile had cost him his home—fled to Provence. The relationship of land to justice formed a major theme in the writings of the elder Schickele: blood had soaked the ground of Alsace over generations by the time young Rainer was born. In books such as his Himmlische Landschaft (1932)—the title literally translates “heavenly earth”—René presented greater Alsace as a garden civilization whose harmonious unity defied the artificial nature of political borders.81 Although he invoked the term Heimat, or “homeland,”—the same term used by National Socialists—René’s conception of homeland invoked ancient forests as a common space for the meeting of different points of view and national traditions, where free thought could develop untrampled. His work imagined the flourishing post-ethnic, pacifist communities that might thrive in Alsace and other garden-worlds, if they were only unburdened of nationalism and racism. He saw the League of Nations as an aid to humanitarianism worldwide, everywhere encoded as the full enjoyment by all people of the land that they inhabited.82 René’s radical vision of an international heimat was anathema to National Socialism in Germany. After being exiled from Alsace, René abandoned his writing and worked to free his friends from concentration camps and publish the voices of other authors silenced by the Nazis.83 René’s son, Rainer, would never use the word heimat in his writings, but working under Norris Dodd,

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Rainer undoubtedly knew the words that Dodd had proposed as an alternative to the Nazi incantation “Nur für Deutsche” (literally, only for Germans). The FAO’s rallying cry would defy outdated nationalisms: “The Earth for Man.” Schickele, ever the feminist, might have edited it further: “The Earth for Humans.” Perhaps Dodd’s catchphrase echoed in his head alongside his father’s invocations of the earth as the homeland of all. The global consciousness of peasants, united by their rootedness in land, was more than an economic concept for the Schickeles; it also drew on a quasi-mystic faith about what it meant to be a human sharing a common landscape with others. René invoked a mystic power of land to unite human beings, drawing on the esoteric theories of Rudolph Steiner, who believed that plants, land, and humans shared a collective consciousness.84 Working the land together, in his view, produced a unified experience of humanity, while clashes over class, race, and nation resulted from misguided human ideas that were out of touch with nature. Like his father, Rainer Schickele believed that he lived on the cusp of a new era marked by the victory of international energies over nationalist ones. The power of the mystical landscape to arouse emotion and inspire community filters through Rainer’s writing, infusing even the field notes in which he, like other civil servants, recorded the routine events of his work—hardly a typical genre for poetry. Consulting for the FAO in Indonesia, he paused in typing up his notes one night to explain, “Landscape breathtakingly beautiful.”85 Very much his father’s son, Rainer Schickele saw in the variety and beauty of South Asian trees something more profound than merely a picturesque landscape. The destiny of this gorgeous landscape, he believed, was to enrich a democratic world of citizen-farmers—as soon as land redistribution protected them from exploitation by landlords. Schickele meandered through the bamboo groves, reading in the jungle mist the energies of peasants fighting for their own liberation. The annals of the history of international development are filled with cases of exploitation and bad faith. Even so, at least one arm of the United Nations— the Land and Water Use Branch of the FAO, where Schickele worked—was explicitly tasked with supporting former colonies in land redistribution and their attempts to make an economic success of going it alone. In the portrait of the Land and Water Branch that emerges from Schickele’s writings, empathy with and faith in peasant social movements represented the instruments of galvanizing development, and land redistribution was proof of their work. Whatever versions of development might have been promoted elsewhere, at

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the FAO, social scientists believed that they were allies of the peasant, working together to overthrow the legacy of feudalism, empire, and racism.

A Theory of History What made Schickele so sure that history was on his side? By 1968, he had lived it. For his profiles in post-colonial courage, Schickele was drawing directly on his personal travels. Schickele would have had occasion to shape Nyerere’s reforms for Tanzania while stationed there for the FAO from 1961 to 1971. Nyerere, a former schoolteacher, had begun by transforming an organization of civil servants that secured independence and free elections in 1958. Nyerere himself became chief minister in 1960, and immediately began a program of nationalization and economic planning that mirrored many of Schickele’s aims. In Schickele’s view, the work of international development was to ally with heroes of this kind across the developing world—be they landless farmworkers, union leaders, poor peasants, mothers, or politicians—and to provide them with support and training, both in the science of agriculture and in the techniques of political and economic cooperation. This required international officers to develop not only a rich cultural understanding of the role of land around the world, but also to defer to the wisdom of Indian economists and landless farmworkers. Based on his experiences at the FAO, Schickele could point to a future where the peasants of the globe, united across national borders, would direct their own future, advised and aided by the United Nations. The collaboration of peasants and social scientists, according to Schickele, would create the preconditions for the inevitable “agricultural revolution” of his title. Like much of the thinking at the FAO, Schickele’s treatise used the teachings of history and contemporary social science, hard statistics, and a mystical faith in land as a potential common cause, uniting the earth’s people in a quest for a livable community. Having examined the trend lines of technology, education, and democracy around the world, Schickele was persuaded that progress demanded a larger investment than that provided by industrial capital or nation-states. Primary education was becoming universal, knowledge of technology was spreading, and a new age of democracy was transforming peasant lands everywhere. But Schickele’s examination of history pressed further than numbers. Properly assessing the prospects for change, Schickele explained, required

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more than statistics. Change happened not only because of demographics, but also because of “emotional” resources, which could be activated by exposure to art, technology, or philosophy.86 The emotional attractiveness of new ideas created social movements, Schickele believed; and it was social movements— rather than expertise—that would ultimately modernize the world. As proof of the power of emotional modernization, Schickele pointed to the retreat of violence around the world, evident in the growing disavowal of outdated practices such as “corporal punishment of people by landlords and employers, prohibition of leaving the estate, and other aspects of serfdom.”87 Such evils were doomed to vanish, in his view, along with racism, empire, and the monopolization of land by landlords. Knowledge of history emboldened Schickele to predict the future. His confidence in the process of reform led him to prophesy the “liberalization and reformation” of China by younger Maoists within ten years of his publication.88 Schickele felt confident that apartheid in South Africa—one of the “museum pieces of medieval feudal orders”—was doomed by the coming era of justice and anti-racism.89 Rainer Schickele’s sense of time, like his understanding of territory, grew from mystic concepts that he had inherited from his father. Schickele believed that he was witnessing the “emergence of a world conscience” that had flowered into being only “since around 1950.”90 World consciousness was an intellectual and legal revolution directed at the “emancipation of the families living and working on the land,” allowing them to demand greater prosperity, managerial freedom, civil rights, and political influence.91 With that autonomy would come “greater productivity of labor as well as of land, hence greater total production of food with increasing efficiency of resource use, and higher family incomes.”92 As the consciousness revolution expanded, Schickele believed, it took the form of the decolonization and peace movements, crystallizing into the League of Nations in the 1920s and eventually leading to the United Nations—in particular the FAO. The present-day ministers of world consciousness were social scientists like himself, especially those employed in the service of international institutions such as the FAO. It is one of the ironies of history that a theorist of the post-colonial moment so dynamic as Schickele should have been utterly forgotten. Like many of the other experts profiled in this chapter, he is little known in the annals of development today. Historians of the United Nations have generally tended to emphasize other factors: the organization of the institution and its departments, for instance, or the work of UNESCO or the Security Council. Histories rarely

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trace the role of the United Nations as an institution erected to support the new governments of peasant nations—Europe’s former colonies. Even when they touch on the activities of the FAO, it has typically been through its founders, like Dodd and Orr, rather than through the papers of such rank-and-file agents as Rainer Schickele, or the branch offices and their work.93 Schickele’s worldview gave him confidence in the triumph of education and progress, which he identified with land redistribution, over temporary political and economic objections by elites concerned about losing their stake in the market: “In the long run, the traditional leaders can only reform or perish—or grudgingly accommodate to the new social power structure arising from the political ascendancy of the poor, as many of them are bound to do for want of courage and insight.”94 It seemed evident to him that a bureaucracy of other social sciences like the FAO could aid in creating a world where peasants made their own destiny.

Conclusion: The FAO in Context In the 1940s and ’50s, a consensus emerged among social scientists that most of the land revolutions around the world would follow the pattern of Ireland’s land redistribution, in which compensation was paid back to aristocrats in the form of negotiated mortgages. Advocates of land redistribution believed in understanding the global economy from a frame of developing the security—political and economic—of the world’s poorest citizens. But it was neither Warriner’s theory of decolonization nor Schickele’s that dominated in Washington, where a slate of Ivy League professors began to preach a “modernization” theory that framed economic growth as the ultimate virtue. In the Washington Consensus that emerged later, far away from Rome, global hopes about the development of poorer counties were increasingly articulated not in terms of justice but rather in terms of consumption. As Wolfgang Sachs observed of the outlook for development in 1992: “Across the world hopes for the future are fixed on the rich man’s patterns of production and consumption.”95 The Rome Consensus at the FAO emerged partly from the dreams of Europe and partly from the disgust of peasants around the world—sick with the poverty bequeathed them by empire, they demanded equal access to the earth. It emerged partly also from the worldviews of social scientists, many directly connected to the fight against Nazi Germany, who looked to small farms as a source of sustainable economies. The theory of history written by those social

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scientists concerning the recent and long-term histories of peasant rebellions revealed what they believed to be a mandate for land redistribution in the postwar world. The achievement of the FAO model must be measured by the span of solidarity that defined the issue of land redistribution after 1968. In that year, those who expected an imminent and global land redistribution included Rainer Schickele, recently of the United Nations, who was writing optimistic manifestos from Iowa State, and the hundreds of English students marching through Hyde Park in a show of support for the land rights of Quechua squatters in Peru. The variety of solidarity movements spanned the vast domain between social science and the grassroots. It was also a messianic doctrine, a chiliastic certainty of a coming age of democratic revolution that would abolish concentrations of power, grounded in the context of history, yet founded equally on hope and fact. Illuminated by faith in liberalism’s destiny, Schickele could urge his readers to hope: “Cynicism is indeed effective in dramatizing what goes wrong, but deadens the will to act, to work for what is right, as it sees no hope and predicts disaster. . . . Hence,” he reasoned, “extreme cynicism leads to a sullen disgust of the world around us, to withdrawal from involvement in public affairs; or, in people with a driving lust for life and power, cynicism leads to brazen opportunism.”96 Schickele’s hope of a global revolution in land redistribution rested, at the international level, on one primary institutional strategy: the work of the United Nations would provide a forum for solving the problems of developing nations; with the help of this institution, a new elite, charged with Weberian ideas of duty and rationalization, would challenge the traditional power of empire or race. Bureaucracy was thus key to the envisioned revolution. Effective land redistribution would depend on the agitation of civil servants, government experts, and popular leaders who understood themselves to be servants of peasant and popular rebellions against oppression. A new elite of educated social scientists would lead the way toward peasant liberation around the world. The moment of international calls to action was relatively brief. Partly because of failures to execute effective land redistribution programs within member nations, and partly because of the failures of international government, after 1974, the pivot of history would shift from Rome and New Delhi back to decentralized peasant movements. Recognizing the expectations of a coming global revolution in land redistribution is essential to understanding what happened at the United Nations during this period, as plans to support a world of small farmers were laid out.

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By the 1970s, the Rome Consensus had forged a fully developed ideology for a global economy in which the small farmers of the developing world could flourish. The tenets of this consensus required the nations of the world to recognize the importance of protecting the beneficiaries of land reform from local elites, the potential power of cooperative networks to supply small farmers with technology and infrastructure, and the value of participatory democracy. This utopian set of ideas informed a growing bureaucracy of agrarian experts, surveyors, cartographers, and policy analysts whose influence, even while it fluctuated in the United States, was aligned both with Rome and with a broadening swath of decolonizing nations abroad. In contemporary discourse, there are few uniting visions that bring peasants, workers, and social scientists together in solidarity to face the challenge of climate change. Even fewer proposals imagine an army of social scientists advising peasant movements worldwide on their claims to the earth—although some arguments for extending human rights have insisted that an international court, in order to be effective, requires the power to compel.97 I have yet to see, for example, the argument for a more powerful UN role in addressing climate change. A celebration of the United Nations’ early ambitions, however, raises the question of what the organization might have accomplished had its ambitious role in global land administration persisted through the twenty-first century. However we may assess the United Nations, many of us now share a view of history in which the theft of land from indigenous people is central to the transformations of capitalism and states over the last several hundred years. Such an understanding may drive us to wonder about possible remedies for the mass evictions of the past and further possible displacements in the future. A version of Norris Dodd’s slogan for the FAO—“The Earth for Man”— points in the direction of such a tonic. Could coordinated land redistribution programs or rent controls today make homes for those displaced by flood, fire, drought, and famine? Many readers will know the objections by heart—the threat of overpopulation, the difficulty of making settlers economically productive, and the risk that rent control threatens economic growth and urban density. We will treat these objections as they arose.

3  •  Can Land Redistribution Scale with Population?

A change of regime was inevitable after the Second World War. The European empires that once divided the world among themselves were battered. Britain, the mightiest of them, was indebted to the United States for mortgaging the weapons that won the war. Anticolonial resistance, once kept in check by violence and sabotage, grew uncontainable—and with that resistance came fresh demands for land rights for previously colonized populations. Around the world, a thousand rebellions—in the form of riot, diplomacy, hunger strike, and war—wrested independent nations free from the empires that had ruled them for decades or centuries. Ireland, the first to leave Britain, declared independence in 1922. The year 1947 saw independence from Britain for India and Pakistan. Britain, so recently ruler of the seas, was now a declining power on the international scene. Other Western powers were crumbling as well. In 1946, the Philippines declared its sovereignty after decades of U.S. occupation. In 1952, Libya left Italy, and in 1956, Morocco rebelled against France and Spain. In 1960 alone, seventeen former African colonies declared their sovereignty.1 With the transition away from empire, a series of questions emerged regarding the directions that life would take in nations that had ­recently been colonies. Would the stark divisions between the races persist? Would economic divides between rich and poor remain acceptable? Critically, who would inherit the land, and whose laws of property would prevail?2 Independence from Europe and America came with calculated risks: it meant breaking free of trade partners and foregoing an organized bureaucracy that had once provided infrastructure, universities, and schools. Independence also presented interior challenges, both political and economic. New states opened the offices of government to native groups previously excluded; many sought

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to administer their governments as genuine democracies. Most also laid plans to run their economies on new terms—wherein populations hitherto denied the right to own property could now become landowners. Broadly, the search for justice focused on the tools of economic independence—and of economic redistribution. In most former colonies, the inequalities between a tiny elite and the vast majority were astonishing. Overcoming the gulf between rich and poor would require reversing the confiscations of empire, making the wealth long held by the few suddenly available to the many. Across the developing world, intellectuals and economists began to research new economic systems that would create wealth for racial majorities. Among the array of strategies they proposed, some embraced the agrarian models of Ireland and Mexico, while others favored industrialization and the riches it promised.3 Postwar social scientists influenced by Doreen Warriner frequently assumed that post-colonial nations would choose the former path, emphasizing the redistribution of land. India was one of the former colonies where colonial land agitation was most fierce. In independent India, the land question returned as a practical problem. Creating small farms was one thing, but making them profitable was another matter. How could millions of impoverished farmers access the capital necessary for modernizing their holdings? Would their collective taxes ever be enough to support the arrival of roads and mail, for instance, or pensions and healthcare? One influential set of answers to these questions came from the developing world. Indian economists had already begun to theorize a new formula for development based on the challenges of independence faced by a former colony. The Indian recipe turned on the promise of small-scale technology. Indian economists urged the possible transformation of small-farm productivity with small-scale tools, building on Gandhi’s rejection of expensive technologies, such as tractors, that tended to pull poor workers into a merciless cycle of debt. The prehistory of the movement, later christened “appropriate technology,” featured an intellectual set of ideas about how and why small-scale technology should play a key role on small farms across the developing world. When modern conversations about the power of small-scale technology first emerged, they remained within the context of post-colonial discussions of population, agriculture, and the promise of technology. While German economic theories foregrounded a relationship between population and land and forecast imminent starvation for the developing world, Indian researchers studied the radi-

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cal potentiality of small-scale technology to increase human productive capacity each year. They showed that small-scale interventions such as hoes, seeds, and pumps could gradually yet significantly raise standards of living in the developing world. Appropriate technology was identified with the idea of the small farmer in the post-colonial world. The farmer’s relationship to land as an owner was created by midcentury redistribution programs like the ones designed—but often abandoned—in India. The farmer’s success often depended on working tiny plots of land created by land redistribution programs. Advocates of appropriate technology believed that these plots could support poor farmers and a growing nation. Emphasizing small-scale interventions, the Indian recipe worked in direct contrast with formulae for economic development promoted by many U.S. economists, who promoted technological investment in the forms of roads, dams, and factories. Rebelling against the orthodoxies of Western economists, Indian researchers collected their own data and prepared alternative economic theories.4 Indian economists converted many leaders in international development circles to their cause in the 1950s and ’60s, thereby influencing the orientation of policy at the United Nations and the strategies pursued by the FAO in the name of international land redistribution.

India’s Post-Colonial Model Like other nations that rebelled against European empire, India faced an economic problem characteristic of a “connected age”: it struggled to become both independent and productive. Indian policy makers confronted the thorny question of whether to focus on industrialization in the cities or rural development in the countryside. They asked how best to ensure a high value for the rupee on international currency markets, and whether to invest in American-­ made agricultural technology, such as tractors or pesticides, or instead to invest in Indian technologies. Whatever their divisions, policy makers in India generally pursued the same overarching objective: improved living standards for the masses.5 Many Indians wanted to achieve a way of surviving that did not depend on foreign investors or technology for success, even in the midst of international linkages that potentially bound them, potentially for decades, in chains of debt, or linked their currencies to trade with the developed world. Some were especially committed to policies that would diminish economic inequality and

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provide opportunity for all. Among the many possible strategies for development, the one that seemed to promise both economic independence from other nations as well as reduced inequality between rich and poor was land redistribution. Land redistribution was already a rule for the earlier anticolonial movements of Ireland and Mexico, and India seemed ready to follow in their steps; and meanwhile, the land redistributions taking place in China were viewed favorably by a vast number of Indians. At independence in 1947, many of India’s leaders were veterans of rent strikes. After 1916, many individuals who would become India’s future ministers would accompany Gandhi on the “no-rent” campaigns in which Indian tenants, following the model of Irish rent strikers a generation before, boycotted their landlords. The strikes transpired in a rapidly changing world. Four years before Gandhi joined the rent strikes, in Mexico, Gustavo Madero had promised land redistribution, and his words had helped to trigger the spontaneous rebellions that culminated in the Mexican Revolution and the redistribution of large estates. A year after Gandhi’s “no-rent” campaign, the October Revolution in Russia declared the abolition of private property in land. A map of how to undo the tyranny of colonial landholding was coming into view, and with it, the possibility of post-coloniality. Five years after the strikes, Ireland would declare its independence from Britain, establishing a path that India would follow a quarter of a century later. Some of the veterans of the Bihar rent strike were destined to lead India after independence in 1947, including Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and Rajendra Prasad, its first president. Those men glimpsed a remarkable transformation of politics in those strikes. As one participant later recalled, the rent strikes armed him with “new ideas, a new courage and a new programme.”6 The “new programme” in question, of course, was a set of ideas about the kind of policies that Indian leaders would install as soon as India emerged from its struggle for independence. Trained as a lawyer, Rajendra Prasad was thrown into prison for his travels with Gandhi during the Salt March of 1930. But both before and after, Prasad had followed Gandhi through a series of organizing actions focused on issues of landownership. Taking down the statements of tenant laborers in Bihar, Prasad helped to build a movement for laws that would protect such workers from rent hikes and eviction. Within a few years, all signs suggested that targeting landownership was indeed a transformative strategy. In the districts where Gandhi had led rent strikes against landlords, schools were being built. Large planter families were disappearing, and small farmers were becoming

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slowly richer.7 The new nation being born seemed to be stamped with a more just economy, one in which every family had opportunity and any child could rise. India’s leadership designed an information infrastructure of maps to facilitate land redistribution, optimistically anticipating legislation that would make this a reality. From 1945, India’s Famine Inquiry Commission attempted to examine the relationship between land tenure and agricultural production. The commission proposed that the government begin making maps to register every plot of land so that an informed government could identify landless laborers and large estates and begin the work of redistributing land to the poor, thus reversing the economic inequalities of empire—a variant of mapping programs that had lately commenced in Britain.8 The commission’s recommendations arrived at a time when radical agrarian change seemed strangely actionable. Only two years after the Famine Inquiry Commission, in 1947, India became an independent nation. By a few years after that, in 1950, India began shaking off the economic torpor that had characterized its experience as a British colony, and its economy started to charge ahead; the government announced land redistribution as one of the pillars of its plan for growth. In 1952, Egypt passed its Law Number 178, triggering a land redistribution program; Guatemala, under the Árbenz government, enacted Decreto 900, a land reform law that would redistribute farms to local peasants. In 1960, the Suharto government in Indonesia passed a land reform law. Seven years later, Tanzania was formed as a modern nation and began its own land redistribution program. Straddling the prewar turbulence of violent revolutions in Ireland, Mexico, and Russia, and the new world of relatively bloodless decolonization whereby land reforms were installed by democratically elected governments, India was the harbinger of a postwar era of non­ violent decolonization. India was also in a position to be the pioneer of strategies for land redistribution that soon came to offer a template for other nations to follow. Land politics came to characterize not only India’s interior politics but also its relationship with other nations. When Indian citizens in South Africa were barred from buying property and quarantined to ghettos in 1939 and 1946, Indians in Delhi and London began to argue that any Commonwealth or world government system that served Indians must assert the rights of Indian citizens, even in the face of racist regimes such as the South Africa of Jan Smuts. As historian Mark Mazower records, “India emerged as the first successful challenger of the doctrine of the European right to rule and highlighted the

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emerging influence (but also the limits to that influence) of a new element in the international system—the postcolonial world.”9 Nehru, meanwhile, became the advocate for what Mazower calls an “internationalist conscience” among post-colonial nations, as he raised questions about what membership in world government could provide.10 After independence arrived in 1947, India’s Congress Party proclaimed its intent to support a new policy of land redistribution, in a mandate summarized thus: “to prevent the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of individuals and groups, [and] to prevent vested interests inimical to society from growing.”11 The next year, 1948, laws for the protection of tenants were passed, including the Bombay Act and the Zamindari Abolition Laws of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In 1950, the first Five-Year Plan emphasized agricultural development with the state as the leader and promised an agenda of rent reforms and land redistribution moving forward. India’s Parliament debated whether to institute a national land ceiling that would force landlords to give up holdings above a certain size, compensating them for any excess acreage and then redistributing it to landless workers.12 In the wake of independence, all elements aligned to bring about a land redistribution program that would correct the confiscations of empire—or so it must have seemed as the new decade dawned. One of the chief intellectuals to engage India’s land redistribution scheme was Govindlal Patel, who became the major historian, theorist, and philosopher of post-independence land reform in India. Charged with overseeing land tenures for the government of Bombay, Patel published several books on land issues from 1954 to 1970; his early work especially was read widely through the latter half of the 1950s by Westerners, for whom Patel represented a key interpreter of India’s land problems. It was Patel, for instance, who offered Barrington Moore his introduction to contemporary struggles in India.13 Patel’s first published book, The Indian Land Problem, summarized the results of his doctoral dissertation and distilled his long period of immersion in the state papers of British rule and post-independence state making. To Patel’s mind, rent reductions and smallholder ownership promised to reshape economic equality and opportunity in post-independence India. “All such laws,” Patel explained, would work to secure “agricultural production and human happiness.”14 From the viewpoint of history to which Patel spoke, the eventual extension of a land reform for India seemed both inevitable and necessary. Quoting the New Delhi government publication Agriculture in India (1950), Patel examined

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the statistics. About 80 percent of the land was in the hands of absentee landlords: “Four-fifths of the land is cultivated by people who do not own it.”15 Meanwhile, India’s first Five-Year Plan declared a commitment to rent reductions and smallholder ownership on a national scale. Patel’s conviction about the importance of land redistribution was built on a study of history. India’s experience as a colony explained the desperate need for land redistribution as well as hopes that such a policy would result in an immediate expansion of opportunity. According to Patel, the categories of local administrators in India—the zamindars, jagirdars, inamdars, and talukdars of Mughal rule and ancient custom—had been systematized by British bureaucracy in repeated attempts to streamline the flow of state revenue while protecting local elites and political stability. Over and over, British reforms engendered famines that resulted in the death of millions, emphasizing the dismal failure of an economic system designed to extract income from India.16 Patel was not alone in blaming empire for India’s contracted economic horizons. In his book Land Reforms in India, H. D. Malaviya, secretary of the Economic and Political Research Department of the All India Congress Committee, linked persistent peasant debt with British revenue policies, which he attacked as the root of India’s continued struggles with inequality. Western observers in India had a similar perspective. For the American agricultural economist Daniel Thorner and his wife Alice, at the core of India’s development problem was its experience as a colony whose subsistence farming the British had converted to factories in order to export the crops, and whose traditional holdings in property were converted to a modern system of landlords. “The announced aim of land reform in India, the most basic aim, was to bring the actual cultivator into direct relationship with the State,” the Thorners wrote. “To enable the cultivators to hold their land directly from the State, the land reforms undertook to eliminate the intermediaries.”17 The Thorners blamed the history of land monopoly on the utilitarian theories of the British and their laws, which penalized smallholders and tenants. British rule, they argued, initiated “the power of landholders to take a substantial share of the produce of the soil.”18 Income inequality and class prejudice necessarily followed: “Persons who enjoyed such proprietary rights tended to become a group more and more set apart from those who actually tilled.”19 Economic inequality offered a second reason many observers expected land redistribution programs to succeed in India. Land redistribution, Patel argued, was the key to making India into a state where any citizen could seize economic opportunity. The Thorners also theorized that economic inequality

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stifled productivity, acting as a “built-in depressor” forever keeping nations from development.20 Independence alone was insufficient to remove the depressor because independence merely removed British rule; it did nothing to repair the systematic inequality the British had created. “When the British withdrew from India in 1947,” wrote the Thorners, “they left the country with perhaps the world’s most refractory land problem.”21 Patel recommended a nationwide program of education and infrastructure of which land redistribution programs and extension would form one crucial part.22 Precedents in other nations offer a clue as to why Indian land reform seemed so inevitable to Patel and the Thorners. Observers had discerned a trend in modern legislation that gave other states control over land—something that India could implement to its advantage. Patel’s ideas about reform drew from British precedents executed outside of India. As Patel urged upon legislators the need for creating tenancy rules designed to enforce improvements in agriculture and forfend absentee landlordism, he held up the Agriculture Act of 1947 in Great Britain—which sanctioned compulsory state acquisition of ill-­ managed farms—as an ideal precedent. India’s land redistribution plan followed the outline of the legislation pursued by the British in Ireland: compensating the ancient estates, buying them out in cash or bonds over a period of twenty or forty years.23 According to Patel, independent India would pursue the course of administration that the British had offered in Ireland, enacting “security of tenure and rents and rights of transfer generally.”24 For Patel, Indian land redistribution would necessarily involve a form of social engineering requiring a strong centralized state authority. “Future tenancy legislation,” Patel wrote, “should impose a condition of good husbandry on the tenants.”25 Drawing on pre-British monarchial customs on the subcontinent, Patel suggested that the future government of India could “inflict penalties” on or even “divest” cultivators who failed to keep up with a current standard of improvement. These economic thoughts advocated a centralized socialist government that could eliminate poverty entirely by a rationalized, intensive use of land. Patel couched the policies he recommended in terms borrowed from Hindu spirituality. Explaining his system of penalties, for example, he urged, “Manu enjoins” them “upon the King.”26 Drawing out the scripture’s meaning, he philosophized: “Land is a social asset and the cultivators are more or less trustees of the social asset.”27 Both Patel and the Thorners saw signs that governments around the world were pursuing centralized legislation to redistribute land and to give the state greater control over agricultural planning in general. India’s government like-

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wise seemed to be taking steps toward rent reductions and land redistributions, which sympathetic observers believed would counteract the legacy of empire, so visible in India’s stark economic divides. Meanwhile, however, another set of theories was coming into vogue in international development circles. Since at least the age of the British economist and theologian Thomas Robert Malthus, Western intellectuals had warned that famine and bloodshed resulted when population overran the productive capacity of the land. In the years that followed the Second World War, many Western thinkers were concluding that population was on the verge of undermining the smallholder approach to agriculture entirely. Indian economists had a rejoinder to this line of thinking as well.

The Economics of the Post-Colonial Moment Questions regarding the potential for economic growth were answered, in some circles, by warnings about the rapid rise in the world’s population. Economists warned that growing population was destined to sink the economies of large nations unless they took certain precautions. Fears about population dynamics brokered renewed interest early in the formation of the League of Nations, and it continued to engage the imagination of economists throughout the twentieth century. In the Germany of the Third Reich, researchers had conducted studies that showed stark limits to farming and suggested a threshold below which farms could not sustain a population. The German theorists of demography recommended an alter­ native to land redistribution to smallholders: land consolidation. Land consolidation worked similarly to land redistribution in that it relied on the state to leverage money, making plans in the name of the greater good, acting as a land broker, and orchestrating tit-for-tat trades for farmers who wished to buy adjacent plots. Most versions of land consolidation aimed to create a world of large farms. According to the German studies—which were endorsed by policies that facilitated consolidation across Europe—only industrial-scale farming could support a growing population.28 German postwar analysts, borrowing from their work before the war, continued to insist that there was simply not enough land for farmers to feed themselves and their families, let alone extend smallholder agriculture. One German conference in 1962 on farm scale, whose conclusions were translated into many languages and disseminated widely, left no doubt that small farms were incapable of supporting development: “Despite all efforts to initiate an

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appropriate and fair system of distributing property rights among the landless workers and tenants, a major problem still remains: the extremely small and inefficient plots, which are determined by the constantly growing demands of the rapidly increasing population and relative lack of available land area, permit neither a profitable nor a quantitatively sufficient production.”29 The study explicitly warned against land redistribution, implying that redistribution in a growing population would produce inevitably smaller farms, steadily fated to become more and more unproductive over time.30 In the eyes of researchers such as these, land redistribution was tantamount to suicide. A review of India’s recent famines helped to renew the debate about overpopulation after the Second World War. In 1948, Americans made two books about overpopulation best sellers: Fairfield Osborn with Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt in his Road to Survival. In 1951, Kingsley Davis’s study The Population of India and Pakistan, written in the aftermath of the devastating Bengal Famine of 1943, warned that a growing population would drive famine and even cause political instability. On the evidence of his demographic numbers, Davis predicted the failure of small farm campaigns, arguing that only industrialized agriculture and mass urbanization could provide food at the scale required to feed the overladen planet. It was nearly seventeen years after American readers had made The Good Earth into a best seller, and the climate of the American readership was changing. No longer did Americans want to read about hardworking farmers abroad whose struggles mirrored those of farmers at home; at a moment of international ascendancy and unprecedented prosperity, Americans wanted to read about the levers of fate that doomed populations abroad. Davis’s study was the template for a rash of best sellers about overpopulation abroad. In the decades after 1951, later American critics of international development embraced Davis’s work as gospel truth of the reality of a population “bomb”—to quote the language of his later interpreter, Paul Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb in 1968 also became a best seller. The detonation of the population bomb, Davis and Ehrlich warned, would sink the developing nations of the earth unless they immediately concentrated their energies on industrializing their economies.31 Studies on population reinforced the conclusions of European research that underscored an immediate and desperate need for large-scale farms. Celebrated in the newspapers, talked about at dinner tables in Washington, the addictive drama of the population thriller left little attention for discussing rival

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theories from India and Rome, which were read and taught mainly by a handful of agrarian specialists in places like Ames and Madison. American readers were thus largely educated in an echo chamber cut off from the currents of international thought. In that echo chamber, the only music playing was the Sturm und Drang of the world’s future according to the doomsayers of population. Many intelligent policy makers, scientists, and even social scientists tuned in to this channel and were shaped by it: among them, a budding anthropologist named Clifford Geertz. Although Geertz would later be remembered for his sensitivity to the multiple meanings of commu­ nication in different cultures—a concept he theorized in an essay in 1972 as “deep play”—his earlier work was bound up with questions of land use and population.32 Sometime after 1952, Geertz joined an interdisciplinary study team that left MIT for Indonesia, which had achieved independence from the Netherlands in 1945. The researchers aimed to interpret Indonesian poverty in a framework that would make available new opportunities for capitalist development. It was partially imagined as a means of counteracting Indonesia’s land law of 1960, which promised to redistribute land to the peasants. The law was being resisted by landowners and supported by communists. The funders of the MIT study—the CIA and the Ford Foundation—were interested in information that could be used to support a U.S.-backed coup against the Indonesian president, Sukarno. The coup failed, but it inaugurated a purge of Indonesian communists, playing off the resentments of landlords, who attempted to win control over territory through military means. In the bloodbath that followed, death squads slaughtered three-quarters of a million Indonesians.33 In 1963, two years before the bloodshed started, Geertz published the results of his research under the title Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Geertz took a line common in his day—the present-­day distribution of land was shaped by colonization. To this, he added a Malthusian twist: Java had entered an era of debilitating poverty, Geertz argued, because when faced with an intractable shortage of land, the Javanese had opted to share their poverty in common rather than developing a managerial elite. Small plots of land, a growing population, and communal landholding were cast as a recipe for economic doom. Geertz was making an argument against Indonesian land redistribution and against indigenous forms of land tenure in favor of a capitalist system of land management that might have been installed had the U.S.-backed coup suc-

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ceeded. He was also playing off of contemporary theories of demography from Kingsley Davis and others, weaving them into a round condemnation of indigenous agriculture that would, in turn, support ecological theories that cast common ownership systems—sometimes called “the commons”—as a “tragedy.”34 Meanwhile, however, many economists in the developing world had no use for American metaphysics of this sort. They answered concerns about demographics by collecting data and devising theories appropriate to the developing world. In 1951, the same year as Davis’s study came out, India conducted its first census, which confirmed a sharp demographic rise since 1921. The Indian numbers also furnished a portrait of poverty: the documented life span of Indian adults averaged half that of those in the developed world, and the rates of infant mortality were simply devastating. One historian called the testimony “an indictment of two centuries of British rule.”35 For Indians, the numbers confirmed not an India that needed to be controlled, but an India whose booming rural population desperately needed support. The government of India would try every available strategy to combat the demographic crisis that faced the country—land redistribution, state subsidies for food, and massive programs of infrastructure and irrigation. For much of the 1940s and ’50s, one persistent theme of conversations was how technology could support a nation of small farmers.

The Indian Rebellion in Post-Colonial Economics In a series of major reports, the government of India made clear that it took the population question seriously. In 1945, India’s Famine Inquiry Commission attempted to reexamine the economy as a whole, exploring how the state could help small peasants to produce enough food so that a famine like the recent one—which killed between 2 and 3 million people in Bengal alone— would never happen again.36 On the cusp of independence, the Famine Commission met in conjunction with other planning committees devoted to vetting strategies for India’s postwar development—one of the most important of which was the pursuit of land redistribution. Discussions of small farms in India were intertwined with questions about technology and productivity. Fighting famine in a world of small farmers was possible, but it would require the state to take bold steps to fortify small farmers against catastrophe by developing the technology, cooperatives, and credit necessary for them to become productive and retain con-

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trol over their own surpluses. To effectively support such an initiative, the state would need centralized information about the size and shape of farms, the number of owners, and the opportunities for building. In other words, the state would need a map. In 1953, India’s census commissioner described the details of India’s growing population and laid out a clear deadline for development. India would have to create a land redistribution program supported by all available kinds of technology to feed its growing population. Those technologies would be diverse: irrigation, mineral fertilizers, manure, Japanese rice cultivation methods, improved seeds, land contouring, and pest control. Even with these innovations, the commissioner grimly concluded, food production “will fall short of our needs before 1971.”37 Thus India was charged with two tasks for the following twenty years: containing the birth rate and intensifying agriculture. It fell to Indian economists to describe how such a scheme might work. With the promise of widespread land redistribution on the horizon, Indian economists began to investigate in detail the premise that efficient, innovative small farms could outcompete large ones. The hypothesis was especially persuasive to those, both in India and the West, who focused on the question of small-scale technology. Among the economists who supported the proposition was Samar Ranjan Sen, founder of India’s leading journal of political debate, the Economic Weekly. Speaking at the international conference of agricultural economists gathered in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Sen had shared research showing that “one of the basic and most important facts of the Indian economy is the tremendous pressure of population on land”: the denser the population, the less productive the land.38 It wasn’t that Sen denied the challenge of population for India and its relationship to famine. From similar sets of data, however, Sen drew different conclusions than had Davis and the Germans. Sen argued that the so-called population trap theorized by Western demographers was actually a temporary feature of India’s economy—one that could disappear with appropriate inputs of technology and education. Social programs could gradually turn Indian farmers into innovators, making each laborer on the farm a skilled craftsman of the soil. According to Sen, Western theorists like Davis had failed to consider the variable nature of population-land relationships, especially the degree to which different kinds of soil, technology, and irrigation could shift the productive capacity of land. Making an argument similar to what Lossing Buck had set forward in his 1937 monograph on agriculture in China, Sen argued that even populous nations with poor soil could

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Samar Sen’s data on productivity per acre, which supported his theory of how improvements in technology could allow the same soil to support a growing population (Samar Ranjan Sen, “The Problem of Population and Food Supply in India,” in Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Agricultural Economists, by the International Conference of Agricultural Economists, [1953], p. 81; by permission of Oxford University Press)

improve their lot, given sufficient amendments. Speaking fifteen years later, in 1952, Sen refined those insights into a general economic theory of how small farms could feed a growing population. Population dynamics were thus mobile, not fixed. They varied with geography, culture, and politics, according to each state’s willingness to invest in the community as a whole. Even as different soil could support different sizes in population, so investments in the land, correctly made, could shift the land’s capacity to support people. Investments in small-scale technology and human ingenuity, Sen’s research showed, rendered each small parcel of land more productive. In answering the question of how small farms could feed a growing planet, Sen proposed as a first step breaking the “law of diminishing returns”—correct-

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ing the state of tenancy, whereby “hordes of middlemen, like landlords, merchants, and moneylenders” ate up the profit of the “actual tiller of the soil.”39 Sen implied that with appropriate investments in seeds and skills, the overall line of best fit could be shifted up: for each point on the plot, a higher productivity per man-year might result from policy shifts—even given a constant population density.40 Sen’s challenge to Davis, in other words, was simple, elegant, and driven by data. Soil productivity wasn’t a given: even in densely populated areas, individuals could be made more productive through technology, learning, and other social investments. By 1955, the factors Sen considered in his equation—labor, productivity per man-year, mechanization, and land—differed from those of contemporary German economists who warned of a population cliff—a sudden and determinative swell in population off of which the Indian population was imagined to be falling to its doom. Unlike the German equations, which considered population merely in terms of mouths to feed, Sen’s model included labor per farm as well as land. He imagined the Indian citizens born since 1930 not just as points of data in a model indicating doom—but rather as potential actors in an economic strategy for their own survival. Extra labor, his research showed, tended to increase the output of mechanization. Sen’s research stressed human potentiality. To Malthusian pessimism about the productivity of land, Sen countered with valiant, data-driven optimism about the capacity of humans to support one another. Sen’s mood in his presentations was one of cautious optimism. In 1952, Sen offered his audience proof that India had begun making the investments that he recommended. He laid out the deficiencies of the first Five-Year Plan in detail, and proposed further investments. Sen urged India’s planning commissions to pursue a diverse program of enrichment—including large-scale transportation and irrigation infrastructure, the introduction of state-run cooperatives, and the creation of an efficient program of agricultural extension to teach farmers about the seeds, crop rotation systems, and other technologies that would help them intensify the yield per acre. As had the census report published in 1953, Sen advocated a model wherein the state would support small farmers through technology and cooperatives.41 Information, widely distributed, would turn each Indian farmer into an agent of national survival. Sen was the pioneer of a set of ideas that became widely influential across the developing world, and even in the West. The ability of small-scale technology to make small-scale farms profitable turned into dogma at the FAO, form-

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ing the basis for most of the strategies the FAO used to support land reform over the next three decades. By 1967, when Tanzania’s president, Julius Nyerere, inaugurated the daring Ujamaa Program with the intent of transforming the nation’s economy, his strategy too would depend on providing small farmers with irrigation and small-scale technology. By 1973, Sen’s idea about the disproportionate power of small devices to produce cultural change would be developed, uncredited, by the engineer E. F. Schumacher into a rallying call for development through technology transfer in his Small Is Beautiful. Sen’s optimism about technology in densely populated areas drew on conversations about technology—and about the dangers of unwise technological investment—that were already a century old. In contrast to the German tradition—which viewed large-scale investments with a naive endorsement of scale— an Indian tradition of economics posited that large-scale technology could not be judged merely in terms of its profitability. For decades, Indian critics of empire had argued that technologies must be assessed by the scale of debt they required and the consequent burden they placed on poor neighbors. A century before India’s debates over population, British engineers began building railroads to channel colonial commodities to European ports. Local observers complained about the costs, which in most cases severely impacted the poor. Imperial technology burdened rather than enriched colonial peasants: such was the irony of infrastructure as deployed in a climate of greed. Costly railroad projects in India, by their very design, benefited investors in England but not Indian farmers. In 1854, Arthur Cotton, a British engineer, published the monumental volume Public Works in India—his overview of empire’s accomplishments and challenges in regard to canals, railroads, and other largescale technology. Cotton warned about the impact of long-term debts in counteracting the potential improvements associated with railroads. He insisted that the taxes necessary to support the British-built railways impoverished Indian farmers, rendering the nation vulnerable to starvation and plague. Cotton’s observations left a lasting mark on Indian conversations about technology, investment, and scale. Gandhi would later see the railroads in a similar light: as dangerous enticements to greed that had devastating unintended consequences for local handicraft production, local government, and spiritual independence.42 Rather than supply a return on investment, expensive infrastructure imposed on an impoverished population could spell irrevocable, mounting debt. A second thread of Sen’s thinking drew on the promise of a growing modern optimism about small-scale technology and the power of agricultural science.

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In the nineteenth century, only a few philosophers contemplated the problem of scale and technology in any detail. In Principles of Political Economy (1857), John Stuart Mill laid out a basis for a European history of progress in which England had the opportunity to participate. He described the traditional garden plots of Switzerland, where hard-working villagers satisfied most of their economic needs. Mill’s sources reported that peasants lived in prosperity amid trees planted and dairies constructed by their ancestors, each generation improving the gardens bequeathed them by the last. Mill influenced Irish agrarian thinkers such as Horace Plunkett, who oversaw a program of seeds, tools, and cooperatives to support small farmers after Ireland’s land reform. Versions of Plunkett’s model had appeared, with some success, in contemporary China. Plunkett’s model was recapitulated once again by Indian postwar thinkers such as S. Thirumalai, whose 1954 book responded to the population question in India with a recipe for land redistribution, credit, and government-supported mechanisms for acquiring new seeds and modern tools.43 For thinkers such as Mill, Plunkett, Thirumalai, and Sen, the distribution of small-scale technology held a tangible promise of supporting a growing population on limited land. A third source of Sen’s thinking—less controversial in international circles— was the power of centralized systems to optimize economies by distributing access to science. Under British Empire rule, administrators from India to Africa had built networks of research stations, where scientists experimented with improved seeds and cures for diseases affecting livestock. In America, agrarian experts were responsible for fighting malaria, experimenting with plant breeding, and evangelizing new forms of agricultural mechanization.44 From these experiments, it was evident that information, if widely disseminated, could transform agriculture. It seemed plausible that India might run a centralized agricultural science program in the name of its own farmers. Even Indian economists who were cautious about the limits of small plots recommended some version of the cooperative model. Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil—founder of the Gokhale Institute, India’s first center for the training of economists—raised concerns about the minimum size of farms required for productivity in his presidential address in 1954. Gadgil prescribed that farmers be grouped into Chinese-style government-supported cooperatives, so that even poor farmers could pool funds for modern technology and farm the land productively together.45 Indian thinkers almost unanimously agreed on the principle that a nation of poor farmers needed technological investments that were appropriate for their limited resources, and that only with investments of this kind could India effectively support its growing population.

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Sen’s thinking about technology almost certainly also reflected India’s twentieth-­century experience with small-scale investments. Indians of Sen’s generation grew up in a world where social transformations resulting from small-scale technology were everywhere in view. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, bicycles, typewriters, sewing machines, and rice mills shifted the burden of labor and demonstrated that small machines could create radical efficiencies in transport, clerical work, garment manufacture, and food preparation. Bicycles and sewing machines created opportunities for Indian man­ ufacture, proving that small technology could become the seed of industrial production. Many Indians started their own bicycle shops or rice-milling factories.46 Small investments in technology had thus actively transformed culture and production—shifting what Sen would call the ratio of “productivity per land-year,” regardless of the size of the land where an individual labored. The promise of small-scale technology was particularly pronounced when it came to agriculture. Mechanized rice milling demonstrated how mechanized changes in the treatment of agricultural commodities could dramatically affect production. Rice milling was an arduous activity overwhelmingly borne by women, who pounded the whole seed with mortar and pestle, a task that typically required two women working for an hour each day to feed a family of five. From the 1910s to the 1930s, cheap American Engelberg hullers and British Bihia mills were widely adopted across southern India, where they crushed sugarcane, pressed oil seeds, and milled rice. The ability to mill one’s own rice or sugarcane tilted profits toward the peasant. As with Indian bicycle manufacturing, rice milling briefly created a new class of rich peasants who became factory owners. Small-scale technology could make entrepreneurs of rich peasants, and finally shatter the division between industrialization and agriculture that had kept India poor during the years of British rule.47 India’s experience with small-scale technology was most forcefully articulated by Gandhi, who championed this and handicrafts as potential sources of Indian economic independence. In the protests he organized against the British salt tax, Gandhi helped to create a collective action that dramatized Indian subjects’ abilities to create basic goods for themselves, without reliance on economic intermediaries. In contrast to large-scale infrastructure, Gandhi urged the promotion of small industries and traditional technology, embodied in the charka, or spinning wheel, which became the emblem of India’s national flag and a potent symbol of the recapture of all stages of economic production stolen from India by the British Empire. At independence, the role of small-scale technology like the charka became pivotal for state-run programs of handicrafts

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development, which widely distributed charkas to villages that would be targeted for the development of homespun cloth.48 Small-scale technology had already become central to Indian identity and economic thought as Sen did his research, and his arguments about how small interventions could raise farmer productivity were viscerally informed by the experience of his generation. By the 1940s and 1950s, many Indian economists began putting questions of this kind at the center of their research. The core of the issue was whether and how small-scale technology could transform struggling small farmers into profitable citizens in an era of population growth. Sen’s research—which suggested a second solution to the population problem, through small-scale support for the Indian farmer—went on to offer the basis for an overarching theory of production in the developing world. The work of economists like Samar Sen and D. R. Gadgil can also be seen as a battle for Indian sovereignty over the country’s anticolonial agenda within a larger picture of Western development policy. Facing the challenge of German and British economists who warned of India’s imminent population catastrophe, Indian economists had to confront a question much debated in Europe and America: could land redistribution scale with population? Learned Indians, armed with data, were not afraid to propose alternative policies to the ones advanced the West. In many quarters, Indian ideas were accepted— especially in Rome, where the social scientists of the FAO embraced Indian economics as a coherent approach to rural development. Sen’s ideas went on to influence compatible research in the West and international policies designed to support a development agenda designed in India by Indians. In the 1950s, the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson extended Sen’s theory by examining the effects of land redistribution on economic opportunity. Robinson classified societies according to one of two tendencies, or biases: “land-saving” societies, in which landlords tended to horde land, and “land-­ using” societies that invested in building, improvement, and new technology. Land-saving societies implied tractors and mechanization; such societies tended to progress economically by retaining fewer laborers on the land and paying lower wages for agricultural work. Systems of this kind naturally tended to enrich landlords to the exclusion of everyone else. Land-using societies, by contrast, tended to grow economically by employing larger numbers of agricultural workers and investing in small improvements in society. Robinson translated the message for underdeveloped economies: planting large-scale farms would result in mass evictions from the countryside, ultimately increasing India’s economic divide between rich and poor. Supporting small farmers

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through teaching programs and small-scale technology would allow productivity to grow with population.49 Increasing productivity, she proved, was a function of more education, more technology, and more attention—there were no inherent limits of productivity per acre. Growth could be as simple as putting more eyes on the land. For Western economists like Robinson, Indian researchers offered a model of independent thought that would frame their own interventions for years to come. Sen’s work demonstrated that economists allied with the plight of the poor could conduct their own research rather than blindly accepting population growth as the predictor of the failure. Leaders in the field, such as the Swedish agrarian economist and FAO administrator Folke Dovring, took up the challenge. In 1959, Dovring answered the German data with his own report, which contextualized the apparent demographic explosion in the developing world within wider trends. Dovring was able to demonstrate empirically that the quicker developing nations invested in the countryside, the sooner they would industrialize. By contrast, if developing nations failed to invest in the countryside, where the majority of their population lived, a larger proportion of the world population would remain trapped in poverty indefinitely. Population growth without appropriate infrastructure, he argued, spelled crippling and inescapable poverty. Dovring’s ideas were republished in the United States from 1963. On a global level, they opened up a wide conversation about the extent to which technology could accommodate a growing population on small farms. In 1965, the Danish economist Ester Boserup offered a holistic theory of how small farms adapted to support a growing population in her celebrated The Conditions of Agricultural Growth.50 A new data-backed theory was proving that investing in small farms could be a motor of economic growth. Meanwhile, students of land redistribution in the United States collected data showing that small farms, given sufficient technological investment, could be as productive as large ones. In 1964, researchers at an MIT conference presented evidence from many nations that “in densely settled areas the enlargement of farm size is not an absolute precondition of increased agricultural productivity per acre.”51 The evidence was mounting that population growth posed little threat to the success of small farms, so long as they were backed by basic state supports like infrastructure and training. Research and data thus reinforced a theory of economic growth issuing from poor farmers; indeed, this research was celebrated by a range of development economists who promoted land redistribution and small-scale technol-

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ogy as both necessary and sufficient conditions for forging a path to sustainable growth that would eliminate poverty in poor nations while reducing economic inequality—and even expanding the developing world’s enjoyment of leisure. Their work provided ample quantitative evidence that land redistribution was a tool for broadening economic growth among the poorest members of the global community.52 Reviewing the state of international scholarship, administrators at the United Nations saw no reason to be swayed by fears of a population crunch, a major concern to many U.S. and European theorists. Instead, they followed Indian economists who advocated a program of technical support for small farmers, which, evidence suggested, could render small farms as profitable as big ones. Much of the world might be hungry, and India’s population might be growing; but with appropriate investments, there was no reason that India’s small farms should not feed the hungry world.53

The Conversion of Norris Dodd On a world tour in 1949, the director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization visited agricultural research stations and land reclamation schemes across Asia. He was startled to see small boys in places like China learning to farm with foot-long hand-held hoes. In Oregon, before he began his administrative career, Norris Dodd had started a pharmacy chain and kept a leisure farm; then, he had experimented with wheel hoes and long-handled hoes, and he knew from personal experience the reduction in labor such devices could make possible. He cringed to see peasants laboring at work he regarded as backbreaking.54 Dodd’s experience prompted a conversation about peasants, livelihoods, and technology. Through Dodd’s speeches and writing and the programs he orchestrated at the FAO, Westerners began to glimpse the possibility that small-scale technology might shift the economic destiny of nations. It was India, above all, that taught Dodd, like many of his generation, to believe in the power of small-scale technology. During that world tour, as the FAO’s newly installed second director, he met with agricultural ministers of many nations. When he returned, his talks were peppered with lengthy quotations from Gandhi’s disciple Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian prime minister. The India that Dodd visited was witnessing a minor New Deal begun at independence in 1947—a program of land reclamation, irrigation, and supply schemes

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to distribute improved seeds and manure. Given that India appeared to be on the verge of a nationwide land reform that would turn a 350 million acre nation into a nation of 100 million small farms, the nascent revolution in technology must have seized Dodd’s attention.55 In India and Pakistan, Dodd found himself in a world where a major consensus rejected investment in heavy infrastructure as part of the road to growth. He met with Asian economists and politicians and delivered speeches about the work of the FAO; and over the next few years, while helping to formulate long-term plans for the FAO, he would write for Indian magazines. On that 1949 tour, he most likely learned about successful cooperatives, like the one that supplied half of Bombay’s milk, and other small-scale rural entrepreneurship schemes. Dodd later recalled his trip to South Asia as the moment of his conversion, when he began to understand that dramatic improvements in the production of food could be made possible on the basis of relatively inexpensive investments in technology and collective organizing.56 In Pakistan in 1949, Dodd discussed how land reform policies might include packages of small-scale technology that would ensure the economic viability of small farmers. “Land tenure regimes should be revised with a view to making sure that share-croppers are afforded sufficient incentives to develop their production and yields,” Dodd wrote.57 He filled his personal notes with elaborations of Indian ideas about how the state could support small farmers, plotting schemes for education and health initiatives.58 Dodd’s Indian travels gave him valuable tools for analyzing and rejecting rival theories of modernity that stressed population control, rather than land, as the key to economic progress in the developing world. Dodd was intrigued by Indian arguments about the relationship between debt and technological investment. After meetings with Indian economists, Dodd began to join them in arguing the case of disseminating forms of technology cheap enough for the poorest farmers to afford. He also stood with Indian economists on the population question. Asked about population in the developing world in 1949, shortly after his return from India, Dodd answered, “I am not ready to say that Malthus’ thesis stands proved.”59 Like Sen and Robinson, Dodd held that agriculture for a growing population needed more people at work in the countryside, not fewer.60 Back at the FAO office, Dodd made the case that commissioning hoes and buckets should be part of international economic policy. Dodd would stress that land redistribution was a precondition to other forms of development. Unless land redistribution first abolished “unjust and inefficient systems of

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landholding,” he wrote in 1950, the benefits of “technical assistance programs” would be “withheld from people on the land.”61 In other words, rural people needed an intervention if they were to benefit from advances in technology, research, and information. Dodd offered the Indian formula of education, cheap technology, and cooperatives as a systematic program for development that could be applied globally. The hallmark of Dodd’s career as director became his emphasis on what he called “technical assistance,” marked by the export of technology and research to the developing world.62 Indian ideas about the effectiveness of smallscale technology had come to play a crucial role in Dodd’s vision of technical assistance. In a speech in 1951, Dodd began to make the case for a global initiative to support small farmers at the FAO. “So far, too few countries have taken the steps necessary to real agricultural progress,” he stressed.63 The world needed an international institution to foster overall improvement. Dodd elaborated on the range of projects that the FAO might serve: “the establishment of research and training institutions, . . . the reform of credit institutions, land tenure, and so on.”64

Indian Ideas About Technology at the FAO Indian social scientists lived and worked in a world flooded with new inventions such as bicycles and rice mills—innovations that demonstrated how small interventions could open the door to a culture of entrepreneurship. The idea that India could a center of invention, however, was destined to encounter resistance from tenaciously held prejudices of the West. Like the British before them, Americans tended to imagine India as an ancient civilization characterized by a pattern of collective thinking in the Indian “village community.” Such thinking implied that Indian villagers were so dependent on collective judgment that they were constitutionally incapable of summoning the initiative to innovate on their own.65 American development agencies would translate Indian ideas about small-scale technology into a prescription for selling India seeds, calculators, and pesticide. But the FAO was not the United States. Dodd might have been an Amer­ ican, but his work in Rome put him in a position that required him to listen carefully to voices from the developing world. As a former farmer, Dodd had tilled the soil himself. As an administrator of the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dodd had experience with persuading rich farmers and poor to cooperate—and he had

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witnessed the wealth to be had when they did. Dodd could appreciate the ingenuity and intelligence of the Indian peasant. Like John Boyd Orr before him, he met spokesmen from the developing world on equal terms. Indian research converted him. Dodd began to imagine each developing world farmer as the potential head of a miniature factory. What if the boys with foot-long hoes were trained to make scythes? he wondered. Every farm could become a prospective site of creative entrepreneurship.66 If small farmers were given enough support, and if they learned to make the buckets and hoes themselves, Dodd argued, their industrial innovations could ultimately enable them to compete with large, industrialized nations. After his visit to India in 1949, Dodd’s vision of development had pivoted to the sparking of industry. Whereas Dodd had initially conceived the FAO’s mission in terms of packages of tools thrown at the developing world—relief vessels filled with buckets and hoes—over the following years, he would grow increasingly enchanted with the prospect of making every farm a site of industry. It is impressive to watch the evolution of his thinking. In his early days at the FAO, Dodd explicitly imagined the organization would merely ship smallscale technology to India. In one article, he even suggested a permanent mission that would ship “little portable gasoline pumps to replace leather or wooden buckets for irrigation, hand cultivators or wheelhoes to replace short-­ handled hoes, scythes to replace sickles.”67 Within just a few years, however, Dodd was converted to a wider view of the FAO’s role in encouraging the progress of developing world technology; and from contemporary histories of the industrial revolution, he came to understand how small improvements, if produced locally, could seed larger industries. Increasingly under the sway of ideas about Indian invention, Dodd began to dream of a world where forging hoes and manufacturing wheelbarrows could be realized in villages throughout India, Asia, and Africa. “All these” objects, he recorded, “could be made in village shops.”68 Village industry, rather than American or British charity, could be enlisted to cure malaria as well, he believed. “Small factories can also be set up for making insecticides and small spray guns.”69 In some discussions, Westerners imagined technology as inoculating the backward peoples of the world with a dose of rationalism. American audiences often thought of the work of development as seeding a world of yeoman farmers who were to be enlightened by Western technology. Technology was some-

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thing the West could give to other nations; it was not something that grew from the earth on every continent. Modern anthropologists like Oscar Lewis confirmed that in both Mexico and India, native peoples lived “so close to the survival margin that they cannot afford to experiment with new things and ideas.”70 In 1959, a commentator in Science on the small-technology question reminded his readers that the peasants the FAO was delivering hoes to were also natives who believed in witches and demons.71 Backward people required an inoculation of Western technology to instill their understanding of cause and effect, went the thinking, and perhaps the hoe alone could act as a kind of rational vaccine. At times—and especially when he wrote for American audiences—Dodd himself invoked such language.72 In building an information system, however, the stewards of the FAO left room for the possibility of sharing indigenous technologies from around the world, not only the inventions of the West. As Howard Tolley explained, “Virtually every underdeveloped country has made progress in some field and has one or more technicians who, because of their special experience, may be more useful to another under-developed country than persons with equal skill and experience, but from a different environment.”73 In concert with such views, the FAO continued to insist that scientific advances might come from farmers anywhere in the world. Writing for the New York Times Magazine, Dodd related the story of the Derris plant, native to China, which was used to create an organic pesticide. Elsewhere, he praised Indonesia’s ancient tradition of aquaculture as a model of local knowledge that deserved to be disseminated to farmers around the world. Dodd regularly claimed that developing world knowledge could benefit science in advanced societies as well as developing ones. “Technical information doesn’t by any means all go in one direction, from the so-called well-developed countries to the under-­ developed countries,” he stressed.74 Throughout this period, Sen’s ideas about the importance of the small-scale technology model for keeping peasants debt-free marked everyday conversations at the FAO. Visiting Bolivia in 1955, one agent advocated for appropriate technology, or, as he called it, “simple technology,” arguing that extension programs that promoted large-scale technology created more problems than they solved.75 Under Dodd’s influence, conversations at the FAO gradually turned toward how the agency could support widespread design, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the developing world.

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Indian Insights About the Enduring Problem of Developing World Debt Debt was at the core of the Indian critique of large-scale technology. The small-scale technology model was driven, in part, by a theory that developing nations were united behind the cause of land redistribution. In a world of small farmers, peasants could ill afford expensive tractors. Initiatives at the FAO thus tended to emphasize the importance of circulating small-scale technology. Ideas about technology at the FAO were implicitly linked to keeping peasants from indebtedness, which could result in the loss of land. So central were these ideas that the FAO actively discouraged larger loans and unsupervised credit, both held to be dangerous for the developing world. FAO agent Arthur Gaitskill, working in Rwanda in the 1960s, warned against the dangers of credit: “Bankers’ terms are no solution to deal with the ground floor of development.”76 The United Nations urged that bank loans be made only where there was extension available for support to ensure that loans could be repaid. The United Nations also tightly controlled access by the World Bank to project sites.77 The organization tried to protect small farmers from loans and from bankers as the auditors of peasant effort. In the 1950s and early 1960s, many agricultural economists in the West grew to accept the Indian consensus on the dangers of debt for developing economies. The Columbia historian Daniel Thorner cited the deleterious effect of the railway and taxation on the Indian farmer. In 1961, Rainer Schickele was in the audience when Gunnar Myrdal declared that big science was bad for developing countries because of the issue of debt.78 UN writers followed Indian thinkers in associating large-scale technology with the conditions of economic oppression, wherein a population was mired in poverty. Expensive investments in dams and railroads, by limiting overall access to credit and raising taxes, could condemn a population to poverty and reduce opportunity overall. Thus agreeing with the ideas of Indian economists, UN administrators cautioned other agrarian leaders that the effects of large technology alone could be devastating. FAO veterans were also among the first whistleblowers regarding the adverse effects of the Green Revolution: improved seeds promised bumper yields, but typically created enormous debts that small farmers could ill afford.79 Unlike U.S. development models that pushed industrialization and extensive technology, the FAO model emphasized growth without debt.

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Through deploying small-scale technology, it sought economic growth that would benefit the poorest members of the community. Land redistribution with appropriate technology offered the ultimate answer to the problem of ending debt and creating broadcast economic opportunity. Land redistribution promised to enrich peasants by giving them collateral and freeing them from the interminable need to pay rent to an absentee landlord. Working carefully through the notion of economic development in one speech to an American university audience, Dodd enumerated the conditions that would result from the failure of projects intended to develop economic opportunities for peasants: farms too small, holdings too fragmented, land badly distributed, rent too high, systems of taxation inequitable, tenancy insecure, the peasantry indebted or lacking in clear titles to land and water.80 In other words, land redistribution that created small farms at viable sizes and constrained high rents was a prerequisite for the success of economic development. Matching the right technology for each farm, however, was no simple equation. It would call for iterative research to determine the best tools for specific crops, soil, and weather patterns around the world. In short, the right way to proceed, as envisioned by the FAO, required a massive research and coordination agenda, documenting the needs of peasant populations and aligning these needs with the right technology. Dodd’s vision of a global program of small-scale technology for small farmers around the world would offer a governing plan for the FAO’s activities in the 1950s and 1960s. The foundations of this plan were the insights of Indian economists: heavy technology was expensive and led to debt; small-scale technology could scale and make small farmers profitable. The lessons of the British Empire meant that nations must defend peasants against the greed of capitalists, or revolt would surely follow. By distributing hoes, credit, cooperative institutions, and information around the world, the United Nations would support post-colonial nations seeking to redistribute opportunity and so reverse the sins of empire. In its full form, the debt-free plan of economic development laid out at the FAO offered a tale of cornucopian production ushered in by a revolution that would activate the latent talents of peasants around the world. One of the fullest reflections on the implications of those ideas was printed in Rainer Schickele’s manifesto, Agrarian Revolution and Economic Progress, in which he argued that the untapped economic potential of poor people could be unlocked as soon as peasants were given an opportunity. Schickele understood, in other words, that Indian economics implied an economy of human potential.

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Farm size, Schickele explained, offered the key to unlocking that human potential. Large farms destroyed the possibility of broadcast innovation in a society “by concentrating entrepreneurship in the hands of fewer people and thereby relegating many farm families to the comparatively routine functions of supervised tenants and farm laborers.”81 Small farms alone had the potential to distribute entrepreneurial activity and other social virtues through society. “Distributive equity, opportunity, status and security, rather than maximum production,” he explained, “are the social values upon which the theory is based.”82 From his extensive reading of current economic debates, Schickele prophesied a coming revolution built not on technology but on a shifting mindset. In his view, the “agrarian revolution” of the twentieth century was not a matter of improved seeds or capital investments. Instead, the revolution was being brought about by a changing outlook among administrators and investors that identified developing world peasants as a source of innovation. “The greatest discovery of all,” Schickele proclaimed, “was the vast riches of talents, energies, and capacity for responsibility that had lain hidden and dormant in the great numbers of poor, uneducated, downtrodden people of all regions and races.”83 Schickele’s paean to the talents and energies of small farmers represented a stand against views of capitalism that attributed economic success only to a minority elite. Raw human potential was itself, he predicted, a source of “unsuspected riches.”84 All that was needed was a “broadening of incentives” that could be unlocked by programs of education that ensured broader participation in the economy.85 Schickele’s position on the psychological virtues of family farms allowed him to dispense with arguments in favor of industrial farming and industrialization. Raw data about growing population and the greater productivity of large farms was ultimately meaningless because the role of farms in the economy was to serve as centers of entrepreneurship, education, and innovation. Properly supported, small farms would grow in productivity and capacity.86 Indian economists and others had already provided empirical evidence of small farm productivity. To Schickele, however, the case for small farms was already implicitly persuasive enough to deserve a psychological theory rather than another quantitative justification. Relying on his theory of innovation, Schickele framed an expanded role for international agencies like the FAO. A culture of small farmer entrepreneurship could be seeded, he believed, through appropriate activities of national and

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international institutions. New “socio-political” institutions would promote the values of a “humanist-democratic social order,” thus promoting the economic participation of poor peasants.87 What this meant in concrete terms was widely distributed information about science, technology, and opportunity, designed to make an innovator out of every peasant around the world. Schickele’s “family farm theory” was embraced in crucial circles of U.S. development. His ideas were quoted approvingly by USAID economists in 1970. In the same year, agrarian economists associated with the Wisconsin Land Tenure Center presented evidence that, in certain circumstances, smallholder agriculture was actually more productive than industrial farming.88 In some quarters, at least, these conversations amounted to a revolutionary social science of opportunity—passed on from Indian to Western economists and to administrators at the FAO. It was a vision of smallholder farms supported by small-scale technology and seeding peasant innovation, free from debt.

Conclusion Understanding midcentury debates about population helps us to revisit the demography problem anew. Taken in its historical context, hostility to small farms amounted to hostility to the economic and technological independence of developing nations. As Paul Lamartine Yates saw it, the debate over population’s role in development “gained in dramatic strength because it was accompanied by the emergence of the under-developed countries as a political force.”89 Warnings about overpopulation in the 1960s left a mark in memory; many readers today will remember scares about the “population bomb,” some of which are still rehearsed in the context of climate change. Far fewer will remember the research collected in India in the 1950s and ’60s showing that population could scale, despite constrained access to land, as long as technological investments continued. Indian economists supplied ready answers to Western fears of overpopu­ lation. The result of the world-bridging conversation between India and the United Nations was a new doctrine in the field of development economics: an assurance that land redistribution could indeed scale with a growing population, given appropriate investments. Indian economists gathered data proving that small farms could indeed be as profitable as large ones, if only farmers had access to small-scale technological innovations. Today, the viability of small farms is more important than ever: agricultural

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research has long shown that small farms give off fewer emissions and preserve more biodiversity. In contemporary discourse, ideas about the role of small technology have returned. With recent advances in nanotechnology and sensors, the opportunities for deploying appropriate technology to render tiny farms profitable are more abundant than ever. Small farms also protect the food security of farmers, and can thus alleviate one of the primary forces that create climate refugees, for many of the reasons outlined by Schickele and his contemporaries.90 Given the promise associated with small farms in devel­ opment research, perhaps such schemes as Dodd’s once again deserve our attention. One significant difference between projects for supporting small farmers now and in the 1950s has to do with the role of centralized agencies versus self-organized groups of citizens. Most present-day experiments with cheap technology happen through peer-to-peer exchanges in online fora. Among the most promising institutions today for coordinating the sharing of plans for small technology to support small farmers are online communities like Farm Hack, which uses a many-to-many platform to enable farmers and designers to share blueprints for tiny devices to mechanize the monitoring and watering of crops. Devices of this kind radically expand the economic potential of smallscale farming. Before the era of the internet, however, sharing small-scale technology, like methods for manufacturing hoes and buckets, required a global information infrastructure. That the FAO developed such an infrastructure—bringing together grain surveys, indices of agricultural experts, and other publications— was an accomplishment in its own right. We turn now to the role of information in the FAO’s strategies for supporting a planet of small farmers.

Part II Cartophilia; or, Building Information Infrastructures

v In the speeches they gave and writings they published after the founding of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization in 1945, the in­ stitution’s administrators imagined a world where experts worked on behalf of the dispossessed. In the expectation of land redistribution, many people believed that peasants would soon farm tiny parcels of land the world over. Under Norris Dodd, the FAO’s second director general, the organization— drawing on the lessons of Dodd’s journeys in India—began conceptualizing a strategy for making peasants profitable without debt. Dodd assembled a list of care packages to be sent to the developing world. Merely having access to hoes, buckets, and other small-scale technology, he reasoned, could revolutionize peasant productivity. In addition, Dodd planned a program of education: an information pipeline that would carry cutting-edge research about agricultural science from universities to member nations, extension agents, local cooperatives, and individual peasants. Flowing both ways, the pipeline would also deliver information about local traditions of agriculture—for instance, Indonesian aquaponics—back to the member nations of the world. The stumbling block in Dodd’s plan, of course, was money. Because the FAO relied on limited funding from member nations, it could not afford to distribute hoes—even cheap ones—on a global scale. The FAO therefore began to concentrate on the cheapest of appropriate technologies: paper. Deploying paper in the form of grain catalogues, indices of agricultural experts, maps,

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and bibliographies, FAO officers attempted to supply an information infrastructure for a global peasant revolution. Mapmaking formed a major part of the FAO’s offering to developing nations. A thorough soil map could, in theory, support not only land redistribution but also careful government programs of consultation, seed sharing, and marketing. Responding to requests for such maps from post-colonial member nations, FAO agents began to plan what would become the Soil Map of the World, but such a global map was expensive and cumbersome. It took decades to assemble—and by the time it was produced, land redistribution was no longer on the agenda in many developing nations. Nonetheless, the FAO became a publishing giant, churning out surveys of agriculture, soil, fishery, timber, and pesticides research. FAO researchers distilled information from university scholars into abstracts, which were then further sorted into indices and bibliographies. Administrators imagined this kind of information apparatus as a powerful tool to be used in the agricultural programs of poor nations, where agrarian experts would coach small farmers on modern methods. With the growth of research funding, however, the bibliographies began to show a bias toward U.S. interests—for instance, the pesticide industry. Other contemporary biases began influencing the data as well. References to long-term overviews of the agrarian past began to disappear, driven out by a culture fascinated with novelty. Much of the paperwork published by the FAO was destined for the dustbin of history. It is unclear whether it ever reached peasants on the ground or served the purposes of land redistribution. The FAO’s initiatives did contribute to the creation of a massive investment in the field of agrarian studies in the West. Veritable armies of surveyors, social scientists, and bibliographers (many of the latter women) created land reform maps and bibliographies designed to serve a global peasantry of indigenous and former enslaved and colonized persons. The FAO’s model of research and publishing inspired similar projects of collecting and abstraction, including one designed by the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, which focused on the land management schemes of indigenous societies across the world. Ostrom, who later became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, left a lasting mark on conversations about ownership, fundamentally redefining the concept of property to validate collective management of land and water. In deducing and laying out a series of laws for how communities manage the “commons,” Ostrom definitively showed that it was possible for communities—and not just individuals—to sustain-

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ably manage the environment without exhausting it. Her work also opened up new perspectives on the diverse ways that human societies define ownership. In later generations, her ideas would help activists to defend the rights of people whose interests had been left out of the FAO’s otherwise exhaustive scheme. The contemporary invisibility of the women bibliographers who produced the FAO’s indices and the importance of Ostrom’s contributions raise important questions about the role of gender in the scholarship that defended a universal claim to occupancy. In Western nations, women had only recently been granted a right to own land: they gained this right in 1882 in the United Kingdom, and even later in some parts of the United States. Women researchers such as Elinor Ostrom were in the minority in social science departments. Indeed, in the story of women like Ostrom, we can glimpse something like the historical force of empathy in world history. Women’s liminal status with regard to property enabled some of them to become innovators around ideas like “common property.” Women researchers became particularly prominent in work that demonstrated the rationality and efficacy of non-Western property regimes that had previously been dismissed. Women instrumentalized empathy as a technique in the defense of occupancy: empathy helped them to understand the experience of non-Western cultures and developing nations. Empathy, not rationality, made the information pipeline work in the service of the peasants for whom it was designed.

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4  •  An Information Pipeline

On October 2, 1949—shortly after Dodd returned from his world tour, with stops in India and Pakistan—the New York Times Magazine ran a cover showing Chinese children eating bowls of rice with chopsticks while staring nervously at the camera, as if asking a question. Another photograph that accompanied the article showed a boy working the rice field, his head covered by a douli—the iconic hat of the East Asian farmer. The answer to the question of where the children’s food came from lay with the implement he was using. It was not a wooden instrument such as the ones that many peasants around the world used, and it was not a tractor. The boy held a long-handled hoe, a steel implement for tilling the soil—the product, perhaps, of a local farmer’s forge. Perhaps it had been designed under the guidance of an international program for farmer education of the kind being proposed by Norris Dodd, director general of the FAO, recently director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the author of the New York Times Magazine story. It was the hoe, rather than the tractor, that would transform developing nations, according to Dodd. With its long handle, the hoe allowed the farmer to work standing up, rather than on his hands and knees; the hoe’s industrial steel tongue meant that it would last longer than wooden implements. Cheap to manufacture and export, the steel hoe was a symbol of a development program that might see poor people manufacturing their own implements, turning farms into factories. Farmers, in other words, would become heralds of a future that was simultaneously industrial and rural. Supporters of the Rome Consensus—that is, the broader international exchanges around the FAO—believed that a global peasant revolution was in the future of almost every nation working toward its independence from Europe.

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The douli and the hoe, October 1949 (Photograph by John Gutmann; © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents)

Around the world, social scientists, economists, and agricultural researchers began to theorize the systems by which new nations and the FAO together could work to support small farmers, both in farming and in manufacturing their own hoes. In the debates that followed, exchanges between India and the FAO would lead the way. In 1949, India had been independent from Britain for only two years, and land redistribution seemed like a central pillar of its new program of economic growth. In the same year, the People’s Republic of China was established, and John Boyd Orr, the FAO’s first director general, received the Nobel Peace Prize. Norris Dodd, Orr’s successor as director general, occupied the most privileged position in the world for addressing the predominantly agrarian economies of the developing world. Like Orr before him, Dodd believed that the FAO should act in the service of developing nations. His first initiative

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on returning from a tour of the world was to use the bully pulpit of the New York Times to preach the lessons he had learned from Indian economists. Unlike many contemporary writers in Europe and North America, Indian economists had little use for theories that classified growing populations as a threat. Instead, Indian economists like Samar Sen understood a growing population as a resource, if only correct investments in education and infrastructure were made on a collective level. Dodd’s article took up Sen’s message, preaching it to a Western audience as a gospel of small-scale technology. Dodd urged development agencies to consider programs that focused on sharing “know-how” and “show-how” with developing world farmers.1 Dodd inherited from Indian economists a set of ideas about investing in small-scale technology. Know-how, sufficiently distributed, Dodd believed, would allow farmers around the world to determine their own destiny. Dodd attempted to put Indian ideas into practice at the FAO. He designed a coordinated global pipeline of models, support, and information that would support the adaptation of new technology by the small farmer with his douli— even guiding the farmer to become an entrepreneur and hoe manufacturer in his own right. The program revolved around an information strategy: the circulation and publication of knowledge in the form of indices, surveys, maps, and bibliographies. The FAO would construct a vast information infrastructure designed to manufacture and disseminate paper around the world, turning the FAO into a kind of machine for galvanizing economic potential from below. Farmers would keep their land and eat from it because they were at the receiving end of a pipeline, millions of miles long, carrying information from nation to nation around the world. Confronting modern conversations about post-colonialism, technology, information, and poverty, Norris Dodd spelled out a program that the FAO would implement over the 1950s and ’60s—the creation of an information pipeline conveying seed catalogues, agricultural statistics, prices, lists of agricultural experts, maps, and bibliographies of modern research to universities and ministries around the globe. Thanks to this pipeline, peasants would be privy to modern research. Through cooperatives and extension programs, they would gain access to science. With small-scale technology, they would earn their own economic independence. In each of these arenas—scientific research, extension services to peasants on the ground, cooperatives, and citizen participation—an international bureaucracy would support local peasant movements. Historians of development have largely ignored the role of international

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information projects of this kind. Instead, stories about technology’s role in development generally emphasize the twentieth-century creation of large-scale dam and highway projects, the promotion of U.S. industry and agriculture, and built-for-show demonstrations of interest in local culture as aspects of an ideological struggle for dominance against communism and as the exploitation of peasant labor around the world. Some researchers have even called attention to the popularity of cheap techniques of what contemporaries called “community development” in contemporary U.S. circles.2 The American fascination with cheap technology and information would, over the years, move away from the major considerations of the FAO. Far fewer writers, however, have examined ideas about technology, development, and information in a context beyond the American sphere. Administrators at institutions like the FAO attempted to orchestrate a development program of ideas from the developing world (and India in particular) through the deployment of information technology at scale.3 I build on the work of im­ portant scholars in this domain by drawing attention to distinctive ideas at the FAO. In contrast to U.S. programs of development that stressed how Western technology and ideas would transform the developing world, the FAO vision emphasized the collaboration of developed and developing nations and the creation of public goods in the form of enhanced programs of scientific research and exchanges for market prices. The claims made for this model of information-driven development were vast. Peasants would become entrepreneurs and innovators, working from modest rural plots to build factories. Democracy itself would be ensured. Elites would no longer dominate post-colonial societies. The only challenge would be finding the money to initiate and develop such a bold venture in a world where political will so often depended on privilege.

The Role of Science The vision that Dodd proposed for science was vast. It would depend on leveraging information about prices and statistics from farmers to researchers, and information from researchers about best practices back to farmers. It would be most meaningful on an international scale, whereby exchanges could flow between the developed and developing worlds. International centralization was key. “Only a world-wide agricultural organization like FAO could manage this,” Dodd underscored in a 1952 address to college students at Pacific University.4

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To support his vision, Dodd offered a theory of the role of collective goods in development. His plans required internationally coordinated science to be made accessible to the poorest peasant in the least-developed nation. “A farmer must have science working for him,” Dodd declared in an early speech.5 Only with the aid of science would the small farmer be productive enough that secure land title would be backed by economic security. Dodd envisioned a global circuit of labs, some researching the diseases of cattle, others the blights of wheat. The centralized coordination of catalogues, he promised, could even drive international research in directions that matched local demands. Coordinated research of this kind could render farming cheaper for individuals around the world. Among the first tests of Dodd’s vision was the publication of catalogues of wheat and rice. Improved American seeds took off in Europe in the 1950s, and many development agents believed a “Green Revolution” would boost yields— if only farmers in the developing world could learn about, and realistically access, the latest seeds. The FAO stepped up: it would coordinate farmers and seeds, and publish material relevant to the growing pursuit of new breeds of plants and animals. The FAO published a world catalogue of genetic stocks of wheat in 1952 and of rice in 1953.6 Dodd imagined the seed catalogues as an illustration of what he proposed as a core principle in development studies: collective investments in shared resources, such as infrastructure and information, could return massive rewards to all individuals. To benefit from the science of plant breeding, each individual farmer need not have his own nursery, Dodd explained. The farmer could benefit from the newest science by merely writing to the FAO, getting an address, and purchasing the kind of wheat resistant to the particular rust diseases that plagued farmers in his area. Because the FAO’s work in coordinating information made seed sharing available at a global level, every farmer in the world could potentially benefit. The United Nations, rather than the nation-state or private agriculture, would provide the research necessary for farmers in developing nations to flourish.7 Today we might think about Dodd’s intervention primarily as an insight about the benefits of collective behavior typical of socialized solutions to economic problems. But Dodd himself thought about centralized investments in information and technology as a principle implicit to the success of capitalism, rather than opposed to it. Dodd had no ideas about tipping world power in the direction of collectivism; he was arguing, as a former entrepreneur himself, about the kind of interventions he had seen work in the New Deal, where

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collective investments in education and technology benefited farmers across the nation. In some elaborations of his theory, Dodd even suggested that the FAO’s circulation of information would act as a general marketplace or stock exchange for agricultural investment opportunities. An exchange of information about prices would create opportunities for farmers to sell diverse seasonal food to communities in need. If price information was publicly shared, small farmers could bargain for the higher prices typically captured by largescale farmers. Small farmers would flourish, and history would demonstrate the viability of small farms.8 Dodd’s vision for the seed catalogues was about building an infrastructure that would make capitalism work in the service of the developing world. Hoping to support an exchange of information about prices, Dodd planted offices around the world that would specialize in the exchange of information about prices and yields. Early in the 1950s, the United Nations set up a national statistical training center in New Delhi. In an article for an Indian magazine, Dodd explained how the published statistics on agriculture produced by offices of this kind could help small farmers to orient themselves within the landscape of economic opportunity.9 A focus on distributing information to all countries alike allowed FAO leaders to promote their ideas while remaining essentially neutral to Cold War struggles. “The wonderful thing about knowledge is that when it is exchanged, nobody loses, everybody gains,” Dodd explained to a gathering of international youth in Rome.10 A controversy at the FAO centered on how to think about development: was the challenge best addressed on a collective or individual level? Dodd’s writings about information and science are especially torn on this question. Dodd frequently described the FAO’s role in terms of the collective undertaking required to raise developing nations. His ideas about statistical offices and price clearinghouses, however, echoed contemporary theories of economics that imagined market exchange as a perfect form of information sharing. Notions such as these were increasingly freighted with descriptions of the work of the individual and denunciations of collectivity.11 The flavor of conversations about information dissemination at the FAO had distinctively collective elements that contrasted with American-led development initiatives that stressed individual accountability. The United Nations, Dodd wrote, was “a cooperatively organized consulting firm” promoting “collective action” and “mutual aid” among nations.12 Such language as this— much of it derived from the utopian socialist and labor movements of the nine-

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teenth century—resonated with post-colonial democracies, some of which, like India, were already experimenting with agricultural cooperatives.13 For India and other developing nations, Dodd’s language signaled UN support for government action and collective economic development. Dodd’s writing moves in both collective and individualistic directions, most likely because of the influence of postwar conversations about science and information, which themselves teetered between a conception of science as a collective enterprise and science as an individual pursuit. One can, of course, see the folly in treating this as an either-or question. Problems in the FAO’s collective imagination arose primarily over issues with funding. Expertise and research were crucial to the working of the FAO in Dodd’s plan. But they were not the only component of its success. Dodd’s vision relied equally on a theory of the appropriate transmission of research to farmers, which went under the name “extension.”

Extension Once scientists and farmers contributed research and data to the infor­ mation pipeline, the FAO would deliver new information to peasants on the ground via trained facilitators known as extension agents. Dodd explains this concept in his homespun language: “By an extension worker,” Dodd wrote, “I mean a man who lives among the farmers of a county or a district, who has their confidence because he helps them, who knows enough about the practical agricultural problems . . . to really help the farmers, and who isn’t afraid to get his shoes muddy and his hands dirty at the job.”14 Under Dodd’s direction, the FAO would establish a network of educators to publicize appropriate innovations and methods to farmers around the world. An agent would be a person living among the poor, imbibing their values and working as an ally to promote their economic advancement—a figure that the American philosopher John Dewey might have recognized as the servant of “face-to-face” community, or that Gandhi might have imaged as the gram sevak, the village worker for sarvodaya, or “progress of all.”15 Dodd would have been familiar with Dewey’s writings from his time working for the New Deal and directing the USDA. In India, he might well have learned about village workers. He seems to have thought of extension as an intuitive concept for world cultures and an integral part of the way that information would reach ordinary farmers around the world. Once UN statistics and manuals reached national ministries of agriculture,

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local extension workers would perform what Dodd called “show-how” and “know-­how”—the techniques of demonstration and education that put knowledge directly in the hands of poor farmers.16 Research from the United Nations would supply the developing world with guidance on food prices, soil quality, and economic systems to support the development of an efficient shared infrastructure and educational network. In addition, demonstration farms, cooperatives, and local universities would teach technological innovation and other agricultural improvement methods until farmers learned to make their own tools. A coordinated undertaking using the structures of research, Dodd reckoned, could supply the educational superstructure needed to help small farmers to innovate, design, and build. UN member nations were expected to provide extension agents. India, Peru, and Tanzania would work with the FAO to set up a human infrastructure to carry pamphlets and seeds to peasants across the countryside. Experts were relied on to gather information, circulate it, and manage it—activities that would increasingly take the FAO in the direction of designing, preparing, and publishing maps, bibliographies, and other indices.17 In Dodd’s vision, the FAO would train those extension agents, transforming local workers into internationally skilled experts.18 Under Dodd’s leadership, the FAO effectively systematized “technical missions” and “schools” to train farmers, extension workers, and statisticians to collect data and analyze it on the ground. Extension workers would not merely relay information to the peasant, they would also study the cultures in which they were embedded to understand the human factors that unlocked development. In some versions of research promoted at the FAO, extension agents were trained to use surveys to quantify peasants’ understanding about local farming practice and its needs. They would collect local “folk knowledge,” assess it, and transmit it to the FAO’s central administration for the edification of other cultures.19 To support its ambitions of training extension workers, the FAO would create a system of information exchanges. The organization would maintain an index of extension workers and other agricultural specialists so that it could recommend appropriate experts to any agricultural enterprise around the world. In 1946, one FAO agent described his preliminary efforts to develop a “catalogue of scientific workers,” a “card catalogue of men upon whom we may call for advice and assistance in the various phases of our work.”20 He created a sample of the index cards he had in mind for the project: on each, he had printed a miniature biography and list of professional accomplishments.

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All of the world’s extension workers, animal breeders, and plant chemists would become specimens in a cabinet of curiosities designed to facilitate the expansion of extension around the world.21 This strategy was first deployed by John Lossing Buck during a mission to Burma, where he presented the Burmese government with a list of possible experts provided by the FAO. In experiments of this kind, FAO administrators put forward a vision of how information infrastructure could function in the service of post-colonialism: the government of Burma would have its pick of the world’s experts, rather than merely having experts assigned from above by colonial forces. Another advantage of this system was that the extension agents would not have to come entirely from the developing world; the FAO would employ agricultural workers from all nations to consult, especially favoring exchanges within a single region. Extension, in turn, would bring research from universities and international data-gathering missions directly to the peasants of the world. There too the FAO plan laid out a platform for rigorously unprejudiced exchange.

An Infrastructure for Participation Extension workers would deliver research to peasants, but peasants, in Dodd’s view, were to be more than simple receptacles of knowledge. Dodd articulated a vision of what he called “participation,” whereby information exchanges and regular meetings would seed rationalized participatory democracy in the developing world.22 The idea of participation became a core principle of the FAO, helping to inspire later exercises in self-governance. Other FAO administrators, such as Howard Tolley, likewise reported that “citizen participation,” rather than any particular form of technology, was the crucial factor in feeding a hungry world.23 Dodd could draw on his experience of leadership in the New Deal and at the USDA to inaugurate participatory exercises in self-government. As a fortyyear-old farmer-turned-entrepreneur recruited to administer portions of the Agricultural Adjustment Agency from 1939 to 1945, Dodd contributed to the idea of a “farmer-committee system,” wherein decentralized groups of farmers volunteered to take responsibility for setting price controls and reviewing welfare claims.24 The farmer committees were an early experiment in participation, in direct, citizen-run democracy as a form of government. The farmer committee system produced remarkable results: farm yields were boosted by

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up to 40 percent in some places.25 At the FAO, Dodd planned to roll out New Deal–style self-government as a means to help farmers get the information and tools they needed. The FAO’s commitment to participation was not mere rhetoric. As early as 1951, the Land and Water Division began looking for ways to promote a grassroots culture of tenants who would administer their own farms. In Chile, branch officers put together a proposal directed at the Chilean government for the management of Easter Island; the ten-year plan for reforesting the island included specifications for a general land reform–oriented plan of integrating peasants into land management.26 The mechanisms laid out in this plan, as with many others promoted by the United Nations, were participatory in their details: they involved concerted efforts to work with indigenous nations, to consult tenants at every level, and to transfer control into the hands of locals. Political participation, however, was not the only way that the FAO conceived of farmers taking an active role in development. Cooperatives, planted by the FAO, would offer opportunities for farmers to collaborate in entrepreneurial undertakings. Farmers would group into collective unions—sometimes self-­ organized and sometimes imposed by the state—for purchasing and distributing hoes, seeds, tractors, and processing equipment. These local cooperatives would collectively invest in consultations, tools, and seeds tailored to the needs of local farmers. By investing jointly in technology and expertise, individual farmers would bear less risk for expensive investments and could bargain for better prices. The economic logic of cooperatives turned on what economists call “externalities”: collective investments in shared infrastructure—for instance, cooperatively owned plants to process rice. The FAO believed that states could lessen the cost of self-education and processing in many stages of agricultural production through cooperatives, credit, shared infrastructure, and education. Sharing the cost of these investments would, overall, be cheaper than if each farmer invested on his own. There was no shortage of working examples of cooperatives that were boosting production around the world. FAO writers applauded precedents from Mainland China in the 1920s as a model for farmers’ self-organization. In the 1950s, India could cite a state-run cooperative dairy that supplied half the milk of Bombay as well as small farms revolutionized by gasoline-powered irrigation pumps. In 1963, the Times of India reported on a survey of agricultural cooperatives worldwide recently published by the Plunkett Foundation, a nonprofit named in honor of Ireland’s minister of agriculture and cooperative

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evangelist of the 1890s. The survey began in the Scottish Hebrides with the Lewis Crofters’ Cooperative, and profiled agricultural cooperatives in Fiji, Hungary, and India, even attempting an evenhanded diagnosis of the problems and opportunities faced by state-organized agricultural collectives in China.27 In the 1950s and ’60s, farmer-owned cooperatives were the panacea recommended to ensure that small farmers were able to invest while holding onto their land. In 1959, a young Amartya Sen lauded cooperatives as the source of economic efficiency: “Irrigational activities can be performed with much greater ease by cooperatives,” he wrote. “Better methods of cultivation can be used; even the application of chemical fertilizers will be much simpler if peasants are organised in some form of cooperatives.”28 At the MIT-USAID conference in 1964, experts laid out a plan for a global infrastructure of peasant cooperatives that would serve a world of small farmers. The fervor for cooperatives was infectious. An agent wrote to a friend at the FAO complaining that the enthusiasm for cooperatives in Sierra Leone was such that politicians considered them a cure for all ills.29 To many economists working in India and elsewhere, the lesson of history was clear: cooperatives offered a sure path to rapid economic development in the service of the many. All states had to do was to encourage their development. To help peasants on the global scale, the FAO depended on a pyramidal structure, reduplicating its efforts through the broad-based support of local institutions. The organization created a training center for cooperative staff in Iraq as part of the extension program for land reform there, and then speculated about forming another training center for rural cooperatives in Ecuador with the support of Michigan State University.30 The FAO started a co-op credit scheme, the largest in the world, and created other schemes for industrial banks, small-scale industries, and a development corporation to fund the cooperatives. In 1951, the FAO appointed its first cooperative expert, and by 1967 there were three of them, all advising the cooperatives about agricultural and land tenure practices, while leaving the problems of labor struggle and legislation to independent movements and other wings of the United Nations.31 Through its extension and advising programs, the FAO actively advocated a variety of forms of co-ops—cooperatively owned factories, cooperatively owned banks, consumer co-ops, distribution co-ops—as the fail-safe method for building a participatory democracy.32 At the World Food Congress in 1963, the Commission on People’s Involvement and Group Action discussed the role of farmers’ organizations and cooperatives. The commission affirmed that farmers needed to organize to protect their interests in a market economy, and that

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cooperatives were the best way of putting control in the hands of the farmers themselves. The FAO also published on the subject of cooperative models. In 1949, the organization organized its first Technical Meeting on Cooperatives for Asia and the Far East in Lucknow. Margaret Digby—a historian who had dedicated her career to researching the ideas of Horace Plunkett, and who had published an astonishing seven volumes on cooperative history, law, and practice—was invited to write as an outside consultant for the organization.33 Around the world, FAO agents could report promising signs of the expansion of cooperatives. They circulated enthusiastic memos about the rise of nationally sponsored cooperatives in India, and passed around articles on the history of Eastern European communal land tenancy. Their note-taking highlighted discrepancies in success among cooperatives. Sometimes cooperatives worked well for vegetable farmers but poorly for livestock producers. Sometimes cooperatives more easily secured loans than did private farmers.34 Judicious information about the patterns of success was being collected, preparing a storehouse of wisdom, with the aim of the FAO’s experts being ready to advise a coming international generation of cooperative owners on how to perfect the system of political economy they were constructing. The FAO’s three cooperative agents, few as they were, had plenty to do. They went to Pakistan—where independent farmers’ cooperatives had appeared fifty years earlier—and were shown a budget and architectural plans for a small college for training cooperative leadership in basic accounting. In West Pakistan, they visited a settlement camp of formerly landless refugees who had built their own farming cooperative, complete with community buildings. They solicited federations of international cooperatives for research on the successes of land reform in China, clipped articles on communal farming in Yugoslavia from the Economist, and collected letters from Economics Division staff summaries on the history of cooperative farming since 1848 in Czechoslovakia. In a 1966 report, the officers boasted about their work and the grander promise of cooperatives for developing nations.35 The coordination of information about cooperatives was impressive, but there was still a problem of scale. In 1967, there were only three cooperative experts at the FAO for the whole world, up from one. How could so few meaningfully contribute on a world scale? Where soil science, economics, and biology were concerned, experts arrived in legions; but cooperative organization— despite its centrality to every viable plan to support shareholders—remained an underfunded corner of research.

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Practice, expertise, and reality were at odds: economists agreed that cooperatives were vital to the success of the small farm, and that cooperatives in poor areas required state support. Throughout most of the world, however, cooperative initiatives remained few and far between—even in India, where the state supported a program of agriculture. A retrospective analysis of the failures of India’s cooperative movement demonstrated that cooperatives needed more support than they received.36 With a grander budget to back its vision, perhaps the FAO might have planted a million cooperatives around the world. Instead, three FAO experts advised developing nations, distributing printed materials wherever they went, hoping that their actions, perforce done on the cheap, would support a cooperative revolution around the world.

Information’s Role in Challenging the Power of Local Elites Many who shared the vision that information and technology could raise up the peasant also shared a common fear: local elites. Social scientists worried that politically connected elites could potentially subvert any enlightened program of government that threatened to force redistribution. Contemporary observers had ample illustrations of this principle in India, where landlords resisted and subverted the land ceiling acts passed by most Indian states in the 1950s and ’60s. Many also knew that the Indian Planning Commission had attempted to set in motion a census that would track the area claimed by every landholder.37 In India, information offered the surest weapon against the corruption of development initiatives by elites. “In many of the industrially underdeveloped countries,” cautioned the agrarian economist Rainer Schickele in an early article, “large estates are owned by a small group of well-educated people whose historical function it has been to control the economy and to govern the country.”38 Agrarian economists, he warned, should be wary of the power of elites filtered through national governments and local customs. “Social beliefs relevant to tenure conditions have been that the well-to-do landowners are in the best position to exercise managerial functions and to determine governmental policy in the nation’s interest.”39 The values of elites even appeared in the guise of economic theory, Schickele warned, describing a “ ‘landed estate theory of tenure’ according to which the landowners know best what is good for their tenants and farm workers, furnish them land, capital and supervision, and in return receive whatever remains after the subsistence needs of the farm families have been met.”40 Schickele was describing, of course, what generations of Irish radicals had

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referred to as “landlordism,” or governance by landlord; and in writing of “landed estate theory,” he was translating post-colonial critiques of empire for latter-day development economists. For Schickele and most of those employed by the United Nations, landlordism was anathema to participatory democracy, the major threat faced by those working to create a fairer economy. The landlord, typically from an elite family with powerful connections in politics, profited directly from the immiserating of the underclass, in contrast to the “knowledge-worker,” who brought opportunity and tools. The “villain in our drama,” Schickele wrote, was the landlord, heir to the feudal princes, plantation owners, and colonial administrators of the past.41 Ancient feudalism reappeared in the present whenever landowners fought against self-education efforts by their tenants or laborers. Schickele was not alone in theorizing that development, land redistribution, and democracy went hand in hand. A revolution empowering peasants with access to technology and markets would challenge the role of elites in both politics and society. John Boyd Orr framed the struggle over democracy in terms of race, suggesting that the question of white privilege would structure arguments for the remainder of the twentieth century. Such warnings had long been articulated, but now they came with a new urgency. In the 1950s and ’60s, warnings were sounded in many quarters of development economics that elites were sabotaging initiatives designed to enrich peasants. Fear of local elites was rampant in many social science conferences and interagency memos. One 1959 FAO memo warned against community development itself—programs of participatory organization included—suggesting that it benefited only the already privileged members of a community, in contrast to material redistributions of land. In 1969, FAO staff corresponded with representatives of the Lincoln Institute working on land reform in Asia, who identified “dominant control by landlords and the privileged groups” and “a lack of active participation by small farmers” as the greatest impediments to development in Asian countries.42 Thinking about the dangers of local elites to the project of reform was greatly influenced by the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, who decades earlier had composed a theory of elites suggesting that the best-educated and most privileged members of a society would find one another and secure government to their own advantage. Carrying this line of thought forward, Gunnar Myrdal sounded grave warnings about the power of local elites to deter land reform movements: “The power in many underdeveloped countries is in the hands of reactionary people who have, or shortsightedly believe that they have, an inter-

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est in preventing those changes in landownership and tenancy that would increase the opportunities and the incentives for the peasantry to try to improve their lot. Indeed, in many countries where there are enlightened national leaders in political control, they are made impotent by the landlords, moneylenders, and other middlemen, who have the power in the villages as well as in the parliaments, and who use it to prevent the implementation of the leaders’ decisions, even when they are put in the form of legislation.”43 Myrdal underscored the inevitability of conflict with elites over land redistribution, maintaining nevertheless that it remained the moral choice. The question was how international initiatives could counter elite power. One answer was the knowledge of peasant history and peasant economics held by workers at an international agency, who could discern patterns of ­injustice and defend against co-optation by elites. The generalized fear that elites could overturn development initiatives—creating a permanent world underclass—fed a sense of conviction among the social scientists at the FAO. Many social scientists considered themselves servants of the poor rather than representatives of the elite; they were none other than the knowledge workers Schickele celebrated, laboring in solidarity with the international peasant. Some at the FAO saw the work of social science as operating outside the realm of elitism—as a product of the progress of knowledge. Schickele explained the role of modern social scientists in terms of a historical trajectory of liberation and solidarity unfolding over centuries. Under feudalism, violence appeared across all aspects of identity: between classes, races, and genders. Villainy reappeared in the modern era everywhere that gender, race, and class were used to exclusion, including when the peasant “who has no respect for the dignity of his wife” then “mistreats her as a slave,” in Schickele’s phrasing.44 Education, enlightenment, and democracy could challenge those boundaries of identity and make a wider solidarity possible. Information’s role was to fundamentally alter the feudal world in which the poor person had “no influence over his environment, no influence with his employer, landlord or creditor in the conduct of public and community affairs.”45 The spread of information would ensure “universal citizenship” and the “abolition of poverty.”46 As peasants came to experience themselves as actors in world history, they would, in turn, respect the identity of persons of both genders and all races. Human rights, peasant liberation, land redistribution, and social science thus went hand in hand. A similar understanding of history framed the role of information infrastructure projects at the FAO. Social scientists argued that human rights and

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democracy jointly depended on the dissemination of opportunity, which would be made possible not through infusions of capital but with training programs, research, and publishing. Information would armor small farmers against the elite. Information would grant them access to the tools necessary to make themselves economically productive; it would also help them to defend themselves as a political class. Many contemporary advocates of land redistribution imagined that only information could keep elites at bay long enough for the underclass to create its own government—a self-government based on rational data, not on dependency or ignorance. Social scientists also believed that information and access to technology could give peasants an advantage over local elites in many parts of the developing world “The skilled human resources of developing nations are typically scant,” one speaker reminded the MIT conference.47 Armed with information, new seeds, and hoes, small farmers would become small entrepreneurs and small industrialists, capable of challenging elites and democratizing power governance throughout the developing world.48 In this view of the world, the United Nations and other international organizations had a crucial role to play in helping national peasant struggles to defeat the power of local elites. Local economies were beset by the corrupting influence of privilege and elitism. Only international institutions like the United Nations and the global network of social science researchers could break the power of local elites and unleash the potential of peasant movements worldwide. Agents at the FAO therefore remained uninhibitedly optimistic about the prospect for land reform in the future—warnings about local elites notwithstanding. Within a worldview in which land reform represented the destiny of liberalism, history predicted the overthrow of feudalism in the countryside. In the vision Schickele shared with many other development experts of his time, information would gradually reverse the sins of European empires, allowing education to triumph over the forces of racism, elitism, and greed.

The Cost of Development In his piece in the New York Times Magazine, Dodd couched his scheme in terms most likely to whet the imagination of American readers. Anchoring his pitch in U.S. precedents, he described the plan as a “modest expansion of the extension service idea,” and referenced programs of farmer education already

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familiar to rural Americans.49 To ensure the compliance of U.S. funders, Dodd advertised his information exchange program as a cheap alternative to initiatives involving heavy infrastructure, such as hydroelectric technology, for the developing world. The idea that the developing world needed U.S. leadership, and his reassurance that development could be cheap, appealed to American self-conceit and thrift—and both aspects of his plan would ultimately undermine the United Nations’ leadership on the international scene. No one at the FAO, of course, actually believed that a successful plan for world development was possible on the cheap. Publishing on an enormous scale could bring to Asian and Latin American farmers the benefits of the science being done in international research universities, but that undertaking alone represented an enormous investment. Dodd frequently defended the expense of his vision by arguing that collective investments were cheaper than individual ones. One nation’s research about plant disease, shared on an international level, could obviate the need for other nations to reproduce the same research. Collective investments in research would therefore be cheaper than national ones. Howard Tolley, one of Dodd’s lieutenants, called for initiatives exploring appropriate technology on the scale of the Manhattan Project: “If the peoples and nations in the positions of leadership in the world today would devote as much of their resources and energy to [small-scale farming] as they are now devoting to atom and hydrogen bombs and other means and methods of destruction, the last half of the twentieth century would go down in history as an era of advancement much greater than any period of the past.”50 In 1972, the journal Foreign Policy ran an article by Roy Prosterman, an affiliate of Wisconsin’s Land Tenure Center, proposing a “Marshall Plan” for the world, and suggesting a new metric to measure the grievances that he believed to be the source of all revolution.51 Prosterman’s index of “landlessness” would count how many people in each nation labored on land that was not theirs—rendering occupancy rights, not GDP, the preferred measure of economic and political success in international affairs. Prosterman thought his index would make it possible for the World Bank to create benchmarks for a system of economic growth that recognized a universal right to occupancy. He reasoned that counteracting displacement would also diffuse the major source of ethnic violence across the world. Equally important, he showed that tracking landlessness and supporting small farmers could be accomplished at a trivial fraction of the cost of the food aid programs in which the United States was presently involved—much less, one might add, the cost of America’s contemporary military engagements.52 While

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it was the FAO’s overarching ambition to promote technology on a global and coordinated scale, doing so effectively required monumental funding. From the FAO’s founding in 1943 until at least 1965, there were sound reasons to expect that the rich nations of the world might support such a program. Evidence was mounting that small adjustments in information and technology could revolutionize the world’s food system. Just after World War II, ships bearing improved varieties of maize from America landed in Europe. The maize was distributed by UN agents who encouraged European farmers to plant the new breeds. From 1945 to 1953 farmers documented an improvement in corn yields of 25 percent higher than traditional varieties. According to the FAO numbers, in one year alone, a profit of $25 million resulted from an investment of merely $40,000 in information and coordination.53 The success of improved seeds sent a clear signal to investment circles that small improvements in agriculture had enormous economic potential. FAO administrators therefore continued to dream of even larger investments that would permanently lift the peasant of the developing world from poverty into productivity. They promoted a global program of research and extension services, cooperative advising, and the other initiatives associated with Dodd’s information pipeline. They plotted larger projects of the kind needed to support the Soil Map of the World and the cascade of printed bibliographies that accompanied them. The only problem with the information pipeline was that it was potentially expensive. Cooperative programs, publishing, and extension were cheap compared with hydroelectric dams, but they were not free. In one not negligible way, they could be more expensive undertakings than dams: rather than being built all at once, extension and research programs required labor that had to be replenished year after year. The price tags associated with the FAO’s services had begun to draw notice— and they became a subject of political bargaining. The FAO’s budget quadrupled between 1956 and 1966, amounting to four thousand employees and a $49.9 million budget by the latter date. Much of the expense was associated with extension. In Peru, the American Alliance for Progress oversaw an enormous program of rural development that increased extension work from ninety-­ six agencies to four hundred over the three years beginning in 1964. The price tag required massive loans from the United States and its partners—a $42 million loan from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in addition to the $50 million committed by Peru itself—further cementing the political and economic dependence of Peru on America.54

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It was becoming increasingly apparent that the FAO vision of development might come with an astronomical price tag, and that, for reasons of political control, member nations like the United States—which sponsored their own development agencies—might not be willing to pay the bill. Writing in 1965, Gunnar Myrdal warned that undertakings proposed by Dodd and successive directors general could not be accomplished on the cheap, and that international agencies should not take funding for granted. Success in development, he warned, would be certain only if “rich countries . . . would rise to the challenge and be prepared to accept real sacrifices.”55 Myrdal’s language of the “sacrifice” required by privileged nations echoed a similar challenge laid out by John Boyd Orr at the FAO’s founding two decades before, when he linked the success of the FAO to the willingness of rich nations to support the relinquishment of white privilege. Like Orr, Myrdal highlighted the fact that the privilege of rich nations rested on the exploitation of poor ones, and that this relationship was unsustainable in the long term. He also reckoned with the twenty years of inadequate funding contributed by rich nations to international development since the founding of the United Nations. The reluctance of privilege suggested a foregone conclusion, Myrdal wrote. Had not America already made its choice against “collective international responsibility,” against support for post-colonial and impoverished nations?56 The FAO vision was vulnerable when it came to money; canny though it was with respect to debts for developing nations, the organization nevertheless required money to support its global development goals. The FAO would struggle to fund most of its ambitious initiatives from the get-go. Dodd’s early speeches had emphasized that the FAO had a tiny budget; even when that budget quadrupled between 1956 and 1966, FAO finances failed to keep pace with the programs of work recognized as reasonable by FAO officials. The potential expense of cooperative advising and extension programs meant that the FAO was increasingly focused on only one aspect of Dodd’s plan for an information pipeline: publishing. Left out of the equation was the rest of an information pipeline designed to plant extension agents around the world who would use the maps and bibliographies to coach peasants on improved techniques of farming. The disjunction between visions and budgets would have real consequences. By 1973, William and Elizabeth Paddock, a pair of scientists who visited land redistribution programs in Mexico, harshly judged the government sites where small farmers were provisioned with land but not extension agents. Every plan for settling small farmers called for extension agents, they explained, because

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without advising, there was no way for new landowners to learn about appropriate techniques for farming or the improved varieties of seeds with which those scientists worked. They concluded, along with a jaded peasant informant, that land redistribution schemes were a “joke” and that America should avoid getting pulled further into any such disasters.57 The Paddocks’ judgment had resounding consequences in the field of international development. The money for supporting peasant farmers would run out, leaving developing nations on their own, marooning a raft of orphaned publishing projects in the 1970s, quantifiable in terms of the declining number of publications released by the FAO from the 1980s forward.58

Conclusion The turn toward information systems on a global scale designed to serve the poor was, in a very real sense, a world-historical event—aligned with the nineteenth-century idealism of Max Weber, who had narrated the piecemeal broadening of participation in the state from the kinship model of the Khans to the Renaissance court to the modern post office.59 Inventing modern bureaucracies had been an moment for human history akin to the discovery of fire: creating a world government—open to researchers of all races and nations, operating in the service of the poor—attempted a step of greater gravity than any trip to the moon. The creation of an information pipeline to connect peasants to experts was part of a scheme to dramatically and irreversibly improve the human condition. Administrators at the FAO believed in the potential of coordinated information technology to support economics from below. Information technology, in these debates, was offered as the alternative to heavy technology, which FAO administrators abjured, sharing the concerns of Indian thinkers regarding the destructive potential of international chains of debt linking the developing and developed worlds. They designed their information systems to help the peasant, concentrating on the power of small technology and information to scale, protection from loans that would lead to debt, and intermediate institutions such as cooperatives. Equally ambitious was the promise of using such an administration to free peasants from debt, to redistribute land, and thus to sow the seeds of broadcast political independence and economic opportunity. Such a use of technology as this effectively reversed the course of centuries, during which informa-

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tion technologies such as paper maps and title were used to defraud indigenous populations of their land.60 If FAO administrators such as Norris Dodd could somehow be transported to today’s world, how would they react? It is not inconceivable that they would be disappointed in the investments in large technology and industrial farming that were the signature of U.S. development. They would surely wonder about the fate of Dodd’s noble vision of extension, cooperatives, and low-cost technology. Some answers to the collapse of those initiatives lie in the story of how the information infrastructures were executed. The information infrastructures developed at the FAO ultimately thwarted Dodd’s idea of a world connecting peasants with information; many infrastructure projects were launched, but— whether or not they reached the small farmers they were designed to serve— they were doomed to be cut short of their ambitions, truncated over questions of funding and politics. It is to the star-crossed failures of information infrastructure—in the projects for maps and bibliographies—that we now turn.

5  •  On Failing to Make a Map in Time

From August 15, 1947, forward—the era when India shuffled off the shackles of British Empire and emerged as an independent nation, fighting for economic success and international allies on its own terms—there were questions about what kind of a government the former colony would form. Many hoped that independence would bring new opportunity for the poor. Law had the power to redistribute wealth. Laws on paper declared policies of land redistribution; maps and surveys identified and described territory to be distributed. Careful observers were increasingly nervous, however. Signs suggested that India’s new bureaucracy might re-create the power dynamics of empire, whereby literate elites used paper to limit the opportunities available to the poor. Writing, maps, and other devices of paper were instruments of power. In colonial India, as in most nations under British rule, only the few could read. During the Raj, and for many centuries before it, written laws tended to reflect the values of these literate few. Even with independence, legal forms and maps— even those that promised to redistribute property to the poor—worked only on behalf of the few who could read. By many accounts, paper—and the flow of information more generally—was at the root of the problem of poverty under the British Empire.1 Indian economists and American observers agreed on the historical role of paper under colonization: Britain’s regime of paper documentation and regulation of the economy favored the colonizer; official material was printed in English and always distributed first among colonizers, which had intentionally made it impossible for peasants to understand or access the civil service. At independence, Indian civil servants imagined their work as addressing that

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imbalance for the greater good, putting the tools of control back in the hands of ordinary Indians. The economist Govindlal Patel believed that investment in smallholders would eventually result in an economy in which all citizens could participate with potential reward. Writing in 1954, Patel expected this rationalization of bureaucracy to result in a “permanent gain” in terms of state revenues, as small farmers’ profits were no longer eaten away by an inefficient bureaucracy or local middlemen.2 A general economic uplift would follow, enriching both citizens and the state, allowing India to modernize by building infrastructure and industry—all because paper had been rationalized. Working from examples in Britain, Indian economists and politicians theorized that the just execution of the law depended on the availability of clear maps of ownership. Such maps would allow the state to identify, divide, and reallocate land for the poor, according to the land legislation that most people expected would be implemented. Soil maps and other maps were needed to facilitate land redistribution. The maps were intended as an expression of popular will in developing nations attempting to fight the legacy of colonial inequality. While many scholars have generalized about maps as a symbol of expert authority, there is evidence that many midcentury maps were, in fact, designed to democratize access to the land, both across nations and across classes. The need for maps in developing nations attracted the notice of the United Nations. With their army of civil servants, geographers, and agrarian economists charged with the promise of liberating peasants through the powers of paper, the administrators at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization attempted to contrive a plan that would support Indian farmers—as well as peasants around the world—in creating an open system of land governance, capable of supporting a global redistribution of land. That conversation led to an effort by the FAO to make a map on a detailed scale that would serve such schemes around the entire world. At the FAO, some agents imagined the map as a tool for helping reformers to redistribute land and thereby reverse the economic inequality typical of nineteenth-century empires. Others thought the map would also help to enrich peasants by giving government the tools to effectively support small farmers by building infrastructure or advising farmers about crops appropriate to their soil. With these various considerations in mind, four interrelated efforts—piecemeal maps and cadastres for client nations, the World Land Use Survey launched in 1949, the

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FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World begun in 1961 and completed in 1975, and the Study on Land Reform Implementation performed in 1969—were intended construct a transformative instrument for global development.3 Altogether, such efforts represented an attempt by an international government to convert the practice of state mapping—long used to oppress and colonize— into paper produced on behalf of the people. Such maps were needed—but none of the efforts to make them succeed. The story of the mapping projects designed to support land redistribution is not a happy one. The most complete of these projects—the Soil Map of the World—was too small to allow effective planning on the global scale. The United Nations’ efforts were also out of step with international political will. By 1975, when the map was published, political enthusiasm for land redistribution had evaporated in many places—the victim of global shifts in political opinion. Even had support for land redistribution remained strong, the Soil Map of the World would have been limited in its ability to support the purposes for which it was intended. It was too limited to supply the detailed information needed for dividing small farms and supporting them. Despite the effort, time, and expense dedicated to the map, a series of negotiations had produced a document that was fundamentally and fatally compromised. The ideas of information and expert advising held value, but the project was doomed by half measures. Although it ran to high costs and consumed enormous energy, the map’s incompleteness rendered it insufficient for the purposes for which it had been intended. The fate of the Soil Map of the World speaks volumes about why many of the information infrastructures developed at the United Nations to support peasants inevitably failed.

India Plans a Map of India The context of Indian conversations about land was twofold: recovering from the legacy of British Empire, and actualizing plans to grow food sufficient to feed India’s growing population. Report after report in the 1940s and 1950s stressed India’s commitment to land redistribution as part of a wider strategy for combating hunger and ensuring economic growth. Mapping formed a part of nearly every discussion. In its 1945 report, the Famine Inquiry Commission proposed that the government create a kind of information infrastructure that would help economists plan around the needs of small farmers: a total cadastre, or detailed map of

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land parcels and their owners. “For every village,” explained the report, “there should be a record of all [owned] holdings and [cultivated] farms, including farms held by cultivators who do not possess a right of occupancy in land.”4 India would therefore require a multitude of maps showing villages, owners, and tenants without rights, providing the information needed by the government to survey land and to support small farmers with appropriate irrigation or technological aid. Mapping the nation was the first step in a plan to permanently protect India from famine. The Famine Inquiry Commission’s concerns with a productive reallocation of land were echoed in 1953 by R. A. Gopalaswami, the census commissioner of India, in his introduction to the first published census of the independent nation. Gopalaswami’s report offered Indians concrete answers as to how India would feed its growing population. Land redistribution and support of small farmers would be a crucial component. Coaching lay readers through the details of an economically informed plan of land redistribution, Gopalaswami explained commonsense truths of Indian geography. “It is clear that the people living in some zones of India have got more land per head than their fellow-­ citizens in other zones.”5 In a pedagogic tone meant to convey economic problems in terms any citizen could understand, Gopalaswami asked a naive question about how land redistribution would work. If densely populated states as well as sparsely populated ones were each divided among all their inhabitants, the latter would get much more land—would that be fair? He went on to explain the country’s geography in simple terms: India comprised mountainous areas that were difficult to cultivate as well as deserts where little grew. Soil quality varied between districts; thus higher per capita land ratios were no measure of the worth of land. A peasant who received an enormous holding of rocky soil would be in the same position as a peasant who received a tiny share of fertile soil. At the heart of his introduction, Gopalaswami stressed the importance of technical details about geography to the enterprise of land redistribution. The commissioner was making the case to the Indian public that the census for which he was responsible showed the importance of a carefully managed land redistribution program. To be effective, that program would necessarily have to take into account the details of soil quality, aridity, and terrain of every plot of land over the entire country. Topographic and soil mapping therefore had to precede any rational land redistribution. Experiments with mapping had begun almost immediately after 1946 in West Bengal, where state officers began to collect village records to test the

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Soil survey of Matpalsa Union (Amal Kumar Sen, “Land Utilization and Agricultural Planning in Matpalsa Union of Birbhum West Bengal,” Geographical Review of India 19:4 [1957], 27; courtesy of the Geographical Society of India, University of Calcutta, India)

principle of whether it would be possible to conduct a land-to-the-tiller distribution. In the 1950s, the Geographical Review of India published partial land use plans and maps of particular districts to accompany policy recommendations. A map of the Mouza Matpalsa district of Bengal published in 1957 offered a trial survey of a kind that—executed on the scale of a region or a nation— would support recommendations for land reform, technological adaptation, and birth control. Later, the efficiency of the state of Bengal in rolling out cadastres would guarantee the efficient deployment of tenant registration campaigns and effective protective projects run on the basis of those surveys.6 Indian planners leaned on the disciplines of land economics, soil conservation, and regional planning, which had evolved since the First World War into new fields of research on a global scale, and were strongly linked to the use of the geographical survey of landholdings. India’s Second Five-Year Plan empha-

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sized the need for land use planning on a national scale to even out regional imbalances of economic opportunity.7 Land use maps typically began with a survey of local soil, delineating districts of fertile loam capable of supporting agriculture, and ones with clay or sandy soils in need of amendment or irrigation.8 On the basis of this taxonomy of soil, economists theorized the limits of local agriculture: the need for technological improvements to enrich the poor farmers on bad soil, or the opportunities poor farmers might have were they given access to the hoarded tilth of richer farmers. In the section of Mouza Matpalsa surveyed by the sample map, only one-third of the land—a narrow strip below the highway—was good loam capable of immediately rendering a high return. The remaining two-­thirds of the district were dry and friable soils.9 The mapmaker recommended strategies that would have been familiar in nineteenth-century Britain: amending the soil with regular applications of manure along with the development of irrigation works.10 A mass solution for farming in Mouza Matpalsa would require both education and infrastructure-­ building initiatives by the state.

Ideas About Planning and the State Land use planning was but one species of a new ideology of planned economies, wherein expert surveys would underwrite sound decision making by socialist governments. In the moment of independence in India, a faction of academics and policy makers fervently believed that India’s small farmers would be best supported by just such efforts at planning a productive and rewarding future for all. In an Indian journal, the young economist Amartya Sen articulated the advantages of a socialist planned economy, arguing that such planning could speed up the process of economic development, allowing India to catch up with Britain’s progress.11 Planning, including land use planning on the basis of soil surveys, would unlock new economic opportunities for the masses and so allow India to catapult forward in time. Land use planning depended on national traditions of mapping and soil assessment that had been part of British statecraft since 1791—two years after the French Revolution—when the Ordnance Survey was founded (the U.S. Geological Survey was founded nearly a century later, in 1879). From at least 1826, British colonial surveyors in Ireland used a general map of soil quality to reform the laws of taxation around rational principles.12 British traditions also showed how fine-grained mapping could support new

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laws legislating occupancy rights. In the late nineteenth century, Irish administrators consulted finely detailed maps to support Ireland’s land redistribution. From 1936 to 1944, the Land Utilisation Survey of Britain mapped refuse heaps, industrial areas, and playgrounds, providing detailed data about location and proximity that would support a total revision of property taxation envisioned by some socialist initiatives as a necessary precondition to formulating policies for rent control that would adapt with markets.13 British treatises—rather than U.S. ones—documenting such experiments with land governance would fill the footnotes of Indian economists. Land use planning was a bold new model of a planned economy. Associated with the rise of democratic socialism in Europe from the 1890s forward, it evolved alongside a set of ideas about how the landscape as a whole should be studied and managed. Based on the principle of rigorous, expert attention to the empirical details of the landscape, studies of “land use” promised to wed the insights of economics and geography to support the rationalization of rent control, housing construction, and agricultural practice. In theory, expert attention would raise each plot of land to its highest possible use. In some versions, land use planning would rationalize development in the name of the common good by facilitating the creation of businesses and schools while penalizing private mansions in the middle of the city. Richly detailed surveys were supposed to guide the planning of healthy and efficient landscapes—for example, schools would be built far from factories and housing created near sites of employment.14 In political experiments of this kind, maps were key: they organized insights from agricultural science, social science, and economics, allowing state planners a god’s-eye view of the needs of citizens and how they might come into conflict. Among the flagship efforts of land planning in the United Kingdom was Dudley Stamp’s effort to create a Land Utilisation Survey for the whole of Britain: a single map would guide the taxation and management of building and farming on every piece of land, urban and rural.15 It was an effort, with which both Indians and surveyors at the FAO were familiar. British debates about the “rationalization of property” in the 1930s and ’40s covered many issues that India faced a decade later. In modern history, discussions regarding land use and tenure have almost always included proposing a vast bureaucracy to examine the price of rent and the use of land. When Britain began to contemplate a serious commitment to state-built housing and rent control in the 1940s, one of the first questions was: what sort of administration would be required to determine the correct price and best use of land?

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In 1943, Dudley Stamp explained to readers of the Times of London that a new system of evaluating taxation was coming, and it depended on having a new map. A corps of eleven Land Utilisation officers, traveling the country and collecting information, could supply a “multi-purpose single valuation” of every piece of property; and their information would determine, once and for all, the correct price of every parcel of land in the nation.16 Information about that value would allow the government to survey the cost of building roads and sidewalks. It would enable a proper assessment of where the rents were inflated by speculation, and where rent was fair. Information would cut “the Gordian knot” of taxation debates.17 Land use planning maps were almost always built on soil maps. In 1943, the British officers appointed to map the nation began to scour the soils of the countryside. Their first charge was to ensure that factories would never be built upon prime soils—which were best reserved for farming. Expert eyes would contemplate every inch of soil, cultivating “personal contacts,” squeezing “confidential information” from locals, and checking geological maps produced by the soil survey, universities, and agricultural colleges.18 In this way, every plot of land would be judged for its compatibility with the “local needs and aspirations” and their appropriateness within the frame of “national policy.”19 The vision was one of total control of land by the state: the state would order the landscape, from providing housing for all down to the aesthetics of garden and house layout.20 Civil servants like Dudley Stamp—and maps like the one he proposed—would form a total information infrastructure, allowing rigorous aesthetic judgment and setting of prices. Stamp also had ideas about collecting information from below. In the 1950s, hundreds of volunteers gathered information on viable local allotment gardens for Stamp’s Land Utilisation Survey.21 Determining the correct price and usage of land, they demonstrated, could be a democratic affair, built on information collected from thousands of participants. Such an idea—of government crowdsourced by the masses—would divert the shape of land governance in India and elsewhere after the 1970s. In the 1950s, however, new ideas emerged about the role of government in creating land use maps for citizens to annotate. These ideas resonated with a growing fascination with information management that had begun transforming corporations and research beyond the FAO. The punch-card systems embraced at IBM were increasingly looked to as a model for states to follow in every domain, including that of land governance. A review essay published in 1966, “Recent Efforts to Improve Land Use Information,” documented a government- and lawyer-directed movement

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to rationalize land use information on a national level. The American Bar Association proposed a survey of rent prices that might be used to set policies for affordable housing, including, perhaps, flexible rent controls set to fluctuate with data. In America, at least, there seemed to be little reason to doubt that modern information processing, built around the coding of locality, ownership, and soil, would soon transform every aspect of economic life.22 The story of the Land Utilisation Survey, like that of many of the techniques of the information infrastructures regarding land redistribution, offers a paradox: was the paper-producing, paper-collecting bureaucracy of the mid-­ twentieth century a democratic revolution that created forms of governance responsible for, and accountable to, the people? Or was the paper-collecting bureaucracy itself a form of government that erected a barrier between people and experience?

Redesigning State Information in India In India, the question of how information relates to democracy was even more pressing. When British-funded railways spread across India in the nineteenth century, regulations in English announced evictions and displacements of native people—and only those who could read the announcements could appeal for compensation.23 During empire, again and again, paper had acted as a divide between the governing European elite and the often illiterate masses. In 1947, the memory of Britain’s paper regimes informed many debates about how the new maps would work and whom they would serve. Indian economist Govindlal Patel, in particular, described the confused bureaucracy over which Britain had presided. Patel warned that an independent Indian civil service must defend itself against such precedents. Patel raised cautions about the speed of legislation and planning in India as well as about the abundance of paper produced. He described how “many laws” were “passed with such a great speed that the legislators and the administrators find it difficult to follow.”24 Patel editorialized: “One is lost in the labyrinth of laws and wonders whether the laws are for men or the men for laws!”25 Faced with corrupt landlords, lawyers, and bureaucrats, Patel asserted, the best way of rationalizing information about the rights of owner-occupiers was a holistic, centralized survey that would consolidate information about the entire nation in one place. According to Patel, India’s incipient cadastre was the most successful aspect of Indian land reform to date in its creation of an independent bureaucracy for

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registering tenant occupancy and title. After independence, the government of India abolished the many intermediaries of ancient and British rule, dissolved ancient estates, and appointed the state governments of India to create an alternative bureaucracy for the recording of survey, settlement, and title.26 This new bureaucracy broke with British precedent in India by discarding intermediaries and reimagining a participatory state, freed from the “labyrinth” of British precedent. Patel imagined that a more efficient regime of paper was already undoing the wrong usage of paper in the past. But the survey he described was slow in the making. This need for maps—to ensure cooperatives, to register tenants, to create an effective land reform—raised the need for surveying at an enormous scale. India would need thousands of maps like the one Mouza Matpalsa had assembled—each painstakingly prepared with the help of geographers and economists. On such an enormous scale, the all-India survey was an undertaking far beyond the capacity of the fledgling bureaucracy of independent India.27 In 1972, India was still waiting for the maps that many believed were required to support small farmers, and the surveyor general was still promising that the cadastre, once finished, would eliminate the problems of a new democracy.28 In the meantime, administrators at the United Nations wondered if their cadre of experts could lend a hand.

The FAO Promises to Map the World India was far from the only nation in the world that faced these problems. Struggling with their own questions about productivity while promising the reallocation of land, other developing nations at the United Nations likewise clamored for maps. UN administrators would soon begin to reimagine themselves as the purveyors of surveys to the world. The demand for maps came to the United Nations from post-colonial countries, most of which lacked bureaucracies for creating their own national surveys. At meetings with representatives of the FAO, an Indian delegation asked the organization to collect information about whether decentralized landholding could feed the masses. In 1952, Puerto Rico specifically asked that the FAO provide a “clearing house information center on land reform.”29 Haiti clamored for extension programs, proposing the establishment of an inter­ national or regional “technical brigade” within the FAO to assist governments in the introduction of cadastral land surveys.30 The United Nations complied with these requests; in the 1950s, FAO experts were sent by the invitation of

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member nations to Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, Malaya, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Honduras, Jamaica, Thailand, Iraq, Egypt, and Pakistan to advise them about land reform, land settlement, and agricultural cooperatives. As the leadership of the United Nations saw it, a worldwide revolution in landownership would require paper systems capable of handling property and soil in fine-grained detail. Experts would advise peasants and cooperatives on the basis of soil maps and reports collected by the FAO. Creating this paper matrix aligned with the FAO’s mandate to help through the distribution of information.31 In the 1950s, the FAO began the careful process of investigating its future role in soil mapping—a conversation that would stretch over decades. The Land and Water Utilization and Conservation Committee announced that it would undertake a world survey of vegetation, topography, hydrology, soils, present physical land use, irrigation, and drainage, proposing that this would be the surest route to usable information for all the peoples of the world.32 By creating an international bureaucracy for surveys of land, the FAO would provide tools for member nations to chart settlement, to identify wasteland, to redistribute land in acts of restorative justice, and to support a holistic plan for the cooperative support of small farmers. The FAO’s surveys would provide the potential for member nations to chart settlement. Soil system maps also added information that could—in theory—amplify planning for land redistribution schemes. The FAO soil maps would provide ideal information about how much land should be worth, which would enable enterprising smallholders to know where they should buy. The FAO’s documentation would potentially liberate a globe of smallholders like those fretted over by Indian geographers. The year 1952 witnessed the conversion of the FAO to the manufacture of paper. That year, the FAO began to compile statistical reports and pamphlets and bibliographies. In 1952, the FAO also initiated a series of piecemeal soil surveying projects. FAO agents pledged to provide cadastres for revolutionary and socialist nations registering new titles, to standardize best practices for rent control, and to oversee the breakup of “inefficient large estates” owned by former oligarchs.33 They would oversee redistribution, affording the new nations of smallholders a rapid path to modernity by consolidating fragmented landholdings, advising about agricultural technology, setting up credit facilities, and advising on taxation. In 1955, the FAO announced its intentions to “strengthen its efforts in the field of cadastral surveys and systems of registration.”34

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FAO agents lacked the expertise to make such a map on their own, so they set out to borrow knowledge of mapping directly from Britain. Dudley Stamp was invited to sit on a working group at the FAO, where he reported on the success of Britain’s Agricultural Holdings Act and recommended it for wider use. The model for a soil survey also came from Britain, where the national Ordnance Survey maintained a staff of sixteen dedicated to plotting soils on topographical maps to create the map of great soil groups of England and Wales. So FAO agents visited Britain’s two soil offices, along with the other soil survey offices in Europe, even making an attempt to poach the top soil surveyors of other organizations.35 Conversations about the survey were dominated by two streams of ideas about how maps would help development: one about redistributing land and one about making small farmers profitable. Discourse about the use of maps at the FAO regularly stressed that cadastres of occupation could identify large-scale farms, symbols of economic inequality, that could be redistributed and farmed by small farmers. This was exactly the kind of land use survey to which contemporary Britain aspired. In describing the specific geological and demographic factors that a land use study should cover, one review essay discussed rent as one of the possible categories: “perhaps, data on land tenure, including ownership.”36 The essay explored how to collect that information about tenure, and detailed concrete strategies: by aerial photograph, field survey, and interview. Cadastres for land reform were crucial to the effective implementation of land redistribution. The explicit intention of enabling land reform was announced whenever the FAO worked for a nation that was already committed to a path of land redistribution: the final report of the FAO’s soil survey in Chile, for instance, justified the survey in terms of land reform.37 Meanwhile, land use mapping and soil maps provided a description of what could be grown on each tiny plot of land. Knowledge of local land use and soils meant that the FAO’s educational programs would be able to advise small farmers effectively about the means of making their land productive. Land use and soil mapping dramatized one of the major advantages of collaborative planning: collective enterprises of research could make small farms just as productive as large ones. Large farmers could afford to hire managers with knowledge of suitable soil amendments, and the enormous tracts of the latifundia meant that they could turn a profit even from poor soil and backward methods. Poor farmers, however, would have access to this knowledge only if it were developed on a collective basis. Advice from heroic bureaucrats

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would act as a springboard to development, bringing peasant “know-how” up to date with modern methods.38 As one of the FAO’s official reports on soil explained, information freed the small farmer from unnecessary economic “uncertainty” that would plague him, however “enthusiastic, well-meaning and hard-working” he might be, unless he also had access to modern scientific data about his situation.39 Correspondence between FAO agents frequently spelled out the relationship of mapping endeavors to land redistribution in no uncertain terms. The FAO’s map of Chile, for example, was designed to support both land redistribution and the small farmers who would thereby gain their own plots of land. FAO staff would help in “the selection of suitable areas for immediate action,” namely, those “where the situation of the rural worker is somewhat precarious and social tensions prevail.”40 A meeting was called in Santiago “to outline and promote the adoption of specific measures aimed at improving the standard of living in Latin America, including land reform.”41 The population distribution in South America dramatized how settlement concentrated on the continent’s mountainous center, a region encompassing eastern Peru and Chile. Mapping population onto soil prepared data in such a way as to highlight the areas of the nation that might support wider resettlement and land redistribution. Meanwhile, a map of soils and a printed survey of vegetation were presented, accompanied by a meditation on how different soils were capable of supporting varying population sizes. The soil survey offered evidence for speculating about how bore wells might irrigate the arid alkali altiplano of Chile, or how pastures of punter, gordura, pangola, and guinea grasses could be developed on the hitherto unsettled dystric cambisol soils of the eastern Andes.42 The soil map offered all the information Chile’s government needed to redistribute land while concocting a plan to support the economic welfare of new landowners. Pragmatic and piecemeal, maps like the one of Chile were supposed to provision a twofold aim: the general support of development and land redistri­ bution and the creation of a joint map. Nation by nation, it was expected, developing countries would commission the FAO’s help in surveying all the elements of the landscape—including, potentially, soil composition, topography, hydrology, vegetation, present physical land use, irrigation, and drainage. Such efforts, FAO administrators urged, would provide the information by which former colonies might achieve self-guided development more generally. From 1953 through the early 1960s, FAO administrators seem to have assumed that independent maps would eventually create a map of the world.

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They encouraged nations involved in mapping to share their surveys with other nations.43 Such a goal—a world map of soil—would have supported the development of comparative research as well as longer-term planning from the FAO. Once the world was sufficiently mapped, administrators at the FAO would be able to engineer interventions in agriculture on a planetary scale; the key inspiration for such interventions was the hope of exploiting “wasteland” around the global periphery, which one agent estimated at 20–25 million acres (80,937– 101,171 square kilometers) in India alone.44 Low yields per acre in Latin America signaled the immense and easy profits nations could reap if they were able to adopt new varieties of plants and animals. “Unused land” in these places also suggested the potential of a plenty awaiting all comers.45 As conversations about famine intensified in development circles, administrators in many parts of the world began to undertake surveys designed to sort empty land into potential farmland and wasteland. A spokesman of the Cereals Office at Morocco’s Ministry of Agriculture explained, “In a country where land is scarce, difficult to work and irregular in output as a result of a capricious climate, non-utilisation of the soil must be regarded as a grave sin against the community.”46 By identifying potential “wastes” on a global scale and using soil science to effectively exploit them, FAO administrators argued that they could end food shortages for good. Scientific mapping of soil and land use, in other words, would make land redistribution into a tool not only for justice—but also for ending famine forever. For such a plan as this to work, however, each of the local surveys had to align with other projects in developing nations across the world. Map had to fit with map in terms of scale and categorization. In 1951, one of Lossing Buck’s students from Cornell—Ardron Lewis, then employed under Buck at the FAO— published a seven-step program for agents working with member nations. Lewis’s agenda delineated a way to combine existing land use surveys from local governments with practical information about soil quality and water availability. The result would be a fully operational predictive map that would aid national extension programs as they advised peasants. It was such a plan— of a geographically specific program of infrastructure, credit, and planning— that Buck had recommended for China in his report on Land Utilization in China (1937). Such a program would facilitate for developing nations the kind of planning services that Britain enjoyed through its Land Utilisation Survey.47 What may have at first glance seemed a simple matter of communication, however, would turn out to be a great deal more difficult. The difficulties of

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aligning local maps to a global project would reveal a major weakness in FAO plans for a coordinated program of worldwide land redistribution.

The Drama of Large-Scale Maps in Puerto Rico One of the first places where the misalignment between local maps and global plans came into view was Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico had asked for a map to support land redistribution. Such a map required small-scale treatment, especially if programs were to be set up to supply each small farmer with appropriate irrigation and soil management help. In 1951, the FAO’s Land Use Branch sent Lewis to advise on soil mapping so that local surveying could proceed efficiently—and in alignment with the FAO’s larger plans for designing a world without famine. It was fourteen years since Lossing Buck—Lewis’s college mentor, now manager at the FAO—had published his treatise on Chinese agriculture in which he had warned that small farmers could never amass wealth without further investments in infrastructure and information. It was a year after the Chinese Communist Party passed its Land Reform Law, the same year that Norris Dodd introduced the slogan “The Earth for Man,” and a year before the Árbenz government in Guatemala introduced a land reform there. In that momentous year, Ardron Lewis arrived in Santurce, determined to make a map. The map that Lewis expected to make was the first step and key to helping Puerto Rico establish a program of economic planning, agricultural science, housing, and infrastructure. Like most geographers and agricultural economists of their generation, Lewis and Buck were caught up in a fantasy of a perfect map—a dream that seemed well within their power to execute. Such a map, coordinated by the United Nations, would tell poor farmers what to plant, and so draw poor countries out of poverty on the basis of knowledge. Lewis had in mind an affordable project of development for the poor farmer and smallholder in developing nations. He worried that, unless armed with high-caliber maps, member governments would waste their money irrigating land of poor quality where “high expenditures . . . would not produce a high income and would be lost.”48 His implication was clear: the poorest countries could not afford to play games with fertilizers to improve their land; what they needed was perfect information about each plot of soil—information that Western specialists in geology were prepared to provide. Lewis wanted a map that would enable states to advise the poor tiller about what it meant to

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invest economically—much as British efforts by the Land Utilisation Survey were doing for the farmer there. A year after publishing the plan for how individual local maps could be planned in such a way as to align with a global plan for agriculture, Lewis arrived in Puerto Rico. His job was to work with the civil servants who had mapped the island. What he found was a disaster. Lewis wrote to Buck from Santurce, announcing that his visit was a waste of time. The soil categories on the Puerto Rico map didn’t match the soil categories he’d hoped to use. The map generated by the local Puerto Rican government had been “generalized” in such a way “as to make it useless” for the purposes of plotting soil classification.49 The choices that frustrated Lewis stemmed from the pragmatic approach of local politicians. Puerto Rican officials had used some of the money for mapping to actually implement a program of land redistribution.50 What mattered most was reallocating land in the name of social justice. Local plans didn’t fit Lewis’s grand vision, but they were nevertheless practical in terms of local purposes. The Puerto Ricans had used the soil classification money for a cadastre: they had blocked out the land occupied by each landowner, large and small—a step that often preceded land redistribution. To the island’s administrators, it must have seemed that maps could be created in stages: first a small map, fit to outline landownership in general and to designate small plots for resettlement. Later, when the initial redistribution proved successful, and political will was strong, a detailed soil survey could be funded. What annoyed Lewis was the possibility that Puerto Rico was sentencing its new landowners to failure by prioritizing a cadastre over a soil survey. As India’s census commissioner had understood, a scientific approach to land redistribution required making a detailed map in advance. In Puerto Rico, Lewis feared that the creation of tiny plots would doom peasant landowners who were allotted plots on soil too rocky or swampy for farming without intensive remediation. Only a precise map could save new farmers from ruin, and keep land redistribution programs as a whole from being discredited—of that Lewis was sure. Scientific remediation could be efficiently deployed only with a coordinating map that showed local variations in soil quality. The civil servants of Puerto Rico, Lewis believed, lacked the foresight to see the link between detailed maps and the success of land redistribution programs that might eventually come. Lewis spent his time in Puerto Rico tracing the correct hatch marks on the

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worthless soil map while imagining a better world in which better maps could be made. Writing to Buck, Lewis fantasized about the maps they would make one day. Lewis wanted a precipitation map that would show the “intricate patterns” of rainfall over Puerto Rico.51 He wanted a soil map “unlike any I have ever seen that would map the soil according to those characteristics that are important to the growth of crops in the climate of the given area.”52 The new map would be a “systematic study of the relation of soil characteristics to crop growth in the field” based on the experience of soil conservationists on the ground, not the erratic system of soil classification he encountered, which he found impossible to reconcile with his own.53 Such a map would tell local extension workers where to lay irrigation and what seeds to plant; a program built on such a map would ensure the success of Puerto Rico’s farmers. India had asked the FAO’s surveyors to help with a national map; Puerto Rico, much smaller in size, had, in Lewis, a surveyor from the FAO ready to help. But his limited time was gone, and Lewis returned to Rome with his dreams unrealized. The difficulty of creating the maps Lewis envisioned—with shared soil systems and infinite detail—was at root a financial problem. Competing classification systems of soils used in Russia, Europe, and America had to be reconciled. Fine-grained maps were more expensive than large-scale ones. Leaving the expense of mapping to each nation put a disproportionate burden on developing countries and territories like Puerto Rico, where it was highly unlikely that the government could put up the money for an agricultural economist like Lewis or Buck without the help of UN technical grants, which tended to be limited to short-term projects attached to a single nation.54 Despite the budgetary constraints, agents at the FAO knew that a world map would be the best way of servicing problems like those in Puerto Rico and India. It would be more efficient to create one system for the entire world— reconciling competing soil categories, mapping everything at a fine-grained scale. In 1955, internal documents at the FAO announced a world mapping project.55 Moving from national maps to a plan for a world survey would only intensify the question of scale, and it would force the FAO to make a choice: a large map or a small one? The problem of cost would structure the shape of the Soil Map of the World, recapitulating the problems of the Puerto Rican survey at a global scale. It was expensive to create any map, but the small-scale one that some desired for land redistribution was prohibitively so.

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The Politics of Scale The choice of the scale of map the FAO would commit its precious resources to would have monumental consequences for land redistribution around the world. It was not a decision that was reached lightly. In 1955, FAO administrators were considering joining forces with another grand mapping initiative—the World Land Use Survey, the brainchild of academic geographers and British civil servants, including Dudley Stamp. Visiting the survey’s offices in London, FAO agents saw what they cautiously described as a “very ambitious effort.”56 Stamp had initially proposed a world map at the fine-grained scale of 1 to 1 million that would make it possible to distinguish cropland, forested areas, improved pasture, grazing land, swamps, and marshes. The map, Stamp promised, would help efforts to stop desertification and erosion and to combat the spread of disease.57 A soil survey as detailed as this would support building infrastructure, counseling farmers about soil, and countless other land use purposes—a map for the world much like the soil map of Great Britain. The World Land Use Survey would offer a platform enabling nations and local communities to decide how land and other natural resources could be divided; where cooperatives, roads, and schools should be planted; and what kinds of seeds, programs, and informational radio broadcasts might be shared with the public. The map would be a tool guiding all other efforts. Officially, such a project was possible. The World Land Use Survey enjoyed the support of both academic geographers and other branches of the United Nations. The survey, which emerged from the International Geographical Congress, had been officially taken up by UNESCO at a meeting at Clark University in 1949. Unofficially, however, the project was in trouble. A world map on a fine scale was a money pit, and Stamp had begun the project without obtaining real commitments to support it. Most of the initial money that launched the World Land Use Survey came out of Stamp’s own pocket with donations of office space from King’s College London and the Royal Geographical Society. Occasionally, funds came from the printer. With Stamp’s encouragement, independent geographers began to draw up experimental land use maps based on a combination of aerial photographs and regional advising. The academic members of the International Geography Conference began to work on land use maps, hoping that their piecemeal efforts would come together.58 Back in Rome, the director of the FAO’s Land and Water Use Branch, Rainer

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Schickele, pressed hard for the FAO to join forces with Stamp. He knew that such a map would grease the wheels of land redistribution programs around the world. But the proposal would be expensive; indeed, it would dwarf the cost of most of the other projects of the FAO at that time. Only after Schickele had finished speaking did the room begin to crackle with dissent. Thomas Carroll, the FAO’s secretary for technical matters, articulated the reluctance felt by most. He was concerned that a world map on the scale of that recently finished in Britain would never be completed, so detailed and onerous was the undertaking Schickele proposed.59 A failed undertaking of great expense—for instance, a map executed only halfway—could make the entire agency look questionable and draw unwanted international attention to the FAO’s support of developing nations. Everyone knew that cheaper alternatives were possible. The kind of project that Ardron Lewis saw in Puerto Rico could offer a precedent. Some of the London surveyors proposed a coarse-grained map at the scale of ten kilometers to the centimeter—a very basic sketch of the soils around the world. It would be quick and dirty surveying. Such a scale was suited to the purposes of cadastral land redistribution or laying out general plots. It would not help UN member nations to avoid distributing land based on rocky soil. It would not help state projects to build appropriate irrigation works to support small farmers, as India’s census commissioner believed a map should do. It would not supply infrastructure or city planning. In the final analysis, it would be expensive and it would take a long time to make—but it was feasible.60 The stakes of the decision were vast—and everyone in the room knew it. A decision about scale would either cut out certain plans in the developing world—or risk delaying the map to the point where it could never be completed. Everyone also realized that time was of the essence. Agents understood that member nations faced deadlines for their agricultural work. Maps were needed now—indeed, they had been needed a decade ago. Conversations about the theory of land classification could spiral for years before surveying began; and surveying itself would be a massive labor, requiring phases of review and correction, with supplemental costs becoming apparent later and adding further delay to the project as a whole. The meeting to debate scale had gone on so long and yet had failed to deliver a consensus. Schickele’s position and Carroll’s could not be reconciled, and no one seemed prepared to budge. “We have been worried about this before and have had several projects started, none of which were carried through,” according to the glum conclusion of the official memo on the conversation.61

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Indeed, the problem with aiming to be an unbiased clearinghouse, collecting information to support small farmers around the globe, was that it entailed a potentially unlimited array of commitments, all of which needed support from the outside. All those grand ideas—from maps to land allocation to radio broadcasts to bibliographies—competed against one another for commitments of resources, personnel, administrative attention, and cooperation on the ground. Impractical plans, constrained budgets, and pervasive delays were taking their toll on morale. After FAO rejected it, the World Land Use Survey did not fare well. The FAO had no money to support. It was occasionally supported by its publisher, but a printer is not an international research foundation. Eventually, the concept of a coordinating map was abandoned. It was too expensive. In the words of the geographer who wrote the project’s obituary in 1976, collecting and republishing land use surveys was an “impossible task” that “would have taken all our time and more than the funds at our disposal.”62 The project devolved into a series of occasional papers promoting the work of individual geographers and occasionally interspersed with reports from the technical assistance workers deployed by the project’s new patron, Shell International Petroleum.63 The World Land Use Survey was, in other words, neither coordinated nor supported as a research program on a global scale, and it could not produce a map. The money problem came to be partially solved—in conjunction with a different mapping project—after 1961, when UNESCO came to the aid of FAO, providing the crucial financial support that allowed it to finally launch a project mapping the soils of the globe. The Soil Map of the World also had other official endorsements, just as Stamp’s World Land Use Survey had. Both the International Congress of Soil Science and the Kennedy administration’s World Food Program also backed the program. But soil science—a subject well funded by American grants for agriculture—brought with it money that the earlier project could not recruit.64 Money meant fine-grained mapping—at least relatively speaking. UNESCO eventually supported a map five times larger in scale than the attenuated, coarse-grained map that Lewis had witnessed in Puerto Rico. At fifty kilometers to the centimeter, the FAO-UNESCO project would create a wide-angle map suited to the process of planning infrastructure—but not to supporting farmers in the way that Lewis and Schickele had hoped. The map would be five times as large as the map proposed by Stamp. Issues of scale determined the life of the map. In London, Stamp and his surveyors had fiercely debated the appropriate scale for such a map of the world. Stamp’s office was committed to detailed surveys suited to building

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playgrounds block by block. His fine-grained maps would have served well the geographers in Bengal who worked, farmer by farmer, to determine the appropriate fertilizer or crops for every acre in a district. In contrast, many land use planners relied on large-scale maps to plan roads and buildings; such planners saw little need for the detailed soil survey work required for small farming. Moving from a small-scale survey to large-scale one was no simple matter; one couldn’t simply “zoom out” as one does with a map on a screen; such an intervention, at scale, required redrawing the entire map. Scale set colleague against colleague: the soil expert against the planner, the plant specialist against the infrastructure expert, and the perfectionist against the realist. The FAO-UNESCO project was destined to be delayed, once again, by a series of debates over which soil system to use for the Soil Map of the World, what to do with soils that eluded accepted geological classifications, and how to reconcile alternative national systems of soil classification. The problem of divergent soil systems—which had so tormented Ardron Lewis in Puerto Rico— continued to structure international conversations about mapping at UNESCO and the FAO for the next decade. Time and money were spent reconciling them: an enormous achievement for the science of geology—but only a theoretical victory from the viewpoint of land redistribution.65 Observers in the world of international development cheered on the project’s publication, whether out of solidarity or because they were oblivious to its shortcomings. USAID dedicated substantial room in its Spring Review of Land Reform in 1970 to the promise of mapping. Such maps, explained one writer, could make farms of all sizes profitable.66 A pamphlet from the International Society of Soil Science in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1968 applauded the ratification of the global world soil map, celebrating the soil map for its “promotion of the welfare of the peoples.”67 Indeed, one possible moral of the map was that agencies succeeded when they formed alliances with each other and took on projects at a scale that none could afford on their own. The introduction to the published Soil Map of the World explained that the map was a living example of “international cooperation.”68 “It is the first map of its kind to be achieved by world-wide international co-operation,” the Wisconsin pamphlet enthused, suggesting the map’s role as a flagship of other kinds of international participation.69 The FAO had indeed succeeded in securing international cooperation regarding soil science— even while it had signally failed to provide the land redistribution map that member nations had been requesting for twenty years. As to the original promise of the map, however, one must ask: was the im-

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mense map prepared by the FAO useful for its primary purpose—supporting land redistribution? It was not. A year before the supposed deadline for publishing the Soil Map of the World, the FAO announced a new project that would take up what the map had failed to do. The maps—a single foldout page for a continent—offered nothing for the task of making small farming productive; it was an overview suited to the planners of roads and dams. The Soil Map of the World that UNESCO published between 1970 and 1978 was a compromise: a map that had historically overlapped with efforts to chart land tenure and to measure soil, sometimes serving economic development, and other times serving as a tool for creating viable land redistribution programs tailored to soil capability. But the map lacked sufficiently detailed information of the kind that could inform land redistribution programs in their efforts to make small peasants profitable. Just as important, the map—too general to serve most agricultural purposes, too general by far to help land redistribution programs in most places—was expensive and had taken decades to prepare. In some places, the period of organization required to make the map outlasted the political will necessary to implement land redistribution. Demand for finer-grain surveys had lost the skirmish two decades before. Lewis’s complaints, addressed to Lossing Buck in 1951, had no effect except in the imagination of a handful of civil servants at the FAO. What he proposed—a total mapping project for the sake of the peasant—was simply too expensive. The project was repeatedly delayed, as were similar proposals from Africa for smaller-scale mapping.70 Instead, FAO money was given to soil scientists, fertilizer experts, and crop geneticists, who promised another kind of advice to enrich smallholders, and whose efforts were increasingly aligned with visions of industrial farming being promoted outside the FAO. The infrastructure Lewis and Schickele had dreamed of, and that inspired the speeches, articles, treatises, proposals, and books of Amartya Sen, Dudley Stamp, and so many others—total information about each plot of land in the service of planning advice for every peasant on the face of the globe—was too expensive, and perhaps too political, to be realized.

The Breakdown of Surveys Once a mighty vision is deferred, its memory becomes disorganized, like so much paper blown around a street on a windy day. As its name suggested, the Study on Land Reform Implementation was a questionnaire, not a map. Launched in 1968, it was intended to offer the components of knowledge

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The Soil Map of the World was pieced together from maps of different exactitudes (Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Sources of Information,” in Soil Map of the World, vol. 4, South America [Paris: UNESCO, 1971], 9; reproduced with permission)

needed by peasants and their nations to orchestrate freedom from feudalism around the globe. It would poll member nations about whether they still needed detailed surveying of their territory, and query them about what purposes such a map might serve. The poll, it was suggested, might become a predecessor to a map as well as a set of general guidelines or principles for effective land redistribution.71 The questionnaire, accompanied by a kick-off conference, suggested another grand effort at supporting peasant movements around the world. The FAO agents responsible for the Study on Land Reform Implementation were apparently optimistic that member nations would return the form and would be eager to support a finely detailed map for land redistribution of the kind they had awaited for two decades. However, skepticism seems to have been the predominant mood with which participants greeted it—not because of the politics of land redistribution but because of the tardiness of the effort. Most of the member nations that replied felt that it represented too little too late. They also thought the survey was time consuming and irrelevant. “I was

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impressed that it requires a great amount of work by experts to fill in,” responded the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.72 Representatives from other institutes shook their heads at the FAO—one coyly asked whether the agency really expected administrators in nations worldwide to return the requested data in a timely fashion. The Italian correspondent wrote that he had no time to complete the questionnaire, referring the FAO to his many published articles on the subject. In Nairobi, the deputy director of agriculture wrote back to report that he could not tell whether his predecessor had already completed the questionnaire or not.73 Calls for fine-grained maps were renewed, but it was too late. In 1972, FAO officers again rehearsed the need for a detailed map, this time made with a computer and tailored to the question of how much extension support each area required. Plots classified as L, for “low,” required only “some technical advisory service,” whereas plots classified as D, for “very high,” needed “to be entrusted to specialists for planning and execution” and would require “government funds” and possibly “subsidies” for “tile drainage [and] terracing.”74 This format for dividing land could support a UN budget based on a detailed profile of where extension services were required. Once the map was completed and extension services funded and deployed, Norris Dodd’s vision of an expert-to-peasant information pipeline would at last be complete. Unfortunately, nothing came of this grand plan to rate and measure lands either. The era of ambition at the FAO was winding down. During the turbulent decade of the 1970s, for reasons that originated outside the FAO, the tide of opinion in developed world countries like Britain and the United States turned sharply against both international government and land redistribution schemes. The FAO’s funding for supporting land redistribution programs would soon be cut off altogether. The moment had been lost: the crucial combination of broadcast international support and visionary leadership at the FAO had been wasted on a survey that represented, at best, a compromise. The FAO’s grand mapping projects did not survive this winnowing. In any event, mapping technology was changing—aided by satellite, information technology replaced work that once had to be accomplished by hand. The new technology might have eased the mapping projects imagined at the FAO; satellites could have supported a global survey of productivity per acre. But the developing world would never receive a worldwide map of land-hoarding landlords, evicted tenants, and overcharged renters to enable the global abolition of feudalism. A noble dream had died. The success of development actions like the Soil Map of the World depended

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on time. This was something that Rainer Schickele well understood, as he observed the fate of agrarian development in the period when the map was just being finished. There was an iron clock ticking away, with which all the peasants’ would-be allies must contend, and the name of that clock was population. “The food goal for the year 2000 must be at least three times higher than present production to feed a population twice as large adequately,” Schickele explained.75 Even a writer like Schickele, who fully believed in the power of family farms to feed the planet, did not believe that family farms could be instantly readied to keep up with a constantly growing population. Preparations had to be made. Wells had to be dug, roads had to be built, surveys had to be drawn, farmers had to be assigned to new territory. The failure to make preparations of this kind might prove right the demographers who warned that a growing population might plunge the planet into famine. Schickele therefore interpreted the supposed population crisis not as a mandate for control over developing world fertility, but rather as a what he called a “race against time,” the logic of which was “produce or perish.”76 And herein was the rub: the world, like the FAO, needed success stories in order to mobilize the money to make investments in technology and farming that would arm small farmers to feed the world. It needed them, and it needed the FAO’s maps, sooner rather than later. Civil servants and popular leaders, Schickele explained, therefore needed to press their policies for land redistribution harder than ever before; they were literally in a rush for time. If time ran out, Schickele foresaw, popular support for land redistribution might collapse, the moment for action lost for good. Defeat and delay would sap international enthusiasm for agrarian change, undermining the “alertness, energy, and will power” on which the entire undertaking depended.77

Conclusion Mapmaking presents manifold challenges to the surveyor beyond those summed up by the power of literate elites over the illiterate masses. Mapmaking can be a seemingly interminable process, depending on the scale required, the number of revisions, and the purposes to which the map is put. The fit between purposes and data is difficult to achieve, and in the case of land reform, a map that would help governments to redistribute land was not the same as one that would help peasants to keep it. In Jorge Luis Borges’s story “On Exactitude in Science,” first published in 1946, a team of cartographers, driven by unattainable perfectionism, create a

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map so exact that its size is the same as that of the empire it seeks to represent, rendering it useless.78 Borges’s story is often read as a parable of imperial ambition and its evils: the king wants to map everything so that he can control it, but because of the resistance it provokes, the goal is ultimately impossible to attain. But in the context of the world in which Borges was writing, many of the organizations mapping the world were fueled more by goals of humanitarian service than by desire for imperial domination and control. The problem with their enormous maps was that great ambitions required massive budgets, which in turn tended to result in half measures that undermined the project altogether. Borges was asking his readers—as many people were asking themselves in the 1950s and ’60s—if a centralized planned economy, with the investments required to execute it well, was really possible, and if not, what the alternatives were. Thus went the story of the Soil Map of the World: by the time the map was produced, few people wanted it anymore. In 1972, the governor of Mysore was still waiting for a map that Patel had told him to look for in 1953.79 The FAO had spent decades trying to provide such a survey, but the map it was just finishing was executed on too large a scale to serve the purpose of land tenure adjudication that India had asked for. Officially begun in 1961, its first records published nine years later, the Soil Map of the World (1970–78) must have felt like a triumph of haste to those embedded in the actual surveying and collection of maps. But in 1978, when the last volume appeared—the same year the FAO published its final bibliography on land reform—it was almost thirty years after Ardron Lewis had reported to Lossing Buck that his soil survey of Santiago, Chile, was too large scale, and thirty-two years after Indian geographers in West Bengal had begun mapping soil to support land redistribution in response to a British report recommending maps as a solution to famine. It was thirty-five years after the founding of the FAO and the establishment of the United Nations. By the time the map appeared, it was too late for most nations to benefit from whatever insight it could provide—at least for the purposes of land redistribution. It came sixteen years after a CIA-backed coup had halted land redistribution in Guatemala; fourteen years after India had prioritized industrial development over land redistribution, leading to the displacement of 20 million people; twelve years after Mao’s Great Leap Forward had triggered a famine that China paid for with 12–38 million deaths; and three years after an American-backed coup in Indonesia, designed to thwart land redistribution, had touched off the genocide of up to 1 million individuals. Had a worldwide

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plan for the rational support of small farmers come in time, perhaps at least some of those tragedies might have been averted.80 The story of these ventures is, perhaps, a cautionary tale of professional myopia and its consequences: missing political opportunity while prioritizing the coordination of scientific knowledge. The FAO supported new knowledge about global soils even while losing the opportunity to provide India and other nations with the detailed map they so needed. Each of the five marble modernist bunkers of the FAO headquarters in Rome was a gridlike tower of perfectly square windows taking in the sun. As with architecture, so it was with information: gridded, infused with logic. The FAO creators of this information were confident that it would solve every malady of humankind. Theirs was an era of information stacked and sorted, an era that believed in the power of logic itself, logic every bit as abstracted as any god of old. Their aim was comprehensive and unprejudiced access to information about various modern agrarian forms. The people of the earth would have statistics to back their tiny plots of land. The earth itself would be regridded and resurveyed in the name of a worldwide redistribution of rights to food and shelter. Toiling within their monument to information, experts at the FAO plotted to cover the world in paper—hoping to create a centralized information clearinghouse that would end problems of hunger by maximizing efficient production of food and distribution of land. Only a few decades after it was created, however, the grid of information, retooled for one system after another, was becoming a monument to failure. From reviewing the history of paper comes lessons that are, perhaps, astonishingly simple: political deadlines are important, but deadlines of this kind are hard to meet. An international organization that lacks the power to compel—or the finances to support a truly global initiative—is inconvenienced in ways that ultimately make deadlines troublesome, if not unattainable. The FAO lacked a hard deadline with its Soil Map of the World, yet the immediate applications to which researchers hoped their map would be put—for instance, land reform in India—had taken a very different form by the time the map was finished. The problems of unforeseen expenses, delays, and distractions faced by FAO agents in the labor in no way diminished the importance of their task.

6  •  The Questionable Effectiveness of Bibliography

A generation of administrators at the FAO preached one doctrine: information could be instrumentalized to shift international policy and bring developing nations to the cutting edge of scientific research. Publishing was becoming a universal tool of social transformation, these administrators believed, and the dissemination of paper therefore had a role to play in the worldwide struggle for liberation from the legacy of European empire. FAO administrators developed the idea of an information infrastructure that would deliver science and training to the poorest farmers in the world, thus putting the means of economic success within their grasp. Much of the utopian paper manufactured by the FAO came in the form of bibliographies—publications, that is, that tallied other publications. To interpret the politics of a bibliography, let alone its utopianism, requires a careful reading of this pedestrian genre, which is easily overlooked as a tool of making myths and destroying memories. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Food and Agriculture Organization became a center for collecting research to advise the peasant. This mandate pitched development agencies into an increasing engagement with information infrastructure—from the creation of grain catalogues to the construction of soil maps—in an attempt to efficiently disseminate new research about agriculture. Administrators at the FAO described an expanded role for the organization as a supporter of post-colonial land redistributions, and they imagined publication as the major form that this support would take. From its inception, the FAO began collecting a library and issuing bibliographies. Over time, it became a publisher of pamphlets, books, and maps of increasing number and ambition. By 1948, the FAO had already issued one

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hundred publications for circulation.1 Beginning in 1952, the organization began issuing a monthly bulletin of agricultural statistics that surveyed the agricultural production of the nations of the world. It was a moment of grand ambitions and utter faith in the possibilities for international collaboration enabled by the sharing of social science. The FAO’s commitments to supporting bibliography mirrored the mood of the time, but they would also help to create and drive a culture marked by the relentless production of research. Collecting and collating modern research required an information network capable of processing the production of new studies—both those created at the FAO and those produced by the growing apparatus of social and agricultural science at research universities. Eventually, the FAO came to oversee the development of bibliographies that attempted to provide an overview of new research related to land redistribution and modern farming. In theory, the indices and bibliographies produced at the FAO would arm local extension workers with the most up-to-date research for implementing land redistribution policies and advising peasants about how to be profitable. The paper strategy came to consume the work of experts at the FAO, representing an increasing proportion of their labor through the 1960s and ’70s. The FAO’s publishing strategy may also explain, in part, the failure of international land redistribution programs across the world, and the inefficiency and waste that their administrators were later accused of. As the cheap paper strategy of the FAO unfurled and expanded, the mapping and coordination of paper overwhelmed the goals of smallholder independence and land redistribution. The manufacture, indexing, and repackaging of research at the FAO was marked by a gendered division of labor: male researchers performed analysis while underpaid women bibliographers—who were rarely promoted—performed the synthesis necessary to construct bibliographies. Few researchers possessed the skills to step back from paper production and ask what the papers meant. One exception to this rule was the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who used the technique of bibliography to establish the validity of indigenous land management techniques and other traditional patterns of land use, contributing to a revolution in the ways Western agencies understood the rational management of land. The FAO’s use of bibliographies in the twentieth century involved its growing commitment to indexing the world of international agriculture and land use studies; the challenges associated with that task grew with every year. As the

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scale of the project grew, bibliographers pulled back from an attempt to render a synthesis of all knowledge from the beginning of time, choosing instead to focus on recent and quantifiable contributions to the field. With that concentration came a relative emphasis on American contributions to agriculture— and these tended to reflect the interests of U.S. funding agencies. At the same time, the FAO’s bibliographic work increasingly drifted away from a transhistorical perspective on the past. Examining the world of research bibliography that supplied the information development initiatives turned on leads us to many probing questions. The patterns of research in bibliography reflect structural trends that inevitably affected the direction of development economics in the twentieth century. To what degrees do the failures of development reflect divisions of gendered labor? To what degree do they reflect the Americanization of research, or the loss of cultural memory about peasant struggles for land?

An Age of Bibliography The project of collecting information about books in agriculture that would form the FAO’s foundation began, in the 1920s and ’30s, as part of an international vision of the way information transfer could transform the world agricultural market. The U.S. Department of Agriculture began issuing a ­bibliography on the world food supply in 1925; and Mary Aslin of Britain’s Rothamstead Experimental Station for Agriculture published a list of periodicals received in 1926. In the 1930s, the University of California and the U.S. Bureau of Agriculture (the predecessor of today’s Department of Agriculture) began issuing official bibliographies on farm tenancy, smallholdings, and subsistence agriculture—everything the New Deal might need in terms of effective research to inform a land settlement scheme—while four women bibliographers, Dorothy Culver, Louise Bercaw, Mary G. Lacy, and Helen Emma Hennefrund, began to aggregate all available information about crops of different kinds into a series of publications. Meanwhile, in Rome, a private entrepreneur, David Lubin, began collecting books and pamphlets under the aegis of the International Institute for Agriculture with the aim of supporting a global clearinghouse for agricultural commodities. Well before the founding of the FAO in 1945, the agricultural institutions of the world had begun to understand agricultural research as a global scientific system that was churning out too much information to reasonably handle in its raw state.2

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The FAO inherited much of the institute’s information-coordinating vision, but the FAO had a larger staff and budget; and thanks to the techniques of random sampling, it could afford to rapidly collect even more statistics from all parts of the world. From the 1950s to the 1970s, much of the FAO’s work was consumed in bibliography and publishing: an information infrastructure intended to support the larger vision of extension, cooperation, and advising. A great deal of bibliographical work was created with the explicit intention of defending the cause of land redistribution to small farmers. The expec­ tation of land redistribution was a major theme of the FAO’s efforts to serve developing nations. By 1953, the Land and Water Use Branch was advertising its modest publications in different nations in terms of the number of pages created. Its publications focused on topics such as land settlement and water laws that would help developing nations to plan land redistribution schemes wherein farmers retained a right to water and could therefore viably farm small plots of land.3 At the beginning, the FAO published yearly indexes to agricultural research, which were rapidly outpaced by the amount of new research. From 1945, the agency published an index to new works on plants, with 2,160 abstracts indexed over a single year. In 1952–53, the FAO began to print a list of the library’s 5,000 new acquisitions and a monthly List of Publications and Main Documents, with approximately 3,000 new references in each bulletin. In 1962, the FAO began to publish a weekly documents list of the many references it received each week, and a separate recommended reading list of the 1,500 most important articles for researchers.4 The magnitude of this work is astonishing: how could any researcher, let alone the library, keep up with such a glut of information? Information labor could be quantified and compared, much like agricultural experts. Rather than growing bushels of wheat, the FAO was involved in growing bushels of words. The metaphor is more than fanciful. Information did not tend to itself; it, too, required an expanding bureaucracy of experts. Statistical work on agriculture on the scale of the globe would generate a manpower problem: it would require an unprecedented number of statisticians. Bibliography was thus an expanding enterprise in the postwar world, not only because landownership and agriculture research had created a font of publication to be organized, but also because information was a political solution to aiding a divided world. The bibliographies took on even grander importance as the Cold War rolled forward; they seemed to promise not only a

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peaceful path to reform, somewhere between communism and capitalism, but also an expertise-driven solution to the clamor of the developing world for control over its own future. In a speech to UN representatives in 1954, Frank McDougall championed the role of the bibliography in answering the call of newly liberated former colonies for assistance in executing land reform. Puerto Rico and India had called for help in gathering information about land reform and land taxation, and the FAO proudly boasted its ability to provide such a bibliography.5 In their own view, the FAO’s bibliographers were building a mighty bulwark out of paper, ramparts and towers constructed of the articles and books stacked end to end in steel vertical files, collecting all of the studies in anthropology, history, law, and sociology for all of time. With the research thus assembled, they could formulate theoretical arguments with an adeptness out of the grasp of economics. In the imagined world of bureaucracy, the bulwark of paper rested between two distinct poles: the researcher, typically in a European or American university, who distilled truth out of study; and the extension agent, working on the ground in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, who would bring agricultural research to peasants via research stations. Paper’s job was to bridge ideal knowledge and on-the-ground knowledge. Paper would flow seamlessly between the state and private enterprise and grassroots movements, connecting and synchronizing the activities of all. As for the bureaucrat or researcher who moved paper, his job, through managing paper, was ultimately to coordinate the raw energy of peasants suppressed by despotism into outlets opened up by the state, as we see in the words of Schickele: “His trials deal with finding ways of harnessing the wealth-­ creating drive of private enterprise within a framework of government policies that satisfy the human wants of the poor, in order to unleash the pent-up capacities and energies of the people which are now stunted, suppressed by lack of education, health, food, and other bare necessities of life.”6 Schickele’s vision of the heroic bureaucrat and the servant state was the product of an age in some ways foreign to our own. Bureaucracy was not a negative term for this generation, which had read Weber as students, but not yet Foucault. Rather, bureaucracy represented a rare luxury known only in advanced states; it was much longed for in the developing world, where cities expanded without sewer systems. International government at the United Nations would export the valuable

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work of bureaucracy and bibliography from the first world to the third, thus boosting peasant energy with the power of first world research.

The Labor of Bibliography Building the age of bibliography at the FAO required an expansion of personnel in the field of information. Information workers gathered as much research as possible, offering support to as many regions of the world as pos­ sible. In 1953, the Land and Water Use Branch was advertising its modest publications on the subject of land settlement and water laws in different nations—texts such as Water Laws in Italy and Some Aspects of Surface Water Development in Arid Regions. The FAO, having committed to bibliography, was incentivized to demonstrate that it was actively collecting, so it counted words: “Twenty publications have been issued, totaling 1,160 pages or approximately 450,000 words.”7 The numbers of summarized works comprising a bibliography would rapidly expand from twenty to hundreds, buoyed by the creation of entirely new bureaucracies within the FAO. Soon, the director general created a special task force—the Bibliographic Unit—at the FAO library, charged with corresponding with all of the libraries in the world that had similar goals, collecting and assorting internal and external bibliographies, and distilling the intellectual pollen of the entire world into the honey of clear conclusions digested by hard-working scholars and archivists. The brave bibliographers at the FAO tasked with taming the wilds of international research were, almost all of them, women. Few colleagues bother to write the obituaries of the ladies who run their offices, so much of that experience is closed to history. This is what we know: they read exhaustively in the literature on land settlement, land reform, rural life, the corn trade, the peach trade, and the almond trade, and they condensed this vast collocation of theory and empirical data into summary arguments. The labor required was profound, and the products were epic documents. Four women at a time were required to produce one bibliography. The labor of bibliography was also structurally undervalued. It is very likely that the male professors and government researchers in their departments, whose salaries almost certainly dwarfed those of the women in the office, used the women’s bibliographies as an indispensable key to arguments, case studies, and data. Bibliographers went beyond the work of traditional clerks; they learned the latest information technology. In the early bibliographies from USAID (itself

Excerpt from bibliography on land reform (U.S. Agency for International Development, “Size of Farm and Productivity,” in Land Reform; a Selected List of References for A.I.D. Technicians [Washington, D.C.: Agency for International Development, 1970], 10; courtesy of USAID)

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a major industry of publication), every report was coded on punch cards so that it could be called up and reshuffled into a new “documentary unit” by specially coded *descriptors* and /keywords/ marking the text.8 Eventually this convention was dropped in favor of detailed summaries. The indexes and bibliographies of the twentieth century were powerful tools for navigating the immense scale of new publications on economic development, intended as part of an initiative to make the entire enterprise legible, both to experts in Rome and Washington, and to agents in Delhi and Lima, ultimately rendering expert knowledge usable by the peasants themselves.

Manufacturing Paper: The Role of the University So sure were postwar social scientists of the power of bibliography to help the peasant that their optimism bled into the work of academics. Research professors around the world began to build a world of international conferences, new research, and publications—much of which was imagined as supplying international government agencies like the FAO with the modern research they needed. In the 1950s and ’60s, American universities came to specialize in convening academic conferences designed to solicit the manufacture and circulation of these cheap tracts on the law and economics of land reform. At the opening of the World Land Reform Conference in Madison in 1951, the conference director—Kenneth Parsons, professor at the University of Wisconsin—laid out a plan for using published academic-style articles to circulate the peasant histories of many peoples to peasant leaders and civil servants in the developing world. Parsons’s ideas paralleled the hopes of contemporary presidents of the research universities. The conference ran for five weeks in the autumn of 1951—the same year that Ardron Lewis was working on a perfect map to support land reform in Santurce, the year that Vinoba Bhave began his mystical pilgrimage for land reform across India, a year after the Chinese Communist Party passed its Land Reform Law, and a year before Guatemala’s democratically elected government introduced its land reform. Guests from every nation around the world were invited to a bus tour of farms in the Midwest, southern states, and the Middle Atlantic region “to let the visitors see different types of farming and find out about different American land tenure arrangements.”9 The visit would include a stop at the Tennessee Valley Authority, with its massive state-built hydropower works. The United Nations sent delegates from the FAO and the

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International Labor Organization (ILO). Each delegate was billeted in a “Wisconsin farm home” in order to “get acquainted with the people and practices of American agriculture.”10 The event was designed to fortify the consensus between visionary leaders in the developing world and leadership in agricultural circles in the United States and the United Nations. Most of the sessions were open to the public, and select groups, including teachers and public officials, were invited. Ambassadors from around the world were approached by letter and invited to send land experts from their region.11 Many nations, including India, proposed sending representatives of grassroots farmers’ movements—although India was eventually represented by a string of civil servants, accompanied by one economist, Mohanlal Lallubhai Dantwala, who afterward became one of the most important commentators on the failures of the Green Revolution.12 The organizers reached out to the Banco de Credito Eijidal in Mexico (although the representative eventually sent was from the Banco Nacional de Credito Agricola y Ganadero). They invited a professor from Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture to speak on the “problems of landless farm labourers.”13 England’s Leonard Elmhirst of the International Conference of Agricultural Economists was invited to come from his utopian community at Dartington Hall in Devon, which hosted a menagerie of artists alongside experiments in community housing and crop rotation—although it was a civil servant representing the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries who ultimately attended.14 The organizers wanted the conference to be an assemblage of utopian dreamers, visionaries, and activists, striving together to create a new world; but working through diplomatic channels produced, instead, a gathering of academics and functionaries. The conference that resulted nevertheless had land redistribution as its focus. It tended toward a pragmatic focus on the technical aspects required to support redistribution initiatives. Workshops discussed the advantages of maps for national land reform work. They described programs for surveying particular areas, reviewing the advantages of cooperative and communal farms, and they suggested the implementation of two pieces of technology—maps (including aerial photography) and history—to the end of resolving arbitrary claims to land.15 The conference was preprogrammed to reflect the ideology of land reform at the FAO. The first week’s events included lectures on European history.16 The U.S. secretary of education gave a speech calling on the leadership of American universities to help understand land revolts around the world in light of the U.S. experience, suggesting that America’s own redistributions of

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the nineteenth century offered a precedent for newly independent nations rebelling against the British and other European colonizers.17 Without mincing words, the organizers explained: “The major contribution of this conference is the realization that land tenure is a world problem and an extremely urgent one at that. If social justice is to be the foundation of democracy, land tenure needs the attention of the free world.”18 The conference was designed to enable the flow of information from developing nations—not merely to promote American expertise. “We expect each delegate to come prepared to contribute to the conference discussion on the basis of his experience and knowledge of the land tenure problems of the area,” explained one memo.19 The organizers elaborated on the theme of governance through ideas, enumerating the variety of “experts, recognized leaders, and outstanding students in the fields of land policy administration, land tenure adjustments, land reform, and land utilization” who would assemble at the conference.20 In gathering such an august assortment of experts and bureaucrats, the conference hosts hoped to inspire a “free, thorough, and objective discussion of common and troublesome issues.”21 Not everyone who corresponded with the Land Tenure Center believed that the American-orchestrated university program was the best way of helping the world land movement. From India, one economist sent his six-page article “A Program for Solving India’s Problems,” which began by boldly announcing that the United States would do better to send money for agrarian education rather than the wheat it had been sending.22 The conference helped to kick off an era in which American university conferences and publications formed the basis for an international repository of research imagined to support the developing world. Participants from the conference would become some of the most important contributors of research to the bibliographies on land tenure and agrarian science published by the FAO. They were also imagined as the ideal consumers of those bibliographies. U.S. university programs also contributed a primary means of sustaining international land programs through the training of international graduate students. Through various course offerings affiliated with the Land Tenure Center, the University of Wisconsin was becoming a funnel for introducing international students to the theory of worldwide land revolution. Many student papers stressed the need for the “democratization” of land practices, including the breaking up of latifundia (the large ranches of Latin America) into so-called minifundia (medium-sized ranches), small farms, or the collective ejidos of Mexico.23 Many of the graduates went on to work for the United Nations or

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member nations’ ministries of agriculture; other students went on to teach at agricultural colleges throughout the Midwest. Classes on land politics at the University of Wisconsin in that period offer a glimpse of how international students learned, in the American university system, to interpret local experiences through the global consensus about land. While a new land revolution waged in China, several Chinese students enrolled in Parsons’s classes at the University of Wisconsin. Tehying Li wrote about Mexico’s revolution, ejidos, and reform. Hsiao Tung Fei and Chih-I Chang drew on British historian R. H. Tawney and his history of English peasants to criticize absentee landlords in China. Salah Abd, afterward employed by the FAO, wrote a paper for Parsons on settlers’ planned colonies in Egypt.24 The papers demonstrate the application of European ideas about agricultural history and land redistribution to revolutionary nations the world over. At Wisconsin, the university itself became a machine for generating knowledge of land reform. A summary of the Land Tenure Center’s activities stressed “the accumulation of field research into general theoretical constructions and extensions of knowledge of the agricultural development process.”25 The pamphlet outlined different arenas of research that concerned small farmers and indigenous communities—and their economic, social, and political context. It categorized the varieties of media in which Land Tenure Center (LTC) members worked, which included films and photo exhibits. The pamphlet then reported the center’s success in terms of the raw bulk of paper it had produced: about 170 publications in six series (LTC Reprints, Discussion Papers, Research Papers, LTC Papers, Monographs, and Training and Methods). The library contained fifteen thousand items by 1969, many of which were nonbook materials such as reports, laws, data summaries, and government documents.26 Like bushels of corn, academic publications could be weighed, bundled, and counted as an index of productivity. The manufacture of reports continued for decades, drawing on the often-­ uncompensated labor of graduate students working on dissertations. The thousands of dissertations about improving land reform practices in fields like rural sociology, agrarian economics, and geography attempted to elaborate a policy tailored to every state and region in the developing world. At the University of Wisconsin today, scores of vertical files document the intense intellectual labor of master’s and PhD students in the social sciences during the period covered by this book—all this academic work was supposed to serve the peasants.27 The motivating factor behind these activities was not something as simple

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as the romance of the American frontier, but rather the larger contemporary question of whether land reform could and would become reality. In short, there was a client: while the United Nations kept land reform front and center, many of its allies, including U.S. universities funded by USAID, focused on land reform, creating a demand for a social science of land, much of it aligned with the privileging of a right of occupancy.

The Challenge of Scale The bibliographers of the 1930s trawled only the surface of the ocean of agrarian research called into being by the postwar alliance of America’s land grant universities and European research institutions by development economics. Ever-expanding international agricultural research would require bibliography to reinvent itself in scale and scope each decade. Information gathering was an inexhaustible enterprise. In 1938, a reader of Dorothy Culver’s bibliography on land utilization could exclaim that it contained “every article ever needed.”28 Subsequent researchers, however, disagreed. By the close of the war, new material was coming to them all the time, the product of research monies given to land grant universities and European research institutes by the expanding class of national and international organizations, all of them directed to think about the developing world. In such a manner arrived the era of the regularly reissued bibliography. Beginning in 1964, the FAO began issuing occasional bibliographies, sharing their new holdings with members of the agency and directing them to new work. For the purpose of setting out reports of this kind, a special Bibliographers Unit was set up in the library. Relevant books and articles, principally drawn from the publications of the previous decade, were summarized according to accessibility (“not requiring very advanced mathematical knowledge”), language (“library has German version”), subject area of data (“data are drawn from Greece, Turkey, Portugal and southern Italy”), and contribution to knowledge (advocates “planning . . . in such a way as to take account of the influence of the time-factor in their comparative efficiency”).29 Even these bibliographies, however, could not be exhaustive. The FAO librarians explained their reasoning for surveying the field in brief: “Many items of highly technical character,” “indicated chiefly for subject experts,” were left out, although they were available upon request at the reference desk.30 A new agency branch came into being, FAO-DOC, which every month issued a current bibliography of all FAO publications, including reports from regional FAO

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offices, member governments, and FAO staff published in other venues. Four times a year, the branch issued a bulletin of statistics and one on plant production; yearly, it published statistics on agricultural production, trade, forest products, fertilizer, and fisheries. Monthly installments were collected into FAOBIB, the exhaustive FAO bibliography of land and water literature.31 As the bibliographies abounded, the librarians went meta. They issued a list of other bibliographers, providing an index to the teeming services for indexing and abstracting research about agriculture and related fields, effectively arming FAO researchers with the tools of efficiently outsourcing specialist knowledge on a global scale. The institutions listed included the USDA and the Paris Institut de Recherches Agronomiques Tropicales. The directory of directories itself was fifty pages long. But all of this meta-indexing would come at a price. As when the sorcerer’s apprentice conjured magical mops to do his work for him, so it went with bibliography. The more the FAO engaged with bibliography, the more work needed to be done. The five marbled modernist buildings housing the agency formed a sort of research hive, with librarians copying, re-sorting, and reduplicating the research of world scholars. Like Borges’s image of the map that would need to be the size of its subject, the documentation of research papers at the FAO expanded, covering the knowledge of agricultural development at an increasingly minute scale. Which subjects would be hidden by this new matrix of paper? The question has a simple answer: the past.

The Politics of Bibliography The bibliography, as a genre, originated as an attempt to keep some hold on the past. The earliest bibliographies were the Enlightenment catalogues of the past, mixing Roman antiquities with new findings in natural history. Subject-­ area bibliographies that investigated approaches to a particular theme did not appear until the end of the nineteenth century, but even then, the genre remained defined as the repository of memory—all memory, that is, for as far back as the bibliographer could extend his inquiry.32 Even as late as the 1920s, agrarian development bibliographies still tried to include eighteenth-century works on agriculture alongside the new research. But the FAO bibliographies abandoned that long-term outlook, focusing on the most recent research: in the process, they also shifted from an emphasis on slow-moving social science and history to the fast-paced fields of science and engineering.

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Memory had played a vital role in organizing the advocates of land reform in the nineteenth century. Across the social sciences and humanities, studies in the history of landowning and peasant rebellion had flourished, creating a minor industry in dissertations. Monographs and dissertations from the 1960s interpreted peasant resistance as a legitimate force of historical struggle: for example, in the adaptations of E. P. Thompson’s idea of a “moral economy” of peasants to other places and times and, famously, in E. J. Hobsbawm’s his­ tories of a modern “age of revolutions” realized not only in ideas but also in peasant resistance around the world. Indeed, the output on these themes was voluminous. Histories of the Irish land reform foregrounded the role of the peasant, returning to primary source documents to capture the conflict over land. Parliamentary histories traced debates over “tenant rights” as they filtered into the language of liberalism. Historians of British Empire descended into the archives of India to trace the roots of conflict over land in Bengal and the northwestern provinces. Histories of the Mexican Revolution traced the agency of peasants grappling for a right to their own titles, culminating in Orlando Fals Borda’s triumphant paean to participatory politics, Conocimiento y Poder Popular, translated into English as Knowledge and People’s Power (1985).33 Anthropologists argued that they could discern a pattern of indigenous attitudes toward “agrarian reform” that united Latin America, East Africa, and Vietnam. Anthropologists studied the peasant’s house as a metaphor for a unified worldview in the village, positing the wisdom of peasant land organization. The 453 results of a WorldCat search for “peasant land” between 1950 and 1980 cover Persia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Latin America, and Europe, mainly contributed by the disciplines of history and anthropology. The political orientations of this work range from Marxism to liberalism; and a few of the authors, including the young political scientist James C. Scott, protested against the power of experts over the masses and forecast resistance and revolution as the inevitable result of peasant energies once suppressed.34 The mountain of work regarding peasant economy created by social sci­ entists in the 1970s must be understood against the backdrop of the previous century, when historians and anthropologists working in the service of empire, rather than on behalf of peasants, had actively shaped both debate and policy. The social scientists who published books about peasant land use in the 1970s had every reason to believe that their work, too, might contribute to a bibliography. If only their dissertations, books, and articles were absorbed in the FAO’s bibliography—and had the agency’s program of extension and land

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reform continued in the way it was designed to—the modern social science of the peasant’s perspective on history might have been taught at extension stations in rural communities around the world. Unfortunately, even while historians and humanists turned to landownership and displacement in detail, the perspective of history began to disappear from FAO bibliographies.35 From the beginning, the mandate to gather information included an emphasis on novelty, the standard by which the quantity and quality of research would be measured. The FAO’s success was measured in terms of the volumes, pages, and words of new publications. Measuring achievement in the form of new paper implied, however, that old paper was less relevant. An emphasis on novelty necessarily tilted the FAO’s holdings toward the work being prodigiously manufactured at American research universities. That pressure of constantly reading new information necessarily implied neglecting whatever was becoming old. In the place of antiquated research, the FAO began to emphasize novel research about agricultural science and economics. In 1953, the introduction to a bibliography issued by the FAO’s Land and Water Branch explained, “The criteria for the publication of these papers is based upon there being no other comparable publication.”36 The later indices served a different role: rather than offering a canon, they specialized in the latest research. Modern bibliography—charged with rendering useful the new output of the research university—had room only for innovation, not for memory. The abolition of memory itself reflected the politics of a new era—an era marked by a mandate of economic growth (rather than sustainable economics or broader participation in the profits of economic production) for the developing world. In terms of research, an emphasis on growth meant focusing not on peasant rights or land tenure history but on commodities and ways to maximize their sales. The shift from land policy to agricultural production is visible in the titles of the bibliographies from decade to decade. In 1964, individual bibliographies were issued on sport fishing, palm oil, and Latin American soil science. In 1966, an index on soil was printed; indices for animals, plants, and forestry soon followed. In 1968, indices came out on nutrition, land and water, rural institutions, and fisheries. The year 1969 saw fisheries and commodities. In 1970, a cumulative bibliography was issued on the food and agricultural industries; in 1971, bibliographies on land reform, environment, agricultural engineering, microeconomics in agriculture, and agricultural cooperation. In 1972, there were indexes on education and training, and a bibliography on the family Mugilidae of fish; in 1973, bibliographies on the Sahelian zone, the

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salmon family, water for agriculture, food and nutrition; in 1974, a tuna bibliography and another on forestry; in 1975, population and demography, education and training, agricultural credit, and palm oil; in 1976, brown planthoppers; in 1977, pollution in the Mediterranean, women and family in rural development, food industry residue, and criollo cattle; in 1978, fish in cages; in 1979, food and agriculture marketing, fish eggs and larva, South American fisheries, and the economics of aquaculture.37 The bibliographies on commodity agriculture displaced an older genre of bibliography on land tenure, which had emphasized the history of peasant landholding and peasant revolutions alongside agricultural economics studies describing the viability of small tenant farms and best practices in securing them, including through peasant cooperatives. Through the 1960s, this genre of bibliography began to disappear at the FAO. By 1971, there were no more bibliographies on land tenure or cooperatives. The FAO was still doing its job of documentation, but the content of that documentation had existentially shifted. Replacing the perspective of long-term history—an element of all the early bibliographies—was a new publication culture that reflected the vast amount of grant money siphoned into American research universities from the U.S. government and U.S. corporations. Publications related to American research initiatives thus came to dwarf the work produced by researchers on other continents. We can get a sense of the scale of the impact of American research money on UN bibliographies by reviewing the numbers of different bibliographies aggregated by the United Nations. Research on pesticide—supported by Ford and Rockefeller grants and wed to U.S. agrobusiness—dominated the literature. Whereas most universities and journals published one thousand to five thousand abstracts a year, one top publisher dwarfed the rest: the USDA’s Pesticides Documentation Bulletin, published between 1965 and 1969, had thirty thousand references. There was no way that the occasional researchers on land redistribution, appropriate technology, or small farms could compete with publication on that scale. Effectively, then, an “objective” bibliography from the United Nations reviewing the most up-to-date literature necessarily became a tool for promoting the U.S. pesticide industry. Meanwhile, UN bibliographies—brimming with references to American publications emphasizing loan repayment, economic growth, and pesticide— were promoted around the world through extension programs that used the bibliographies to consolidate research.

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On the ground, field agents bristled under pressure to conform to U.S. doctrines of economic growth. One FAO agent reported from Sierra Leone in 1965 warning that representatives from the World Bank, visiting with FAO extension agents there, were collecting cases of failures, like the consumer co-ops that flopped in Ghana and the hundreds of thousands of dollars lost to consumer cooperatives in Nigeria. That information, he hinted darkly, could be used to threaten the life of the cooperative program altogether.38 The pressure to show returns on investment was at odds with the experimental and innovative spirit of the FAO, which dealt in hoes, grains of seed, and grassroots community organizing. Bibliography had become the primary tool the FAO would use to defend itself: a bulwark of information documenting the research behind its ideas. FAO agents would be accountable to research; they did not hold themselves accountable to the logic of price or the market. Thus the FAO responded to the warnings of collapsing co-ops by proposing more information. In 1970, the FAO’s Provisional World Plan for Agriculture included a system for coordinating credit institutions. What was needed, agents argued, was a massive coordination of prices, credit, and infrastructure to make possible a revolution in the scale of production. Becoming the information broker to the world, they insisted, would surely keep the FAO relevant.39 In a sense, bibliography offered an alibi for FAO administrators working in uncertain times. It cloaked the FAO’s activities, making the institution look busy in appropriate ways. Even while FAO administrators schemed to publish new studies of land tenure and land redistribution, bibliography proved that they were handling the demands of economists at the World Bank, dealing with loans and their repayments. Research occupied the organs of international development and demonstrated productivity, even while more radical plans for administering land reforms and extension or delivering small technologies around the world were neglected. Building a perfect information infrastructure had become a goal in itself. Meanwhile, the fashion for bibliography was also becoming the badge of focused academic attention—it functioned as a shibboleth, allowing nonprofits and grassroots movements alike to signal the seriousness of their engagement with a topic. By the mid-1970s, other, independent bibliographies were beginning to appear that documented the new work in the humanities and social sciences, filling in the gaps left behind by the FAO. In 1973, a bibliography on cooperative theory and studies of successful agrarian cooperatives was issued by another UN branch, the International Labour Organization in Switzerland.

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Other freelance efforts followed: a bibliography on appropriate and indigenous technologies was issued by ITDG, the Intermediate Technologies Development Group set up in 1974 around the ideas of E. F. Schumacher; American radicals in San Francisco allied to back-to-the-landers and Native American movements published their list of resources in 1975; and a group of American urban planning librarians issued a bibliography on rent control in 1976.40 If policy needed paper in order to substantiate its decisions, then paper it should have. Did all this academic production, summarized and masticated into hundred-word abstracts for bibliographies, ever reach the peasant, with his douli and hoe, at the end of the information pipeline that Norris Dodd envisioned? It is doubtful. Expense issues meant that extension services were being substantially cut in the 1960s, even as bibliography expanded. Bibliography was becoming an end in itself. Even during the most prolific years of bibliography creation, there were certainly a few who doubted that the practice was necessarily the by-product of clarity, insight, or righteousness—but that remains a question outside the purview of this work.41 Bibliography, for all practical purposes, demonstrated the consensus of academic scholars, and in this way cloaked start-up advisory bodies like ITDG with the aura of learning. To deconstruct the utility and fashionability of bibliography, however, does not detract from the many instances in which aggregated learning produced dramatic new insights about land and the shape of land redistribution. Among these exceptions, new insight was definitely being assembled in at least one important arena: discussions of collective landownership or, as it was coming to be known, “the commons.”

Elsewhere, Bibliography Sparks Insights About Land One of the most valiant attempts to ballast an alternative regime of property through the power of bibliography transpired outside the FAO. It came in the form of a bibliography on land and water rights created by Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at the University of Indiana, whose research for her book Governing the Commons (1990) made her the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Unlike most of the figures in our drama—the designers of the United Nations, the economists in newly independent India, the students who called on Britain to expand its right to housing—Ostrom presumed that no particular state or international authority would enact her recommendations, and she looked to no particular group of people to implement her vision. She was an

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intellectual with knowledge about how different communities administer their resources as well as a gifted researcher capable of collecting a vast and various swath of data and analyzing its tacit abstractions. Yet she, too, turned to bibliography to capture elements of landownership that had been invisible to those working at the FAO. Ostrom’s intellectual engagement with problems of land and water echoed many of the debates of the previous century, such as self-governance and indigenous or traditional modes of governance, which presuppose preserving the right of occupancy. But she also pushed these conversations in new directions: methodologically, through an emphasis on new tools of information technology, and theoretically, by engaging with indigenous cultures and their ways of allocating territory, as well as by grappling with questions of the environment and sustainability little touched upon by earlier thinkers. Ostrom thus represents the culmination of an era as well as a departure from many of that era’s values. Assessing her manifold contributions is no simple matter; the admiration accorded her, and the acceptance of her ideas in various domains, suggests that her work—even more than that of other thinkers covered in this book—holds the greatest potential for the future. In the years after 1973—when UN activity to support international land redistribution had all but ground to a halt—Ostrom began a massive effort to refine social science research into a new theory of property that encompassed collective and cooperative endeavors alongside private ones. Rather than prescribe a single model for owner proprietorship of land, her work suggested a role for indigenous patterns of landholding, wherein a tribe administered a piece of land as fishing or hunting territory. By reaffirming the economic productivity and long-term environmental resiliency of the commons, she highlighted the importance of recognizing local landholding patterns, as opposed to the imposition of industrial agriculture. Her positive revaluation of community self-government became a foundation of contemporary discussions regarding how information regimes characterize particular cultures. Post-­colonial activists like Vinoba and Colin Ward had promoted a radical revaluation of community self-governance: Vinoba argued the case for local, naturally evolving administration of land reform, and Ward advocated for “self-build” housing as opposed to state efforts. Ostrom, however, was no wild-eyed activist championing self-government. The squatters and mystics associated with early self-­ government—with their lack patience for documentation—were limited in what they could actually accomplish. Ostrom, in contrast to Vinoba and Ward, was an expert researcher, a careful

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documenter and coder of evidence. Her analysis was based on information painstakingly collected about tens of thousands of cases around the world, and it was from this rigorous empiricism that Ostrom advanced her theory of self-government. Ostrom’s research techniques reflected the values as well as the technologies of an era of information infrastructure. Her ability to create a new theory of property was premised on a mighty bulwark of paper. With her husband, Vincent, she ran Indiana’s Workshop on Political Economy, a seminar that collected its own bibliography of indigenous and peasant land tenure. The workshop met several times a year over the next four decades, inviting visiting academics to document systems that held economic rights in common—for instance, the European peasant commons and its analogues around the world. With Elinor and Vincent at its helm, the workshop gathered every paper its members could find about systems in which land, water, agriculture, forests, pasture, or fisheries were maintained as a commons. She represents, in that sense, the culmination of the movements in solidarity with global peasants discussed throughout this book, which turned to information as a tool for supplementing peasant organizing from below. Her vision of landownership expanded past the concept of the single-owner model of land proprietorship that was taken for granted by Dodd and Schickele, recognizing the full diversity of forms of ownership around the world. Ostrom’s care in gathering, curating, and especially analyzing her bibliography also makes her heir to the traditions of the anonymous women bibliographers. The Ostrom bibliography was housed first in the steel vertical files of the workshop’s offices at the University of Indiana and eventually in a custom-­ built online “commons” that allowed peasants around the world to freely access and download commons scholarship without the restrictions on copyright that typically accompany U.S. academic publication. By 2009, the database had 89,755 records of coded studies of evidence about commons systems. It is a reflection of the Ostroms’ commitment that they designed the technology of information retrieval to act as a commons, informed by the laws of mutuality that Elinor in particular was documenting.42 All of Elinor’s claims about traditional societies resulted from counting carefully coded data on the basis of information she had collected, a fact that underscores how useful bibliographies can be if rigorously cultivated. According to Elinor’s analysis, traditional societies governed themselves—even as the Ostroms governed their own workshop—through the flow of information. In all of the successful regimes in the developing world, Elinor noted, mechanisms

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existed that allowed locals to inspect the count of fish brought in by each fisherman at the end of the day or the amount of wood taken out of the forest by each family. Unlike Vinoba’s model, in which generosity simply materialized out of collective assent, Elinor’s vision of the world was framed as no mystic paradise. Sharing information about the common pool and how each family benefited was the mechanism that allowed some societies to function cooperatively where others failed. Elinor’s ideas echoed other movements of her time, which looked past the single-proprietor model of landownership to stress the way in which many communities depend on collective rights to property. Joseph Sax, a law school professor, promoted public domain law in the 1960s as a means of pursuing environmental justice, arguing for the state’s use of authority to seize tracts of private land on behalf of the public good. Civil rights activists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862 as a model for land appropriation: used to encourage landownership by white settlers once, could it not be turned to the purpose of ensuring equal rights for indigenous persons and African Americans? Native American activists, occupying Alcatraz, demanded the renegotiation of property boundaries. A private solidarity movement, the community land trust, organized African American farmers and middle-class householders into cooperatives for holding low-rent land for local cross-class, interracial communities. Like these movements, Ostrom’s ideas stressed that communities could govern themselves and make themselves profitable, as long as they had the tools to resist pollution and displacement from without. Finally, in distinction to the great majority of those who thought, wrote, or organized about landownership in the twentieth century, Elinor Ostrom was an environmental thinker. Her questions about land spoke poignantly to the environmental crisis recently articulated by Rachel Carson and posed by the Club of Rome as a global problem. Ostrom’s theory of the commons directly challenged prevailing ideas about environmental sustainability like Garrett Hardin’s theory of the “tragedy of the commons.”43 While Ostrom shared with Sen and Schickele a critique of twentieth-century Malthusianism, her position rested not on a fantasy of economic productivity driven by technology but on concrete questions about how much growth fisheries and forests could actively sustain. In contrast to the anti-empire and racial justice–based logic of many other thinkers, her defense of traditional systems of occupying land and water was thus environmental as well as economic: Ostrom would eventually argue that, in general, traditional commons systems remained robust against environmental exhaustion because of prohibitions on when or how much

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natural resources could be gathered, and on who could partake of these resources and how. Ostrom offered one of the most important post-1970 critiques of the logic of growth-based economics, challenging Western concepts of property holding itself in favor of indigenous and peasant methods of self-government. Ostrom’s research built on decades of research by historians and anthropologists, and it revived a strain of thinking that had been quite dominant in the United States and Europe since at least the 1850s. She collected researchers’ articles in an enormous array of vertical files, carefully tabulated and assessed by her team of graduate students. They read histories of the commons in medieval Europe and studies of modern kibbutzim and communal farming experiments, annotating how authority worked in each setting, whether free riders were compelled to participate, the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, how profits were calculated and when. Only after years of collecting such research studies on the commons and sifting them for similarities and contrasts did Ostrom publish her results. Common property systems, she reported, could easily be identified around the world, many of them capable of being sustained over generations and centuries with minimal conflict or corruption. Those common property systems that survived tended to share twelve major characteristics, including a clear delineation of insider and outsider and the exclusion of the latter from participating in the goods of the commons, the public accounting or measuring of the goods in question (as in common-pool fisheries—the fish caught every day were displayed in the public square so that all one’s neighbors knew that no one had taken more than allowed). When this accounting for property was managed, humans could indeed collaborate, preserving the common herd, the water, the land, or the fishery, never exhausting it and never overstepping the rights of their fellows.44 In a sense, Ostrom was thus the evolutionary destiny of the woman bibliographer at the FAO: her weapon of choice and necessity was the collection and annotation of paper. Unlike the bibliographers at the FAO—and unlike Pearl Buck with her novels or the women bibliographers of USAID and FAO—­ Ostrom had a PhD and a university faculty position; this put her in a position not only to collect but also to author a synthetic overview of the material she had collected. She was therefore able to use her bibliography to feed a string of publications about commons systems that would eventually impress the Nobel Committee. Her position and use of the bibliography thus allowed her to compete with mainstream ideas about development while defending indigenous ways of life around the globe.

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The papers gathered by the Ostroms definitively illustrated, for the first time in history, the global applicability of a theory of the commons suggested by antiquarians in the nineteenth century: that in Europe before the industrial revolution as well as in indigenous societies around the globe, alternative economic regimes governed resources in a way that did not lead to exhaustion, producing a more equitable society in which the rich and poor were never separated by a mighty gulf, and one class never dominated another. Among the first papers heard by the workshop was a study documenting the functionality of the Swiss grazing commons: for centuries villagers had pastured their cows on a mountain together, so that private greed never exhausted their collective resources; research of this kind opened up the possibility that the “tragedy of the commons” theorized by contemporary ecologists might not define the limits of the system. Later papers would document indigenous fishery commons on the coasts of Africa and water commons in the American Southwest.45 Ostrom’s bibliography gathered data from anthropology and history, studies in the medieval commons, and predevelopment allocation systems among native peoples. The entire range of human behavior—not merely the successes of white privilege—became the field of her economics research. Ostrom thus became a bridge between disciplines—carrying into economics the viewpoints of fields that had been “feminized,” in the sense that women were becoming bibliographers and anthropologists at a significantly higher rate than they became political scientists or economists.46 The feminization of social science fields meant that history, anthropology, and sociology controlled less access to power—and thus to policy and money on a global scale—via their access to the FAO, than did economics, with its dominance of the World Bank. Ostrom’s bibliography became one of the few points of contact between policy-oriented development economics and the feminized social sciences that examined peasant concerns. Ostrom’s bibliography was thus designed, in a sense, as a political weapon that could defend the commons. Working with data from past societies, poor borderlands, and native territories allowed Ostrom to reach economic generalizations more closely allied to the reckonings of history and anthropology than the work of other economists. The essays the Ostroms wrote proved that the commons system was not a myth or an outdated fantasy, but an economic system with laws of its own—a way of living, indeed, that could plausibly be recognized, ratified, and supported by international regimes like the FAO. In part, Elinor Ostrom represents a tragic case, much like the FAO itself: despite its defense by a fortress made of paper—and even despite her winning

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the Nobel Prize and briefly rising to international celebrity—her commons system would never come into being. Her ideas have mainly been embraced in the world of information technology, where “creative commons” licenses structure publication, and Wikipedia-type endeavors allow many hands to draft an “information commons.” Even so, it’s important to remember that Ostrom’s original work was on land: pasture, forest, fishery, and irrigation. She proved that communities of small owners had indeed collectively tended successfully to their environment and could do so productively in the future. Timing, of course, is everything. Had Ostrom’s theses been issued in the era of land reform, they might have been taken up to help India and other states to redistribute land into peasant commons and indigenous territories, channeling technology and research to help those communities to work at scale, wrapping common rights ownership around worker cooperatives. Instead, the logic of individual ownership dominated midcentury efforts at land redistribution; and to this day, there has never been a mass land redistribution based on the concept of common ownership of land.

The Role of Women’s Research Reconsidered The endeavor of reading and thinking that went into the bibliographies that organized research in the twentieth century was “women’s work,” and it was an important, if often overlooked, contribution to a global effort. Just as much of the labor of farming and enclosing land—identified by Locke as the source of individual claims to property—often went unremarked in Western systems of landownership, women’s work in research was invisible. Women’s labor thus brings us face-to-face with the unsolved problem of credit for labor. The women bibliographers consulted were almost never named in the articles and books that counted as published research. Nevertheless, it was brain work: imagining how all the pieces of the world fit together and describing them in succinct but transparent detail. “So comprehensive is the work that the table of contents reads like an atlas,” wrote Carrie Maude Jones admiringly of Dorothy Culver’s bibliography on land utilization.47 Women’s invisible labor runs through the entire arc of the land problem. Consider the group of women connected with Fanny and Anna Parnell, whose work enabled the rent strikes of nineteenth-century Ireland to become more regular and more effective. Fanny Parnell was born in County Wicklow—the “garden of Ireland”—to a half-American mother in 1848. In that same year,

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her mother’s home state of New Jersey passed the Married Women’s Property Act, which would have allowed her mother to inherit land. As Fanny’s biographers have suggested, had similar legislation existed in Ireland, the sisters might have inherited the privileges that their prominent family bequeathed to their famous brother, the politician Charles Stewart Parnell. Thanks to the agitation of women across the Irish Channel, however, legislative change was afoot in Britain. Even while Fanny worked with the Ladies’ Land League to provide land huts for evicted families in Ireland, Britain legislated the right of women to buy, sell, and manage land in its own Married Women’s Property Act in 1882.48 Nineteenth-century women received their own version of land reform only after a century of criticism and legal action defeated the Norman law of coverture, which treated a wife’s property as if it were her husband’s. Many a Jane Austen novel revolves around the fate of women who could inherit only if appropriately wed—although once wed, they lost control over the family’s resources. Coverture worked against women’s freedom in general, and it especially harmed women who earned their own living and women separated from their husbands.49 The women described in this book who worked for land redistribution schemes and expanded definitions of property were legion. Did they think of themselves as extending a Married Women’s Property Act to the colonized and indigenous people of the world? Doreen Warriner, born in 1904, would certainly have known women whose opportunities had expanded with Britain’s Married Women’s Property Act of 1882. Later women who worked in the name of the land were younger, but they too would have had mothers and grandmothers whose right to inherit property had been denied. At any rate, many of them—including Elinor Ostrom, the political scientist Doreen Warriner, the statistician Alice Thorner, and the propaganda analyst Karin Dovring—tried to make a home in the research university at a time when their professional prospects were limited by gender. Women such as these, as well as the outspoken Parnell sisters and Pearl Buck, are a tremendous, but often invisible, component of the movement for peasants’ rights to land. Women scholars working in the university followed in the footsteps of unacknowledged and uncredited bibliographers and indexers like Dorothy Culver, who helped to create the modern genre of the research bibliography. Insofar as they imagined themselves to be exiles, their work securing homes for others mirrored their own struggles to make a home in a hostile environment. The common cause of subaltern rights to land and women’s rights was theo-

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rized as early as 1965 by Ester Boserup, whose work linked gender disparities across Africa to the preference of European empires there for male labor and colonial-era prohibitions on women’s ownership of land.50 The mirroring of women’s rights and peasant rights, I believe, implies the existence of a significant but often overlooked quality: empathy. Although harder to identify in the work of bibliography, the emotional life of international land redistribution has a history. Administrators at the FAO speculated about the role of “emotion” and “world consciousness” in repairing the legacy of European empire. Empathy would be theorized later by researchers of participatory movements. In the work of participatory organizers, women’s silence and the silence of working people and indigenous people ran in parallel. Their talents, insights, and ways of knowing could be unlocked, however, by carefully organizing venues for conversation in which hierarchy was watchfully expelled. Only in such conditions could the full contribution of each individual come into play. It was in meetings of this kind that organizers identified empathy as nothing less than a technique—a technique that had already been operationalized in the land movement since at least the era of the Parnell sisters. It was empathy that mobilized the sympathy and money of Irish American workers around images of burned-out cottages. It was empathy and outrage expressed by the Irish lobby in Parliament. Empathy motivated Pearl Buck to write The Good Earth, which enabled so many Westerners to see the linkages between starvation and the murder of female children in the developing world. Empathy drove social scientists such as Doreen Warriner to rescue children and to preach the need for a world where everyone had a home. Empathy inspired English students to march with London squatters and to rally for the land rights of Peruvian indigenous peoples. Empathy connected movements to supporters. And empathy changed minds. Of all the techniques that organized land reform, empathy was perhaps the most important, clearing the way for the global sweep of occupancy movements. But empathy was not enough to repair the lack of memory, and the failure to coordinate, that began to dismantle the work of land redistribution movements.

Conclusion Recently, one climate scientist despaired of the process of creating a global consensus around scientific information in time for international action on

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the United Nations’ climate goals. The anonymous scientist, interviewed by journalist Dougald Hine, remarked that the success of capping carbon emissions depends on an experiment—using science to advise an international institution in the face of a global challenge—and that doing so is a completely new endeavor in human history, the like of which has never before been tried.51 Such a claim about the past is simply untrue. For seventy years and more, science has advised international development agencies in the service of fighting poverty and hunger, instructing administrators about the laws of population, the best kind of dam, and the right kinds of seeds. Social scientists at the United Nations advised world governments about the best policies for supporting small farmers based on an immense bulwark of research. In other words, the bold experiment in which science advised on policy has been tried. But the structure of the experiment was itself flawed, inevitably producing corrupt results. The process by which science is conveyed to the state changes the shape of the information so conveyed. According to the model of the information pipeline, which FAO administrators devised at the end of the Second World War, science would reach policy makers, government ministers, extension agents, and peasants in a prepackaged form. Scientific papers would be reduced into abstracts, which would be collected into bibliographies. Bibliographies focused only on the newest contributions, and they were weighted in the direction of research funding. As a result, much critical thought about land redistribution, post-colonialism, and poverty was lost. The era that followed would be marked by a tilt toward a different set of subjects: trade, markets, and economic growth. The system of bibliography packaged scientific research in a format that reflected the bias of interested parties—for one notable example, the U.S. pesticide lobby. Much of the advising was also ill advised and entailed unforeseen consequences—for instance, when American and Indian engineers built dams that ultimately displaced millions of Indians, or when the cost of improved seeds put small Indian farmers out of business. The lessons of this moment for climate change are many. Science can support decision making only if it reaches the individuals whose decisions matter. Policy makers are liable to hear from vested interests before they hear from the plurality of researchers. Assuming that disinterested science exists, research must be published in such a way that it reaches policy makers with a mandate for action. Effective climate science, in other words, is actionable climate science. Typically, actionable research first reaches the representatives of communities directly affected by a reality. In the case of climate science, the

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communities most gravely affected by present-day changes to the climate include indigenous populations, climate refugees, ethnic minorities, and other poor communities consigned to live in desertified areas, floodplains, and areas subject to toxic dumping. Science can surely support communities in danger, arming them with information that allows them to generalize about their condition and formulate appropriate responses. But reaching endangered communities requires scientists to rethink their arenas of publication, and the kinds of testing and data collection they prescribe, to match the needs of poor communities around the world. Like Elinor Ostrom, they must take the format of publishing their data and conveying its prescriptions seriously, lest their research, like so much of the research in the bibliographies and vertical files described here, be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Part III Bureauphobia; or, The Revolt Against Government and the “Third Way”

v By the year 1970, attitudes toward land redistribution were changing in the West. Neoliberal ideas—alongside racism and the war for currency value—­ undermined land redistribution in both the United States and the United Kingdom, bringing repercussions for the FAO’s global effectiveness and the international trajectory of occupancy rights. Once supporters of land redistribution around the world, by the 1960s, U.S. agencies were beginning to formulate a path for development uniquely attached to market values—rather than to occupancy rights, the inspiration for activities at the FAO. Whereas Indian economists had insisted on the viability of small farming, American economists increasingly promoted an ideal of largescale farms, and American agencies pushed a plan for post-colonial nations reimagined in the image of U.S. industry. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations began to circulate materials—including a cheap calculator, the Curta, shipped to farmers across the developing world—that encouraged peasants to think of themselves as entrepreneurs connected to a global marketplace. The concentration on “innovation” in these programs reflected a new emphasis on economic growth and on theories that embraced the potential of markets and technology to solve poverty—without land redistribution. A series of triggers—especially communism, race, and the environment— marked the U.S. break with the global fight for occupancy. American reporting on the totalitarian regimes in Russia and China—not always unbiased—gave way to U.S. theories that described land redistribution as a form of psycholog-

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ical warfare. Meanwhile, calls for redistribution at home only increased: African Americans demanded land for reparations, indigenous people challenged the denial of their rights, and environmentalists called for the state regulation of pollution. Collectively, these factors prompted a withdrawal of U.S. support for international land redistribution programs. American leaders at the World Bank began to attack UN programs supporting land reform. Directives from the World Bank effectively undermined the information infrastructure that had been designed to support the world’s most environmentally friendly farms. In Britain, meanwhile, intellectuals who rejected the state continued to defend occupancy for all. British neoliberal evangelists, funded by the construction industry, began to challenge the welfare state, highlighting the failure of Labour politicians to end homelessness. Housing became the battleground for the ideologies of state and market. A series of high-profile scandals undercut faith in a Labour platform that had preached land redistribution for sixty years. Although market-based policies won elections, they never provided the supply of cheap, affordable housing they promised. Instead, policy makers began to concentrate on strengthening Britain’s currency, a competition that indirectly drove up the price of London’s urban real estate. Condos prohibitively priced rendered London a “Ghost Town”—in the idiom of a contemporary ska hit—where the vast majority, especially persons of color, struggled to find affordable housing. Even while dreams of land lived on elsewhere, the era of occupancy rights was coming to a close in the West.

7  •  The Peasant’s Calculator

Technology was central to many ideas about a world marked by occupancy. It was a key element that explained how post-colonial countries might si­ multaneously redistribute their land and build a solid economic future. To be profitable, peasants farming tiny plots of land would need technology. Some visionaries imagined peasants as potential micro-industrialists, manufacturing buckets and hoes for their neighbors. Indian ideas about small-scale technology and its role in supporting peasants eventually inspired UN projects for the distribution of hoes, maps, and bibliographies. The ultimate evolution of that vision, however, might be best symbolized by the Curta. The Curta was a handheld calculator distributed to peasants across India by the Agricultural Development Council (ADC)—an American nonprofit that grew out of collaborations between the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. In theory, the Curta would plug the Indian peasant into global networks of information about price, opportunity, and credit. The calculator would help them to bid on prices—but also to calculate loans and their repayment. At the United Nations, administrators had cautioned against programs that required peasants to take out major loans. But the Curta arrived at a time when U.S. development programs began to encourage peasants to take out loans and invest in larger farms, improved seeds, tractors, irrigation works, and pesticides. The Curta offered the first step for the peasant who wanted to use agricultural statistics to calculate a gradual path to amassing land in order to become one of the lucky few to benefit from the new American regime of development. In short, the calculator was a gateway to the entire line of investment and production necessary to profit from the so-called Green Revolution, which tended to

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Curta mechanical calculator, model II, 1954–73 (Photograph courtesy of the Collections of The Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan)

reward peasants who farmed at scale but punish small farmers. It was a tiny engine for reversing land redistribution. The Curta was introduced in a world where national land redistribution schemes were under way, frequently supported by agents at the FAO whose introduction of cheap new technology to peasant farmers indeed proved transformative. In the place of a love affair with land redistribution, however, American development agencies embraced a different mystique: the idolatry of economic growth. New agencies would increasingly turn to appropriate technology not in the service of peasants but as a means of creating devel­oping world consumers for Western engineering. Redistribution—in terms of land or otherwise—was increasingly removed from these discussions.

Tanzania’s Experiment with Technology The idea that small-scale, cheap technology was right for the developing world became a fundamental law of development at the FAO. Among the flagship programs in which small technology played a leading role in the postwar world was Tanzania, which had formed as a modern nation from colonial Tanganyika (independent from Britain in 1961) and the Zanzibar Archipelago (independent in 1964). Julius Nyerere, prime minister before independence and

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president afterward, was dedicated to an ambitious and extensive program of resettlement that would use appropriate technology to make small farmers productive. In 1967, Nyerere announced the Ujamaa Program, as it was known—ujamaa being a Swahili word for “extended family”—framing the program in collaborative and nationalistic terms: a land redistribution program in which government contributions of cheap technology were designed to transform Tanzanian agriculture overnight. International consultants visited, offering technical expertise. Rainer Schickele visited the development, representing the FAO’s Land and Water Division. Through international grants, the Tanzanian government was able to invest millions of dollars in improved roads and projects to irrigate the new plots of land, ensuring a livable future for future farmers. They might have been following advice from Schickele’s book, where he sang the praises of mechanical improvements such as “metal tubes and pumps,” which could supply enormous areas with irrigation while ending unemployment.1 It was on the basis of collective control of water that Tanzania began to privatize land previously farmed as plantations and grazed as commons. The Dutch sociologist Gerrit Huizer described Ujamaa as a counterreaction to the “authoritarian” development programs forced on farmers during colonial rule. Measures of “doubtful value,” forcibly imposed by the government, Huizer recorded, provoked “considerable resistance, resulting in more or less violent action.”2 Resettled peasants were closely supervised by government advisers who forced peasants to contribute long work hours, the benefits of which were often unclear. The resettled peasant was effectively little different, in his status or freedom, from a farm laborer or sharecropper. The programs had a darker side, however. The Ujamaa Program focused on resettling the Sonjo peoples from northern Tanzania into more fertile lands— sometimes burning the Sonjo villages to ensure migration—details of the story that Western observers would notice and report on decades later. Water would serve as a means of enticement, but fire was a means of control. Too late, Elinor Ostrom’s workshop would collect papers on Maasai and Sonjo grazing; too late, her theory of common-pool property systems would validate the economic principles that governed indigenous forms of land tenure like grazing commons.3 In many ways, by 1973, when Huizer published his article, Tanzania was a success story regarding land redistribution, small-scale technology, and its capacity to produce participatory democracy in a nation throwing off the shackles of colonial rule. But Tanzania’s success was short-lived. Utter chaos followed

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within a few short years, caused partially by a series of droughts and intensified by the oil embargos, which cut Tanzania off from the rest of the world. Tanzania, which had been a net exporter of food, became the largest importer of food in Africa. Toothpaste could not be had; transport was undependable. Only aid from the World Bank allowed Tanzania to continue importing food. In 1985, Nyerere retired, leaving the country one of the poorest and most aid-­ dependent nations in the world. Tanzania’s investments in roads and irrigation coincided with the beginnings of an international love affair with markets and productivity. Easily enchanted by tales of engineering innovation, many Westerners read a moral lesson in the experience of Ujamaa—that small technologies, appropriate to a nation, could result in the utter economic transformation of a community. Indeed, over the longer term, it has begun to look as if small investments in Tanzania’s development proved a success: Ujamaa produced high rates of literacy, and Tanzania has been marked, overall, by a relative political stability that many other African nations might envy.4 What kind of technology is appropriate to the developing world? The answer to that question has to do, in part, with the politics of the respondent. For Rainer Schickele, who believed that peasant rebellion against European empire represented the destiny of the world, the correct form of technology might be whatever helped Tanzania’s peasants to render their small plots of land viable, especially roads and wells. For other interlocutors of the time—notably among them Raúl Prebisch, the Argentine economist who believed that developing nations must industrialize as quickly as possible lest they become permanent plantations supplying the developed world with raw materials—the best form of technology was whatever helped peasants to make economic decisions. If the talisman of Schickele’s thinking was the well, that of Prebisch’s might have been the Curta.

A Love Affair with Productivity Manufactured in Liechtenstein from 1948 to 1970, the Curta was the descendant of the nineteenth-century adding machine, designed by a half-Jewish Austrian, Curt Herzstark, son of an adding-machine manufacturer, during his imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp. It depended on several shafts, each of which was grooved to work with a counting gear inside. The Curta’s beauty was its transportability; it could bring statistics to the farm. The operator held the Curta in one hand, slid the knobs to input each

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given digit, and then turned a hand crank at the top to begin the process of calculation, turning the crank once for each digit of the second operand; and then on top, the answer would appear in black and silver numbers. The machine could add, subtract, multiply, and divide large numbers; and with charts, it could also calculate squares and cube roots.5 This capability made the Curta ideal for surveyors and agricultural experts who, like their nineteenth-century forebears, were attempting to make rapid estimates of potential land prices based on harvest yield and acreage. For a time, it became a favored tool of surveyors, although sales never went beyond 140,000. The Curta was identified by U.S. foundations that supported agricultural development as an indispensable tool for agrarian economists analyzing the progress of rural development. In 1966, officials at the American Agricultural Development Council recommended to their Sri Lankan correspondent “hand-­ operated calculating equipment for the use of students in the farm management laboratory” in Ceylon. They explained: “The advantage of the Curtas is that they can be used both in the laboratory and in the field for research.”6 The Curta, in other words, was the perfect link between the rural smallholder— calculating possible returns on prices of traditional and improved varieties of grain—and the international market. The distribution of the Curta reflected an era of increasing concern with documenting the possibility of economic growth on small farms. The pressure was mounting to demonstrate linkages between particular investments and economic growth. Economist Raúl Prebisch’s doctrine of development economics emphasized the need for rapid industrialization in the developing world, a strategy that left little room for the slow creation of hoe factories on peasant farms favored by the FAO’s founders.7 Advocates of third world industrialization argued that higher profits could be achieved if the majority of the workforce worked in factories instead of on farms. If they did acknowledge that a significant agricultural focus would persist for most third world economies, they urged that farms be modernized, not via the ideological path laid out by advocates of appropriate technology, but rather by the shortest road to economic growth. “Agriculture is capable of dynamic growth,” recorded the experts consulted by USAID in 1964.8 An ideology of market-based development was spreading in many devel­ opment circles by the late 1960s. By 1968, many international activists were already prepared to jettison the model of land redistribution, together with the entire model for an information infrastructure that had accompanied it,

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including appropriate technology, communications infrastructure, schooling, and political reform. They had a new model in mind: development through banking. Ideas about how banking might replace bureaucracy were circulating in conversations about the developing world. One conference in 1968, staged by the newly founded Vienna Institute for Development, gathered together academic leaders in international development who were dissatisfied with the progress made by postwar investments to date, among them directors of major academic institutes in Paris and Calcutta and the heads of the FAO, the World Bank, and other UN organizations. The record of their conversation suggests that some UN leaders were beginning to explore a radically new direction for development: one in which the market, rather than the state, would offer the primary means of fighting poverty in the developing world. Chaired by Colin Legum, an anti-apartheid activist from South Africa and editor of the Observer newspaper in Britain, the conference and the volume that reported on it collected the reasons for dissatisfaction and the results of their deliberations about new possibilities. The turn toward unregulated markets was framed as a correction to the failings of development efforts over previous decades. In terms of the record of economic growth, it was clear that the development efforts of the 1950s and 1960s had produced smaller results than expected. Robert E. Asher, director of the Brookings Institute, wrote off the 1960s as an era of “false expectations and false hopes,” “very naive” in its ambitions.9 The Belgian sociologist Paul Bairoch gave the reasons: the foreign debt of developing nations reaching $50 billion, a deficit of food production at 12 percent, flagging industrialization, and a trade deficit. The Swiss sociologist Bruno Fritsch compared the enormous growth rates of Western countries—32 percent in the United States, 44 percent in France, 76 percent in Western Germany—with those in the developing world, which averaged 4.2 percent.10 During the years of international collaboration in the early 1960s, dubbed the “Decade of Development,” the economic productivity of the developing world had actually declined. In their opening speeches in Vienna, the leaders of the new global state chastised the idealism of an earlier era. Speakers blamed the international bureaucracies charged with development for slowing down the natural process of economic growth.11 As the conversation went on, characterizations of the sins of the 1960s began to coalesce around a common target: land redistribution. The core issue was the production of food. Bairoch cited figures that seemed to suggest that land redistribution programs were actively undermin-

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ing the creation of productive agricultural models: “Surface per active head of population [is] reduced to 20 per cent of what it was in 1960.”12 The heads of the World Health Organization agreed, citing food as a primary concern: 25 percent of the population was undernourished in good years, 40 percent in bad ones. Given that the third world imported $6.5 billion in food every year, why should land reform play a role? The Decade of Development had been a failure, and the inefficiencies of land reform were part of the reason why.13 At the Vienna conference, the advocates of markets urged that the sins of naïveté—among them redistribution and political zealotry—had to be corrected. The means of righting them would be financial expertise, directed to correcting a key marker of financial well-being: the “balance of payments” between rich countries and poor.14 In other words, the marker of success for development would no longer be measured in terms of agricultural output or small-scale innovation or gains in redistributing land and creating new opportunities that corrected the history of colonialism. Victories would be assessed according to terms set by the developed world: repayment of loans made by the World Bank and prices developing countries could charge Westerners for goods. In practical terms, the phrase balance of payments implied a world where developing nations’ success didn’t depend on rural development at all—but rather on hasty, large-scale industrialization, typically backed by large-scale loans. A consensus began to form around an epochal idea: the World Bank could be the agent charged with overseeing a new direction in coordinated economic planning for the developing world. In this new direction, deliberate planning for economic growth would take precedence over political ideas like land redistribution.15 The Vienna conference was not the only site where new ideas about markets were assembling a new approach to development—one in which small farms had little place. At the Ford Foundation, Collis Stocking launched an all-out attack on India’s land redistribution schemes, calling for large-scale farming and industrialization. The language of free markets filled the entire sermon. He preached the need for “free enterprise” to fill “empty hands,” touting a vision of top-down economics.16 Stocking interpreted India, because of its emphasis on small farmers, as being in a state of “quiet crisis.” His diagnosis was full of allusions to the “free world,” “communism,” and “the productive vigour of free enterprise.”17 The Ford Foundation, henceforth, would fund initiatives to create industrial agriculture in India, actively countering policies that favored land redistribution.

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New technologies began to seem relevant in an era highlighting productivity and free enterprise. The Curta entered the development conversation at a moment when information technology and its impact on rural development were increasingly subjects of interest to U.S. universities and development agencies. Early computers promised to bring new efficiency to agriculture. American grant agencies were enthusiastic about the potential of computers to solve the once intractable problems of the developing world. One grant application sent to the ADC proposed a project in Nigeria at the University of Ife’s Faculty of Agriculture. The applicant, currently completing his PhD at Cornell, promised to conduct extensive Yoruba-language interviews with about three hundred farmers to assess their willingness to accept government recommendations for new strains of grain. The information would be punched onto IBM cards and processed at “the recently established IBM Data Processing Center at the University of Ibadan” for the purpose of “correlating coefficients and other statistical tests which may be applicable.”18 Information technology made everything look potentially like a data problem, including the profitability of dairies. In 1960, IBM Japan provided machines to the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Tokyo, paid for by the ADC. They were supposed to reduplicate the record crunching executed at Cornell about dairy farms—a study of 559 dairy farms written by Bill Young. The Tokyo computer had four hundred records. The economic viability of developing world agriculture was beginning to look like a problem that computers could solve.19 Computers could make cattle farming more efficient, and they could compute which peasants deserved loans, and on what terms those loans should be repaid. At a conference in 1964, participants agreed that banking and marketing services would also essentially be part of this broader knowledge network, trading not in goods but in “information.” “A credit system is needed,” argued the experts, “to provide credit on terms that will facilitate the farmers’ use of the new inputs or the new information.”20 A rationalized development economics would require a centralized organization to “assemble, store, and distribute the additional output from the new inputs or new information” that credit might produce.21 Focusing on loans and their repayments meant that stories about the direction of history—for example, faith in the promise of civil rights—had to take a back seat. William D. Clark, director of information at the World Bank, gave a speech in which he outlined what he believed to be a cost-benefit analysis of jettisoning civil rights in favor of economically guided development—a choice, he argued, that would go down in history. “This is not likely to be known as the

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Nuclear Age, or the Space Age, or the American Century, or the Era of the Common Man,” proclaimed Clark. “It is going to be known as the Development Age, the age in which two-thirds of the world’s population revolted against their customary but no longer tolerable conditions.” Civil rights in America, Clark said, would be seen by historians as a “minor skirmish” in comparison with questions of economic growth.22 Shockwaves of market ideology, however, were not enough to deter the FAO from its mission of protecting peasant movements. At the FAO, administrators like Rainer Schickele continued to preach the destiny of peasant land reform through the 1960s, researching soil conditions and agricultural experiments that had the potential to make peasant farming a success.

Technology Teaches Peasants About the Free Market Like the United Nations, many U.S. agencies believed that information could solve the problem of poverty. Indeed, their ideas often resembled the ones preached a few years earlier by Norris Dodd. American private foundations began to develop a campaign of information infrastructure for the developing world, paying for the preparation of lectures and textbooks, from primers to pamphlets to two-volume textbooks on malariology. A Ford Foundation conference in 1953 proposed the “creation and development of a ‘nerve center’ for keeping in touch with land reform developments all over the world.”23 In principle, the information pipeline thus proposed ran in parallel to ideas about information infrastructure long discussed at the FAO. But the Ford and Rockefeller innovations would differ from those ideas in a significant way. At the FAO, where many social scientists believed in the historical inevitability of peasants’ struggle for their land, information systems were designed to convey knowledge and ideas from both the developed world and the developing world. At the Ford Foundation, where many leaders believed that peasants needed to be modernized, technologies would educate peasants to become wise and conscientious consumers. Technologies of information dissemination appealed to these institutions partly because they had limited means of distributing high technology. In the 1950s, the government of India forbade the distribution of major technology from abroad, hoping to chart a Gandhian path to industrialization by cultivating technology manufacture in India. Thus training centers were an alternative: the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations could fund them and distribute information without running up against local development strategies. Infor-

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mation itself was an appropriate technology, characterized by flash cards and flyers on teaching methods. The government of India was happy to have educational facilities constructed. At the time of its founding, the Rockefeller’s Allahabad Agricultural Institute was the only training center in India for rural development workers at private institutions. The institute offered six-week and one-month short courses in agricultural extension methods targeting practicing rural development workers. Students, sent by the government, included teachers from the government’s higher-grade extension training schools. The Rockefeller Foundation and its organ, the Agricultural Development Council, flooded India with educational materials about modern agricultural techniques. In 1956–57, the tally of materials circulated to adjoining regions came to 1,020 booklets, 938 posters, 27 film strips, 23 flash cards, 261 flannelgraphs, 24 puppets, 10 puppet plays, and 38 news posters. Visual displays were thought to be especially useful in targeting indigenous populations.24 Rockefeller extension agents worked alongside local missionary groups, teaching theological students and working with Methodists to create a “bone cooperative” where farmers could make fertilizer together.25 The extension agents also offered a “vegetable seeds multiplication programme.”26 Their material emphasized integrating agricultural development training with agricultural fairs, sports competitions, cattle shows, and folk dances.27 To house these programs, the Rockefeller Foundation built libraries and extension classrooms. Among the first was Dadesgur Experimental Station, a fortress-like suite of dormitories. Farmers trained in driving tractors to clear and till land on a large scale, as well as small-scale land clearance of a single lot. Special classes targeted specific types of farmers, for instance, millet workers, while other courses trained extension agents who would become the instructors of peasants deep in the countryside.28 Agriculture textbooks were shipped around the globe, funded by a special grant from the Agricultural Development Council. When the foundation began to work with a new agricultural outpost, a typical first exchange was to ship a slate of proposed reading material and to propose a lecture series of international experts. Other books were reprinted at ADC expense. Favored books were ordered in shipments of five hundred and four thousand copies at a time and distributed to the universities of the developing world. Cheap ($1.50) or free pamphlets about community development and rural welfare were published by the Agency for International Development, Cornell, and the FAO. The publications disseminated included practical guides to making surveys—

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for instance, H. P. Yang’s Fact Finding with Rural People (1957)—as well as more treatises about assessing the abstract “indicators of well-being” in rural populations.29 The books, of course, encapsulated the ideological slant of the provider. At the ADC, most of the books aimed to introduce the peasant to modern capitalism. Books such as Cornelius Davies’s Considerations and Procedures for the Successful Introduction of Farm Mechanization and J. C. Abbott’s Marketing—Its Role in Increasing Productivity sought to employ paper to convert the poor farmer into a modern entrepreneur capable of earning and selling in the marketplace.30 When the ADC administration reviewed a recent list of pamphlets for distribution, instructions in red pencil informed the secretaries to omit all non-­ English-language articles, all pamphlets that referenced models dealing with sustainable economics, indexing only quantitative studies that would educate peasants and extension agents about positive cases of economic growth. An ADC manuscript developed for use in extension programs reflected on the importance of teaching the “cost of marketing” and the nature of price so that those in the developing world could compete in a capital-driven world.31 In that endeavor, the greatest tool of farmers and traders was “information for sound decisions,” as evidenced by “the large numbers of trade periodicals in major markets,” government schemes for collecting and publicizing information about acreages and crops, land and planting surveys, and the publishing of prices in newspapers.32 According to the materials that circulated, an information revolution was key to engineering the success of development around the world. This information revolution was to be one informed by science and economics, by “constant learning and experimentation” that would fill the lives of extension workers and peasants, who would thereby be inducted into a world of efficient fact.33 Such was the world in which the Curta was being distributed: it was a campaign to modernize peasants through statistics and information of all kinds, so that they could take part in the expected revolution of market growth. Like the flash cards and pamphlets distributed by the Ford Foundation, the Curta was as much an implement of propaganda as a device for peasant independence.

The FAO Reluctantly Conforms to the Age of Peasant Indebtedness Agents at the FAO did not love the idea of Western institutions monetizing information about peasants or competing with one another to provide loans to

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the poorest peoples of the planet. Previously, the FAO had actively attempted to dissuade member nations from enterprises requiring large loans. In 1965, when FAO agent Arthur Gaitskill, visiting Rwanda, heard that local farmers needed credit, his first response was to reject the credit program entirely. He clamored instead for more extension: more information, more classes, and more technology. Unlike the World Bank or the ADC, administrators at the FAO still focused on the small farmer, and not on increasing the overall GDP of underdeveloped nations. As a result, the FAO actively discouraged larger loans. Unsupervised credit and large debts were held to be a dangerous threat to farmer autonomy—the poison of redistributive land reform. Gaitskill warned against the dangers of credit: “Bankers’ terms are no solution to deal with the ground floor of development.”34 Yet in the years that followed Gaitskill’s warnings, changes to the structure of the FAO would produce a change of face in the institution’s policies. Required by its funders to report on activities that showed a relationship to growth, the FAO would increasingly become an agent of peasant indebtedness. The change began with the shifting sources of the FAO’s funding. Dodd had imagined the FAO as providing an information pipeline, connecting peasants of the developing world to small technologies—such as hoes and buckets—and to scientific advice. But the pipeline required funding. The FAO’s budget—the largest of the UN ventures when it was founded, accounting for 30 percent of the U.S. contributions to the United Nations (UNESCO’s commitment, by comparison, was only 10 percent)—was soon insufficient to support the work the agency had proposed. The FAO’s many projects—which included efforts at mapping, research, and extension, several of these intended to help secure the holdings of small farmers—required a larger budget than the United Nations could provide. Already by 1957, one of the FAO’s original founders—the British agriculture policy specialist Paul Lamartine Yates—was urging the need for a larger budget, driven by the FAO’s expanding research needs.35 There was no way the budget could support plans to initiate greater projects in the future. Long-term planning required a long-term budget, not short-term member pledges secured by the United Nations. By the 1970s, the impasse facing the FAO would be reconciled by a new alignment with outside authorities. By 1966, the FAO was accepting money for special projects from the Shell Oil Corporation. Gradually, the World Bank began to take “a more active interest in agriculture” and provided a growing proportion of FAO funds.36 With the World Bank’s growing work in agricul-

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ture came greater leverage for the United States. As Ruth Jachertz explains, “The matter of funding gave the United States, as the primary contributor, more control over the allocation of FAO resources.”37 The increasing dependence of the FAO on the World Bank created a relationship marked by competing and mutually incompatible interests. Strange bedfellows, the FAO—dedicated to issues of food and rural welfare—and the World Bank—dedicated to making large-scale loans for the purposes of international development—were to work together to ensure that agriculture-related loans to developing nations had high chances of repayment. The FAO controlled its own budget, and it was the FAO and not the bank that made connections and issued policy. The Rural Institutions Division, for instance, specifically prohibited the World Bank from joining research trips until after the FAO had already set up extension services and provisions. Later, such prohibitions seem to have disappeared.38 Under this new regime of loans and repayment, the FAO’s activities began to shift. Activities focused on securing peasant land tenure began to take second place to efforts to demonstrate the FAO’s support for economic growth in the developing world. The FAO began to publish indices of prices, available technology, counseling, and expertise. So long as the FAO was responsible for efforts to ensure that peasants could pay back their loans, the organization was also charged with creating a documentary record of efforts to educate peasants. Econometric analysis, therefore, became an ever increasing task at the FAO during the 1960s. In 1958, as the original arrangement of departments was overhauled, branches that employed economists were promoted over those that employed rural sociologists, anthropologists, and historians. In 1968, another overhaul happened. The Land and Water Division became essentially a colony of the World Bank—no longer proposing new development initiatives, it mainly submitted technical reports to World Bank officers on how to proceed.39 The FAO’s agenda was increasingly set elsewhere: at the site where the loans were made. Distributing small-scale technology did not automatically create a record of the success of hoes. When the FAO paid experts to create a bibliography or a map, however, the documents they produced did act as a published record of ongoing education efforts justifying the expense; and those studies provided some quantified suggestion of the future economic growth to be expected. The pressure for economic growth thus essentially amounted to a pressure to publish; and a pressure to publish, in turn, amounted to a pressure to em-

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ploy expert academics with PhDs to interpret, measure, and document land reform in order to create a testable record, rather than spending money on land distribution itself. In other words, the mission to intensify a focus on economic growth amounted to a mission to create information infrastructure at the cost of directly supporting peasants through land redistribution. Peasants would become the targets of research, and the objects of teaching, in a vast flow of information designed to carry market signals to every small farm around the world. The FAO had a great deal of experience in this quarter, not only with maps and bibliographies but also with collecting statistics. Dodd’s extension program at the FAO had long emphasized the collection of statistics about farmers. Dodd believed that statistics would give small farmers the knowledge to court higher prices by providing the opportunity to sell diverse, seasonal food to communities in need. He also believed that once the statistics were shared, the record would demonstrate the viability of small farms.40 At the FAO, the increased focus on accountability took the form of mounting pressure to demonstrate that small farmers could be profitable. That pressure was felt most strongly at the United Nations in conversations with the World Bank, as the former became an adviser about loans around the world— and an institution increasingly interested in technologies that would ensure the profitability of small farms. Instead of supplying peasants with hoes and bore wells, the FAO was increasingly in the business of supplying them with instructions about how to use a calculator.

The Metamorphosis of Appropriate Technology Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s and ’70s, enthusiasts of economic development outside the Rockefeller, Ford, or the FAO had become fascinated with the promise of information infrastructure for connecting the developing world. Beyond the network of development institutions, however, there were individuals eager to connect the global peasant to technology—not as a citizen benefiting from education and connectivity but rather as a consumer who might sustain the inventors of the West by his purchases. This step would complete the evolution of ideas about appropriate technology—from a system of government-designed inputs, intended to help peasants to secure their rights of occupancy, to a system designed chiefly for the benefit of Western commerce and the glory of Western engineering. In market-style development initiatives, discussions of small-scale technol-

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ogy tended to feature an enchantment with Western information and research. American faculty began to dream about a system within U.S. higher education that might supply the designs and prototypes for small-scale technology for development at scale. At the MIT development conference in 1964, scholars presented research that affirmed the role of lightweight technology, then being dubbed “intermediary” technology, in the sense that it would help primitive small farms become intermediary zones on their way to industrialization. Pumps, plows, and modern trucks, they argued, could be introduced on small farms as well as large. Better still, a nation full of small farmers was a nation that would near full employment at all times. The report produced by the conference recommended employing more engineers and economists to study the best expression of technologies for the small farm.41 The vision promoted at MIT and elsewhere was one in which small-scale technology became a vehicle for promoting the talents of Western engineers. The original context of ideas about small-scale technology in development— for promoting small farms so as to challenge economic inequalities inherited by former colonies from European empire—was nowhere to be seen. The enthusiasm among Western researchers for helping the peasant by designing small-scale technology reached its peak after the conference in 1968 where E. F. Schumacher launched the Intermediate Technologies Development Group, or ITDG. It was the same year as Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons” and Robert McNamara took over the directorship of the World Bank, and the world was ready for ambitious new ideas—especially if they came coated in the language of markets, and if they seemed capable of overturning the logic of economic development as it had been practiced to that date. Schumacher invited a small body of inventors, academics, and British politicians to St. Cross College, Oxford, to discuss their possible contributions to international development. In the eyes of the conference’s designers, they were out to correct a mistake of history that lay beneath the failure of development economics: the fetishization of “bigness in techniques,” of large-scale industrialization, whereby “developing countries mistakenly asked for those things which we happened to be best able to provide.”42 As the visionary behind the conference, Schumacher gave an extended example of his line of reasoning, choosing (eerily or fittingly) a problem that had intrigued John Ruskin almost a century before: the relative costs of making a road by different means. Schumacher observed: “For a developing country undertaking, say, a road programme, it was much less trouble to order a num-

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ber of bulldozers from abroad, and recruit a comparatively small labour force to operate them, than to organize thousands of manual workers. Economists might insist that the bulldozers method was cheaper. But had they necessarily done their sums right? Had they taken all factors into account, particularly social costs? Which was better: to have a crowd of unemployed men watching bulldozers hacking out a road through the area where they live, or to put thousands of these men to work with simple tools and simple methods?”43 Schumacher was painting a portrait of conventional economic development as waste. He hinted that an alternative approach—characterized by “simple tools”—might automatically lead to riches and employment, more efficiently channeling human energy than the projects of road- and dam-building that international interests had supported to date. The commitments Schumacher outlined in his book had echoes of an earlier era. Schumacher’s idea of “simple tools” unlocking the creative potential of the developing world was plagiarized from Gandhi, Lossing Buck, Norris Dodd, and Samar Sen; post-colonial thinkers led the way in imagining a development model that would turn every Indian into a small farmer and every small farm into a workshop or factory. Like those authors, Schumacher hinted at the need for some coordinating, centralized power that would distribute tools and measure the results. In his language of “social cost,” Schumacher celebrated the Keynesian concept of full employment, identifying the problem of modernity as alienation and the breakdown of community; these were to be solved not by land redistribution or other challenges to inequality but by coordinated planning—for instance, putting impoverished people to work on the grueling labor of breaking stones to pave the street. But Schumacher was also short on details, and his book would be received as an indictment of institutions in favor of the power of technology, widely distributed, to change lives, in the absence of roads or economists. The most coherent of Schumacher’s ideas was the one he borrowed from other development experts of his era: faith in the power of information to connect and empower. Where anticolonial arguments focused on the monopolization of land, Schumacher argued that information had been controlled by rich classes and rich nations, such that valuable research was almost never connected to the poor. The failure of development economics, Schumacher thought, was bound up with these stifled patterns of communication.44 Ironically, Schumacher was spelling out the justification for a centralized clearinghouse of imagination—exactly along the lines, in many ways, of the one already manufacturing bibliographies and maps at the FAO.

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Schumacher, the prophet of small technology to end poverty, proposed a simple tool for transforming the world, the same one Johannes Gutenberg had shaken the world with centuries earlier: publication. Schumacher enthused that printed material, “widely distributed and in the hands of the people really struggling with the problem of world poverty,” would solve the problem.45 He thought “there ought to be a systematic stream of publications on low-cost techniques in all fields relevant to rural poverty”; “the knowledge was available,” it merely “needed to be mobilized.”46 Through the work of his nonprofit, Schumacher aimed to wed the whole of British industry to information printed for—and gathered largely from—the developing world, but as a first step, he settled for producing a paper guidebook. To the problem of the isolation of nations from expertise, he proposed more expertise. In Schumacher’s vision, however, a centralized information clearinghouse would focus its energies not on methods for poor farmers but on all aspects of technology. Schumacher defined the power of technological innovation as the possession of the Western world, thanks to its research universities. By implication, the developing world lacked the ability to innovate. In Schumacher’s plan, Western universities would contribute technological innovation to aid developing world problems of all kinds, not merely ones involving rural poverty. The appropriate technology movement has been blamed for focusing on paper instead of building networks for the manufacture and distribution of small technology on a global scale.47 The same critique might be leveled at other institutions and scholarly communities inspired by the land redistribution movements: their focus on paper, while intended to complement activities on the ground, often became a distraction—but relying on paper to do the work of dissemination was a charge particularly well leveled at the appropriate technology movement. In the decades that followed, appropriate technology advocates would develop independent publishing houses designed to target the problem of poverty abroad. They would collect and curate examples of successes with rainwater capture, improved cookstoves, and solar panels, printing them in private, curated collections of small technology that were designed to circulate in the developing world, promising a Sears catalogue of cheap devices for ending poverty.48 But whereas Norris Dodd, proposing a similar idea twenty years earlier, had worked within the United Nations to forge a global information network from dozens of national ministries of agriculture so that research, seeds, and tools would reach the smallest farmers of the Global South—if only the nations of the world would support such an undertaking—Schumacher’s fol-

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lowers typically had only publishing to show for their efforts, and they lacked the global network and coordination of the FAO. To make up for the supposed inefficiencies and waste of “typical” development, Schumacher had contrived a smaller, less-connected version of the FAO. Nevertheless, the Schumacher-style catalogue grew in popularity, reassuring inventors and engineering faculty in the West that they, too, could participate in the fight against global poverty. Imitators appeared, such as the Whole Earth Catalogue, which supplied white back-to-the-landers with old-fashioned hoes and cookstoves. Appropriate technology became a popular movement on the campuses of North America and Europe, but enthusiasm at the FAO and the foundations had moved in a different direction, even at the moment when Schumacher codified his ideas in the form of a classic treatise, Small Is Beautiful, published in 1973. Schumacher’s ideas also departed from earlier iterations of talk about the power of small tools. Indian enthusiasts for small-scale technology believed that India could supply its own technology in many instances. But Schumacher moved in academic circles that were skeptical about the technical abilities of cultures outside the West. Because Schumacher embraced the innate superiority of Western technology, he saw Western universities and Western engineering taking a new lead in transforming daily life in the developing world. It was therefore appropriate that the starting point for launching his vision was held in 1968 at Oxford University, where Schumacher invited leaders from research universities, the government, and industry to join him in a discussion of innovation. Schumacher’s vision of efficiency did not entail actual collaboration with developing world peasants or economists; all the collaboration would come from Western researchers and capitalists. Fortunately for Schumacher, his audience was already prepared to believe that development economics needed their help. Participants at the Oxford conference attacked what they saw as a mainstream development view that privileged large technology. They blamed “conventional wisdom among the leadership of developing countries” and prescribed “soul-searching” for the Ministry of Overseas Development.49 Shifting Western investment to innovation, they believed, was all that was required to provide potential riches to the developing world. In 1968, the Oxford conference showcased the wealth of technical expertise on offer by the West, which the participants believed would rapidly transform life among poor people in poor nations. Schumacher invited university engineers to show off cheap sources of energy for the developing world. P. J. Hall,

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the assistant director of the Tropical Products Institute, sketched a world to come of solar power, hydroelectricity, wind generators of various sizes, and small- and large-scale desalination treatments of seawater.50 Many of the engineering ideas on view were indeed visionary; they embraced the promise of renewable resources. But they weren’t cheap, and the gathering proposed no avenue for turning Indians into the builders, designers, and manufacturers of solar panels, as opposed to their role as grateful recipients of the same. Despite these oversights, the conference helped to make Schumacher’s ideas into an intellectual success in the West. After 1968, the cry for small tools for the developing world meant rich universities and investors sending technology abroad, not programs for enriching small farmers in India and turning them into entrepreneurs. Even while Schumacher distorted Gandhi’s ideas about the liberating power of small tools, the new articulation grew in popularity in the West, and it unified many radical thinkers about development working on the borders of economics, during which ITDG and its successors would achieve a large share of funding from the World Bank—even while the World Bank was simultaneously slashing funding for the FAO.51 Schumacher’s framing of the problem called for the richest universities of the Western world to participate—as they had in much of the FAO’s bibliography project—by lending research for export. There would be no “sacrifice” required of rich countries, in the language that Orr had used. Instead, development would merely require that technically clever nations contribute their clever technology to poor nations, by creating special programs in which engineering students reviewed, once more, the voluminous research on agriculture in the developing world and consulted their own Western expertise about appropriate, nonwasteful response. Appropriate technology, in the West, was coming to mean Westerners providing improved technology for peasants.

Conclusion E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful has become a canonical text in Silicon Valley today, where it speaks to engineers’ enduring fascination with the power of small innovations to transform the world around them. But Small Is Beautiful is also a peculiar relic of a bygone age. It was neither the first nor the most important piece of writing about small technology in international development. But it might have been the most depoliticized. Small Is Beautiful proposed a version of appropriate technology essentially purged of reference to imperial debt, post-colonial revolution, land redistribu-

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tion, and the importance of keeping peasants debt-free. Like the Curta calculator, which was distributed around the same time—cheap, easily distributed, and designed to help peasants calculate loans, uncoupled from political context or peasant demands—Small Is Beautiful was the herald of an age that would privilege finance over occupancy. Decades after Schumacher, social scientists would rediscover that the Sonjo people, whose villages were burned to encourage them to become small farmers, had possessed technologies of their own: dams and irrigation works suited to local materials.52 Whatever the importance of such technologies to a changing world, they attracted less interest from engineering schools and international development than those machines that promised to turn peasants into consumers.

8  •  China and the Battle over Memory

In 1924, the year before his death, Sun Yat-sen had presided over an agrarian program, cast on the model of British precedents in Ireland, and filtered through Henry George’s ideas about land. Rents and land prices would be controlled by the state, while wealthy investors would be taxed—thus allowing peasants to become landowners rather than tillers of another’s soil. It was twelve years after Francisco Madero had proclaimed the need for land redistribution, his words sparking the Mexican Revolution, seven years after Soviet Russia announced the abolition of private property in land, and three years after Ireland left the British Empire, leaving its still heavy mortgage of redistributed land unpaid. In China, the Chinese Nationalist Party embraced a new slogan: “The Land to Those Who Till It,” variously rendered as “Land to the Tiller” or “He Who Tills the Land Shall Own It,” depending on the translation.1 The phrase echoed an earlier slogan, “The Land for the People,” which Irish peasants had embroidered on their banners to protest high rents during the Land War of the 1880s.2 That phrase, in turn, had perhaps been borrowed by British administrators from the Old Testament book of Jeremiah.3 By the twentieth century, it was a global adage, as befitted a movement that rallied the peasants of all nations. Among the grandest schemes of the twentieth century were those of China, where land redistribution had a bipolar nature. Sun Yat-sen’s promises of land redistribution were fated never to pass, but the early land redistribution projects begun by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1940s were voluntary, and were successful by almost any measure. They raised incomes and decreased mortality. Yet before fifteen years had passed, China would become the poster child of

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land redistribution as disaster. In 1958, Mao’s Great Leap Forward committed the nation to a rapid program of industrialization and urbanization. Mao’s plans required farmers living in relative prosperity on collective farms to leave their agricultural life behind, supplying the new factories with labor and leaving only a skeleton crew behind to manage agrarian operations. The result was one of the worst famines in human history, marked by 12–38 million deaths. Western observers would struggle to make sense of the contradictions embedded in China’s experience. The stories that circulated about China would shape how the leadership of world powers interpreted the course of contemporary events. In the United States, anti-communist campaigners would be increasingly mobilized by reports of Chinese violence, fearing that the violent phase of land reform presaged an epoch of anarchy and slaughter around the world. Some observers, for instance, the Columbia professor Karl Wittfogel, even theorized that land reform was a species of psychological warfare, designed by greedy bureaucrats to lure hapless peasants into a struggle without end—a tactic, Wittfogel warned, that could be deployed anywhere at any time, so great was the world hunger for land. Meanwhile, the United Nations would cleave to the theory that land redistribution—embraced through the contradictions embedded in a variety of political means by decolonizing nations—represented an absolutely neutral position, or a “third way,” between capitalism and communism. UN bureaucrats carefully responded to correspondence about communism, identifying their allegiance with third way theory, and refusing to acknowledge the suits of former landlords who suffered loss in national redistribution schemes. Wittfogel’s assaults had little consequence at the United Nations, but anti-­ communist campaigns soon began to refashion the international intellectual landscape by limiting the civil liberties of American intellectuals associated with land redistribution. Via a series of seized passports, travel bans, and rejected security clearances, anti-communist campaigners systematically paralyzed American intellectuals who supported a global discourse about land and post-coloniality. Meanwhile, other American social scientists continued to preach the validity of social science, even composing “indices” that quantified occupancy rights as a predictor of political stability. The outcome was a battle over the facts of global history in the twentieth century, wherein American intellectuals found it increasingly inconvenient to reference land redistribution as one of the mobilizing forces of recent centuries.

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China’s Land Reform From a Marxist point of view, it was inevitable that every capitalist country would eventually see workers claim the means of production, including the land. Liu Shao-chi, the top-ranking theoretician in the Chinese Communist Party, asserted in 1950 that the end of landlords and the transfer of their property to poor peasants would accomplish “the greatest and most thorough reform in thousands of years of Chinese history.”4 In China, Communist redistribution of land took successive forms. In the beginning, China’s land reform was voluntary. First came local attempts to equalize landholding on family farms. The Outline Land Law published by the Communist Party in October 1947 set forth the principle of equal landholding, encouraging peasants in the countryside to take action.5 Then came sporadic attacks on landlords. Then came the shaping of family farms into “mutual aid teams” that shared farm implements, and finally the state-directed grouping of cooperatives into collective farms. Each of these successive projects increased rural prosperity—and even earned guarded admiration from the world outside—until the Great Leap Forward, from 1958, undercut the whole project, like a hand brushing apart a house of cards. In the beginning, international observers of China’s actions were optimistic, even exultant, about the land reforms. Research missions by Westerners had long advocated land reform for China, the world’s largest peasant economy.6 The Nationalist platform announced in 1927 seemed to follow the pattern set by events in Ireland and Mexico. Within four years, Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth was being devoured by Americans who read in the suffering of the hardworking Wang Lung a distant mirror of the experience of American farmers ejected from their land by the Dust Bowl. American and European sympathy was with the Chinese peasants who, after all, were only waging the global struggle for land rights that had been similarly engaged by other laborers around the world. Even while Buck’s book, with its implicit critique of traditional Chinese agriculture and implied suggestions of the need for international collaboration, was being completed, other experiments to improve the lot of the farmer were happening elsewhere. In Russia after 1928, the state began to drive peasants from their land, forcing farmers to labor on collectivized farms. The experiment that followed was a disaster that would be marked by the death of millions, and the events would trouble many Western observers who had previously been sympathetic to the Soviet experiment.

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As the Second World War drew to a close, alarms began to sound again as the land struggle in China took a violent turn. The Chinese Communist Party publicly encouraged farmers to put their rents—and their landlords—on trial. Across China, spontaneous courtrooms began to erupt, where landless laborers publicly recounted their grievances. Some of the trials ended peaceably, but not all. Sometimes landlords simply paid the bills their tenants handed them or expressed remorse. Some were forced to wear a dunce cap and a slogan announcing the triumph of land redistribution. Elsewhere, however, retribution and greed heated up the confrontations until they led to arrests and ferocious beatings, even executions. Although the Communist Party officially frowned on violence—and attempted to codify the importance of peaceful processes of land turnover in the Land Reform Law of 1950—local conflicts boiled over, sometimes motivated by rumors of hidden buried treasure that peasants hoped to claim through torturing the landlords supposed to possess such a cache. In 1946 and 1947, wildcat land redistributions reached their peak, with as many as 250,000 landlords slain in 1947 alone.7 The early reforms of 1950–51 boosted the starving masses of agricultural laborers to a relatively more comfortable existence, broadening the class of “middle peasants” from 20 percent of the population to 80 percent. Beneficiaries of land reform in Manchuria doubled and tripled their purchases of cloth, an extravagance formerly little known. Across China, food production and families’ incomes grew by startling proportions.8 In the early period, from 1951 to 1956, Communist leaders encouraged the peasants to group themselves into mutual aid teams, collectives in which they would share tools and resources. The state urged these teams to join into “advanced cooperatives” of one hundred families. Under this voluntary land reform, agricultural growth improved, and incomes were more evenly distributed.9 In 1955, Mao began an ambitious push to move the economy toward productive socialism, one part of which was to establish communes from the advanced cooperatives. In a stunningly swift move, voluntary teams were consolidated into twenty-four thousand communes that farmed and managed grain according to government-set quotas and government-provided prices. Under this second collectivized land reform, China’s fate forked in new direction. Crop production grew—despite the slaughter of draft animals slain by peasants who resented forced collectivization. Mortality declined, at least until 1958, when Mao announced the Great Leap Forward, to be marked by an ambitious, rapid program of industrialization.

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It was industrialization, rather than collectivization, that caused China’s gains to vanish overnight. Forced to move in droves from farms to factories, masses of former farmers were commissioned to produce iron and steel to support Mao’s ambitions of an interconnected age. Back on the collective farms, skeleton crews farmed territory that had once been worked by crowds. The outcome validated Samar Sen’s theory that more labor made land productive; with little labor available in the fields, Chinese grain production plummeted. The worst famine in human history followed: an estimated toll of between 12 million and 38 million fatalities between 1958 and 1962.10 In the years before the famine, China’s land reforms initially received a positive reaction from many quarters. International observers cheered on China’s early land redistribution, seeing it as the fulfillment of an international war against landlord government. Those who expected an international revolution greeted China’s land reform as historically inevitable, part of a wider zeitgeist of peasant freedoms, not necessarily wedded to any particular ideology. Frank Moraes, writing for the Times of India, concluded with Tawney that China’s poverty was based on government by landlords. The new land reforms, he argued, had “abolished landlordism and reared in its place a peasant economy.”11 Many international observers understood the Nationalist and Maoist land reforms as morally interchangeable: both were inevitable consequences of a global rebellion against landlord government, although one was faster and more violent, a barbarism that could be explained, perhaps, by the overboiling political pressure of the era. The British historian Basil Davidson, a specialist on the history of colonial violence, made an extensive tour of China in 1952, about which he wrote with profound sympathy for several publications, including the New Statesman and the Nation. In each of his essays, Davidson described the Chinese reforms as essentially continuous with the reforms of Mexico and Ireland. Chinese land redistribution represented the liberation of the peasant; it was an inevitable expression of a historical force. In the San Francisco Chronicle, he described for his readers how a “gigantic land distribution has ended feudalism and opened the way to material advance.” It was “the ending of feudal landlordism,” a historical accomplishment.12 “Today, no one pays rent,” recorded Davidson approvingly. “Land taxes amount to between 10 and 20 per cent of over-all production.”13 Political progress was marked by higher production in every possible field, with production increases of 128 percent in grain and 252 percent in cotton over the three years before 1951. Davidson saw some of the increases for himself. He visited canteens serving unlimited rice to factory workers in Shanghai;

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he noted poor villages near Zhejiang harvesting bumper jute crops. The peasants he interviewed rejoiced at having a surplus to sell—a new experience for their families within the span of modern memory.14 It seemed that land nationalization was working, enriching peasants at an unprecedented scale. The responses of Moraes and Davidson echoed the impulses of the doctrine that Doreen Warriner had dubbed “the third way”—a belief that land redistribution schemes represented a middle point between capitalism and communism, ensuring equity for all members of society even while condoning the ownership of private property and the opportunities that such a system could afford. After all, in 1955, it was by no means clear that land reform provoked violence on a global scale: in Ireland in the 1880s, government-appointed rent control had temporarily halted the guerrilla assassinations of the Irish Land War (although violence would return decades later with the Irish struggle for independence). Successful land redistribution (along with other causes) might indeed be credited with the relatively low numbers of casualties—fifteen hundred— in the Irish Revolution of 1919–21. The 1.4 million individuals who died in the Mexican Revolution were not, typically, associated with barbarity or despotism. From the viewpoint of occupancy rights, the Chinese land reform was a victory of historic proportions. At thirteen thousand times the scale of the Irish land reform, here was a national initiative bringing untold opportunity to millions of poor peasants. Indeed, Western development agents had long encouraged conversations about land reform for China on the Irish model. In America and Europe, celebrations of land reform tended to be the work of nonspecialists talking about China in broad-brush terms. Gripped by a vision of the international peasant revolution, they glimpsed in China the inevitable violence linked with massive historical transitions. The number of individuals dead and imprisoned reflected a global surge of revolutions and enormous clashes between global powers, symbolic of the Second World War but also of post-colonial conflict. In an era when millions were dying because of famines, ethnic genocide, and conflicts between national powers, significant fatalities did not necessarily signal the moral bankruptcy of the project of Maoism in particular, and certainly not of land reform in general. By dint of its sheer scale, the Chinese land reform promised to vindicate theories of peasant liberation in world history. The movement dwarfed most previous land reforms, towering over the distributions of colonial Ireland, the Mexican Revolution, and India’s weak, state-by-state land reform. Even the land redistributions of Soviet Russia looked trivial in comparison. According

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to the numbers published by Stalin, 10 million peasant families, or more than 45 million persons, became the stewards of collective farms by 1930. Positive opinion supported the Chinese, even though property was overturned in many places and landlords were never compensated for their lands. In this sense, Chinese land reform stood in contrast to the models of “willing seller, willing buyer” land reform advocated by Doreen Warriner and others. The land reforms of Ireland—as well as the land reform originally proposed for China by the League of Nations—had required compensation of landowners in return for their property. But even after the Nationalist land reforms of Sun Yat-sen abandoned the willing seller, willing buyer model—opting instead for outright confiscation—foreign opinion generally recommended the Chinese model: why should not desperate peasants challenge an age-old hierarchy? Perhaps the most famous articulation of that view of Chinese land reform was the one dramatized for English-language readers by Bill Hinton, an American student in China, in his memoir Fanshen (1966), which depicted the struggle for daily existence of ordinary laborers and the relative plenty that resulted from turnover. Republished many times, the book entered the canon of radical left commentary for American student readers, offering a plausible account of global poverty and its political consequences: a study in peasant revolution realized. The positive evaluation of China’s land reform was also shared across many parts of Asia. In India—one of the first nations to recognize the People’s Republic of China in 1949—many people understood China’s land reform as the equivalent of the land reform that Indians had expected with independence from Britain. Indian observers praised the newly collectivized farmers, recognizing a “system of cooperatives” wherein poor farmers could pool resources to invest in tractors and other advanced farm equipment.15 As the collectivi­ zation progressed, the Economic Weekly circulated scholarship suggesting that China’s land reforms had been conducted “considerately on the whole,” even as it reviewed the story of China’s “rehabilitation” of landlords whose goods were confiscated and who faced imprisonment or hard labor.16 The India-China Friendship Association in Bombay organized an exchange program for Indian legislators to visit China, encouraging them to interact with peasants and come to their own judgments about the new legislation. The Speaker of the West Bengal Legislative Assembly, S. K. Mukerjee, was impressed with what he saw. When he asked an old farmer why he worshipped Mao Tse-tung and not Lord Buddha, the reply was: “Mao has given me land.”17 If the peasant was the en-

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gine of history, it was surely inevitable that Bengali peasants would soon demand what Chinese ones had already. Indeed, this line of thinking led to the eruption of Naxalite and other communist movements promoting violent land reform across Bengal, Orissa, and Kerala after 1969. Notably, even the Taiwanese critics of communist land reform took pains to differentiate “true” from “false” land reform: true land reform ennobled farmers, and false land reform created slave labor. The positive opinion, of course, had not been universal; an editorial in 1952 in the Manchester Guardian lamented that the high goals of land reform had been “spoiled by the brutality and bestiality” of Chinese communism.18 Even more pointed were commentators who questioned communism’s commitment to economic opportunity for the peasant. The Chinese exile C. M. Chang published two heated exposés in Foreign Affairs in which he painted Mao’s land redistribution as a “stratagem”—a dishonest attempt to steal the thunder of Nationalist land reform by paying off peasants with the immediate promise of cheap land.19 Other exiles in Taiwan were similarly critical. A pamphlet published by the Free China Review in 1953 argued aggressively against “the so-called ‘land reform’ ” of the Chinese Communists: “It is the purpose of the Chinese Communists first to pull the wool over the eyes of the farmers, to instigate class struggle, to sow seeds of dissension in society and to create a site of chaos so that they could better consolidate their political power. It is the present policy of the Chinese Communists to exercise strict control over food so that they may have a large supply of slave labor on the farm and common fodder on the battlefield. They are intensifying their reign of terror at home and speeding up their armed aggression abroad.”20 Such warnings aside, as late as 1953, Chinese land reform did not strike most observers as a problem. The earlier Chinese land reforms—voluntary and focused on families—had been marked by increasing crop output and declines in mortality. Chinese collectivization tells a markedly different tale than the Soviet collectivization of twenty years before, with the famine of 1928–32, when 6–8 million died, seemingly because of inefficiencies on the farms. Chinese collectivization, according to the most recent assessments, was economically a success.21 By the end of the 1950s, however, much of American opinion was beginning to turn. The trigger was the forced collectivization of farms, and the famine of 1958–62 that followed, which some U.S. observers would estimate as proof of the impossibility of land redistribution. American observers would increasingly report land redistribution in China—and around the world—as

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an instance of theft or the alienation of property. They would circulate accounts of the murder of landlords. Some would even assemble the case that land reform was a form of psychological warfare: a talisman for hypnotizing bewildered peasants, inciting them to violence with promises of gold.

Land Reform as Psychological Warfare In the 1940s, as the forces of the Chinese Communist Party were struggling against the those of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the two groups competed as to what they could promise the peasant. Both offered a more equitable distribution of land as the payoff for revolution, as had the leaders of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. The only question was how soon. Following in the tradition of the Russian Communists—who, as part of their first acts of setting up a new state following the fall of the tsarist forces declared the abolition of private property of land—the Chinese Communists promised that private title would be abolished as soon as they came to power. Peasants would gain immediate access to land. Facing promises of this kind, the Nationalists resorted to similar guarantees. While the Nationalists believed in compensating landowners, they began to offer pledges of immediate land access, contingent on their victory, even though no mechanisms for compensation were in place. Certain American observers were troubled by what they saw. According to some witnesses of this dance, land redistribution was nothing more than a bribe. Some commentators began to theorize that land reform, in the context of Chinese Maoism, had acted as something like propaganda, exerting a powerful emotional pull on peasants. If land redistribution was brainwashing, went the reasoning, then land was not—as the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville had theorized a century ago—the lever of democracy. Indeed, promises of land might work a spell even more potent than the lure of bribes or propaganda. Land, some reasoned, could become an intoxicant, energizing the poor while dulling their sense of reason, driving a succession of anarchic and pointless acts of violence around the world. The chief interpreter of the inebriating power of land was Columbia University’s specialist in East Asian studies, Karl Wittfogel, a survivor of concentration camps and a former member of the Communist Party. Decades later, embedded in the American Ivy League, Wittfogel surrendered names of Communist Party colleagues to McCarthyist investigators and became one of America’s

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most widely published critics of Russian and Chinese Communism. For the American public, he painted the horrors of land redistribution as practiced in communist nations, building up an account of land reform as a form of psychological warfare. Wittfogel was horrified by accounts of the forced collectivization of Chinese land reform and the state determination of destiny for the masses. Quoting Hinton’s Fanshen, Wittfogel underscored an episode in which a popular uprising was directed against a rich peasant: unsatisfied by his efforts to redistribute his land and even the surrender of his house, the mob hunted him down and beat him. Beneath land redistribution, Wittfogel suggested, lay a potential for vengeance and power whose end was not democracy but rather cruelty without limit.22 In Wittfogel’s critique, collectivism spelled the annihilation of individual self-determination. Cooperative members would “toil as unprotected agricultural laborers for a management that is the local instrument of the ruling bureaucracy.”23 Wittfogel saw echoes of Chinese despotism everywhere in the postwar world. His theory of totalitarian societies, worked out in the pages of high-profile American magazines over the 1950s and ’60s, painted a detailed picture of communist land reform as a threat to the values of independence, security of property, and personal safety. His approach was also stained with racial prejudice, echoing eighteenth-century British treatises in its account of the failures of Asian empires past and the superiority of freedom designed on a European or American model. Wittfogel supported his theory by linking collective movements to violence and despotism. Communist land reforms, he argued, had the direct aim of fomenting more violence. For Leninist-Stalinists, he wrote, the commitment to land was only temporary. The communist “strategy,” wrote Wittfogel, “holds that in the struggle for power the distribution of land is a temporary step to gain the support of poor peasants.” But communists were fundamentally committed to destroying smallholders: “Lenin asserted again and again that after big property was destroyed the small landholders were ‘the last capitalist class’; and, like Lenin, Stalin has stated frankly that Bolshevik policy ‘uses’ the peasant for the purposes of the revolution.”24 The argument against land reform was sealed, for Wittfogel, by accounts of the violence associated with revolution in Russia and China. Wittfogel catalogued the horrors of totalitarianism for his readers: “Show-trials, public ill-­ treatment, and spectacular killings characterized both the early and the later phases of the ‘land reform.’ ”25 He quoted reports that 7 million Chinese had

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been executed, while 10–16 million were held in slave labor camps. Peasants slaughtered their work animals or sold them at any price. They cut down trees rather than turn them over to the cooperatives, noted Wittfogel.26 It was Wittfogel who warned American readers to beware the duplicitous nature of land redistribution, which he had singled out among various communist programs as one of the most seductive and dangerous political movements. Playing upon peasant desires for improvement, communist nations enlisted land redistribution as a ruse, promising economic equality in return for the surrender of political freedoms. When the peasants took the bait, he argued, they risked losing their autonomy altogether. In his depiction, land redistribution programs made “the rural producer the slave-like tool of a state-­ centered totalitarian economy.”27 According to Wittfogel, the Soviets and Maoists had studied the history of land with an ideological agenda, trotting out the old promise of land redistribution to mobilize proletariat desires for their own self-interest. In China, he argued, land reform was only a pretext for the larger goal of communism: “political and economic control of the villages.”28 The theory of a hidden agenda spread among American social scientists in the 1970s, painting land reformers as unwitting stooges of communist propaganda, not unlike the brainwashed American in The Manchurian Candidate, the subject of a novel in 1959 and a film in 1962. In that story, a captured soldier is literally reprogrammed by advanced psychological tactics used by the Russians, rendering him an unwitting assassin for Soviet interests when he returns to America. The narrative evidenced an American obsession with psychological warfare as used by the Soviets, whose key stratagems, it suggested, might be so subtle as to be undetectable by rational observation alone. To argue that peasant rights to occupancy reflected invisible manipulations rather than a legitimate grievance seems counterintuitive. The theory of a hidden agenda reflected the influence of Sigmund Freud among American academics of the 1950s and ’60s. Freud’s theory of the subconscious promoted the idea that individuals might not be aware of their own intentions. Freudian thinking created an intellectual environment that encouraged speculation about the hidden dimensions of enemies’ agendas. It prompted a generation of social scientists to theorize with abandon about the unseen actors who would profit from peasant revolution. American social scientists in the 1960s and ’70s not infrequently claimed to be able to discern invisible psychological mechanisms nested within communist land redistribution and similar political policies. A Stanford researcher

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quoted, as evidence, a secondhand description of the communist “onion peeling” strategy, a “process,” he wrote, “of taking one layer of power in the countryside off after another, and physically destroying some, and driving out others in a systematic process.”29 Land redistribution, once embraced by Americans as the gateway to democracy and freedom, was now seen as the first step toward authoritarianism. According to such theories, land redistribution, like all forms of psychological warfare, potentially contained within it the demonic force of rising expectations. Peasant desire, once ignited, might become unquenchable, and what had begun as mere claims to lower rents and land would inevitably lead to violence and collective thinking, from which there could be no return.30 That this was a conspiracy theory based on a moment of panic within the U.S. policy-making world is evident in retrospect, but Americans’ interest in the psychological consequences of land redistribution occupied a volume of attention unmatched in other nations. Meanwhile, at the United Nations, discussions of land redistribution remained governed by the consensus that had shaped that institution at its founding: the idea that land redistribution represented an ideal beyond the poles of either capitalism or communism. As director of a center for the study of China at Columbia University, Witt­ fogel had a bully pulpit for reaching middle America. In editorials for papers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wittfogel argued that land was literally the ground over which communist and capitalist visions were battling.31 His articles were recommended in flyers printed for distribution to national libraries, where Wittfogel’s name was classified alongside those of other influential intellectuals such as Peter Drucker and Reinhold Niebuhr.32 Because of his influence over a wide American readership, Wittfogel held a unique position of power. When Wittfogel began a campaign for the United States to police the values promoted by the United Nations, he pitted his views against decades of U.S. support for the United Nations.33 To fight the domino effect of communism, it would be necessary, he believed, to “use every means provided by the Charter [of the United Nations], including the veto, to prevent the seating of a Chinese Communist delegation in the United Nations.”34 Under the influence of hidden agenda theory, the United Nations thus became a battleground of conflicting ideas. Already at one important academic conference about land reform in 1963, ranks were forming, separating the United States and its allies from the rest of the member nations. Socialist countries requested that communist countries be represented at the conference, an act that would have been against UN policy.35 FAO agents would have

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to tread carefully as they supported developing regimes whose use of land redistribution placed them—according to Wittfogel’s schema, at least—in the enemy camp.

Third Way Theory Even while Wittfogel published his attacks on China and lobbied against a Chinese presence in the United Nations, many proponents of U.S. foreign policy believed that FAO-directed land reform had a major role to play in leading peasant uprisings on the path to peaceful prosperity. Third way theory— which positioned land redistribution as an ideology all could agree on—was the gospel of the midcentury FAO. It protected FAO officers from charges of bias during the heightened tensions of the Cold War. The United Nations owed its allegiance to member nations in the developing world, many of which, like India, had announced a plan for land redistribution upon independence. Administrators at the FAO believed that the teachings of history were plain: peasants across the developing world had suffered under empire; the economic inequalities in their nations could be corrected only by land redistribution. Land redistribution was therefore a precondition to democracy and capitalism. Some shake-up of the old exclusions of empire was, moreover, an inevitability. The theorization of land reform as a third way can be traced back to Doreen Warriner, the British expert on economic development who lectured on Eastern Europe and advised the Egyptian government, among others, on strategies for post-colonial economic growth. “Some people think that the object of land reform should be to defeat communism. . . . Others will assert that land reform is communism. Political arguments of this kind can easily overwhelm us if we cannot keep them in their proper place.”36 From the 1940s to the 1970s, the political scientists who preached the dogma of the third way—the teaching, that is, that land reform represented the only way for decolonizing nations to avoid authoritarian communism on the one hand and capitalist exploitation on the other—asserted that participatory democracy was possible only when elites had been prevented from tampering with material inequality: that is, when the power of the state was used to redistribute land. Promoting third way rhetoric allowed international advisers to maneuver between capitalist, communist, and socialist agendas at the United Nations without losing the allegiances of any party. While UN agents never referred to the third way explicitly, they followed Warriner in defending land reform as

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a route between two warring ideologies. At the United Nations, land reform referendums were endorsed by both communist and capitalist nations, providing a working space of collaboration between the two blocs. Nations as diverse as Cuba and Taiwan, for instance, both recommended that the United Nations establish a committee dedicated to international action for the promotion of land reform. In 1952, when the United Nations endorsed land reform as a central focus of its activities, it was responding to a tide of political movements around the world.37 In the 1940s and 1950s, third way land reform was actively promoted by the United States in Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The American experts, like their counterparts at the FAO, believed that the nations of the world were experiencing a transition from feudalism to capitalism. India, according to Karl Wittfogel, was undergoing a process of shuffling off ancient forms of oriental despotism enshrined, for example, in Indian castes of the zamindar (former tax collectors who had become India’s landlords under British rule) and jagirdar (former administrators of land, similarly enshrined as landlords at a later date). In 1954, even Wittfogel believed that full modernization in India would take the form of rent control laws and national laws to allow the tenant to buy even when the landlord was unwilling to sell. American diplomats shared similar views: only the abolition of landlordism and the implementation of a bureaucracy to oversee rent would be sufficient to stabilize a country in a new direction.38 For U.S. policy makers in the 1950s, land reform was a central part of a strategy of containment. Third way thinking about land redistribution dominated many international development circles for at least two decades after the Second World War. A group of Americans professors of agricultural economics convened in Mysore by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1959 was unanimous in its critique of the threat that landlord-based economies represented to the fledgling democracies of the post-colonial world. One participant classified land issues as one of the “most pressing” factors in development.39 Another concurred, warning that many of the so-called democracies of Asia were “actually run by large landowners.”40 A program of land reform would be necessary to ensure “freedom.”41 Rockefeller-funded experts advocated that Indian states experiment with “land ceilings,” or a maximum quota for farmland per individual, beyond which the state would reimburse families for their land while redistributing the excess to landless workers. The Rockefeller experts acknowledged that land ceilings were currently the subject of great consternation in India, where the

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policy had proved difficult to enforce because wealthy families tended to subvert the upward limit by deeding excess land to children or cousins. The Rockefeller experts conjectured that states could minimize the possibility of “intrafamily transfers” such as had happened in India.42 Like the family farm theorists at the FAO, the experts at the Rockefeller agreed: elite concentration of power threatened new democracies, and redistribution of land would be necessary to set new nations on a path to success. The only problem was how to perfect these tricky policies, despite the predictable machinations of human nature. Meanwhile, other U.S. land reform researchers were being urged to explicitly reject Marxism. Kenneth Parsons of the University of Wisconsin Land Tenure Center wrote in 1957 that land reform was becoming “a battleground issue between communist propagandists and their adversaries in so many of the underdeveloped areas of the world.”43 Parsons’s personal position, however, endorsed the third way: “With sufficient land of their own, some have lived well; without land countless millions have suffered literal starvation.”44 The principle of the third way required the United Nations to be above the fray of national conflict. It was inevitable, in the worldview of some development experts, that supporting land redistribution would pit the institutions of international governance against local elites. In his textbook for students of agrarian economics, Schickele predicted an expanding conflict: “There will be much silence, covert repression of progress by landlords obstructing implementation of land reforms and primary education.”45 When Americans urged the United Nations to take sides against communist land redistribution, UN affiliates tended to reject the U.S. fear of land reform movements.46 Given the pressure to align with one side or the other, administrators at the FAO sometimes offered evidence that land redistribution represented a strategy for containing the spread of communism. Edmundo Flores, a consultant at the FAO, advocated fighting communism through the aggressive spread of land reform: “The best antidote to communism is nationalism built on a wide, popular base.”47 Flores believed that the land reforms spreading across Latin America evidenced the influence of the Mexican Revolution. Even in remote villages in the Bolivian Andes, peasants could now watch movies depicting the struggle of Emilio Zapata, the Mexican general and defender of peasant land rights, imagining how their own nation might profit if reforms similar to the Mexican ejidos were enacted in their own territory.48 Development theorists such as Gunnar Myrdal likewise embraced land re-

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form as a tool for combating the spread of communism. “We must hope,” wrote Myrdal, “that the political institutions in the underdeveloped countries will prove themselves capable of pushing land and tenancy reforms, so that in these countries, too, Marx will be proved wrong in his prophecy of violent revolution as the inevitable result of increasing inequality and the impoverishment of the masses.”49 The FAO’s Howard Tolley assured readers that land use experts would actually strengthen local democracy on the ground, driving forward a culture of “citizen participation” that, by implication, would be heartily resistant to communist propaganda.50 New philosophies of markets, commodities, and economic growth had created a new set of pressures in international development, many linked to U.S. economists at the World Bank who were actively hostile to a doctrine of global peasant land redistribution. This new pressure to show returns on investment, however, clashed with long-standing commitments at the FAO. In the early days of the organization, FAO administrators had embraced Indian economic teachings about the importance of avoiding debt in the developing world. Accordingly, the FAO supported programs of small-scale technology and information—including hoes, grains of seed, and publications—that were relatively inexpensive. FAO administrators had attempted to prove that their agenda of supporting small farmers was compatible with economic growth in the developing world—for instance, through the extensive documentation of theories of economic growth associated with smallholders. As pressures mounted to demonstrate that FAO projects were economically viable, the FAO responded by renewing its commitment to building information infrastructure. Circulating information was, after all, a politically neutral mandate aligned with the visions set forward by Orr and Dodd in the 1940s and ’50s; it was impossible for either capitalists or communists to complain that printing bibliographies or maps somehow served one side in the Cold War against the other. The production of indices, such as bibliographies about agricultural commodities, likewise allowed FAO administrators to demonstrate their commitment to a new world of market-based idealism. Bibliography was thus one way that FAO administrators sought to prove that they were, in fact, supporting an agenda of economic growth. FAO bibliographies increasingly came to focus on agricultural commodities—for instance, research about the farming of fish species or oil palm—rather than issues of nutrition, welfare, or land redistribution. Meanwhile, research bibliographies increasingly reflected the financial

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support of U.S. agrobusiness—notably the pesticide industry—for research agendas. The mission to intensify a focus on economic growth amounted, in other words, to a mandate to create information infrastructure at the cost of directly supporting peasants through land redistribution. Peasants would be the targets of research, and the objects of teaching, in a vast flow of information designed to carry market signals to every small farm around the world. As the Cold War waxed, however, this delicate network of alliances was subject to new stresses and pressures. Those who preached land redistribution came under the scrutiny of an American establishment wary about the missionaries it sent abroad. Pearl Buck, Rainer Schickele, Daniel and Alice Thorner, and the agricultural development expert Wolf Ladejinsky were caught up by America’s Cold War web of surveillance in different ways. They represented a generation—and a social science consensus strongly linked to the FAO in Rome—that was international in scope. By 1967, when the book Famine, 1975! by William and Paul Paddock became a best seller, another generation of American experts—more narrowly national, more skeptical of international undertakings—was rising in prominence. The stability of the third way approach would be endangered by the new attitude toward development represented by the Paddocks. Cold War ambassadors for science like the Paddocks put their trust not in history but rather in numbers—numbers told them that corn yields doubled with hybrid corn, and numbers testified when a development experiment was bankrupt. Denouncing the work of generations of social scientists and diplomats, the Paddocks attacked every form of development whose results they believed to be immeasurable— food aid, land redistribution, and even education and industrialization—as misdirected efforts resulting from sparse and unsystematic knowledge. The third way of solidarity with peasant movements would be increasingly mis­ understood by Americans, both on the right and on the left, with dire consequences for the support of land reform movements around the world.

Navigating the Cold War from the United Nations Addressing the National Press Club in 1953, FAO director Norris Dodd asserted the importance of the United Nations remaining neutral. He warned against the Food and Agriculture Organization being used as a weapon to combat communism by the United States or as a tool wielded by the United Kingdom to hold together the Commonwealth.51 He feared that anti-communist

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machinations in the United Nations would shut out the possibility of inter­ national schemes coming to fruition. According to Dodd, anti-communism in the United States was a distraction from the work at hand. In the midst of the Cold War, the United Nations struggled to maintain independent connections with the developing nations of the world, even while that relationship was routinely jeopardized by both the United States and the USSR. After the United Nations’ authorization of the defense of South Korea, the USSR boycotted the UN Security Council, and Stalin accused the organization of being a weapon of the United States. When the USSR returned to the Security Council, the United Nations was prohibited from further endorsing actions in South Korea. The United Nations was also caught between U.S. and USSR power plays in the Suez crisis (1956) and in the UN operation in the Congo (1960–64). In both of these clashes, UN armed forces acted as a buffer between rival powers.52 For most of the Cold War, the United Nations’ role was defined as peacekeeping. FAO administrators had to mediate between communist and capitalist phi­ losophies and policies, defending their avocation of a third way and thus their political independence. One source of tension was the increasing divide between capitalist and communist countries at the United Nations itself. During these years, FAO officials tended to understate their utopian ideas when representing their activities before the international congress, engulfed in political tension as it was. After a CIA-backed coup deposed a democratically elected government in Guatemala that had initiated a national land redistribution scheme, FAO representatives grew cautious. Two years later, when the director of the Agriculture Division, F. T. Wahlen, wrote to country representatives, he downplayed the importance of agrarian reform and described rent control and redistribution as potentially dangerous measures.53 Elsewhere within the FAO, however, officials continued their support of land redistribution unabated. At the FAO, walking the third way sometimes took the form of exercises in rhetoric by way of diplomacy. FAO officers carefully consulted with one another to manage conversations that touched even tangentially on communism or Cold War rivalries. One dispossessed Chilean wrote to the FAO to protest its support of President Eduardo Frei’s redistribution program. The letter was carefully analyzed in a series of internal memos. Was Chile’s land reform designed to undermine private ownership in principle? Was it a thinly disguised Trojan horse meant to usher in communism under cover of darkness? The director of the FAO’s Rural In-

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stitutions and Services Division, Viggo Andersen, dismissed the letter as sour grapes; the author was, in general, angry at land redistribution because he had lost his land—but that did not mean that land redistribution was inherently communistic.54 Nevertheless, the fact that charges of communism were increasingly causing alarm at the FAO registers throughout the external exchange of memos that followed. Andersen certainly felt the need to check in with other administrators across the organization. In his writings, Andersen laid out his defense of the FAO’s position on land redistribution. He carefully recorded the accomplishments of Chile’s law, especially the distribution of land to landless farmers and the extension of credit to the poor. Chilean law, he noted, allowed for government confiscation of property only if it was classified as abandoned or underutilized—something that Andersen’s superiors would have recognized as a style of legislation typical of contemporary land use policy in nations such as Britain.55 Chilean land redistribution posed no threat to private ownership per se, Andersen affirmed.56 The third way, UN officials agreed, protected rights to property and embraced the possibility of redistribution. Beneath the dance of diplomacy ran the pulse of commitment. The consensus of FAO officers behind redistribution remained firm. They continued to believe that land reform represented a viable third way between capitalism and communism, that land tenure reform was the destiny of former colonies around the world, and that the tools of limiting rent and landholding would enrich peasants and make the world more democratic. The vision of a global peasant revolution embraced by many agents at the FAO was more than an understanding of history: it also offered a plan to annihilate poverty around the world through democratic means. In an early article about land tenure policies, Rainer Schickele underscored that the growth of land reform was concomitant with the expansion of democracy itself: “It abolished slavery and caste, peonage, and servitude. Latifundia were dissolved, landlords expropriated, and tenants made into owners,” he enthused. “Free land was given to settlers, tenants were given rights of security and managerial freedom, land rents were placed under the control of courts.”57 For Schickele, the relationship between imperial landownership and slavery made land redistribution an antidote to the legacy of empire. For nations seeking to correct ancient imbalances in power—for instance, the new states of the post-colonial world—land redistribution offered the perfect tool. The United Nations changed little in reaction to public opinion or pressure from the United States: from the beginning, it was neutral by design. One as-

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pect of UN policy was, however, vulnerable to external pressure: its funding. Even as early as 1956, the dependency of the FAO on external UN finance organizations such as the UNDP meant that it had little direct control over its technical assistance projects. What vestige of control the FAO retained began to vanish with the World Bank’s greater involvement in agriculture. By 1980, the World Bank was running the circus, dictating which countries merited agrarian reforms and which other forms of finance.58 The FAO would serve only as a technical counselor supplying expertise in programs of surveying and land titling that had been designed, in their important particulars, elsewhere. That reversal would be cataclysmic for the revolutionary projects imagined by advocates of land redistribution.

The Confiscated Passport and the Failure to Suppress Social Science Meanwhile, in the United States, invisible walls were going up. As the Cold War went on, advocates of land redistribution in the United States faced a labyrinth of prohibitions. Even though she had grown up in China and won the Nobel Prize in 1938, Pearl Buck was forbidden to leave the United States to visit China. She was no communist, but her sympathies with Chinese farmers expressed in The Good Earth seemed increasingly incendiary, given the rise of communism there. University of Pennsylvania historian Daniel Thorner faced an even starker challenge: his passport was confiscated, leaving him stuck in India and unable to return home. As he traveled around India in 1953, Thorner had preached the need for land reform, extending his dissertation work in the imperial governance of land settlements. Meanwhile, back in America, rumors had spread: he was part of a conspiracy, they said, one close enough to Marxism. Thorner was never a Communist Party member, but he had always been an advocate of land reform, and sometimes an interlocutor in discussions of Soviet economics. Because he refused to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee on communist sympathizers, Thorner lost his passport in January 1953, and was asked to stop advising Nehru’s government on land reform. Stranded in India for eight years, he lost his university appointment; and his wife, a statistician, had to rely on her inadequate income to support their five children.59 The draconian punishment showed that functionaries in Washington little cared that he was a scholar whose views on world history were informed by research and aligned with the cutting edge of European and Indian

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studies in political economy. Fear ruled the day: a fear of communism so strident that it could not tell the difference between an economic historian of the British Empire and a tool of Soviet propaganda. Thorner’s fate was the bellwether of a new moment in American politics that ended up having devastating international consequences. In America, anti-­communism entailed the suspicion that land reform was spreading—and with it, a new way of looking at the world. It was twenty-one years after the disastrous Soviet experiment with forced collectivization in Russia, and midway through the Chinese experiment with collectivized farming. In the United States, meanwhile, the anti-communist era of McCarthyism had begun: communistic screenwriters were blacklisted from employment; communistic faculty in the Ivy League were called before tribunals. U.S. experts on land redistribution in developing nations were particular targets of McCarthyist inquiries. At the UN headquarters in New York, Mc­ Carthyist representatives maintained an office charged with guarding against “communistic influences,” which led to the firing of various experts. In 1953— the same year Thorner’s passport was revoked—Rainer Schickele’s résumé was scoured by McCarthyists, who discovered his 1941 monetary support of legal counsel for African American communists in Oklahoma. They flagged his file, although they stopped short of preventing him from taking a job at the FAO.60 Two years earlier, in 1951, Wolf Ladejinsky, the architect of the American-­ imposed postwar land redistribution in Japan, had applied for a security clearance—he too was turned down. The reasons for Ladejinsky’s rejection were never explicitly stated, although many historians have linked the episode to a growing fear of communism.61 Yet American hostility to land redistribution schemes around the world in 1952 was never universal. A year after Ladejinsky was denied a security clearance, the United States took over the administration of Vietnam from French colonial rule. It was in 1951 that the American director general of the FAO, Norris Dodd, introduced the slogan “The Earth for Man” and that the University of Wisconsin hosted a five-week international conference on land reform. Even while delegates from around the world assembled in Madison, the fear of communism was already acting as a brake on land redistribution. Certain U.S. experts were raising the alarm against China and the Soviet Union, and also addressing the challenges to landowning in America associated with various civil rights movements. Around the globe, a conversation about the right of peasants to the land they worked grew out of colonial resistance to empire. Early twentieth-century so-

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cial scientists imagined that they were seeing a global push for rights of occupancy. The only question, they emphasized, was whether peasants would get the land through redistribution programs—as they had in Ireland and Japan— or through violent revolution, as in Mexico and Russia. As individuals were barred from travel, ideas came under assault. In America, Cold War suppressions and machinations resulted in challenges to the intellectual concepts that had undergirded UN support for land redistribution in decolonized nations, and the proposal of a rival set of concepts—chief among them the ideas associated with Karl Witffogel, a specialist in China, who classified land reform as a typology of psychological warfare. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, European political theorists—and some American social scientists as well—had endorsed land redistribution as a third way between communism and industrial capitalism. Land redistribution programs, giving every peasant a plot of earth, offered a peaceful approach to development, somewhere between the Scylla of communist revolution and the Charybdis of industrial immiseration. Even while hostilities to decolonization resulted in restrictions on travel for Buck and Thorner and a security clearance denial for Ladejinsky, it was by no means clear, in the 1950s, that the United States would part ways with international movements for land redistribution. Social scientists and historians remained committed to the implications of third way theory for international development. Indeed, the consensus behind third way theory would continue to exert an influence over academic social science for decades to come.

Conclusion: The Battle for History In June 1974, the Agrarian Reform Institute in Savannah hosted a seminar funded by USAID and endorsed by the Philippine Federation of Free Farmers. Attendees were agrarian economists, sociologists, and historians—including a young James C. Scott (then a newly fledged professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin), who would later publish many well-known books on state power, peasant redistribution, and the role of territory. They represented, broadly, a left-leaning set of social scientists and social historians, many of whom worked with the leading American institutions of international development. The subject on the table was how these leftists could develop mechanisms to ensure that land redistribution programs produced certain predictable and desirable psychological consequences for peasants. The Savannah meeting began with a talk by John Powell—a political scien-

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tist at Tufts and an alumnus of Wisconsin’s Land Tenure Center—who promised to examine “the adequacy of social science models for the study of peasant movements.”62 Powell’s framework would create a history-based audit of the ideas being promoted by Wittfogel, the Paddocks, and others. Powell proposed a modest summary of the values that would orient the rest of the gathering. Material security was important to people of all classes across history. But even greater than economic security—as a force—was the freedom of self-determination, something that peasants across the world were struggling to achieve in the aftermath of decolonization. Like Tocqueville, Powell believed that land could inspire peasants to industry and, ultimately, fraternity. The Savannah papers evidence the stress of a wide-ranging program of social history and theory that had been asked to compete with Wittfogel in terms of instrumentalism, responding to a generation that longed for silver bullets and quick fixes. The organizers of the conference had proposed a wide-ranging program of analysis designed to deconstruct the hidden workings of democratic revolutions that, like those in Ireland and Mexico, had succeeded in achieving both relative economic security and political freedom within a democratic framework. Two historians—the Columbia University expert on Spanish history Edward Malefakis, famed for his history of agrarian reform in Spain, and the social historian David Sabean, a specialist in early modern peasant rebellions in Germany, then visiting the Max-Planck-Institut in Göttingen— were asked to provide context for contemporary events in Vietnam. Discussions compared rural revolution in the Russian, Yugoslav, Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese contexts. A panel of experts offered corollaries of communal peasant uprisings in Western Europe before 1800, and discussed the role of peasants in the Spanish Civil War. “Peasant revolts, rebellions, and millenarian movements have been frequent events throughout history,” explained Powell, citing the French Revolution alongside upheavals in China, Mexico, Russia, and Vietnam.63 The social scientists gathered in Savannah were heirs to a consensus that recognized the universality of exploitation by nineteenth-century empires and the inevitability of rebellion in the former colonies. They agreed that ownership of land was a key element of this struggle, and that only the redistribution of land to formerly colonized subjects would permanently end their grievances. To a certain extent, the conference participants shared an orientation with Wittfogel. Like Wittfogel, they viewed history as a source of comparative models that could be exploited to manage the world and contain its capacity for violence. By focusing in detail on events in history and their psychological as-

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pects, social science promised an end to violence and exploitation more generally. Clever social scientists, like James C. Scott, were even willing to entertain ideas for measures and indices of world rebellion grounded in a notion of peasant occupancy. But the similarities with Wittfogel ended there. At the Savannah conference, it was history’s wide-angle lens on human ­affairs—not the narrow focus of communism’s purported hidden agenda— that was used to mobilize broadcast comparisons. The history of rights to occupancy, in other words, was being proposed as a tool for ensuring world peace—and a counterweight to other Cold War models of development, substantiated by history and fact, and equally actionable as any theory that mobilized the American military abroad. Nonetheless, in the climate of conversations about mind control and psychological warfare forged in the course of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War, even academics who favored land redistribution sometimes felt it necessary to situate their ideas within the scheme of an American research complex interested broadly in peasant psychology as something that could be controlled and exploited from above. Borrowing a page from the theory of land reform as psychological warfare, Powell endorsed the idea that access to land could fundamentally change a culture. Analysts, Powell argued, should not underestimate the “psychological benefits accruing from the improvement in peasants’ self-esteem.”64 In Powell’s view, land reform promised both economic security and political freedom— the best of all possible worlds. The participants in Savannah attempted to systematize their knowledge of land so as to create a formula for psychological counter-warfare. In his talk, Powell too suggested that history would help one to understand whether “revolutionary success depend[s] on some organizational ‘secret weapon,’ ” whether there were “ ‘recipes’ for a successful land reform,” and whether land reform contributed to revolution or preempted it.65 Responding to the call to conceive of land as a mechanism, James Scott presented a model that wedded social history theories to action. He offered a sketch of an index of the changing rights and protections available for tenants that he claimed could predict the “feeling” of exploitation by peasants, and therefore the likelihood of rebellion.66 Like the index of “landlessness” proposed by Roy Prosterman in 1972, the deliberations in Savannah were trying to shoehorn a vast set of ideas about collective action, social history, and anticolonial action into the requirements of a newly quantitative age—one that wanted revolution, however absurdly, distilled to a number.

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Attempting to reduce world history or rights of occupation to a single quantitative score might be laughable. But the index wasn’t the problem; if anything, attempts to index social history were a symptom of the poisonous environment in which American social scientists were working in the years of the Vietnam War. Prosterman’s index of landlessness—never embraced as one of the main measures used by the World Bank to measure its work in the world—might offer a joke; but it doesn’t represent a tragedy. Both Prosterman and Scott were working in a tradition of social science and history that recognized the validity of struggles against empire around the world. In the era in which Wittfogel dominated explanations of China, U.S. social scientists like Scott, Powell, and Prosterman had been trying to wage an unwinnable war against American skepticism about other lands and their dreams— a skepticism wedded, at base, to racial prejudice and blindness. Quantitative indexing of the past, like social history, and like bibliography and mapmaking before them, represented another technique by which the advocates of land redistribution attempted to make their case. Unfortunately for individuals around the world who impatiently waited for justice to be restored, it was Wittfogel and his allies, not the advocates of land redistribution, who won the battle over how the global moment of land redistribution would be remembered. Social scientists such as Scott, Powell, and Prosterman—whose views on land redistribution broadly reflected the longterm history embraced by the Rome Consensus, in which resistance to European empire predicted the broadening recognition of occupancy rights around the world—tended to tell a rich and diverse social history, one that could easily accommodate the history of peasant rebellion in early modern Germany alongside accounts of nineteenth-century rent strikes in Ireland and more recent events in Mexico, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Guatemala, and Peru. Witt­ fogel and his cohort used history too; but they preferred to deal strictly with a more confined set of revolutions—the English Civil War and the American Revolution (which they classified as successful instances in which the protection of property was institutionalized), and the revolutions of Russia and China (which were classified as dangerous). Wittfogel belonged to a set of American historians whose work was typified by the writing of Barrington Moore and Walt Rostow and who preferred to exalt the American and English examples as unique contributions to individual freedom in securing the rights of contract. Behind their theories was an intellectual framework that looked to British customs of individual proprietorship of land in the era after the English Civil War as the apogee of freedom. They extolled as their ideal a moment that

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was the high-water mark of freedom for white Protestant men, but not for Roman Catholics, women, or the natives of colonized lands around the world, whose rights of property were negated at the same time.67 Wittfogel helped to inaugurate a history of land redistribution that interpreted all of its contemporary instances—Russian, Chinese, Latin American, and Indian—as failures, while the earlier instances—Irish, Mexican, Japanese, and Taiwanese—were forgotten and buried. The new historical consensus also required using history’s scalpel to selectively narrate the history of each nation, for instance, dwelling on China’s Great Leap Forward of 1958 and the famines that followed, while minimizing the success of Communist China’s family-based land reforms from 1945. Wittfogel’s selective history allowed him to connect communist authority to the political machinations of a small elite struggling for control for their own enrichment. To a degree, this interpretation reflected current theories of elite influence via Talcott Parsons and Vilfredo Pareto, and concerns about the power of elites were shared by many social scientists at the United Nations. But Wittfogel carried this fear of elite privilege further than most, maintaining that communism, with its lack of constitutional protections, was inherently damaging to the possibility of dissent. Fighting communism, according to Wittfogel, must be given the highest priority. Given the world history of the rise of authoritarianism, arguments for land redistribution would have to take a back seat. A single step on the path toward authoritarianism, according to Wittfogel, was as good as the annihilation of the individual. Explaining his misgivings about land redistribution schemes, he explained, “The power of an absolute managerial (or even a semi-managerial) state corrupts its rulers absolutely.”68 Land reform was therefore best understood as “reactionary Utopianism: progressive in words and retrogressive in deeds.”69 Wittfogel’s idea that collectivization caused lasting psychological harm to a society pulled together several compelling factors: recent work on the psychological power of authority, the world’s experience with German fascism in 1933–45 as a representation of a society transformed by its fascination with authority, and contemporary theories of “brainwashing” and other forms of psychological warfare. In Wittfogel’s hands, the history of peasant uprisings for land redistribution was remapped onto a new history of psychological warfare and authority. After the forced collectivization of Chinese farms in 1951– 56, his ideas came to dominate conversations in many policy circles in the United States.

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The mature version of the critique of Chinese collectivization, published in 1990 by Taiwanese economist Justin Lin, argued that Maoist leaders engendered the famine through new rules that banned individuals from exiting the commune—a strategy that Lin believed led to the rise of “shirking,” numerous acts of refusing to work productively because of the lack of a sense of personal investment or even feelings of resentment. Lin attributed shirking to the absence of incentives and personal drive, characteristic, perhaps, of an era of managed prices and limited opportunities for individual initiative: shirking, he reasoned, was so inevitable in such a system that collective societies could never manage the rates of economic growth seen in individualist societies. Like Wittfogel’s theory, Lin’s turned on the supposed psychological benefits of capitalism and the stifling of individuality through collectivization. The reasons for the famine were not based in agriculture at all; they resulted from the transfer of labor from farms to factories and the resulting lack of hands to plow the fields.70 The pessimistic analysis, however, was not the only version of history available. In contrast with Wittfogel’s theory of despotism, twentieth-century writers associated with the doctrine of the third way believed that land redistribution had a social history born from centuries of resistance to empire. The idea that human beings had a universal right not to be displaced, and that communities could work together to protect this right, was both older than communism as an ideology and more universal. Peasants rebelled whenever the right not to be displaced was in jeopardy; they would continue rebelling against eviction and displacement long after communism was gone. Long-term interpretations of land reform held sway in international circles in the 1950s and ’60s. Daniel Thorner—who, like Wittfogel, had trained as a historian—preferred to interpret the history of China’s failures as proof of the deeply rooted power of local elites; only violent revolution, he suggested, would be enough to displace them in certain places. Over the long run, Thorner believed, the question of land redistribution, like other ideas about justice, was likely to return, given enough time and will, much as agitation for the vote had once spread around the globe.71 Another historian by training, the Swedish agrarian historian Folke Dovring— who spent six years as a manager at the FAO in the 1950s before returning to research—likewise saw no conspiracy theory in Soviet land reform; he believed, rather, that events around the world supported the theory of the third way, favoring the interpretation that peasants had fought for a right to occupation over a long time period. In Dovring’s view, this long-term struggle overarched the relatively short-term struggle between capitalism and communism.

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There is nothing inherently more correct about long-term analysis over short-term thinking, of course, but long-term context can sometimes aid interpretation by putting short-term realities in perspective. Just so, Dovring’s long-term view of the history of peasant struggle allowed him to see different realities in his own time than the ones recognized by Wittfogel, who was haunted everywhere by the specter of the Holocaust.72 Dovring and his wife Karin, a student of the new discipline of mass communications, organized a quantitative study of the rhetoric of land reform in official pronouncements from the United States, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and the papacy. The result, they concluded, was that the real differences in policy were minimal; all nations advocated some form of affordable housing for urban citizens and affordable land for their rural workers, and all understood it as the duty of the state to provide infrastructure. The major differences counted in formal releases were largely cosmetic, the Dovrings argued: for example, when the papacy made pronouncements about land redistribution, mentions of the benefits that would accrue to “the family” predominated.73 An orientation to the shared reality of peasants in different nations allowed the Dovrings to make conjectures about the meaning of the present moment that were more generous to a diversity of experiences than Wittfogel’s or the Paddocks’.74 It was, however, the pessimists, with their rewritten history, who fit the mood of America in the Vietnam War: a nation unwilling to reckon with its own history of indigenous land theft and genocide, aloof to African American claims about land restitution. Even in academic circles, the generations that followed, in both Europe and the United States, would be deeply affected by the rewriting of history. By the 1990s, announcements of the death of land reform, this time pronounced from the history department at Cambridge, came to dominate how many academics in Britain and America viewed the history of recent decades. Anthony Low—a Cambridge historian who became one of the major interpreters of the postwar world in the 1990s—categorized land reform as one aspect of the “egalitarian moment” of the postwar era, a moment especially felt in post-colonial nations around the globe. The egalitarian moment was expressed in democratic movements, civil societies, and utopian programs, including communism, which Francis Fukuyama and others were in the process of declaring over and done with in the era of the “end of history.”75 While Low cheered many of the aims and accomplishments of the post-­ colonial era, his interpretation of land redistribution was cynical—an attitude that reflected the sense, current at the time, that land reform was no longer on the agenda for development. Low was heir to the short-termism of Wittfogel’s

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perspectives—and to the rulings on land reform’s failure by the Paddocks— rather than to the long-termism of Thorner and Dovring. Low rationalized the disappearance of land redistribution programs with terms borrowed from Wittfogel. Despite pretensions that they would lift up the lowly and create an egalitarian system, he argued, land redistributions in fact represented a counterrevolutionary impediment to change, designed to create a kulak buffer of rich peasants who would balk at other reforms.76 Low thus characterized land reform as an antirevolutionary strategy, for it simultaneously offered those peasants a technical legislation of inclusion while effectively creating a barrier of rich peasants whose conservatism and success would forever pit them against efforts by the unwashed masses to organize in numbers sufficient to take over any organ of government, local or national.77 Low’s cynicism drew on the intellectual climate of his time, which was fascinated with markets but increasingly skeptical of social programs undertaken by governments or international organizations. After 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the victory of free market policies seemed final, many of its original utopian ideas increasingly appeared naive or even silly. Low promoted a view of history heavily influenced by the dominant American doctrine of skepticism about decolonization movements and their economic ideals. Without the longer view, all that was left was an American dogma that characterized much of the world’s recent history—and the idealism of most of the world’s people—as mere utopianism, irrational and ill fated at best.78 Much of the history of the twentieth century that circulates in policy circles today is the product of an age that had begun to forget the insights of the Rome Consensus that had emerged around the FAO in the decades after the end of the Second World War. In the 1980s and ’90s, Cold War ideology had come to influence how many development specialists and historians talked about preceding decades. The conservative political scientist Fukuyama—a latter-day heir to Wittfogel’s tradition of skepticism toward peasant grievance— would explain away the twentieth century as a titans’ clash between capitalism and communism, in which capitalism had been proven to be definitively more efficient in eradicating poverty.79 The diversity of programs that this book has examined in detail—including hybrid capitalist-smallholder programs and international government efforts inspired by the history of European peasant commons—failed to fit Fukuyama’s model. They were therefore left out of the story, the triumph of the free market and of industrial agriculture.80

9  •  Racism, Skepticism, and the Cloak of Science in U.S. Debates About Land Redistribution

By the late 1950s, ghost towns had begun to stipple the landscape of Guatemala—evidence of land redistribution gone awry. Originally these towns had been experimental villages, designed and sponsored by the United Nations and other international institutions as part of national programs of land redistribution. In the model villages, programs intended for the entire country would be rolled out on a small scale. Peasants would receive plots of land at taxpayer expense. Perhaps roads would connect the new settlement to major market towns. The visiting American scientists William and Elizabeth Paddock observed one such town, Papaloapan in Veracruz, when it was being plotted in 1957. They stopped and chatted with another American, who introduced himself as an insurance man and announced his intention to offer the peasants hard cash for their tiny plots and convert the village as a whole to large-scale sugarcane growing. When the Paddocks returned to Papaloapan in 1969, there were no peasants left, and a great deal of sugarcane. All that remained of the settlement program were abandoned roads and a decaying mural painted on the side of a building imagining the homes, electric lights, and endless fields of corn that might have been.1 Bill and Liz Paddock were a husband-and-wife team who had been involved in efforts to develop modern agriculture in Guatemala and Honduras. It was they who sounded the alarm, arguing that the entire enterprise of international development as practiced at that time was hopelessly corrupt and in need of a drastic overhaul. Their 1973 book, We Don’t Know How, was intended to lay bare a series of shockingly wasted funds in the form of abandoned research centers, or even abandoned land. According to the narrative they laid out, most

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land redistribution schemes in the developing world amounted to fraud perpetrated on the American public by nations too mired in political breakdown to merit investment. The Paddocks inaugurated a grand campaign for the expurgation of development. In a sense, their call for efficiency was only the latest episode in a long tradition of American postwar purges that targeted any international entanglements that potentially went against American interests: in the era of McCarthyism, anything communistic, inefficient, or wasteful was rounded up and jettisoned; land redistribution schemes making huge changes in China were increasingly understood by Americans as dangerous—perhaps even a form of psychological warfare. None of those attacks had been strong enough to sever the U.S. relationship with international land reform. But the civil rights movement—along with indigenous and African American claims to American land and the hotly contested engagements of the Vietnam War—all heightened the stakes. White Americans had begun to fear not only communism but also the possibility that their taxes were serving ends that some rejected as unjust, unreasonable, and too expensive. To the frayed patience of white Americans the Paddocks delivered what seemed to be the cool analysis of reason in the form of a systematic survey of the undertakings abroad of the United Nations, USAID, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and other organs of international development. They came to believe that most of these projects were governed by irrational ideological strategies. Denouncing the inefficiencies associated with ghost towns and empty laboratories, the Paddocks proposed a thoroughgoing program of reform: in the future, scientific research rather than boundless optimism would lead the way. In the context of the American war in Vietnam, We Don’t Know How was read as an indictment of all things international—a plea for putting America, and American-style efficiency, before the concerns of foreign peasants or other immeasurable virtues. The Paddocks’ text gave U.S. leaders a blueprint for renouncing land redistribution altogether. It paved the way for a new form of international development in which bankers and land speculators, rather than democratic representatives and social scientists, would decide who got land and how. The timing of their intervention, however, was as important as the content. The Paddocks provided the American public with a reason to disinvest in land redistribution. Their prescription arrived just as the communities that might have most benefited from land redistribution at home—including indigenous

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people, Latinos, and African Americans—were beginning to mobilize their own demands for land, demands that remain largely unacknowledged to this day.

The Farmer’s Daughter, the War Hero, and the Poison of Experience Elizabeth Jane Mills was the child of generations of Iowa farmers, descended from migrants who settled the Iowa frontier in the 1850s. As an undergraduate at Iowa State University in the class of 1943, Liz Mills met Bill Paddock, a sturdy young botany major originally from Minneapolis by way of a Connecticut prep school. At Ames, Bill took field artillery classes and studied plant pathology, soil bacteria, poetry, and Spanish. Liz took courses in interior design, meal planning, childcare, and jewelry making.2 After graduation, Bill joined the Marine Corps and headed to Okinawa, where he was wounded in battle and was awarded a Purple Heart. After the war the couple moved to Ithaca and both enrolled as graduate students at Cornell. Liz took advanced courses in home economics, while William specialized in plant breeding. Together, they studied subjects that would have fit them to maintain the house and garden of an exquisitely well-ordered home. Upon earning their PhDs, both Liz and Bill took teaching jobs at the University of Pennsylvania. When a position for Bill opened up in Ames, the couple spied an opportunity to raise a family close to kin and old friends. Liz quit her faculty position and turned her studies of home design to the Paddock household. Meanwhile, Bill’s new varieties of hybrid corn plants—bred to produce cobs longer and more fruitful—were planted in the soil where Liz’s ancestors had raised corn for generations. The Paddocks’ graduation from college coincided with an explosive moment in the field of biological science. In the 1940s—while Bill was immersed in his studies in plant breeding—experiments with corn were opening up a new world of plant-breeding technology. The improvements seemed to suggest that science could transform the food supply, surpassing known limits of production per acre. All abundance required was cross-pollination. When scientists dangled the tassels of separate strains near each other, new strains of corn were born that exhibited “hybrid vigor”: they were more resistant to rust, blight, and insects; and their ears were longer and their girth more expansive than traditional ears of corn. Corn was the first crop to prove that modern agricultural science was

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capable of producing robust, disease-resistant varietals distinguished by enhanced production; by the end of the 1960s, the techniques of corn hybridization would also be applied to improved strains of rice and wheat. William had a front-row seat observing the development of hybrid corn at Iowa and Cornell, and his career would run in parallel to the broadening studies of hybrid grains. He became one of the directors of the brave new field of international corn breeding, which promised to create varieties of corn with “hybrid vigor” tailored to climates nearer the equator. The Paddocks’ research took them across Central America and to Washington, D.C., where they briefly became heavyweights in the world of international development, speaking and writing on behalf of science. They wielded the authority of science itself against what they believed was the enemy: waste, embodied in the bibliographies, maps, and small farm experiments of the United Nations, which lacked the rigor demanded of scientists in Ames. In 1952, Bill began a job as a faculty member at Iowa State’s Tropical Research Center in Antigua, Guatemala. It was the same year the FAO began its massive program of collecting and publishing statistics to support the land redistribution efforts of member nations. The year before the Paddocks moved to Guatemala, the Guatemalan people had democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz, whose government redistributed property to landless peasants.3 In 1954, the U.S. government took over from the French in Vietnam, and a CIA-backed coup deposed the democratically elected government of Guatemala. Little did the couple realize they had front-row tickets to a massacre. The Árbenz government had committed to labor laws that went against the interests of U.S. farm conglomerates, most notably the United Fruit Company, headquartered in New Orleans, which maintained enormous plantations in Guatemala. The year after the Paddocks’ move, John Boyd Orr published The White Man’s Dilemma (1953), wherein he heralded a brave new program of economic development designed to permanently end hunger. According to Orr, such a plan would be possible only through a deliberate commitment on the part of rich countries to economic “sacrifices” intended to raise up the former colonies of the world, and Orr underscored the question of whether the rich would be willing to voluntarily make those commitments. Just as Orr had predicted, when land reform came to Guatemala, the fate of the nation hung on the decisions of affluent elites far away. When the United Fruit Company proved unwilling to sacrifice its holdings for the greater good of the Guatemalan people, the

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U.S. government intervened on behalf of the American corporation. With the backing of the CIA and United Fruit, Guatemala’s conservative military leaders staged a coup. The first action of the military junta was to undo the land redistribution work of the previous government. After 1954, the new military dictatorship under Carlos Castillo Armas seized the redistributed peasant land, and returned it to the hands of the powerful few. Thousands of peasants refused to vacate their property. After all, according to Guatemala’s land reform law of 1952—which had been instituted by a democratically elected government—the land they were squatting on was their own. The peasant squatters were summarily arrested, their land confiscated on behalf of friends of the new regime.4 Thousands of Guatemalans were imprisoned and tortured, political opposition was banned, and four decades of civil war and slaughter followed. How did the Paddocks experience the bloody scenes that unfolded around them? It wasn’t by consulting Orr’s program in The White Man’s Dilemma for effective and international collaborative responses. Safely ensconced in the United Fruit guesthouse, the young scientists spent their time sinking backward into memory. As a teenager, Bill had visited a Mexican ranch in Hidalgo where the Quesada family had visited sick farmworkers, attended weddings, and maintained a school for their otherwise propertyless peones. Outside the ranch, however, the turbulence that followed the Mexican Revolution was raging. “The agraristas (land reformers) would occasionally shoot through the windows at night,” he later recalled. Bill was glad that the ranch house was built like a fort, “with gun slits ready to fight off bandits.”5 Returning to Latin America in the 1950s, he concluded that this scene of embattlement was the reality of experience for hard-working people in much of the world. Surrounded by the carnage of the Guatemalan coup in 1954, Bill and Liz interpreted the bloodbath as evidence of the hopelessness of all global projects of development—despite the fact that Bill himself was charged with the leadership obligations of a scientist heading up one of the most important Latin American institutes of agriculture. It was a uniquely desperate and pessimistic point of view, and it surely reflects the trauma of his early experience in Mexico as much as the terror of the coup in Guatemala. While Bill soured on the project of development, other scientists of his generation were coming to believe that they were inaugurating an unmatched era of plenty for all. Norman Borlaug—the breeder of dwarf varieties of wheat who became the anointed prophet of the “Green Revolution” as a mechanism for curbing deforestation— was Bill’s senior by only seven years. Like Bill, Norman was a native of Iowa, a

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product of the land grant colleges of the Midwest, and a scientific evangelist of plant breeding to Latin America in an era of land turnover. By rights, Bill’s expertise in corn should have made him also a leader in the optimistic revolution unfolding in botany laboratories around the world. Bill’s double trauma experiences ended up damaging him irrevocably. He became the inverse image of Borlaug: the scientist-turned-soothsayer who foretold not plenty but doom. Shaped by two encounters with revolution— both of which he endured from the safety of guesthouses provided by local aristocrats—Bill’s outlook began to bear the shape of a grim realpolitik. He began to parrot theories that smacked of nineteenth-century colonialism and its damning certitude about the impossibility of improvement abroad. The peoples of the developing world, Bill reasoned, inhabited a barren landscape, underdeveloped and impossible to farm, riven by political instability. No silver bullet could cure the turmoil he saw; no research station could amend a failed state. Science, he concluded, could benefit only the allies of the strong. Though he would pay lip service to the nobility of poor laborers, Bill had been poisoned, like so many colonizing settlers in troubled lands before him, by fear of the chaos an uprising could bring. As soon as he returned to North America, Bill began reworking his harrowing experiences on paper, writing in collaboration with his brother, Paul Jr., a retired foreign service officer who specialized in Eastern Europe and who possessed a similarly pessimistic global outlook. Bill and Paul Paddock wrote two books together, Hungry Nations (1964) and, more pointedly paraphrasing their understanding of the crisis, Famine, 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? (1967).6 The books painted the developing world as a maelstrom of famine and poverty, ravaged by never-ending wars that pitted rich against poor, wherein the majority of the world’s inhabitants would die within the next five years. Bill’s combination of presenting bad news with an affable outlook was precisely what American readers wanted in those years. The New York Times gushed over the Paddocks’ first volume: “It is brilliant in conception, easy to read, ironic and entirely hardheaded, essentially depressing and yet constructive in its spirit.”7 Similarly fulsome praise from countless readers turned Famine, 1975! into a best seller. The book’s shocking pronouncements—its unrestrained dismissal of developing world agriculture and peasant land rights, its invocation of laws of population and dangers lurking in foreign birth rates, and its prescription of expert oversight—all spoke to American readers. Positioning the United States as the only possible savior of an overburdened

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planet—the “sole hope of the hungry nations”—Famine, 1975! proffered a solution as ruthless as it was original. Since Iowa had perfected farming, Iowa could feed the world—and it might as well, the authors argued, for some nations abroad were doomed to exist in a political “morass” from which they might never escape. Bill, deeply affected by his experiences in Latin America, had come to regard the nations of the earth as zones of despair. The only rational course of action, reasoned the brothers, was to abandon agriculture in India, Egypt, and much of the rest of the world, allowing the farmers of the United States to literally and directly supply the grains that would enable the rest of the world to survive.8 The climate in which the Paddocks became best-selling authors stands in stark contrast to the world that made The Good Earth a best seller three decades earlier. Only five years before the American-led coup in Guatemala, in 1949, the New York Times Magazine had published an article by Norris Dodd linking his new position as director general of the FAO with his earlier work with the New Deal. In his article, Dodd celebrated American traditions—­especially lavishing praise on participatory government, American-style, where farmers helped farmers and small technologies could make a big difference. Dodd believed that farmer-run cooperatives and farmer-directed price controls had helped many farms to flourish during the New Deal; it was a pattern, he wrote, that the FAO could help to export to the rest of the world. In the America Buck and Dodd hailed from, there had been many Americans who believed in land redistribution. Liz Paddock’s own ancestors had settled in Iowa on farmland bestowed on them through one of the great schemes of nineteenth-century land redistribution; midcentury administrators like Norris Dodd and intellectuals like John R. Commons believed that land redistribution was the destiny of other peoples around the globe. In contrast, the Paddock brothers’ analysis of land redistribution spoke to a readership willing to believe that international affairs were in turmoil. By 1967, when Famine, 1975! came out, the poison of rough and ambivalent experiences in the developing world had transformed not only Bill but also an enormous segment of the American public during the previous decades. After 1954, American forces were simultaneously occupying Guatemala and Vietnam. By 1967, the American presence in Vietnam was entering its second decade; search-and-destroy missions had created some 2.1 million refugees in South Vietnam alone. The Paddocks’ book was published one year after a series of devastating droughts and famines in India, which many assumed would be repeated with-

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out end (in fact, those famines were the last of an era; they would be ended by the improved grains to which Bill’s plant-breeding expertise had contributed, little though Bill predicted it in his writing). The book appeared just after the close of a period of mass genocide in Indonesia in which up to a million individuals died in the aftermath of a failed land redistribution program. The problem behind all of these catastrophes, according to the Paddocks, at base, was corrupt political and cultural environments that turned a blind eye toward wastefulness—in the face of the insurmountable realities of the developing world. In attacking the fear of waste, the Paddock brothers were attuned to other forms of skepticism that were on the rise. Their book was published a year after a conservative think tank in London, the Institute of Economic Affairs, began a campaign of books and pamphlets arguing that the United Kingdom’s housing and land market could be more equitably governed by free market principles than by the vast bureaucracy of planners that had arisen in the middle of the twentieth century to protect a universal right to housing. One year later, the ecologist Garrett Hardin would publish his essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” where he asserted, as a scientific principle, that collective holdings of land could never flourish. Ideas of this kind, promoting market-­based reasoning as the embodiment of science, would have devastating consequences for those who hoped to repair the violence of empires past through land redistribution, both in America and abroad.

The Resurfacing of Race in the United States Administrators at the United Nations premised their work on healing the divides between empire and former colonies. At the core of that goal was a promise of overturning the legacy of economic injustice, especially as that injustice intersected with race. In America, a historical fixation with granting privilege to whites—which contrasted with the equalizing aims of land redistribution—was brought home in the 1960s as African Americans, indigenous communities, and Latino communities began to assert their own rights to land. In the context of a global conversation about land redistribution, these movements triggered a worldwide acknowledgment of the legacy of U.S. Reconstruction and the abandoned promise of land for formerly enslaved persons. As models for the rest of the world, FAO administrators often held up America’s land reforms of 1862 (the Homestead Act) and 1944 (the GI Bill). The United States, however, was often significantly out of step with an international program premised on recognizing the rights of all races.

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America was the site of land reforms premised on genocide: a settler colony, the United States was founded on land shared with native peoples from which native peoples were later excluded. Massacres of indigenous communities preceded every major land redistribution in North America, including the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160 acres to white settlers who promised to improve the western lands and so guard them against native, Latino, or Asian incursion. In the 1960s, the racial drama of indigenous land seizure was little acknowledged in development circles, including the progressive ones at the FAO. Another bloody episode from American history, however, captured the international imagination. In the United States, African Americans had been excluded from participation in any land redistribution program, even those that had been specifically designed with their collective suffering in mind. In the 1960s, as renewed efforts to assert the civil rights of African Americans came to the fore of international politics, many international commentators began to argue that the United States, too, needed a land reform. In this view, an opportunity had been missed after the Civil War, when land reform had not been used to endow formerly enslaved persons with their own small farms. The U.S. general William Tecumseh Sherman had pledged “forty acres and a mule” to previously enslaved persons in 1865. A century later, African Americans—denied access to the land redistribution of the GI Bill and constrained by the laws of segregation, forbidden access to public spaces such as elevators, lunch counters, bus seats, and water fountains—were organizing in conjunction with their allies. America’s civil rights struggle tore the country apart. Might the lynchings, marches, lunch counter sit-ins, bus boycotts, and assassinations have been avoided, some wondered, if African Americans had received their land, and with it, economic opportunity and political security, a century before? Addressing U.S. historical and current inequities was a complicated strategy in international politics. It pointed the finger of blame at the United States as a nation compromised by gross injustice, and this drew attention away from American talking points about land reforms as communism. Rehearsing the missed opportunity of land reform during American Reconstruction, meanwhile, reinforced the drumbeat of land reform as justice: the argument being fashioned at the United Nations and in nations around the world was that only the redistribution of land could enable peasants worldwide to break free of crippling poverty and the oppression imposed by elites. In 1964, Gunnar Myrdal concluded that post-colonial land redistributions should be the model for the “liberation of colonial peoples” around the world.9

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In Myrdal’s view, the American experience exemplified the necessity of global land reform. Unless they enacted land reform in the present, the nations of the world would be doomed to repeat the unresolved clashes roiling the United States. Finally, talking about the failure of U.S. land reform underscored the question of justice in compensation. Some asked the obvious: why should U.S. landowners and academic theorists complain about low compensation for land seized in land reform when formerly enslaved persons and their descendants in the United States still went uncompensated for their labor? FAO consultant Edmundo Flores quipped: “It might be said that one of the outstanding exceptions [to the historical validation of land reform] was the seizure of property, without compensation, represented by the 1.3 million slaves valued at $3,000 million who were freed by the Lincoln Administration.”10 The lasting grievance caused by the unrealized promise of forty acres justified the spread of land reform around the world as a vaccine against future race war. In the 1970s and ’80s, the argument was rehearsed in U.S. textbooks on development as well as in radical publications about the future of agriculture. It also spread to U.S. and British student organizations through the circulation of Hugo Blanco’s Land or Death (published in Spanish in 1972 and translated into English that same year), one of the key treatises on Peruvian land reform, which featured cutting remarks about the long-term endurance of structural racism in the United States, a fate that Blanco hoped to avoid in Peru through the redistribution of land.11 The connections were certainly not lost on American Latinos. In 1967, New Mexican farmers began to rally for the return of land confiscated in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War. Spanish land grants had recognized landownership by collectives—for instance, village ownership of grazing land. But in 1967, U.S. courts had broken with precedents in British common law, recognizing only individual claims to ownership in land. In U.S. v. Sandoval et al., a court case in 1897, the American Supreme Court refused to recognize community land grants—which covered approximately 52 percent of the state of New Mexico. Ultimately, nearly a third of the state’s land was confiscated. Some went to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service; some was acquired by white ranchers and government officials, who worked unlawful land deals in their own favor.12 After 1963, American Latinos in New Mexico—organized by Reies López Tijerina, a minister in the small town of Tierra Amarilla—began to reassert their rights. Through Tijerina’s persuasive sermons, based on his reading of Spanish law, some twenty thousand persons became members of a new orga-

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nization, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grant Heirs). They were determined to reassert the rights of families whose land had been confiscated unlawfully.13 In 1967, when Anglo ranchers cut their fences, allowing cattle to feed on the land of Latinos, the landownership issue came to a head. Twenty members of the alianza armed themselves with semiautomatic assault weapons and dynamite, and held the courthouse of Rio Arriba County in an attempt to free imprisoned members of their group. When federal troops descended, the forces exchanged gunfire until the insurgents fled into the nearby mountains with two hostages.14 In the aftermath of the assault, the Alianza Federal took on another name, borrowed from Hugo Blanco’s indigenous activism around landownership in Peru: Tierra o Muerte, or Land or Death. In 1967, a poster appeared that linked the rights of Latinos to historic struggles for landownership in Mexico as well as contemporary activism for labor rights in California. With that stark phrase as its caption, the poster depicted the armed figure of Emiliano Zapata—bearing the contemporary face of César Chávez.15 Images and phrases like this underscored that rural Latinos in New Mexico understood themselves as connected to a panoply of national and international movements whose struggle, over the years, to assert their rights had ended in success. International connections may also have energized the ambitions of African Americans. As U.S. researchers began to underscore the crisis facing African American landowners—thirty-three thousand African American farmers lost their land in 1964–69 alone, largely due to racial bias in the administration of farm subsidies—they called for public policies like cooperatives and technological investment that mirrored land reforms available to small farmers in other parts of the world. As African Americans began to demand civil rights related to voting and education, some also raised questions about reparations in land. In 1969, James Forman, a former leader of the Student Non-­ Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), issued the Black Manifesto in which he called for $200 million in federal payments to reverse the loss of farmland by blacks. The money, he wrote, should be deployed to assist in the creation of black-owned farming cooperatives.16 Indeed, land redistribution programs in other parts of the world had followed John Boyd Orr’s guidance for land reforms that led to greater opportunity for nonwhite groups: indigenous communities received official title to their land in Mexico with the ejidos; in India indigenous communities often profited from land reforms there.17

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Careful observers in North America must have anticipated that continued alliance with international land redistribution programs would eventually raise problems related to the racial structure of land claims in North America. In 1969, native people occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. In Custer, South Dakota, in February 1973, a military standoff erupted between the American government and Sioux Indians. In 1974, a group of indigenous people staged an occupation of the territory of Ganienkeh in upstate New York.18 These protests suggest that indigenous people took international land redistribution movements, and their international support, as a sign that their long-­ ignored claims to territory might, if asserted, be validated at last. Meanwhile, the early Green Movement was also beginning to make claims for the collective use of land—including arguments for the increased role of state and federal government in monitoring the environmental use of public lands, the quality of air, and the quality of water. Among the most prominent voices describing the environmental crisis was the farmer and poet Wendell Berry, whose essay “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture” in 1977 prescribed a return to small farming with appropriate technology as the first step in creating a more ecologically conscious civilization. Some environmentalists suggested rethinking American land use in a way that would limit and regulate the rights of landowners for the sake of a sustainable civilization.19 Within years of the assertion of Latino, African American, and indigenous land claims, the United States began to officially withdraw its support of land redistribution in an international setting. A line was being drawn in North America that would have deep consequences for the support of land redistribution programs. American support for justice in the form of landownership was drying up.

The Paddocks’ Argument Against Land Reform The argument against land reform mostly took the form of attacks on land redistribution as it appeared outside the United States, and it was framed in terms stripped of racial prejudice: the burning issue was the scientific fight against waste. Bill Paddock—whose immensely popular books had predicted mass planetary starvation by 1975—led the charge. Despite the bumper harvests of the 1960s, Bill remained convinced that something was amuck in the state of international development. With Liz’s help, Bill began the assault on land redistribution—appealing to science and finance, rather than policy, as he made the case that land redistribution schemes were built to fail.

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In 1973, Bill and Liz Paddock announced the results of a systematic survey of most acclaimed experiments in development policy undertaken by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, USAID, and the United Nations. Their new book We Don’t Know How did more than critique the short-termism of agricultural labs in the developing world. It also painted a condemning portrait of international development as a fraud. The authors showed that educational health clinics, research facilities, and even villages built by aid money had been essentially abandoned when the research money ran out. Each time a new official was appointed—and there were fewer and fewer of these—the goals of the last one had already been forgotten. It was a scandal of waste. In preparation for writing a new survey of international development as a whole, Bill and Liz had asked ministers of agriculture in Guatemala and Mexico to direct them to the most thriving examples of land redistribution in the nation—and in both countries, they found that millions of dollars spent building roads and dams had failed to bring electricity to the poor settlers. The Paddocks visited these “failures” from the comfort of haciendas and guesthouses provided by Mexican landholders, rich farmers, and United Fruit. In his writing, Bill caricatured both Mexico and Guatemala as perennially dangerous scenes of “unrest” and gunfire. He was unimpressed with what the ejidatarios in Mexico had done with their land: “The ejido looked much the way the land used to when it was part of the hacienda,” he observed.20 Revisiting a site he had seen before redistribution, Bill believed that the only major change to the peasants’ experience after land reform was the fact of overcrowding. “There is one, and only one, surplus crop—children.”21 Bill Paddock mouthed agreement with an axiom conceived two decades earlier by Norris Dodd, who had urged that poor farmers could improve their production and standard of welfare only with appropriate outside investments in infrastructure and technology. Following the lines of thought that Dodd had plowed, Paddock formulated a critique of how the FAO vision had been too small in scope and too underfunded in its application in Mexico. “With only a hoe and a machete,” the man working on five acres “could not keep the weeds back,” Bill observed.22 Had Bill stuck to the analysis of technology, advocating expanded infrastructure and increased investment in cooperatives, and calling for a redoubling of efforts to bring scientific advising directly to the peasant, he might have become a reformer. But he stopped short of spelling out a plan, and he dropped the critique of development short of anything constructive. Instead, Bill ventriloquized the opinions of his aristocratic friends who suggested that peasants were incapa-

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ble of initiative on their own. He could detect no evidence of initiative or entrepreneurship among the Mexican poor, and he blamed an attitude of entitlement. “I saw no evidence of modern technology, nor could I see that ‘land reform’ per se—the dividing of the land—had made much difference in the standard of living.”23 In the same period, the peasants had produced children while the elite landowner had invested in tractors and hybrid corn and benefited from the electricity from the dam.24 Taken at face value, the Paddocks were offering a manifesto for an economy managed by elites. In the Paddocks’ estimation, it was the lack of accountability that characterized the breakdown of agricultural programs in Guatemala. They believed that international development was plagued by superficial pressures to produce quick fixes: labs set up for political reasons one year and abandoned the next. Such fickle conditions, they reasoned, had jeopardized the premise of robust scientific research. Their viewpoint grew out of slow and patient observation from some of the most privileged places in the architecture of agricultural research. After leaving Guatemala, in 1957, Bill took over the directorship of El Zamorano, the Pan American School of Agriculture in Honduras. Founded in 1941 by a former president of the United Fruit Company, El Zamorano became, under Bill’s directorship, the first formal program of higher education in agriculture in Latin America. After five years of breeding corn in Guatemala and another four in Honduras, the Paddocks moved to Washington, D.C., where Bill became the Kennedy administration’s director of Latin American affairs for the National Academy of Sciences. In Washington, he and Liz became part of a circle of neo-Malthusians, dining with Garrett Hardin and Paul Ehrlich in a group that began calling itself Zero Population Growth. They would come to advocate for enforced limits on childbirth in the developing world, first as a means of fighting hunger, and later as an approach to fighting climate change. The Paddocks were not radicals or ideologues of the free market, at least not originally. They were careful researchers who became ambassadors for American science in the era of Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. They didn’t invent free market idealism—they merely documented bureaucratic excess wherever they found it, and sounded the call for the systematization of international development. They believed in the power of small experiments—when one cleaved to them with dedication over time. Bill and Liz were partners as much as co-researchers, and they would stay together for seventy years of marriage. After Bill passed away in Antigua, Guatemala—their onetime research site and later their home in retirement—Liz, like a swan dying of a broken heart, passed

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away in her sleep just three months later. They believed in collaboration—at least in theory—and they even thought the United Nations could be a vessel for reform, although they offered few specifics as to how. To be frank, it hard to attribute the Paddocks’ narrow interpretation of these complex struggles to anything less than a profoundly limited appreciation of history. As the coup and its aftermath raged around them, the Paddocks saw their share of riots, gang warfare, corruption, and poor bookkeeping—but where others might have interpreted these social troubles as the legacy of privileged access to government, or as disruptions caused by Guatemala’s ongoing civil war, the Paddocks assumed this turmoil was simply an endemic reality of the tropics. They interpreted such failures as a reason to step back altogether from the enterprise of development—to stop throwing good money after bad, and to let failed states sort out their own business. The Paddocks intimately knew many villages around the world; and yet, compared with generations of social scientists before them, they had spent very little time learning about the political rationale of other peoples. The scientists seemed impervious to the distinct likelihood that the war over land stolen from colonized people would not end until the land was returned. Had the Paddocks better known their history, they might have appreciated that anticolonial struggles had raged for decades in places like Ireland and India until the theft of land was reversed. But the closest Bill had come to a history class in Ames was a literature course called British Masterpieces taken in his senior year. Liz, who was generally an A or B student, got her only D in an introductory course in economics required by the college. She had to retake the class the following semester. Despite their PhDs, the Paddocks arrived in Guatemala with little educational background that would help them to understand a post-colonial clash between the landed elite and the peasant. Instead, what they recommended was a set of strategies tailored to make family farms in Iowa more efficient: more bookkeeping, more accountability, and less waste. They recommended a recipe for rule by banks, but not a plan to end corruption or to annihilate long-term grief, results their informants at United Fruit told them were inevitable and impossible to counter by reasonable means. Bill therefore nodded approvingly to the coup that deposed Árbenz (“the quasi-Communist regime”), and glossed over Castillo’s rollback of land reform by lavishing praise on the dictator’s Potemkin settlement program for small farmers.25 A more experienced thinker would have seen through the facade. The Paddocks, for all their critical spirit, were scientists, not social scientists. They lacked the sense to notice that poverty in 1950s Guatemala

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was as intractable as it might have been in the American West in the 1840s, not in the TVA in the 1930s. They expected land redistribution to provide an overnight amelioration—as improved strains of corn enriched corn farmers within a single season. They surveyed Latin America with an attitude of skepticism and fear, and that attitude resonated with their readers. Half a decade before We Don’t Know How framed international development as a catastrophe, another book—Rainer Schickele’s Agrarian Revolution and Economic Progress (1968)—had offered an assessment of the prospects of the Global South that was the inverse of the Paddocks’ judgment in every way. Schickele described every land-starved village, outcast tribe, and family in the developing world as a site where potential leadership could be found. Schickele had urged the importance of basic rights, not “needs.” For leaders to emerge, communities required so little: political rights and land alone could free them to change their world. Basic investments in education, infrastructure, technology, and credit could transform them into entrepreneurs. If international development only provided enough investments like this, he argued, every nation could build its own destiny. Wasted money was less important than wasted human potential. Issued in the wake of the American civil rights movement, published the same year that students in Berkeley, Mexico City, Paris, Stockholm, Prague, and Karachi rallied for democracy, cross-racial solidarity, feminism, and white-collar support of the working class, Schickele’s book spoke to passionate currents around the world. Schickele’s book was every inch as readable and trenchant a vision of the post-colonial world as Famine, 1975! But it was the Paddocks’ thrilling exposé of international development—and not Schickele’s manifesto for allyship— that sold copies in the United States. The American public—already exhausted from the Vietnam War and terrified by anti-communist propaganda—had no appetite for the kind of wide-eyed solutions that required collaboration and patience. Americans preferred to read the narratives Paddocks and Ehrlich provided—essentially, rebooted nineteenth-century theories about the teeming masses of the ethnic poor, characterizing foreign affairs as an intractable political cesspool and land wars as utterly unsolvable, a depiction of global dysfunction that absolved the United States of any further responsibility for righting inequality in a maddening world. The disjunct between Schickele’s book and the Paddocks’ illustrated an intellectual divide that stretched over university campuses across the Global North—one that would have lasting consequences for generations to come. While the Paddocks were undergraduates in Ames, Schickele was an associate

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professor active at the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station, where Bill had spent much of his time the year before. They would have walked the same halls, tramped the same campus, perhaps even occupied the same classrooms. In 1954, as the Paddocks were watching a coup unfold in Guatemala, Schickele was departing for Rome to direct the FAO’s Land and Water Branch. It is not impossible that their paths crossed multiple times: in Ames and again later in the world of international agricultural research. But there were important reasons why the Paddocks might have remained ignorant of the theories of history and sociology that informed Schickele’s work. In Ames, Iowa, as in Cambridge, England, the university was increasingly divided into what British novelist C. P. Snow called the “two cultures” of scientific and human approaches.26 Even researchers in disciplines whose concerns were as close as those of plant breeding and agrarian economics might labor on similar problems in a climate of mutual ignorance and even disdain. One reviewer from the social sciences, well versed in the studies the Paddocks were ignoring, described their book as an “unscholarly example” of “dramatic polemics of dubious quality” whose analysis was “irresponsible at best.”27 In their attack on the bureaucracy of development, however, there was at least one crystalline truth that Bill and Liz saw quite clearly: the emergent features of project management at the United Nations, where enormous initiatives were increasingly focused on the future—projects to map the soils of the world, compile the research on agriculture and landownership, and advise developing nations. The Paddocks correctly understood that this research juggernaut had little way of looking forward or backward. It was essentially unaccountable to any structure other than the logic of publication. Memory was available only to locals and the few, such as the Paddocks, whose appointments allowed the leisure of touring the old-fashioned way: walking through a town, interviewing businesspeople, checking up on particular sites. This evanescence and obsolescence were the result, in part, of a mighty new regime of paper that the United Nations—along with the American university system—had helped to construct.28 The Paddocks believed that the solution was more coordination—proctored, perhaps, by the United Nations itself. The United States could transfer its military budget to the United Nations’ peacekeeping force. But what happened when politics in the United States and developing nations diverged? The Paddocks were shorter on specific solutions, longer on indictment. They believed the problem was the bureaucrat—and they characterized the social science theories so beloved by bureaucrats as the heir of ancient superstition. “Today’s

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priestly class of government officials, international technocrats, development experts, and foreign aid advisors still have nothing to offer the peasant farmer that will enable him to produce a surplus,” they wrote.29 In the era in which the Paddocks were working and writing, an ideology of information coordination had dominated both the FAO and most other institutions of international development. We have dubbed this ideology bibliocracy, or rule by documentation—documentation as a fixation and a surrogate for real change. The Paddocks understood that bringing about something as vast as political and economic opportunity for all through research would require a sprawling effort—collective labors that might never be finished. One of the major defects of bureaucracy in an age of expanding management was that for any query, debate, or failure, there was always more potential research to be done—and this would inevitably spiral down into an infinity of clients, services, and theoretical problems. As a result, suggested the Paddocks, policy tended to obey a law of intellectual fashion only superficially associated with the research programs running in the background. A more generous interpretation of the bibliographies would necessarily acknowledge how the United Nations slowly, deliberately, and cumulatively tilted social science away from the logic of empire and toward an appreciation of marginalized perspectives—the concerns of peasants, indigenous forms of land tenure (including commons and common-pool forms of ownership), and women’s ownership and labor. The era of bibliography at the FAO was launched in the hopes of coordinating a vast transfer of information and research from the first world to the third in support of peasant revolutions. But seen more and more through the lens of bibliography and publishing, an emphasis on novelty and innovation meant more bibliographies—ones that were aligned with modern doctrines of growth-oriented economics. Predictably, the United Nations thus published more bibliographies about commodity agriculture and the pesticide industry—while novel studies of land tenure and peasant cooperatives essentially vanished. Eventually, much later, historians of Mexico would return to Papaloapan— the land reform settlement visited by the Paddocks and denounced as an example of fraud—and ask the hard questions: why did Papaloapan—the vaunted land settlement of Mexico that the Paddocks visited in 1957 and again in 1969— fail, abandoned by peasants, turned over to land speculators? The Paddocks’ interpretation suggested that peasants were lazy, land speculators were eager to take advantage, and bureaucratic oversight was missing. But the Paddocks’ survey of development projects didn’t entail much research.

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It certainly didn’t include a return to the documentary record to understand the fate of different settlements, nor did it attempt to trace where blame should be accurately applied. Its mood—the total denunciation of international development—should be seen in the light of history as an ideological slant rather than an informed opinion. One historian, reviewing the document trail, has asserted that Papaloapan’s failures were the result not of some fault with land redistribution but the result of disillusionment that grew alongside other social and environmental disasters of large-scale projects associated with Mexican president Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946–52), in contrast with the more successful smaller-scale land redistribution projects executed under Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s.30 The ideology that motivated the Paddocks was not so simple as faith in the power of markets or deregulation. Rather, many observers, including the Paddocks, believed that this era of documentation and expert rule was due to be challenged. By 1964, the attacks on information-gathering systems were many— the classic being during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, when students rejected the punch cards used to manage enrollments as an emblem of the information society.31 The break with bibliocracy came from various sources: here a radical critique of the use of information to secure hierarchy, made in solidarity with the peasants of Vietnam; there a libertarian assault on the overreach of the state; elsewhere, with the Paddocks, science preaching the need for efficiency; with Schumacher, preaching that technology itself should be sufficient to engineer cultural change. In the years after 1968, a series of guerrilla attacks launched at the organs of bibliocracy would transform the shape of international governance as practiced until that time.

A Bombing, a Framing, and a Poison Pen The American attack on land redistribution that the Paddocks helped to inspire would be party neutral: both radicals and conservatives would come to believe that land reform was a kind of psychological operation to win peasants to a particular ideology. In 1969, campus radicals at the University of Wisconsin demanded that the Land Tenure Center and the ROTC be shut down or exiled from campus. Their demands were published in the campus Daily Cardinal and reviewed critically by the conservative Daily Badger Herald.32 The rejection of explicitly Marxist policies at the Land Tenure Center left student radicals suspicious of the organization’s collaboration with the less savory aspects

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of U.S. foreign policy. On the radical left as well as the right, Americans had begun to interpret land redistribution as a front for coercion. In 1974, Marion R. Brown, a professor in Wisconsin’s Department of Agricultural Journalism and director of the Land Tenure Center, was framed by the CIA, accused of running a drug ring in Peru. Newspapers claimed that the professor had persuaded a naval officer to smuggle cocaine in diplomatic pouches, which ultimately arrived at local food markets and dry cleaners in New York and Washington, D.C.33 The American war against land reform had become such a fixture of policy that passport confiscations and trials had evolved into a war of dirty tricks at home. The position of the social sciences at the American research university would be destabilized by orchestrated attacks on international development as it had been practiced in the 1950s and ’60s. American conservatives wanted to make sure that land reform never came back—at least insofar as it was supported by taxpayer funds. In 1983, the Heritage Foundation issued a report on the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin claiming that university faculty there subverted “academic freedom” into “academic terrorism.”34 The charges against the Land Tenure Center were repeated and recirculated through newspaper articles.35 In 1985, a Milwaukee paper condemned the Land Tenure Center for financial support of “active Marxists” in Nicaragua.36 Meanwhile, the charges were expanded to target new individuals. In 1983, a Jesuit priest, Peter Marichetti, was exposed as an “espoused Marxist” for his work among the Sandinistas.37 Too statist for the right, too individualist for the left, land reform was being utterly rejected across the United States—a nation that little understood the impulses of other continents. In the years directly after the Paddock books, an alternative to bibliocracy was proposed, not by the Paddocks but by the World Bank—in the form of a system of checks on developing world policy, crystallized in the form of debt. In the world post-Paddocks, it was bankers, not bureaucrats, who would become the auditors of social ventures. The seeds of the neoliberal revolution were sewn in the fear of communism, suspicion of developing world politics, the veneration of science, the clamor to end waste, the primacy of the ledger as a means of ranking and promoting development projects—and, especially, the distrust of history and the social sciences as a means of understanding and supporting other cultures. It would become increasingly impossible for anyone to realize an inter­ national collaboration on behalf of housing, land, or water for the poor, in any nation, in the climate of disillusionment and blame that followed. In the atmo-

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sphere of moral panic that faced Americans during the era of the Vietnam War, a generation reached for numbers—peasant calculators, improved strains of corn—while abandoning the ideological framework the previous generation had built to support the peasants of the world. In such a climate of ideological warfare, almost anything could happen.

The Assassination of Land Reform Aroused by the spirit of paranoia, U.S.-led institutions began to largely dismantle the mechanisms of international governance. In 1974, the same year that newspapers were busy covering the supposed cocaine ring launched by a social scientist at the University of Wisconsin, a report was printed by the World Bank that echoed the Paddock assessment of land redistribution programs in Latin America, describing international land reform in general as a failure. The report—Bank Policy on Land Reform, written by the American development expert Wolf Ladejinsky under pressure from a World Bank regime directed by Robert McNamara—was a direct assault on the work the FAO had been doing for twenty-five years: supporting small farmers and advising nations how to create more equitable systems of landholding through taxation, redistribution, and infrastructure. It represented a realignment of World Bank policy to match America’s post-Vietnam policy of aggressive free trade, food production, and industrial agriculture. In short, it was a seizure of international policy through the funding agency of the World Bank, explicitly cutting the money supplied to the United Nations and the FAO over the issue of land. Robert McNamara came to the World Bank in 1968 after being humbled by his managerial failures in Vietnam. He had presided over a push for quantification in Vietnam: progress measured in terms of deaths; and military intelligence turned to surveys and computational analysis to guide social programs and to measure the “hearts and minds” of Vietnamese peasants.38 Back at World Bank headquarters in New York, McNamara would oversee a move toward policies marked by the same deference to numbers that he had instantiated in Vietnam. The new policies would hold every UN project accountable in real financial terms. They would dispense with theories about peasant welfare and attempts to limit the standing debt assigned to developing world nations. McNamara’s World Bank would instead orchestrate an era of sinking standards of relief, the privatization of housing and land, and mounting debt across the developing world as a whole. In the countryside, the McNamara policies tilted the world heavily in the direc-

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tion of industrial farming. Instead of land ceilings for farms that were too big, the report proposed minimum land sizes, outlawing farms that were too small to be productive. Small farming was dangerous to a nation’s food supply, according to McNamara’s policy, because land divided into small parcels was land unavailable for industrial production. His reports even characterized small farmers who practiced subsistence—that is, eating food that they themselves grew—as greedy eaters whose selfish actions jeopardized the national economy.39 Every small farm thus effectively represented theft from the nation by competing with the large-scale food industry.40 As the product of an American moment obsessed with overpopulation, McNamara’s World Bank presented land redistribution the gateway to famine. The only kind of land reform endorsed by Bank Policy on Land Reform was the consolidation of fragmented holdings into more economically productive industrial farms with modern “transportation, irrigation, and mechanized operations.”41 The report explicitly rejected the rallying cry of land reformers since the Irish Land War—that “the benefits should go to those who till the soil”—as unfairly biased against city dwellers.42 McNamara’s World Bank left little room for UN agencies to administer justice by recognizing the land claims of dispossessed peasants. Ignoring the Indian literature on technologically intensive small farms and their productivity, the World Bank report buried land reform beneath the contemporary panic over an exploding world population, dramatized by recent best sellers like those of the Paddock brothers and Ehrlich, which described a population “bomb.”43 Land was being reclassified from a form of property to which individuals and groups had rights to a commodity that could be bought by the highest bidder. Under the heading of an “anti-poverty” campaign, McNamara announced a regime in which peasant access to housing and water were renamed “basic needs.”44 Success in supplying “basic needs” would be reckoned in terms of standards of living, gross domestic product, and caloric consumption.45 The category of “basic needs” allowed a right to shelter to be disaggregated from a right to land; it introduced a new framework for understanding the position of land in international development. The report Bank Policy on Land Reform explicitly rejected the valuation of “land-per-person” as a proxy measurement for wealth at large. Land would henceforth be considered merely as one commodity among others: a valuable resource, like capital itself, that should belong to those who had wealth and could purchase it. That was a grand enough transformation. Beneath assertions of market categories, however, there raged a struggle between institutions. McNamara’s

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World Bank was doing something more than merely reclassifying economic categories—it was announcing a challenge to the United Nations. Many issues of identity, citizenship, and empowerment—long the subject of discussions at the United Nations—were swept out of the conversation in one gesture. Over the course of previous decades, the World Bank had continually opposed UN initiatives that allowed the United Nations to elect to fund work independently of bank policy. By officially narrowing the circumstances under which FAO projects would be funded, Bank Policy on Land Reform signaled a final shift of power from the FAO to the World Bank.46 The World Bank hammered the last nail into the coffin of international land reform as an initiative coordinated by the United Nations. Never designed to be truly independent, the United Nations had no authority to enforce policy from the beginning: its agencies overall lacked the power to compel member nations, a right that the great powers involved with its founding had reserved for themselves. But even its abilities to advise and maintain neutrality depended on enough funding to keep its activities going and enough independence to choose its missions. What was being fought, in the 1980s, was a war of memory.

Conclusion The situation might have played out otherwise if the framers of the United Nations, a generation before, had possessed the foresight to comprehend the capacity of the world’s strongest nations to dominate work executed on behalf of the poor. In 1945, the designers of the United Nations, advised by national powers greedy for control on the global scene, had relinquished many proposed roles in the international milieu that might have given it more ability to realize the regimes of social justice that its founders envisioned. The United Nations did not obtain an international court of justice, and the FAO did not have the power to compel member nations to redistribute land. Furthermore, the FAO lacked the resources even to invest the small farmers of member nations with hoes. Had an empowered and well-resourced international institution been created, it might have more effectively advocated for the poor farmers of the world. Instead, the FAO became the purveyor of soil maps and salmon bibliographies to rich and poor alike, feeding them to a world where certain elites were increasingly skeptical that research even needed to be coordinated— or worse, paid for. As the FAO’s administrators continued to collect citations and index rural

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change, throughout the developing world peasants were losing the war to keep their land. A new philosophy had begun to undermine international efforts to support land redistribution. The FAO’s exercises in bibliography could not save the developing world from competition with industrial agriculture, from demands that indebted peasants pay back enormous loans, or from the ideological assaults of the Cold War. With the FAO unable to effect change in other ways, publishing, that once homely tool, became the ultimate goal in itself—and this was the golden age of bibliocracy. For researchers overwhelmed by the scope of global dysfunction, publishing may have served as a soporific—a distraction from the pursuit of justice in a changing world. For some researchers, disenchanted by bureaucratic inertia, publishing may have provided the strongest illusion of forward movement—especially as the United Nations grew increasingly sidelined from realpolitik in the 1960s, and decisions regarding global development strategies came to focus narrowly on loans and industrialization—two categories the FAO had sworn off engaging. Ill equipped to survive the mercurial political climate of the Cold War, the United Nations certainly failed to create a strategy to support small farmers, but not before laying out a series of experiments in provisioning post-colonial movements with the tools of distributed economic growth at a global scale. Today, few Westerners have heard of land reform. What survived of the ideas of a global peasant revolution remained in places where peasants were able to organize, generation against generation—for instance, the landless peoples’ movement (MST) in Brazil and the Zapatistas of Mexico.47 So long as those movements are viewed as idiosyncratic and discontinuous, it is hard to imagine them as integral to a larger movement or a longer swath of time. In a sense, that myopia—imagining that collective movements don’t matter, or that peasant grievances will disappear on their own—is a direct product of a particular brand of American conservative thought during the Cold War: its vicious refusal to endorse global movements for occupancy and independence acknowledged by the rest of the world. The world lacked—and still lacks—a narrative that explains the capture of international institutions by the likes of Wittfogel and his followers. Perhaps the sprawling theories of world history embraced at the United Nations seemed to some contemporaries like an ill fit for the world of the Cold War. Administrators at the FAO may have had a systematic history of international politics that fit the world from 1870 to 1940, but few of the FAO’s agents were actively writing a history of the postwar world. Faced with the axioms of Wittfogel, they

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possessed little in the way of a theoretical analysis of how economic history was unfolding around them. What they could not see, above all, was the relative attenuation of the United Nations’ authority in many spheres, and the rise of U.S. interventions, increasingly active on a global scale, both through direct military power and the indirect financial limits imposed by American directors of the World Bank. Meanwhile, another set of theories was coming into play to explain the limits of coordinated action between post-colonial, worker, and peasant movements around the world. In many quarters, social scientists were concluding that a global social revolution would be necessary if a fairer economy were ever to arise. Capitalism was “overdetermined,” in the sense that each individual, decision, and policy was structured by all that had gone before it, according to the French philosopher and Marxist Louis Althusser—who borrowed the word from Freud, mirroring a psychological narrative of history like Wittfogel.48 Viewed from such a perspective, there is nothing surprising about the co-optation of well-intentioned reformers: the FAO, playing on a capitalist field, never had a chance. In Beijing, Moscow, and elsewhere, careful thinkers probably viewed the collapse of UN-led land redistribution without surprise. Before we wholly endorse such a view, however, it might be wise to pause and remark on the surprising temporal persistence and global span of ideas about land redistribution. By 1970, modern ideas about land reform and rent control were a century old. Land reforms had been implemented or attempted on every inhabited continent. There was a great diversity of styles of implementation and outcomes, ranging from admirable examples (rent control in Ireland) to violent revolutions (Maoist China) to stillborn failures (rent control in England). Land redistribution has not been entirely abandoned as a model for reform either. In Europe, land redistribution has reemerged as the agenda of activists protesting the legacy of aristocratic privilege, challenging bank ownership of homes and public space, and demanding a right to public housing. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003 instantiated a “community right to buy” that foregrounded traditional legal protections afforded the inhabitants of a community against speculation, artificial rent inflation, foreclosure, or eviction. Grounding these concerns in the history of legal reform gave vulnerable populations effective tools to defend their communities, and to form an even more powerful consensus protecting the values instantiated in law by their ancestors in order to hold communities together in the face of financial crises and

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the flight of capital. Such precedents offer some of the most important tools that contemporary communities possess. Raw data, as well as history, has backed the promises of land redistribution to create an even playing field. In other words, it simply isn’t true that land redistribution failed on economic grounds; rather, the economic grounds— like the stage of international politics dominated by U.S. interests in the era of the World Bank—were rigged.

10  •  A Neoliberal Rebellion in Britain

In the 1940s and ’50s, a new set of writers from developed nations challenged government bureaucracy with a new vision of market efficiency. These writers—later dubbed “neoliberal” for their adherence to propositions about capitalism derived from eighteenth-century classical liberal thought—viewed proposals for government rent regulation and land redistribution as heresy. Far more rational, they argued, was the logic of price and market in allocating land. Historical research has concentrated extensively on the twentieth-century impact of neoliberalism—defined as the twentieth-century movement that endorsed market competition as the basis for political decision making—on ideas in the university, in social policy, and in law.1 After the 1970s, however, the most visible impact of neoliberal ideas was on housing and land policy. Because land redistribution programs depended on states interfering in the price of rent or housing, ideas about market rationalism struck at their root. When states were unwilling to leverage prices to influence accessibility to housing, earlier techniques used to defend occupancy—such as tallies of persons evicted or rent strikes—became useless. Britain had been an early participant in conversations about rent control and land redistribution. In the postwar world, British Labour politicians laid plans for land nationalization. Despite these precedents, claims about the ability of markets to redistribute resources would destabilize the land question in Britain—for good. Neoliberal ideas about the ability of the market to coordinate resources, and housing in particular, made their way into British politics in the 1970s, producing one of the most dramatic political realignments of the century. In the bizarre

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reversals that followed, Britain—the home of J. S. Mill, the author of the first modern rent control and land reform laws—became one of the first nations to privatize its public housing, trusting an epidemic of squatting to allocate underused land more efficiently than the government could. A series of crises led to discarding Britain’s commitments to public housing and a national program of land redistribution. There were four components of that watershed: a housing crisis, an opportunity opened up by political scandal, the promotion of a new ideology about the market, and financial decisions to transfer British wealth into private real estate. Ideological, financial, and political levers triggered the first episode of an emerging series of policy movements to liberalize and marketize real estate that culminated in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s privatization of public housing for the middle class. Together, these moves inflated the price of land out of the reach of ordinary citizens. Despite its claim to provide housing for all, neoliberal reform instead portended the assassination of occupancy rights in Britain. The results of this reconfiguration of policy were profound. The case of Britain’s turn from state-led land redistribution programs to neoliberal ones is emblematic of patterns of politics across Europe, North America, and much of the developing world.

Free Market Theory In “Roofs or Ceilings?” the 1946 pamphlet that catapulted Milton Friedman into public debate about the nature of the economy, the American economist documented a pivotal moment in his political and economic thinking—the difficulty experienced by many families in finding housing during the wartime price controls on housing. Friedman implied that, because almost nothing was available on the housing market, many families were being forced to “double up” with other people—a choice, he hinted, that most families would prefer to avoid.2 Price controls had spread across the United States during the Second World War to protect workers from the potential inflation of housing prices. After all, the demand for housing was increasing in those years: many individuals moved to port cities to take jobs building ships or munitions. Meanwhile, the construction of new housing had drawn to a halt, as workers were drafted to join the war. In these conditions, the cost of housing was liable to go up. Government policies kept the price of housing artificially low. In an intellectual move that must have seemed ironical to readers who

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watched the rise of rent control, Friedman offered a surprising conclusion. He blamed the government—rather than the war itself—for creating a postwar shortage of housing. Friedman’s conviction was that any shortage of housing after the immediate cessation of hostilities was inherently irrational—after all, property investors and construction interests had a natural incentive to build housing fit to the demands of solvent individuals, like himself, who moved to major cities after the close of the war. Because the government had enacted rent control, Friedman argued, property owners were disincentivized from building more housing. At a moment when many people were clamoring for the government to build more affordable housing, Friedman made a novel proposition: the way to get more housing was to repeal rent control entirely. In his theory—which he later expanded from housing to a range of other economic problems—Friedman spelled out how the market could have adjusted to provide affordable housing for the middle class if rent controls had been removed. At the core of Friedman’s thinking was a prejudice that resonated little with mainstream politics at the time, but has grown more popular since: markets and investors regulate resources more efficiently than the state; bureaucrats who worked for the government, whatever goods they promised in the name of the public, tended to waste both money and time. Friedman’s defense of this position hinged on pure rationality, stripped of sentimentalism for the poor or needy. In the case of housing, sentiment for the homeless or underhoused had no place in his thinking. It was hard rationality, not gushy feeling, that guided Friedman’s critique of state-built housing, which took the form of a four-point view on how rent control legislation damages the natural mechanisms of price: 1. In a free market, there is always some housing immediately available for rent—at all rent levels. 2. The bidding up of rents forces some people to economize on space. Until there is sufficient new construction, this doubling up is the only solution. 3. The high rents act as a strong stimulus to new construction. 4. No complex, expensive, and expansive machinery is necessary. The rationing is conducted quietly and impersonally through the price system.3 Friedman argued that in an ideal economy, price, rather than law, would tell the construction industry when to build. Price indicators would inform poten-

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tial developers about demand for housing, given that money available for investment acts as an indicator of the number of bodies that need housing and their relative affluence. More savings would indicate more affluent persons. Superabundant savings would indicate the emergence of a class that could afford larger houses, air-conditioning, automatic washers, hot tubs, and vacation homes. In an ideal setting, a stable rate of savings indicates to banks the potentiality for property development, and banks would invest in property accordingly, as they would do with any other form of investment. Banks, not the state, were thus the ideal providers of housing. Beneath the shroud of unflinching rationality, however, at least a trace of idealism was at work in Friedman, even in this first publication. In his first statement—“In a free market, there is always some housing immediately available for rent—at all rent levels”—he advanced an axiom that later events would falsify entirely. Perhaps such untruths lurked because Friedman ultimately did not care about housing. Rent control and housing were only of peripheral interest to Friedman and his early neoliberal colleagues. But rent control and housing were things that many citizens cared about a great deal, and Friedman’s promise to rationalize housing would touch a nerve, as his ideas resurfaced with every housing crisis in the decades that followed. According to Friedman, each crisis of housing was essentially a fraud perpetrated on middle-class and working-class families by bureaucrats. Individuals had trouble finding adequate dwellings because government regulations resulted in a lack of available property. It was a simple enough formula, and conveniently, it assigned blame for the housing crisis in an obvious way. Friedman’s ideas about rent might have seemed at first like a minor matter. But he and his cohort were opening a Pandora’s box of radical skepticism, unleashing a million doubts about the ability of bureaucracy to support the collective good. Persons bitten by radical skepticism would come to deride the possibility of citizens collaborating for the improvement of their world through any arrangements other than those of the market. Some would even come to disbelieve that a government elected by the people was inherently responsible for providing its citizens with a livable world and opportunities for fortune. At the most extreme, apostles of reason doubted the worth of any government in a world governed by market incentives and economic self-interest, finally disbelieving in the worthiness of government-built roads, tax-supported schools, and state-provided water. Friedman’s pamphlet was published in the same year that Jorge Luis Borges published his fictional account of a ridiculously large map, and a year after the

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founding of the FAO. It was sixty-five years after the first modern rent control law, in Ireland, and thirty years after Gandhi was leading rent strikes in Bihar. It was two years after the GI Bill created a program of subsidized mortgages for white homeowners in America. In the year Friedman’s essay was published, soldiers returning from the front to London marched with banners reading “Homes for Everybody Before Luxury for the Rich.” Inaugural activities were under way at the newborn FAO and the United Nations, established within days of each other in the previous year. It was three years before the UK Town and Country Planning Act would give urban planners unprecedented power to halt any form of private construction in the name of organizing efficient cities in the service of all. Friedman was not the only thinker of his time consumed by questions about providing sufficient housing, or the only individual concerned about the political model responsible for housing’s supply. In the same year as the pamphlet appeared, in China, the peaceful land redistribution schemes on a village level, hitherto pursued without violence, were beginning to escalate into campaigns of attacks on landlords. One year after the publication of Friedman’s pamphlet, McCarthyist trials would begin in the United States. In the years that followed, many Americans and Europeans began to associate state regulation in general with violence and economic failure. They began to look for ways of formulating an alternative to states—and they argued for markets. Friedman’s early pamphlet echoed a grander critique of government that had lately been extended by the Viennese economist Friedrich von Hayek, who had taught at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1950, and from 1950 to 1962 at the University of Chicago, where his tenure as a faculty member overlapped with Friedman’s. While Hayek is most widely known, perhaps, for his defense of classical liberalism, his studies encompassed a variety of themes that became influential in the 1970s. In his books from the 1940s—The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Individualism and Economic Order (1948)—Hayek formulated his anxieties about the capacity of authoritarian states to exploit citizens. Hayek was hardly unusual for his time in his wariness of the abuse of power. Like many European intellectuals of the 1940s, he was witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust; his relationships with Jewish intellectuals such as his cousin, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, informed Hayek’s arguments about the horrors of state authority extended indefinitely. Hayek’s line of thinking about the importance of preventing future Holocausts ran in parallel to that of the liberal

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philosopher Hannah Arendt as well as that of the Marxist-turned-conservative-­ historian Karl Wittfogel in America. In other ways, however, Hayek parted ranks with other philosophers of civil society, his speculations tantamount to a rare telescope into the future. In addition to his writings about the state, Hayek also explored the information society of computers. He read with fascination about new experiments like the massive indices and bibliographies being collected at the FAO. In his 1964 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek applauded the widespread collection of information and its potential to improve efficiencies. This technological optimism reflected many of the themes that had enchanted advocates of grassroots mapping like Dudley Stamp—and perhaps it reflected the chiliastic utopianism embodied in Schickele’s theory of the “family farm” as the ideal unit of production. To this general fascination with participatory economics, however, Hayek added his general skepticism about the state’s ability to deftly collect information or administer markets based on its results, and an equally profound faith in the market as the ideal network for coordinating the collection of information. For readers of Hayek who were familiar with the many contemporary programs of indexing and assorting information about society and the economy— among them the FAO’s half-baked experiments with the Soil Map of the World and its as-yet incomplete experiments with constructing an information pipeline—Hayek’s warnings about information must have come across as a prescient and cutting critique. Canny readers may have asked themselves a line of stark and uneasy questions: was international government—or any government— capable of organizing an initiative as widespread as an economically successful global redistribution of land? It was to the skeptic of government who harbored questions of this kind that Hayek spoke. Hayek armed individuals who were predisposed to resist the state with a general rule for interpreting the world around them: the market, not the state, should be managing information and resources. Hayek’s tiny seed of an idea, once planted in the United Kingdom, would germinate and grow into the greatest of intellectual movements: the tree of the knowledge that government is inherently evil. In the view of Hayek and his followers, markets would satisfy citizens’ needs—for instance, housing—with an efficiency that states could never provide. While housing was of limited direct importance for Hayek, it was nevertheless a matter of extreme importance for many citizens. In the decades that

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followed World War II, housing would become a major frontier of the debate over state regulation and markets in general, and the followers of Friedman and Hayek came to organize a full-on attack on the idea that states and civil servants possessed the capability of solving housing crises. By the 1960s, the ideas of Friedman and Hayek were given direction and shape by a group of British lobbyists organized around the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)—a British think tank founded on free market principles, and one of the most important forces in British politics in the era that followed. Tradition has it that the idea for the IEA was spawned in 1945, when a dis­ illusioned UK civil servant working in the Ministry of Defense read a summary of The Road to Serfdom in the Reader’s Digest. The civil servant in question, Anthony Fisher, sought out an appointment with Hayek himself, and the economist urged Fisher to create a political vehicle designed to promote reason to an unreasonable world. When Fisher later founded and sold a company, he invested the profits in the formal creation of the IEA. From 1955, the IEA operated as a nonprofit, and Fisher began recruiting a stable of economists influenced by Hayek to promote market-based ideas. For the first eight years of its existence, the IEA would issue occasional books on monetary policy and pension reform. The founders, however, had bigger sites in mind: they wanted the IEA to foment a “Fabian Society for nonsocialists,” a political advocacy group capable of creating a political revolution as vast as the one that resulted in Britain’s pensions and public education system at the end of the nineteenth century.4 To accomplish this, they would need to do what many international organizations had dreamed of doing in the postwar years: they would build an information pipeline. They would tap the economics departments of the University of Chicago and similarly conservative universities in the United States, bringing the critiques of market-minded economists to a general readership. From 1963 to 1965, the IEA published a flood of books and pamphlets for a British readership, outlining the logic of “competition,” the “marketplace,” “enterprise,” “economic miracles,” “economic efficiency,” “stable growth,” “macro-­economic models,” and the role that this new jargon might play in the rebirth of Britain, to quote the title of a book authored by Arthur Seldon, the institute’s founder. Another fleet of publications argued that market principles could be applied to every potential zone of government undertaking, as market reforms would be both possible and liberating. Pamphlets explained what market-based reforms might mean for Britain’s education and healthcare systems, sales and inheritance taxes, the steel industry, farming, the land market,

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urban planning, and even public libraries—which the author believed could be approved by creating a levy on reading. The authors offered a barrage of new jargon, proposing the review of budgets as a panacea for every facet of British life. The provision of welfare, the authors suggested, exhibited innumerable inefficiencies that could be corrected by careful finance-minded review.5 This was only the first volley, of course, in what would become a sustained and focused attack on the organs of British governance—with the state provision of housing and regulation of land as primary targets. Beginning in 1966, the IEA would harness its research to launch an all-out assault on state restrictions on investments in property, rent controls and, indeed, all public ownership of land. A new armada of treatises published after 1966 targeted the state ownership of railroad, roads, and houses. They looked backward nostalgically to a day when private railroads covered Britain, and pointed across the ocean to bustling, unregulated Hong Kong.6 As the IEA was issuing these pamphlets, its leaders were busy cultivating politicians favorable to such reforms, starting with a then little-known chemist-turned-memberof-­Parliament, Margaret Thatcher.7 Through those connections, a new political era would emerge. The campaign was ahead of its time, and perhaps driving policy in a new direction. Two years later, under a new director—the American Robert McNamara—World Bank policy would shift toward a renewed focus on budgets and markets. Eight years later, in 1974, Friedrich von Hayek would win the Nobel Prize in economics. Thirteen years later, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher would preside over the program that began privatizing public housing in the United Kingdom, selling off state-built housing to the highest bidder. The IEA’s campaign to privatize British land began quietly at first, over the uneventful years that led up to the flood of new publications in 1966. Behind closed doors, a plan came together. It would require the energies, information, and funding of the leaders of the British economy who might have the most to gain from the deregulation of land. IEA leaders began to plan meetings with executives from construction, real estate, and private development. The construction sector was chosen because IEA officers suspected that they might have an ax to grind—and money to put behind the cause. The IEA’s initial survey of economic sectors affected by government regulation suggested that construction, real estate, and development were among the arenas that were systematically hamstrung by regulations. Unlike the education or health sectors, which were largely managed by committed civil servants, the construc-

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tion sector’s leadership also had money to invest in any initiative that might clear the way for more contracts, faster approval, and more building. The cohort of the willing—who joined the IEA for offices and replied to memos and letters—came from the ranks of builders and investors in land: private developers, private investors in real estate, and the construction industry. In conversation after conversation, the IEA’s officers plumbed the experiences of directors of construction companies for evidence of how bureaucratic reviews held up the process of building housing, taking extensive notes on what they learned.8 Representatives of the construction industry were happy to oblige. They suggested that they could provide housing more cheaply if they were not hampered with the costs imposed by government delays, and that in the process of building housing, they could also help to solve unemployment. Local authorities, they urged, used land inefficiently. For instance, urban green belts contributed to the high prices of land “by artificially increasing the scarcity of land and by forcing high density (i.e. high rise and high cost) building on internal authorities and private developers.”9 Public housing was also singled out as an example of government wastefulness. “At Sutton the housing committee insisted that a tower block should be built with no central heating installation on the grounds that tenants should be free to choose their own,” private companies explained. “But individual provision is vastly more wasteful and expensive.”10 From conversations such as these, IEA officers recorded every possible argument that might help them to attack a Labour Party platform of housing and land use. Builders in the construction trades could easily describe a long list of projects that might have run differently had they been in charge—for instance, the failure to install heating units in public housing apartments in advance of families moving in, with the result that equipment had to be installed later by individuals at an exorbitant cost. Of course, the heating units had been skipped because of civil servants’ concern with keeping the bill for public housing low for the taxpayer, while making units as affordable as possible for the new tenants. But this sort of calculus little featured in the thinking of the IEA officers, who were looking to sell a scandal.11 Every anecdote expressing the wastefulness of the welfare state was useful. IEA officers were trying to hone their accounts of the promise of market logic, bringing to life the principles expressed in arid economic texts. They were accumulating contemporary details that underscored the inefficiency of government works paid for by taxpayers. The entire land use bureaucracy and urban

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planning enterprise, they would argue, represented a choke on profits by delaying any proposed building scheme for years—sometimes for a decade— while the proposal was inspected and revised for its fit with urban planning. Yet the complaints voiced by the private builders in this archive hardly amount to a resounding indictment of an inept and wasteful bureaucracy. Officers at the IEA carefully edited the details of the letters they received, assembling only the data that supported their position. After all, the IEA was not set up to weigh the costs and benefits of state and market activity for the common good; nor did its officers have a mandate to evenly weigh theory and reality, as might a scholar whose time was dedicated to the pursuit of truth. The IEA was a political organ, not a department of philosophy. It was collecting a list of possible objections—however remote from reality they might be. It was, more properly, a war room for drawing up plans with which to attack state bureaucracy and private taxation. Through conversations with building firms, the IEA gathered early arguments about employment. In 1966–67, it carried out a survey of residents of public housing asking about their experiences.12 Soon, the results of this research phase began to appear. Pamphlets from the IEA blasted contemporary land use legislation as a disorganized mess, a “plethora of good intentions” characterized by “a new housing or rent act on average once every three years.”13 What was needed, the IEA asserted, was a new approach characterized by economic care and intellectual rigor, as typified by the discipline of microeconomics, which, the pamphlets pointed out, had only rarely been brought to bear on housing issues in Britain. Moreover, internal documents quoted polls suggesting that some 60 percent of heads of households opposed rent and price controls. IEA officials concluded that there was a silent, dissatisfied majority fed up with British housing law in action. That same majority, they believed, could be goaded into actively supporting an economic revolution—one in which market principles, rather than idealism, guided the allocation of housing.14 IEA officials began to author and circulate pamphlets decrying rent reform, urban planning, and the oppressive delays associated with land nationalization. In 1966, the IEA began a research study on council housing and house building, guided by the IEA’s director, Ralph Harris, an economist by training. The study was funded by major corporations in the construction and real estate sectors. Harris sought the support of construction industry executives, urging them to organize an assault on land use policies. The building industry, Harris argued, was bound by a thousand ill-planned restrictions that prevented those

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in construction from creating the buildings that could end the housing crisis for good. The IEA and its allies thus tilted the message: whereas generations of politicians had blamed high rents on landlords hoarding land, they blamed the state. It was government regulations that stopped the noble construction industry from building houses that the public so badly needed. It was red tape—not human greed—that led to a housing crisis.15 The think tank recruited academic advisers to bolster its recommendations, including lecturers, readers, and professors of town planning, urban studies, land economy, finance, economics, and valuation. The new spokesmen for the institute included J. B. Cullingworth, author of a textbook on town and country planning, and Ralph Turvey, author of a study of the price analysis of electricity. After nearly two decades of the IEA publishing little-read pamphlets, its message was beginning to take root in political circles. In 1973, IEA affiliate Martin Pawley published The Private Future, in which he documented the privatization of many activities once considered public, a growing trend. It was denounced by liberal commentators, but it laid out a blueprint that many analysts would later recognize as the original plan for privatizing Britain. In 1974, Alan Walters, later the personal economic adviser of Margaret Thatcher, began authoring economic essays that envisioned a world in which the sewers and roads themselves, as well as all housing and public space, had been privatized.16 The ownership and administration of land and housing in the city were primary subjects of attack, just as they had been for the IEA. Walters and other London School of Economics faculty began to issue pamphlets that decried government interference with the property market, advocating a return to a laissez-faire, private ownership of land as the sole method for justly adjudicating what Walters described as contemporary warfare between squatters and council residents, between the deserving and undeserving poor. One such pamphlet, Government and the Land, struck straight at the institutions through which modern governments had, for nearly a century, regulated city development: “Is town planning necessary?”17 Through the influence of these pamphlets, the message spread. Editorials in the London Times began to praise urban planning experiments that did away with zoning and other forms of government control.18 Founded in 1955, the IEA came into being in the same year the British political scientist Doreen Warriner had visited Egypt and declared land redistribution the “most important social change now taking place in the world.” The

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IEA was founded eight years after the UK Town and Country Planning Act had empowered British urban planners to halt any development whatsoever. Even as the IEA aimed to dismantle state power over land in Britain, it also mirrored the mechanisms of information dissemination then being used at the United Nations. Just as published bibliographies had been the chosen instrument of the FAO, so too coordinated publications were strategic opportunities undertaken by the political right. The conservative think tank was the vanguard of a counter-movement to ideas about occupancy that depended on the state. The attacks of the IEA would resonate with significant parts of the British public, where questions about the welfare state had been fermenting for decades.

Dissatisfaction with the Welfare State While Friedman was drafting his critique of rent control in New York, dissatisfaction with the welfare state’s handling of land and housing was already spreading across the United Kingdom. The chief markers of this dissatisfaction were suspicion of prestige and disbelief in the promises of land nationalization. Increasingly, conversations about the welfare state would come to circulate around fears and distrust of bureaucracy. The era of expert planning had created a mountain of red tape. Under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 every transaction in land had to be rubber-stamped as either declined or approved—and if it was declined, it had to be measured to see who had lost out and by how much and whether the crown owed them money. The critique of bureaucracy was not exactly new. One can glimpse in many writings of the period—not just those explicitly identified with neoliberalism—a rejection of the maddening redundancies and dehumanizing absurdities satirized in Kafka’s fiction decades earlier. One team of analysts, writing in 1953, argued that the problem was lawyers and urban planners trying to create an equitable system for everyone, a matter beyond their ability. The drafters of the Town and Country Planning Act empowered a cadre of elite urban planners to stop any form of development whatsoever.19 The many taxes, tariffs, and bureaucratic stipulations that surrounded midcentury urban planning generated a bizarre dance that Simon Jenkins, a journalist at the Evening Standard, dubbed the “property game.” This game involved compiling portfolios of prize properties, bundling them into a new package, and transferring them from owner to owner so as to avoid taxes on inheritance designed in the nineteenth century to deflate primogeniture among

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the landed aristocracy.20 Massive fortunes were accumulated seemingly overnight. Stories almost without precedent in British history can be glimpsed through the meteoric rise of investors such as Harold Samuel, whose Land Securities Investment Trust’s value expanded twenty times between 1944 and 1952. This wily class of newly rich property investors created a political constituency capable of playing finance against the public interest, colluding with one another to defeat red tape and eluding even the most scrupulous of civil servants. Red tape created scenes of massive abandoned housing developments—and the numbers of homeless rose. Because of the bureaucracy and scale of intended interventions, grandiose government redevelopment schemes stalled for months and sometimes years. The result was temporarily abandoned housing on a massive scale—one hundred thousand government flats on the official count. These flats, half developed or slated for demolition, were occupied by squatters, whose activities would become the focus of arguments about the insufficiency of the British housing system. Issues such as these were notably dramatized by Ken Loach’s masterpiece of social realism, Cathy Come Home (1966), which followed a working-class woman’s search for affordable housing and her subsequent spiral down the economic ladder until she was evicted from a squat. Cathy’s plight must have resonated profoundly with her real-life contemporaries: after she starts a family with Reg, a well-paid truck driver, all seems well until Cathy becomes pregnant and the two discover that their landlord does not allow children. Cathy stops working, and an injury causes Reg to lose his job. Further catastrophes cause the family to experience a series of evictions. After being evicted as squatters, they seek government services—but, with Kafkaesque inevitability, these require husband and wife to separate. Cathy’s explosion of pent-up rage, directed at other women at the shelter where she is placed, is understandable after this pilgrimage of misery—but it also means that Cathy’s children are taken away from her by social services. Broadcast on television for a wide audience, the documentary offered a latter-day retelling of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress—or even the biblical episode of Job: the protagonist’s afflictions worsen in a descending journey of contemporary misery. The documentary chronicled realities of Britain’s housing market that affected many but pleased few—especially the restrictions on the private housing market and the year-long waitlists young people encountered if they wanted to secure government-subsidized housing at a reasonable cost. Young people were especially caught between the cracks, as Cathy and Reg had been in the

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documentary. Loach’s story helped to inspire an outbreak of real-life squatting across London—part protest and part DIY solution to the housing crisis. Students and intellectuals rallied, calling on the state to provide more housing, with contradictory effects. By drawing attention to the failures of the state, documentaries, protests, and squats armed critics from quarters like the IEA, for whom every disappointment signaled the fact that unregulated markets could outdo the government in providing access to resources. The IEA already had written the screenplay for the acts that unfolded next. Housing issues mobilized two political classes, one quite rich and one quite poor, who resented the British planning acts. The modern real estate merchant, much like the squatter, was a creature that arose in the era of urban planning. Their evolution was only conceivable as a reaction to red tape, and they survived by avoiding countless rules through a series of feints and escapes. The real estate merchant, also like the squatter, had pressing questions about why red tape had been allowed to stymie the housing market. The solution that the IEA had designed, and that would be implemented in the years that followed, would appease the real estate merchant, but not the thinkers and students clamoring for more housing and security for all. New policies spelled an end to red tape but produced an expensive city marked by frequent sales of property on a deregulated market. With every sale, prices escalated. It was heaven to real estate merchants. The Cathys of the world, however, had other dreams, few of which would come true. Instead, they would inherit a changed city—one in which only squatters could survive.

The Landlord’s City Rents surged in London over the 1970s and the decades that followed, as Friedman might have predicted, but higher rents did not solve the housing crisis. If anything, the crisis was intensifying into a catastrophe. Even while the transition from a state-led land economy to a market-led one was under way, some observers began to notice a troubling problem: empty flats—and, indeed, empty buildings. Families vacated London en masse, fleeing to cheaper properties outside the city’s margins. The market, however, did not necessarily solve the housing crisis. The capital of the rich was being invested not in new industries and infrastructure or factories but rather in real estate: that is, investors were paying higher amounts for the ground rent of a building and charging higher rents to the occupants,

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rather than constructing new housing. Capital followed finance: if London offered cheaper rates for financing than Hong Kong, capital invested in London land prices. In the 1970s and ’80s, with the deregulation of markets, cities and regions increasingly competed with one another for lower rates of management. The opening up of land markets to investors—including the limiting of rent control and the free circulation of property prices—began to appear around the world.21 Both ideological and technical in nature, financialization and neoliberalism combined to remove many of the choices about the development of cities and housing from the hands of urban planners, replacing the experts of the state with a distinct caste of bank-appointed experts whose main charge was to create high returns for investors. Contrary to what Friedman had suggested in his 1946 essay, however, those investments did not necessarily take the form of creating more housing in general or more housing affordable to the middle and working classes. That, at any rate, was the verdict of Simon Jenkins, who had explored the consequences of house building grinding to a halt while rents skyrocketed, and while investors nonetheless continued to fund office development.22 The 1974 crisis inaugurated an era of the transfer of assets from investments to real estate, resulting in spiraling prices for offices and houses within London. The sudden arrival of so many willing buyers of pieces of land did one thing: it raised the price of territory to a point where no one could afford to inhabit the land. Land prices were shooting upward so quickly that most property owners in London could get more from interest from reselling the property to another buyer in a Ponzi scheme–like pyramid than from seeking renters. The consequence was a hollow city; office buildings stood empty for years, while the nominal buying price and asking rent of the land soared high above what any local could possibly afford. Rent had become a tool for squeezing gold out of nothing. It was, as historians Margaret Reid and David Dynaston later observed, “the new alchemy.”23 And it turned London into a ghost town. Patterns of migration created extreme exclusion along racial lines.24 Ejection from the city was especially dire for the working class and people of color. The various issues were enshrined in The Specials’ 1981 ska hit, “Ghost Town.” The song is about how the climate of declining economic opportunity and racially targeted police violence resulted in boarded-up storefronts, a mass exodus from the city, extreme policing of public space, and the decline of public musical culture. “Ghost Town” is about what it felt like to be poor during the

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financial crisis of 1974, when jobs disappeared, rents went up, and public rage— failing to identify responsible parties—instead vented itself on racial minorities. The same thing was happening all across Britain. Land prices were going up so high that the government could no longer afford to act as the developer of public housing, nature trusts, and infrastructure. Higher land prices overall increased the hurdles any government, no matter how willing, had to surmount if it wanted to reclaim land for the public sphere—and so, no further plans for such aims were undertaken. The same pattern of high rents with disappearing jobs, meanwhile, was beginning to appear around the world.25 In Britain, the turn from government as the primary manager of land and housing to the market as the primary distributor of land constituted nothing less than a reversal of almost two centuries of political policy. The city of Manchester’s municipal government holdings in land had grown every year from 1815 to 1972, through successive eras of highway administration, water authorities, slum clearance, and housing development. But by 1972, the standing plans had been completed, and financial and political crises led to reversals of holdings in land for the first time. In a 1988 study of these trends, the urban planners mapping them gasped at what their data revealed: “The effects of these changes will take some time to work their way through the system but, almost certainly, the 1980s will turn out to be one of the most profound periods of transformation in the sphere of public landownership.”26 At the end of the nineteenth century, radical journalist Henry George had theorized that increases in the bare rental value of property (as opposed to property development) represented sums of money that were perforce not being invested in factories or roads. Such investments only empowered landlords, creating a class of people with disproportionate control over where government subsides go and who benefits from them. This system tends to structurally impoverish rent-paying members of the working class, who have the fewest investments in real estate.27 George’s critique applies directly to events in Britain during the era of financial liberalization. Starting in 1968 and escalating after 1982, capital went through a transatlantic migration from industrial, infrastructure, and development investments into inflated real estate values. As the Times of London explained, “Land has become a highly emotional issue in Britain”; the increase in prices had driven “the cost of a decent home beyond the reach of countless thousands of British families.”28 At another moment, a political party might have emerged to champion the needs of working families, lobbying for the state to return to its promises of building houses and

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keeping rents low. Unfortunately, the most likely candidate for embarking on such a course was otherwise occupied.

Land Nationalization Dies in Britain In the decades since 1948, the Labour Party had consistently promised that the state would build additional housing. In the mid-1970s, land nationalization stood for the collective hopes of socialism and expert rule, the promise of lower rents and better housing for all. According to editorialist Bernard Levin of the Times, the fate of socialist nationalization as a whole rested on the success or failure of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s land nationalization gambit, part of the 1960s “moral crusade” program the Labour Party candidate had used to rally against the Tories—calling them land speculators who benefited from rising rents at a time of economic stagnation.29 But in April 1974, a massive political scandal destabilized public trust in government land programs. Wilson himself came under attack for purported corruption. Newspapers claimed that Marcia Williams, Wilson’s secretary, and her brother Anthony Field had profited enormously from land speculation using information divulged by Wilson about a land nationalization scheme. Field had purchased a slag heap near Wigan with the intent of selling the slag to develop the land beneath it. When the property appreciated as a result of government interventions nearby, Field claimed he turned a profit of $250,000. The Daily Mail, however, estimated those profits to be $1,860,000. Field and Wilson admitted to having discussed the government’s plans over a game of golf.30 Public resentment flared. Were such insider deals routine? Were Labour elites benefiting from land transactions? Rather than explicating the differences between land speculation and development, Wilson sued the newspapers, raising further questions about the degree to which government officials felt immune from the everyday reality of their constituents.31 The Wilson scandal suggested that the real estate market, far from being subject to government scrutiny and regulation, was capable of corrupting the government. It was the opposite of the promise of popular control over land that squatting, the Labour Party, and leftist intellectuals had championed over the last half century. In Parliament, Wilson attempted to parse the difference between “land speculation” and “property development” to a skeptical audience of MPs, who well understood how much of government land reform rested on collapsing that distinction.32 He was greeted with hoots from the Tory bench.

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A later commentator explained, “This was an entirely routine, arguably even socially useful piece of speculation, but it was undoubtedly ‘land speculation,’ and, given the Labour Party’s dislike of ‘speculators,’ it was an accident waiting to happen.”33 A few weeks later, the allegations against Wilson were complicated by the revelation of a letter on government stationery to the slag heap’s owner bearing Wilson’s signature. Handwriting experts hired by the Daily Mail absolved the prime minister of blame, and subsequent journalism showed that Ronald Milhench, the slag heap owner, had forged the signature himself in the hopes of recruiting moneyed investors to his projects. Milhench was alleged to have told his lawyer that if he could prove a “connexion with Mr Wilson and the land,” he could have sold the letter to journalists for £25,000. Milhench was sentenced to jail for three years.34 As the facts came in, Wilson was ultimately cleared of charges of personal wrongdoing, but the unpleasant affair left behind a portrait of seedy misdealings that tarnished the Labour Party’s reputation for plain dealings with land. The Milhench affair was a drama of middle-class irresponsibility and hubris. The drama was laden with the stink of insider information and a corrupt real estate market in which the most knowledgeable and best connected benefited from land deals. As public attention focused on insider trading as the taint of the land market, contemporary socialists had to produce an argument that did not besmirch their reform platform. They argued that since the eighteenth century insider trading had been a reality of the trade in land; it was not a problem created by—or potentially remedied by—twentieth-century political inventions like land value taxation, participatory mapping, or even land nationalization schemes.35 As faith broke in the state’s abilities to administer land and housing, many foretold that the collapse of the welfare state would not be far behind. In the 1940s and ’50s, advocates of land redistribution at the United Nations had warned that “local elites” formed a bulwark against plans for rationalizing an economy. Britain offered a telling case study: Harold Wilson’s own investments in land became an embarrassment that stopped him from critiquing early free market maneuvers that took London’s housing market out of the hands of the state. The visible manipulation of privilege clashed with claims of a moral crusade, raising the hackles of middling observers already insecure about the extent to which the austerities and bureaucracy of the burgeoning state hurt or helped them. These scandals, jeopardizing public trust in the government’s ability to stand outside of land speculation, sealed discus-

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sions of public land culture for the next three decades. The British left did not seriously raise land nationalization again as an issue until journalist George Monbiot’s “Land Reform Manifesto” of 1995.36 As Western nations began to look toward financial investment—rather than social movements—to allocate land, older ideas about justice began to drop from favor in development and policy circles. Politicians made friends with the reality around them. Front men claimed to be coining a new school of capitalism, a brave reversal of Keynesianism, built on moral fiber and self-help and a return to Victorian values. Seen from a different perspective, however, what is important about this moment is less an intellectual revolution than an abdication of involvement by politicians, who bowed out of their previous role of defending housing and land rights, instead choosing to engage their talents in the form of apologies for big capital. As the journalist John Plender quipped, “Deregulation is . . . one of the few radical courses of action open to politicians that appears to carry little short-term political or budgetary cost.”37 The radical ideas at work now belonged to the bankers, not to the politicians.

Conclusion From the viewpoint of the twenty-first-century historian looking backward, nothing has established a natural law indicating that governments generally fail in their aims to improve the human condition while markets succeed. Both markets and states collect and assort data—and both investors and politicians take action based on that data. Advocates of both state and market may, in the service of their ideal, encourage steps that result in hardships for many. In the postwar world, however, the protean optimism about international development that characterized the founding conversations of the United Nations began to founder on the rocks of resistance. Across the developing world, power grabs and political tumult followed the collapse of empire—many of them prompted by the desire of U.S. interests to tip policy in a certain direction. In the chaos that followed, it was easy for observers who didn’t know their history to turn a disbelieving eye toward the information-collecting projects of states, both international and international. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations may exemplify an institution that produced good results, despite being judged harshly by its contemporaries. By 1971, when the FAO’s Soil Map of the World was published, the map—among the many bold FAO experiments with mapping and bibliography—could demonstrate

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little immediate improvement in the condition of individuals in the developing world, even though the map had taken decades to produce. While profound criticism of national and international governance was undoubtedly warranted, a study of those turbulent decades does not bear out a wholesale condemnation of projects of coordinated governance. To this day, the postwar work of the United Nations remains largely uncharted by historians; and as a result, it has been technically impossible to assess, as a whole, the work of international governance in the twentieth century. Another interpretation besides the free market critique of states is also possible. It was the opinion of many FAO administrators who lived through the era of the Soil Map of the World that the plans laid by the FAO’s founders were sound—they merely lacked enough time and financial backing to materialize the vision of a worldwide system of support for small farmers. A closer study of those decades suggests we take with a grain of salt the free market view of government as a failure—and it encourages us to go back once again to examine the evidence from a more nuanced perspective. In the 1960s, a point of view was emerging that broadly characterized government initiatives as doomed. In Britain, early advocates of the free market proposed that markets could redistribute land better than the state. The neoliberal rebellion of the 1960s and ’70s resulted in the reversal of a politics of land redistribution, affordable housing, and access to land that had dominated that nation’s politics for nearly a century. Whereas land redistribution and other anti-empire movements had fought against the exclusions characteristic of the age of empire, the neoliberals merely reinstated the gap between a small class of property owners and the many renters who struggled to afford high prices. The consequences of that view for housing were profound. In places like London, however, neoliberal policies failed to create affordable cities and thereby protect the occupancy rights of the poor. Instead, they created a world where real estate became a target of investment—until, predictably, the price of real estate grew so high that entire districts of the city went empty, holding only collateral for the rich. An important facet of the new politics was that fewer and fewer people would get to have a say in what was done with land. In the era of neoliberal policy, the battleground of land prices—which were once determined by the common space of the protest march or the floor of Parliament—was becoming the stock exchange. Many individuals might hold stocks, but it was the investment choices of the few, not the many, that determined how land prices appreciated.

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Many national governments became increasingly unwilling to protect affordable housing. Nations and cities competed with one another for the best deals they could offer to investors. The war of the stock exchanges, in which London and New York competed for the fewest regulations, benefited only those interests that could afford to compete there. At U.S.-led institutions that governed the market, specifically the World Bank, the leadership was growing more and more articulate about what it saw as the failures of land reform and the immediate need for a moratorium on future land redistribution. In the shift from state to market, money dried up for both state-built housing and international land redistribution initiatives. London, in the 1970s, was becoming a rich man’s city. As the property market was deregulated following the reforms proposed by the IEA, gentrification followed, and with it, the displacement of the working class. This unprecedented gentrification almost completely thwarted Britain’s Labour Party’s ­attempts to take a stand for widespread access to housing. In London, the Labour-voting middle class—citing their cross-class alliances—moved into the “poor neighborhoods,” purchased property at deflated prices, and built their own condos, which they could rent or sell at an enormous profit. Such widespread gentrification of previously impoverished areas caught the notice of another contemporary geographer, John Rennie Short, who described the phenomenon as one sign of the “growing bifurcation of life chances.”38 It would henceforth be almost impossible for a British political party to forge an alliance between the working and middle classes. The middle class had been bought out by property ownership, and thus Britain’s radicalism had been contained—just as Russia’s Stolypin Reforms had attempted to do, six decades earlier, by turning rich peasants into landowners. It was the privilege of wealth that allowed the middle class to become speculators in real estate, thus benefiting from the market-based reforms that Margaret Thatcher would inaugurate. But that privilege was also compounded by other advantages. It was the privilege of knowledge of government plans (sometimes insider knowledge) that allowed them to anticipate the trends of the market and to discern which property investments were wise and which foolish. But worse, it was the privilege of knowing communities and identifying with the working class that allowed Labour Party elites to set up houses in working-class neighborhoods—giving them the courage to look their new neighbors in the eye without guilt. Gentrification, after all, was executed by self-described allies of the working class. As both international and national networks dedicated to occupancy col-

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lapsed, advocates of land redistribution looked to other methods to secure their goals. One of the most important ways they worked was to turn to information as a tool of justice. Social scientists at the FAO were enchanted with the idea of information infrastructure working to create opportunity. A rich history of collective land management in the past had proved the viability of indigenous land management. Neoliberal ideas about markets in Britain were grounded in similar hopes that the work of information could connect individuals with resources and create new opportunities. Although the neoliberal gambit in London failed to produce housing for the many, wider ideas about the use of information in society would continue to evolve. Information infrastructure came to be emphasized as a tool for democracy rather than an aspect of the market. Participatory movements would begin to refine the modern techniques of marching and squatting to publicize the right of occupancy. Meanwhile, indigenous people and social scientists began to use participatory mapping to crowdsource collective claims to land. Grassroots groups that turned to documenting the landscape for themselves—taking up the charge of land reform in the absence of the state—have given us some of our most useful instruments for the future. These mechanisms are alive today in the form of efforts to crowdsource knowledge of climate change, pollution, and sustainable farming practices, as well as initiatives to broaden the arena for democratic debate on such issues.

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Part IV Resistance; or, A Democratic Program for Occupancy

v In the years immediately before and after the end of World War II, land redistribution looked like a cure for the ails of humanity. That consensus began to disintegrate, however. In India, the program for national land redistribution was whittled away by local elites. On the international scene, a critique of land redistribution emerged in the late 1960s, as Austrian and U.S. development programs began to push the cause of economic growth over equity. Even as the failure of states to redistribute land became evident in many parts of the world—for instance, after India’s experience with the Green Revolution from the 1960s forward—grassroots movements began to appear that reasserted inhabitants’ rights to occupancy in new ways. The techniques they used included pilgrimage, squats, and the creation of many-to-many maps that helped participants lay claims to territory: a groundswell of new means by which inhabitants claimed their rights to the soil. In India, from 1951, when he began walking across the country, Vinoba Bhave urged elites to build the nation through the spiritual practice of “land gifts” to the poor. Through the technique of pilgrimage, used before him by Gandhi, Vinoba drew attention to the possibility of a nonviolent land redistribution while publicizing the plight of India’s landless poor. Nonviolence succeeded where political promises of land redistribution had collapsed. Vinoba’s teaching inspired followers around the world to consider the possibility of peaceful decentralized action, coordinated by pamphlets and conferences, promoted through the work of trained mediators. The participatory research

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movement shared Vinoba’s ideas as a set of practices for developing village-­ level conversation about challenging privilege. In Britain and elsewhere, in the decades after the Second World War, squatters protested homelessness by claiming abandoned buildings for themselves, using coordinated networks to alert one another to police presence and to assert their claims via the media. Meanwhile, from the 1960s forward, activists in India from the participatory research movement began to experiment with ways of focusing village conversations around land. By encouraging villagers to walk through the landscape together, they helped conversations to settle on issues like the management of village rows and fisheries. By the 1970s, even neoliberal philosophers began to celebrate squatting as the essence of spontaneous self-governance. Advocates of the market, eager to demonstrate that market thinking was available to all, lauded the squatters as exemplars of entrepreneurial activity, even praising peasant squatters around the world and launching World Bank programs to support the legal documentation of squatters as occupiers turned property holders. Throughout the postwar decades of the twentieth century, new techniques and infrastructures expanded the laws of ownership. Nonviolent protests and the gifts of land they inspired created hundreds of thousands of small farmers and urban homeowners. Shared maps allowed peasants and indigenous people to assert their ownership rights. After the Beaver and Cree people of Canada began to draw their landholdings on a map, other people too began to document their findings in the form of many-to-many maps. In court, indigenous people used techniques and infrastructures of this kind to enforce their claims to lands, halting a tradition of seizures and infringement on their occupation. In protecting the occupation rights of the dispossessed, the landless, and the indigenous, the citizens who wielded pamphlets and maps were also dem­ onstrating how technology could be used to assert and codify the needs and rights of the many. Squats and maps offered a way to fight in court over local concerns about polluted water, unequal land distribution, or property grabs. They showed a way to manage land redistribution without relying on the support of elites, national governments, or international institutions. They showed that occupancy could be protected for the many and by the many. Today, rights to occupancy may be endangered around the globe, but the legal precedents described here illustrate how coordinated action has defended rights of occupancy over the course of the twentieth century. They underscore the historical importance of challenging the legacy of empire and racism. They also highlight how demands for land redistribution are still in play in many

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parts of the world today. Finally, they illustrate an important tradition of thinking about property that emphasizes a multitude of strategies for effectively managing land and water in such a way as to benefit the poor. The story of land redistribution, in its rural and urban iterations alike, demonstrates how actions can be both global in ambition and marked by local democratic management—and how an information infrastructure supports actors whose voluntary schemes might otherwise fail.

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11  •  Techniques of the Mystic The Long Walk of Vinoba Bhave

In 1968, in Oakland, California, the Black Panthers had begun to organize free breakfasts, lunches, and doctors’ visits for schoolchildren, proving that a community of vulnerable people could indeed govern itself and see to its own development if its members had political rights and a neighborhood where they need not fear displacement. They began to formulate ideas about self-­ government that would inspire generations of activists across the developing world. The Panthers both came under the surveillance of the McCarthyists and were noted by social scientists who admired their strategies. Harry Edwards, an African American professor of sociology at San Jose State University, joined the Panther Party, donning a black beret and sunglasses along with his standard professorial attire. In an interview with journalists, he compared American racism to Nazism. He spelled out the lesson he took from Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination: in America, nonviolence had failed. Nearby in Davis, California, Rainer Schickele’s daughter-in-law, a professor of political science, helped to draft a petition calling for a federal investigation into the systematic harassment of Panthers by the Oakland police. Sandra Schickele also was added to the files of the McCarthyists.1 Meanwhile, in India, a pilgrimage against violence was wrapping up. Between 1951 and 1969, Vinoba Bhave walked some fifty thousand miles (eighty thousand kilometers) on foot on ritual marches.2 Vinoba’s pilgrimages, which captured international attention, foregrounded the failures of India’s government to inaugurate a promised land redistribution for the nation. In 1947, when India declared its independence from Britain, many observers had expected a government program that would dismantle colonial inequal-

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ities through the redistribution of land. Misery throughout the system was ensured by the British laws of settlement, which were designed so as to extract as much wealth from the colony as possible. By 1951, however, there were already signs that the state’s land redistribution was in trouble. Despite broad support from the prime minister and the Congress Party, the legislation was delayed. Ultimately, the Indian courts failed to ratify land redistribution on a national level, and the issue was sent back to the states, where local elites passed laws so weak as to be ineffective. India, a place where land redistribution seemed as truly promising as it was desperately needed, was becoming the face of land redistribution’s failure.3 It was just as agents at the FAO had warned: local elites, who owned most of the land, could not be trusted to execute the legislation needed to help peasants— they undermined every program that aimed for redistribution. The only alternative to their program of rule seemed to be violent encounter, such as that called for by Indian Communists. Enter an ascetic in monkish robes. Vinoba’s pilgrimage offered a radical alternative to land distributions that worked through the state. Organized as a spiritual mission to transform India through voluntary gifts of land, the redistribution program Vinoba inspired represented a major political departure from post-colonial revolutions and centralized programs at the United Nations. There was no forced collectivization, nor were there violent clashes; the movement raised no questions about the state’s use of authority. There was only the gifting of land, inspired by a vision of an India that might yet be. Between 1951 and 1969, the descendants of colonial tax collectors voluntarily began to hand over their land to the poor, acre by acre. Vinoba Bhave, the son of a weaver, became one of Gandhi’s acolytes in the 1930s, helping to run the ashrams associated with the satyagraha movement. After Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, Vinoba became the prophet of a new political movement that drew on Gandhi’s ideas. Vinoba’s strategy, like Gandhi’s before him, was grounded in nonviolent action, but such action had a new meaning in the context of Indian independence. Whereas Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930 has protested colonial-era restrictions that kept Indians out of politics, Vinoba’s postwar pilgrimages took place in an independent nation whose citizens could both vote and run for office. Nevertheless, the political context was fundamentally the same: one in which the interests of the landless poor and the moneyed classes often worked against each other. Vinoba challenged Indian society to collaborate to extend the opportunities available to the poor—not through political parties and parliamen-

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tary battles, but through radical, spontaneous, and individual acts such as the gifting of land. Vinoba’s insistence on voluntary individual actions, grounded in local communities rather than national or international political alliances, provided a pivotal new vision for both Asian and Western skeptics of the state’s centralized authority. It proposed a form of politics that imagined global change based on individual acts of generosity. Vinoba’s writings proposed a radically democratic, decentralized practice of self-governance via consensus, inspiring a movement among educators of “participatory research,” whereby facilitators led villages in conversation, explicitly including the voices of women, children, and the elderly. Vinoba and his followers, in other words, pioneered the shape of a radically inclusive form of democracy that allowed the voices of the dispossessed to be heard. But did it work? Interpretations are mixed. Through gifts alone, Vinoba’s pilgrimages redistributed some 2.5 million acres (10,024 square kilometers)— no small feat in itself, although it represents a fraction of the land area redistributed decades before by violent revolutionaries in Russia and China.4 One simple takeaway is this: Indian elites in a new nation were, in many cases, so persuaded that independence heralded a new era of opportunity that they were willing to flout the laws of economic self-interest to see their neighbors lifted up. This lesson suggests, against the lessons of contemporary economists in America, that altruism is as real a force as any other in the economy: a law of history unto itself. Another lesson has to do with the sheer confusion to which Vinoba’s initiative stumbled. Vinoba’s effort, by design, was the opposite of centralized authority in every respect. He asked for donations of land, but made little effort to ensure that the land was effectively turned over to the needy; he left that to the initiative of local communities, counting bureaucracy among the realms where altruism could prove its worth. Onetime philanthropists turned out to be poor bookkeepers. In many cases the paperwork was lost; undocumented land returned to its original owners, whose commitments to gift giving changed years later when land values were rising.5 As a result, the actual land returned to poor peasants was much less than the 2.5 million acres promised. Gifting was neither the most efficient nor the most effective way to ensure economic opportunity for the poor, although it did highlight the failure of state and international governments to provide occupancy rights for those who needed them most. Vinoba’s legacy has only a small place in India’s story of landlessness and economic division. Nevertheless, his ideas about decentralized decision mak-

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ing would travel further, inspiring some of the most important democratic movements of the late twentieth century that asserted peasant control over land.

The Failure of Governmental Land Reform As observers from the United Nations had warned, the independence of former colonies at midcentury was not necessarily a victory for democracy. Local elites frequently stood as a bar against land reform, undercutting any schemes that might diminish their power. In the 1950s, Indian elites were doing well, and their expectations began to rise as they realized what the future might hold. The postwar moment was one of unprecedented growth for India. Indian agriculture, which had barely increased its production for half a century, grew 3 percent a year in the 1950s—in comparison with a 0.03 percent growth under British rule from 1891 to 1947.6 As individual fortunes swelled, so too grew a conviction that industrial factories and industrial agriculture represented paths to enriching India. Land legislation was delayed. Meanwhile, a Soviet delegation reached out to Indian intellectuals and politicians in Calcutta, urging the advantages of economic planning. In 1954, the Congress Party concluded, behind closed doors, that land redistribution was not succeeding and that the situation was fast deteriorating. In 1956, the second Five-Year Plan axed agriculture’s share of public sector outlay, instead funding the promotion of mills and factories.7 In a single act of legislation, the promise of expanding opportunities for all Indians through agricultural investment was curtailed dramatically. The legislation that was actually passed buttressed elite power through loopholes that allowed rich families to circumvent land reform. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, state legislatures passed “land ceilings” limiting the amount of land that could be held by any single household—laws that were often subverted in practice, as landlords hid their excess holdings under the names of children and cousins. Without an army of officials to watch over land transfers on the lookout loopholes and exceptions, land reform was failing on the ground. The same class as before remained in control. National legislation for land reform had already been defeated in the Indian Supreme Court. As the Indian journal Economic Weekly put it tersely: “Those who will have to finally implement the reform . . . cannot be entirely indifferent to the interests of the class from which they come.”8 Many international observers gave a pessimistic account of land reform’s failure in India. One suggested that the new nation would need outside inter-

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ference if its land reform were to succeed. Presenting in Moscow in 1960, the American historian Daniel Thorner and his statistician wife Alice gave a pessimistic diagnosis of India’s land reform since 1947. The opportunity to create a nation of entrepreneurs and inventors through small shareholding had been blown. It could be repaired only through a renewal of state power. A similarly negative evaluation was given by the agricultural development technician Wolf Ladejinsky, the architect of U.S.-led land redistribution in Japan.9 Contemporary observers like economist Govindlal Patel awaited India’s land reform with the conviction that change was imminent. Patel published his first book The Indian Land Problem, however, after the Indian Supreme Court defeated national land redistribution in India, leaving it to the individual states to decide whether they would pass land redistribution measures there. Patel therefore added a new chapter to his five-hundred-page treatise on the value of and prospects for state-driven land reform in which he praised the virtues of Vinoba’s voluntary campaign of land gifts. Patel’s view was echoed by others, who found in Vinoba a new figure to rally behind, given the failure of the state. In 1956, India’s first president, Rajendra Prasad, was still editorializing about land redistribution, but he did so within the framework supplied by Vinoba, summoning the image of a thousand years of Indian saints who had rebelled against attachment to property. That trajectory of India’s sacred history, he explained, had overthrown the British Empire, and it would overthrow Indian landlords’ appetite for property in the generations to come.10 Vinoba’s beliefs, translated by Patel as a view of Indian national history, offered land reform as the ultimate destiny of a nation spiritually and morally inspired to fight poverty. Vinoba, however, was no economist; and despite ­Patel’s economic and historical rigor, he left unanswered many questions about how land gifting would help the country to feed its expanding population. Meanwhile, pressure was mounting from outside India for the nation to fight starvation via a set of economic strategies promoted by U.S. development theorists: large farms, pesticides, improved strains of seed, and mass sterilization. Vinoba’s processions to call for land redistribution had a long legacy in India. In his youth, he had followed Gandhi on similar pilgrimages protesting against the injustice of empire and the suffering of the poor. In Vinoba’s pilgrimages, like Gandhi’s, the symbolism of ancient Hindu devotions and spiritual asceticism were repurposed to protest latter-day injustice.11 Like Gandhi, Vinoba published numerous references to the Bhagavad Gita as the basis for arguments about the moral reformulation of a Hindu nation, foreshadowing the rise of a Hindu nationalist movement.12 Vinoba’s work continued two pre-­

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independence initiatives begun by Gandhi: a critique of the economics of empire, and an inquiry into the possibility of individual, nonviolent action on behalf of the greater good. Vinoba, of course, held no governmental power. He could rally and preach, but he could not compel land redistribution. With the ruling of the Indian Supreme Court, the prospects for land redistribution at the national level seemed empty. Moreover, in a climate of international skepticism about land redistribution triggered by American reactions to events in China, an array of existential and economic concerns about the prospects for land reform was appearing in the Indian press. What would happen as a result of political dissent if landlords refused to give up their land? What would motivate the newly enfranchised small farmers of India, uneducated as they were, to learn how to feed the new nation? What if small farmers accrued debts when a depression undercut prices? India had more questions than answers. The mood in many Indian states turned from skepticism to rejection of land reform. Peasants would beg to be “relieved” of their farms when the next depression struck, the Economic Weekly predicted in 1957.13 In 1972, one state executive used the word suicidal to describe a new land reform initiative in Congress.14 In such a context, the only land redistribution plan that could move forward was one imagined as a spiritual act, a voluntary gift from individuals whose desire for national transformation looked beyond politics as a source of change.

Voluntary Gifts in the Context of a Failing State Vinoba’s pilgrimages operated far from the debates of the Cold War, wherein the opposing poles of state and market dominated the conversation. In Russia, China, and Cuba, Soviet land reforms depended on the mobilization of armies, directed by political parties, to expropriate land and factories from their private owners. They were centrally coordinated land reforms, anathema to the laws of private ownership. Vinoba’s answer could not have been more different: his ascetic demeanor, patterned on Gandhi’s, contrasted with the behavior of Chairman Mao and Comrade Stalin. No government or party enforced his ideas. Instead, land would be voluntarily gifted from the rich to the poor, in an act described as the enshrinement of spiritual principles that united the nation. In the course of the various pilgrimages he led across India beginning in 1951, Vinoba Bhave managed to gather pledges for over 4.7 million acres (19,020 square kilometers) of land, of which 2.5 million acres (10,117 square

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kilometers) was actually redistributed.15 The poor yield suggests the ongoing collapse of political will for land reform across India. The success of the mission in terms of scale of reach and potential, however, was phenomenal. Between 1951 and 1969 some five hundred thousand landowners were persuaded to give up part of their land. One historian recounts that in 1952 all the landlords in an entire village in Uttar Pradesh agreed to gift their holdings in full. In another region in Odisha, a landlord who owned 4,500 acres gave away everything except 30 acres for himself. According to one estimate, 5 percent of the nation, or 44 million acres of land (178,062 square kilometers) was pledged in one form or another. One-third of India’s villages, by one estimation, experienced some land redistribution as a result of Vinoba’s activities.16 Much of the land was donated by students, inspired by memories of a similarly ascetic pilgrim, Gandhi, who drew attention to the concerns of landless farmers beginning in 1916. The land redistributions advocated by Gandhi’s followers had failed to materialize, but Vinoba led a new generation of students, walking the nation after independence, ruminating on the economic fate of the peasant, and proposing a radical source for authority over property: the individual conscience. Spiritual volunteerism emerged as an alternative to a series of political stalemates after numerous attempts had failed to establish an effective national land reform. Vinoba was admired by economists and ministers like Patel and Prasad, who had committed to a pre-independence mandate to redistribute the land and who worked to pass legislation and programs for land redistribution after independence. Their admiration suggests how rooted Indian politics was, in the 1950s, in pre-independence conversations about problems with colonialism and the kind of participatory democracy that many leaders hoped to see when British rule retreated. Reviewing the history of British land leg­ islation, Patel complained about the “many laws . . . passed with such a great speed that the legislators and the administrators find it difficult to follow.” He editorialized: “One is lost in the labyrinth of laws and wonders whether the laws are for men or the men for laws!”17 Patel urged India to create an alternative bureaucracy for the recording of survey, settlement, and title that would break with British precedent by doing away with intermediaries, and thus he reimagined a participatory state, freed from the “labyrinth” of British administration.18 Given the political roadblocks that stopped land redistribution in India, the next best option for ardent believers was to talk about land turnover as spiri-

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tual work. Vinoba’s teachings about voluntary land redistribution allowed individuals to continue advocating for reform even in a hostile political climate. In these circumstances, visions of state power were replaced by a logic of voluntary land redistribution, symbolized by Vinoba’s spiritual pilgrimage. Spiritual and voluntary land reform would eventually be enshrined as the definitive Indian approach: piecemeal, gradual, individual, and motivated by altruism. Even while Indian politics underwent a crisis regarding land reform, Vinoba’s quest thus also supplied a partial answer to the country’s political paralysis. The principle motivating the movement was called bhoodan, “gift of land,” and it was preached as a new kind of spiritual discipline that translated the ancient Hindu virtues of self-sacrifice, detachment, and kindness for use in the post-colonial era. Seeing Vinoba in his monkish robes, a tourist might have mistaken him for a vestige of India’s timeless past, but such an observation would be wrong. Vinoba was at work on something extremely modern: designing the shape of a highly visible social movement open to participation by all, requiring neither state nor market to enforce its demands for justice. In contrast to the closed debates of representatives and lawyers, Vinoba’s movement offered an entirely voluntary and even spiritual alternative to the confiscations of states and the inequalities of the market. Vinoba provided an answer to the dead end of political regimes under pressure to visibly reject communism in his encouragement of a budding international definition of participatory democracy. Vinoba had the credentials to translate the ancient scriptures of the Bhagavad Gita for a new era. As a contemporary economist explained of the movement, “Its fundamental assumption is that like air, sun and water, land belongs to God and should be socially owned.”19 Vinoba’s pilgrimage also offered the beginnings of a conversation about a fundamentally modern problem: aside from the state, how do communities care for themselves? Vinoba’s answer was to return to a premodern form of protest—the procession—but to modernize it by inviting experts and inter­ national travelers to join him, encouraging them to contemplate what a truly participatory government might look like. The march thus offered, among other things, a decentralized answer to land reform: neither the work of the Indian state nor the support of the United Nations was required. Vinoba’s many writings, which circulated across India in the form of cheap paper tracts, uniformly emphasized the value of politics reached by consensus. “State power is a conservative force,” he argued. “It may bring about some social reforms, but it cannot radically alter the lives of the people.”20 Instead,

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Vinoba formulated ideas about the gift as the center of social transformation. In 1952, Vinoba proposed that individual villages become centers of altruistic land gifting, where village landholders would collectively decide to turn over part of their holdings to the poor. The idea of a national land gift program— bhoodan—thus transitioned to another voluntary program—gramdan—wherein village landlords contracted to treat their community as a commons belonging to all. Vinoba’s ideas continued to evolve, generating a tide of democratic responses to the failures of political consensus on a national level. In a series of new initiatives, Vinoba tried to decentralize his own movement—for example, in 1956, when he ordered the committees for bhoodan to liquidate themselves, devolving financial and administrative decisions to the people. He encouraged his followers to cultivate independence from the entanglements of any one organization, instead maintaining a radical orientation toward the possibility of new self-organization in the name of the common good.21 The march itself— humble, on foot, open to comers and goers of any class or race—epitomized a democratic openness, a radically open organization, that Vinoba was proposing as the basis for government and indeed for economic order. An English-language magazine called Gramdan spread the idea, and village associations were set up, one at a time. These gramdan villages began to seek legislative authority to mandate the turnover of land. In this way, voluntary grassroots land gifting could swell into wholesale land reform, one village at a time. Gramdan acts were passed in various states around India, some of which required 100 percent assent of village landlords. In other states, an 80 percent majority of landowners could, through a democratic process, compel their rich neighbors to gift their land. In more radical regions, the level of consensus was lowered. In Kerala, where the Communist Party dominated elections, 20 percent of the village assenting to gramdan was enough to compel the rest of the village landlords to turn over their land to the poor.22 Bhoodan and gramdan spread only slowly, but they were the only vehicles by which land reform was actually pursued in post-independence India.

Famine, Industrial Farming, and Lasting Divides Meanwhile, Indian agricultural policy faced an emergency. From 1965 to 1967, back-to-back droughts raged in India, especially in Bihar, where food production dropped by almost half. The government set up stores where poor people could buy food for a fair price. Though less severe than any of the fam-

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ines suffered by India under British rule, the drought reignited a global debate characterized by Malthusian claims about the dangers of the many poor on too little land. The droughts pushed India further into a network of competing international agencies that would shape its agricultural policy—and ultimately doom efforts, voluntary or otherwise, to support small farmers. In 1965, Indian diplomats had already spent more than a decade negotiating with the United States to provide food relief essential to plugging gaps in agriculture. India was not alone among developing nations in facing famine with the help of the United States. Under Norris Dodd, a scheme at the United Nations had proposed an international project for delivering food aid to starving nations. The plan, however, was killed off by the United States, which by 1951 was preparing its own plans for using aid as a tool to leverage political influence in the Cold War. With few alternatives, nations like India were forced to accept offers of aid from the United States, despite the loans and political entanglements that aid entailed.23 Henceforth, plans to develop India’s agriculture would follow a different set of plans: ones forged in American think tanks, often furthering the interests of U.S. agrobusiness. Facing shocking declines in productivity, India’s Agriculture Ministry turned to technology. Tractors, irrigation works, and high-yield seeds were being pushed by U.S. agencies under the heading of the Green Revolution—marketed as an alternative to both failed land reforms and to the “red revolution” pursued in China. American agents promoted a program of industrialized agriculture— in short, a program of large farms rather than small ones.24 Land reforms thus had little opportunity to find support. Other initiatives to fight famine depended on controlling population through initiatives like the forced sterilizations of India’s tribal populations in the 1970s under the “emergency” declared in 1975 by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.25 The shift from land reform to the Green Revolution had immense and irreversible repercussions for small farmers. Improved seeds and the water and pesticides required to maintain them were too expensive. In the hands of large farmers, however, the improved seeds boosted profits and drove the price of grain down, until small farmers could no longer compete. They fell into debt, and many were driven off the land. These transformations were noted by Indian social scientists such as Mohanlal Lallubhai Dantwala—an alumnus of the World Land Reform Conference organized in Madison, Wisconsin in 1951. Between that date and 1976—when he began to chronicle the unintended consequences of the Green Revolution—­

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Dantwala had continued to advocate for ideas associated with land redistribution. He turned the keen gaze of the social scientist onto the plight of small farmers struggling to repay their loans. He began to publicly preach the need for policies that would create and support smallholders—for instance, the creation of new loans to help them transition to alternative crops or practices—to no avail. Within a few years, another social scientist—the anthropologist Surendra Prasad Sinha, who studied tribal Bihar—would record his own verdict: the Green Revolution had doomed the survival of India’s poor.26 In an effort to survive, farmers had turned from traditional crops like millet and pulses to growing wheat and rice for export. The pattern increased hunger among rural populations. Economic disparities grew between rich farmers and poor and between rich, well-irrigated states and poorer ones. Overall, development money went to subsidize the rich. Extension programs and collective infrastructure projects were abandoned. The result was overall low growth. One economist calculated that India’s economy had grown at 3 percent between 1950 and 1960, but that rate fell to 2.1 percent between 1965 and 1975.27 Among the most notable results of the Green Revolution was the permanent transformation of landownership. The result of Green Revolution policies was the monopolization of land: 53 percent of the rural households of India owned 16 percent of the land, while 7 percent of the richest households owned 52 percent of the land.28 Despite decades of expectation of change and policy making concerning the economics of the smallholder, what India had to show was the opposite of land reform. Alternatives to large-scale farming persisted mainly in areas of India where the Communist Party was strongest, especially Bihar and Kerala, where the party continued to recruit votes for a political platform advocating land redistribution. Massive land redistributions to smallholders did take place where communists held sway. To effect these reforms, the communists required strong control over the political process through the agency of small farmers themselves; the communists stringently kept landlords off all committees that discussed land reform.29 Indian communists would have installed a nationwide land reform instead of the piecemeal and village-level one that Vinoba oversaw. Beyond Bihar and Kerala, however, communist influence was limited. Many believed that the struggle for peasant land rights would eventually became—inevitably and necessarily—a violent war. The anthropologist Surendra Prasad Sinha thought that communist-led land reform represented the last bid for a politics of survival among smallholders. “The Green Revolution,” he wrote, “has definitely accentuated the circumstances that led to the politici-

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zation of the peasantry.”30 He prophesied a bloody battle for the land, first taking the form of marches and protests, and gradually of theft of crops and of battles between agrarian laborers and tribal laborers. Land remains the open wound of history in India.31 The disparity between rich and poor in India is one of the greatest in the world today. Landless workers labor with as few rights as their predecessors had under British Empire. In cities, shanty dwellers crouch in squatted shacks, far from the mansions of the rich. Both agricultural laborers and the urban poor suffer from a lack of access to water, except in the state of Kerala, where communist land reforms provided every peasant family with a plot of land and where wells and rainwater tarps supply every family with water. Had land redistribution been enacted in 1947 at independence, every Indian family might have gained a right to drinking water along with the rights to land redistributed from British Empire. In the account of Wolf Ladejinsky, the aftermath of the Green Revolution proved that land redistribution and programs to support small farmers were still necessary. The economist and Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen, revisiting a series of earlier famines in India, argued that no increase in agricultural production would prevent starvation if inequalities in distribution remained. Among the greatest predictors of food security, according to later researchers, was smallholder farming.32

Assessing Vinoba’s Legacy Did Vinoba play a role in India’s failure to widely redistribute land? Did his elaborations of voluntary giving siphon off energy that might otherwise have more aggressively pursued further legislation across India? Or did Vinoba channel the power of land reform into the most useful outlets possible, given the barriers erected by local elites? A common critique of Vinoba’s work is its ineffectiveness and disorganization; but this latter quality was intentional: Vinoba viewed a lack of structure as an invitation to locals to invent institutions appropriate to their own locality. Millions of acres were pledged, but no centralized cadastre kept track of them, and no instrument ensured that land once pledged actually reached its targets. Without a cadastre to collect information on what was donated, without the state to back it up, and without a mechanism of enforcement, donated land was vulnerable to seizure. A skeptic might conclude that pilgrimages represented a distraction from

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the more effective reforms executed by communists in West Bengal, Bihar, and Kerala. In the 2000s, bhoodan land voluntarily contributed by willing landlords for the purposes of a more egalitarian economy was seized by the state, even when the land’s workers still held paper tickets from the 1960s and ’70s that Vinoba himself had placed in their hands. The state turned bhoodan land over to the “special economic zones” it was using to attract international corporations.33 Land donated for a utopian project of lifting up India’s poor peasants was confiscated by the elite and handed over to international investors. Bhoodan’s success ultimately hinged on an uncertain gambit: the claim that voluntary acts for the common good could equal the force of the state. Vinoba’s proposition drew on Gandhi’s concept of “trusteeship,” or the faith that wealthy people could be persuaded to care for the poor. Contemporary advocates of land redistribution such as Morajibhai Desai—who became India’s fourth prime minister, from 1977 to 1979—warned that Vinoba’s movement faced untold challenges in its promise of effecting a voluntary land reform.34 Compared with the compulsory land redistribution programs implemented in Ireland, Mexico, and the communist states, the raw area of farmland turned over to peasants via Vinoba’s voluntary program looks trivial. Skeptics nevertheless acknowledged that voluntary land reform achieved at least limited results. Vinoba’s followers continually sought and discovered means of redistribution. In 1977, West Bengal inaugurated a series of land reforms including tenancy reforms. In an initiative known as Operation Barga, which began the same year, the government began to register the names of bargardars, or sharecroppers, so that their rights could be supported and their holdings expanded. Operation Barga was a success. A total of 1.4 million bargardars were registered, and approximately 1.2 million “surplus” or underused acres (4,856 square kilometers) were acquired and redistributed by the government as homesteads. One study suggested that Operation Barga produced higher incomes, enabling some bargardars to become landholders in their own right. The researcher discovered that land turnover in West Bengal for 1977 to 1995 happened at nine to ten times the rate of land sales elsewhere in India. Households of landless laborers—many of them members of Adivasi tribes, or indigenous and ethnic populations of India—became landholders, successfully acquiring farmland beyond their homestead as a result of these reforms.35 Even bolder results grew out of gramdan, Vinoba’s movement asking villages to pledge to a consensus model of democratic politics. In villages that committed to gramdan, land was reallocated equally to all the families of farmers—

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even those from landless tribes and castes. Certain land was set aside as a commons for the shared use of inhabitants. The entire village needed to assent to sell the land to outsiders, thus rendering gramdan villages immune to the incursion of corporate land grabs that plagued much of the rest of India.36 The evidence suggests mixed results for voluntary land reform. There were some successes: Operation Barga enfranchised landless laborers; Gramdan gave rights to the landless. Yet bhoodan, the voluntary and spiritual equivalent of the land reform that never was, could not provide what government-­ mandated reform would have accomplished. Vinoba’s long walk has never stirred India to redistribute land on a national scale, or to provide housing, water, and agricultural work for all, and in that sense it speaks of India’s political failures at independence and since. Nonstate techniques of occupation worked differently in different places. From 1968 to 1969, landless workers in Uttar Pradesh staged a series of protests in the form of land occupation—squatting, as it was known in the West. Uttar Pradesh’s landless workers clearly had a sense that the land belonged to them, as Vinoba and other contemporaries thought they should. While squatters in Peru, Bolivia, London, and New York were being given title to their land, those in India were arrested on a scale of tens of thousands of persons; entire villages were broken up by vigilante gangs funded and armed by landlords.37 Given the context of violence in India, Vinoba’s return to voluntary land reform is an important chapter in the history of nonviolence. Rather than a failure, it can be read as a strategy for protecting nonstate actors in their pursuit of justice. Such was Vinoba’s message from the beginning: service and indifference to property were “weapons,” he argued, in the coming “social revolution” that would eventually liberate India’s peasants.38 Vinoba argued that democratic land reform, in contrast to the land reform of despots and communists, would directly manifest a sense of community. His failure marked a limit to his thinking: land redistribution, on Vinoba’s model, was to be inaugurated only by the voluntary actions of the landlord. The peasant, who had no land to gift, could not inaugurate the change—as he might in a revolution by shouldering a weapon, or in a democracy by taking to the ballot. When landlords declined to surrender their property, the movement failed. It was only so strong as the power of Vinoba’s ideals to enchant the minds of the rich. Beyond India, Westerners began to take up the concept of voluntary land reform as well. The fantasy of a world where rich people happily gave up their land holdings to the poor did not always match reality, but Vinoba’s successes

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inspired a variety of experiments and writing from both the left and the right. On the international scene, Indian saints like Vinoba Bhave were celebrated as evidence that post-colonial nations didn’t need land confiscations or national political alliances to enrich the poor: economic transformation could be done voluntarily through spiritual action. His pilgrimage drew in foreigners who walked alongside him, absorbing his ideas: early accounts of his actions were published in Switzerland, Italy, Britain, and California. In the 1950s, the pilgrimages were greeted by land reform experts like the University of Wisconsin’s Kenneth Parsons as evidence of the great moral transformation of peasants into free individuals that land reforms were imagined to represent.39 Vinoba’s teachings entered the canon of leftist thought, embraced as a new gospel proclaiming the vast potential of collective action in the absence of the state. Christian missionaries in India adopted Vinoba’s message in writings about nonviolence and service to the poor. Protestant theologian Walter Breuggemann of Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, wrote a book in 1977, The Land, which bore the subtitle Place as Gift, nicely capturing Vinoba’s concept even as Brueggemann argued that land rights were a central theme of the Bible as a whole. Moreover, the issues Vinoba raised about the importance of protecting rights to occupancy flickered through Catholic liberation theology and pontifical pronouncements on the importance of land redistribution.40 Vinoba’s political influence on the West reached even further. Early publishers featured Vinoba on a list of “modern heroes” that included Helen Keller and Albert Schweitzer. Robert Swann, who traveled to India decades before as an American disciple of Gandhi, brought ideas of shelter, justice, and nonviolence to the American South in the 1970s as he began to preach the right to occupation of the land by all. His concept of community land trusts—afterward widely adopted across the United States—was a translation of gramdan applied to cure the problems of homelessness, gentrification, and racism.41 The idea of voluntary land reform complemented free market thinking in the United States and the United Kingdom, where followers of Friedman and Hayek asserted that markets would naturally accommodate those who needed employment and housing. Possibly through the influence of his Western disciples, Vinoba was increasingly identified as one of the major thinkers about development, education, and politics in the context of a market society. In 1980, Vinoba’s ideas about participation—how it was furthered by education and hindered by political manipulation—were canonized for international policy makers in a UN reader on the subject.42 Anarchist and libertarian think-

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ers anthologized Vinoba, as did thinkers about the radical principle of “de-­ schooling”: all found in Vinoba’s pilgrimage evidence of the possibility that nonstate movements could indeed transform the political economy of an entire nation.43 The concept of bhoodan continues to attract admirers and imitators. Unlike corporations or states, which generally persist little changed from one generation to the next, utopian initiatives are easily defeated in political struggles, as they were in India. They reproduce only through the seductive influence of the imagination. Utopias beget other utopias, as the incomplete work of one generation is passed onto the next through stories infused with hope. Bhoodan was revived in the 1970s as peaceful protests by peasants and advocates walking long distances, preaching detachment from possessions as a way of creating a more just society. Memories of these past pilgrimages—and those of Gandhi and Vinoba—were invoked again in 2007, as another padayatra, or “political pilgrimage,” took form: twenty-five thousand landless farmworkers marched over twenty-eight days from Gwalior to New Delhi, hoping to prompt a national political response that would bring, at last, the promised land reform. But the grand hope of large-scale land redistribution seems to be off the table in India for now. Ideas about voluntary gifts as the primary means of land redistribution also harbored a degree of wishful thinking. Ultimately, the power of voluntary redistribution—with no state to track the turnover of land in terms of registration, taxation, or rights—has proved to be limited: Vinoba’s movement garnered millions of acres of land pledged to the poor, but without a mechanism to back up the land transfer, the results were meager.

The Participatory Research Movement Starting in 1972, a dozen Asian scholars began meeting at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. They pulled together organizers of worker cooperatives and women’s groups who began comparing their experiences of how insti­ tutions could be refashioned to push power downward. From 1979 forward, members of this group joined with other organizers, and meetings were held in North America and Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. The people who assembled at these international conferences were united by their commitment to overturning the rule of experts, investigating not merely the theory but also the practice of participation.44 Although the movement had

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no direct connection to Vinoba, its indirect connections were many: an emphasis on voluntary labor and on facilitators offering a vehicle for grassroots politics, and a curiosity about how land redistribution might be enacted in the absence of the state. Regular conferences helped to solidify a global network of participatory researchers. From 1979, Rajesh Tandon, India’s former minister of education, now head of an ambitious nonprofit organization called the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), attended adult education conferences and collected materials in Toronto, Ann Arbor, Mzumbe (Tanzania), Llubljana (Yugoslavia), and Bangkok. The meeting in Bangkok included representatives from India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Korea, and Australia. Funding from FAO and UNESCO subsidized the conferences and publications. Cheap airfare allowed grassroots organizers to travel the globe, meeting and exchanging ideas on a different continent every summer. At each conference, new pamphlets detailing research methods, printed on a dot-matrix printer and reproduced by mimeograph, were spread from participant to participant, achieving a version of the global publishing distribution network used by international institutions.45 These meetings and publications helped to forge a new consensus—a faith in the power of dialogue and deliberation to transform society. Tandon’s PRIA group presented participatory methods as a tool for undoing “the dominant form of knowledge produced and articulated throughout the history from the point of view of the rulers, the Kings, the Brahmins.”46 “In this new approach,” wrote participatory organizers of their work in Sri Lanka, “the community becomes the decision makers while the officials support the process.”47 In 1985, Orlando Fals Borda’s manual consolidating the experience of participatory organizers in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Columbia was printed in New Delhi.48 Printed materials from these conferences circulated among a growing group of interested international correspondents. Developing world activists thus began to articulate and share strategies for participatory surveying. They wrote and printed instructions for organizers of meetings who wished to follow contemporary ideas about minimizing the impact of hierarchy in face-to-face meetings. They documented and explained the results of meetings at the village level in which poor people explained their values, and they shared the results of participatory meetings on regional production and economic growth.49 They were creating, in other words, a participatory information infrastructure. Dot-matrix printers and mimeographs allowed activists from the devel-

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oping world to rival the FAO and Western universities as publishers, as they churned out instructional manuals about how villages could conduct their own research about development. The organizers of participatory research conferences rarely referenced Vinoba directly, but their ideas about creating social change without recourse to the state reflected a climate of optimism about the accumulation of individual acts of generosity similar to that promoted by the mystic. Other global movements inspired the organizers as well: some post-colonial, some in the realm of education, and some among Western spiritual practitioners. Among the chief influences on participatory organizers were two figures, Paulo Freire and Sherry Arnstein, whose articulations of power and hierarchy made a lasting impression on the movement. These two figures—one Brazilian and one American, one speaking to educators and one speaking to urban planners— offered a radical position on how changing the dynamics of meetings could level inherited hierarchies of gender, race, and class. Brazilian education reformer Paulo Freire offered a commentary on how particular kinds of knowledge, including literacy itself, were used to dominate colonial populations. Freire’s work emphasized how teachers could more successfully teach literacy when they engaged the students’ own reasons for wanting to read.50 Drawing on Freirean methods, participatory organizers shaped meetings to ensure that women, the elderly, and minorities had a voice. Leaders concentrated their energies on quieting men who tried to interfere with women’s consensus, or adults who tried to tell children what to think.51 By using Freirean techniques, such as encouraging women to interview other women separately from the men, participatory organizers were able to highlight community voices that otherwise might have been silenced. “In one recent exercise while the village was being mapped by women,” recalled James Mascarenhas, “a discussion on malnutrition was initiated, and the symptoms described. After this the women began to point out and mark on the map the houses which had children suffering from malnutrition.”52 Conversations about a community and its needs tended to change as new voices were included in the conversation. Arnstein’s seminal contribution to the movement was an article, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” originally written as a commentary on the failures of U.S. urban governments to integrate the desires and directives of African Americans. Published in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, the article encouraged urban planners to consider their work within the mandate of restoring agency to those traditionally excluded from the economy. In the

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Sherry Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation” (Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35:4 [1969]: 217; reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Ltd., www.tandfonline.com)

article that was often read alongside biographies of the Black Panthers as a portrait of the birth of a new ideology of self-government from below, Arnstein argued that any process deemed participatory needed to result in a measurable downward devolution of decision making, transforming the structures of authority from expert elites into a consensus of citizens, workers, or neighbors. “Participation without redistribution of power,” she explained, “is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless.”53 Bound up with Arnstein’s manifesto was a rejection of previous tools of urban planning, including the survey and the hearing. She illustrated the ladder referred to in her article’s title in a visual aid showing the possible levels of authority and democratization in the planning process. It suggested a hierarchy of inclusion practices from “manipulation” and “therapy” up to “delegated

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power” and “citizen control.” The survey and hearing ideally lent themselves to the sixth rung of Arnstein’s ladder, “partnership,” wherein experts and neighbors would collaborate in creating a city plan. Arnstein’s examples of failed meetings included meaningless “advisory groups” created by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Philadelphia.54 Were these consultations really allowing the participation of the many in the structures of society? she asked. Arnstein counted them as failures, forms of participation that halted before real change began. They belonged on the bottom of the ladder, in the categories Arnstein defined as “manipulating” or “informing,” staged in a context in which experts had already made decisions contrary to citizen desires. Arnstein’s definition of participation as a ladder confronted the reality of co-optation and held up a higher ideal: “delegated power” and “citizen control.” This democracy of authority, wherein neighbors participated in institutions rather than resigning them to experts, was no fantasy, Arnstein explained. Civic institutions of this kind were already a reality in Oakland, going back to the mixed-race neighborhood institutions erected by Teamsters and longshoremen in the 1940s. By the time Arnstein was writing, black leaders had already organized community-directed schools and worker-owned cooperatives.55 Her essay held up further precedents in Selma, Alabama; Portland, Oregon; Harlem, New York, and Cleveland, Ohio, where black communities had organized worker-owned, worker-managed cooperatives and loans for community development designed to empower black-owned businesses. These businesses and loan networks resulted in a close-knit, active community, involved with the institutions tasked with governing that community’s future. The implication of Arnstein’s message for the developing world was clear: merely sending extension agents to poor communities was not enough. Empowerment required a total reorganization of institutional structures from the community level to the national and international. The message of participation resonated with contemporary movements, and Arnstein’s ladder appeared in pamphlets in India and around the world, reprinted for communities discussing a formula for self-government. At the conferences, trainers fluent in Arnstein’s ideas translated the values of community control into ground rules for meetings. Participatory training manuals emphasized, for example, that leaders of meetings should display a mindset of humility as the base for dealing with data. Empathy and modesty would take the place of science as the modern sociologist’s method. Theirs was a philosophy opposed to expertise, stressing, as one activist put it, a “loss

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of complete control by the researcher.”56 New lists of proper “tactics” were printed and circulated; and while this mirrored the training of sociologists of yore, the new techniques emphasized a methodology of empathy. Appropriate practices included “being unimportant” and “listening.”57 One set of mimeographed instructions drove home the point in all capitals: “don’t lecture!—for god’s sake!! and, don’t interrupt.”58 Arnstein’s ideas about hierarchy were reflected in practices whereby the poor coauthored reports on their own situation. At a conference at the University of Sussex, one activist reported on his work in a village in Bangladesh in 1974–75: he had used participatory surveys to create a report on exploitation of the rural poor that emphasized the many avenues through which the poor were kept in place, including “tenancy, labour, moneylending, the market, lineage status, patron-client dyads, the co-operative, the systems of access to public resources and justice, and straight-forward coercion.”59 In these settings, collecting information about injustice was understood as key to future political actions that would challenge hierarchies of class and race. Under the influence of Freire and Arnstein, participatory organizers began to theorize that eliminating hierarchy in face-to-face meetings offered the foundation for a new kind of government: one in which, as one activist wrote, “work on the drawing board becomes work on the settlement.”60 Drawing on wider theories of civic society, the public sphere, and privilege, a new generation of theorists in the social sciences offered a new synthesis of ideas about inclusion.61 The word participation came to encompass many of these ideas, grounded in considerations about modest changes to communication and information, and how even small adjustments could eventually lead to eliminating previous exclusions of gender, race, and class in the work of education, governance, and communication more generally. The growth of ideas about participatory meetings and participatory democracy shows that Vinoba’s ideas about transforming society without the aid of the state were creating new forms of organization. The ideas of the global participatory movement ushered in a new technique of occupation: the participatory map—such as a map created by a hundred villagers to document who held the land, who was responsible for village well maintenance, and where the water was polluted by the local tannery. Participatory mapping went on to become a movement entrenched both across India and around the world; today, Indian law requires that any community development initiatives funded by the government must have a participatory mapping component. Eventually, participatory meetings were put directly to the causes of redistributing land

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and water, preserving indigenous property rights, or suing polluters: thus the effects of participatory meeting strategies could be very material indeed.62 The participatory map enshrined the values of participation and self-government preached by Vinoba, demonstrating how self-government of land might arise in the absence of the state. The concept suggested to many a way of rethinking bureaucracy from the bottom up, creating a self-government of land that could potentially scale to the size of a nation or even a planet.

Conclusion: The Legacy of Voluntary Land Reform Beyond India Vinoba’s movement was a mixed triumph: a partial land redistribution was achieved, coupled with a spiritual rekindling of interest in democracy. Yet the long-term economic divisions associated with colonialism’s past continued unabated: the want of opportunity for the many, a gaping wound in the modern world. Voluntary land reform offered compelling answers to contemporary fears about state violence and the limited ability of state-run institutions to collect or manage information with efficiency. Land redistribution programs in the USSR and China had become associated with famine, authoritarianism, and violence, especially according to viewpoints in the United States—and U.S. aid programs exerted a powerful influence on Indian policy. Meanwhile, landowners in India had managed to commandeer party politics in Congress by the 1960s, stopping land redistribution schemes in their tracks in many places. India’s Parliament, led by stalwart believers in land redistribution who had led rent strikes alongside Gandhi, had failed to pass effective legislation. Evictions and landlessness continued unabated, especially among India’s tribal populations. Expected land redistribution programs overseen by the United Nations had produced few direct results. To some observers in the 1960s and 1970s, it undoubtedly appeared as though the case for the state had run out, as though the only viable means of creating a world of small farmers was redistribution either through the market or as a matter of spiritual practice. The decades that followed might well be considered the age of Vinoba. Volunteers brought Vinoba’s vision to the rest of the world, promising that decentralized action could effectively fight poverty. For example, Robert Swann’s community land trusts have appeared across North America, protecting housing and sustainable environmental policies. “Think globally, act locally”—the slo-

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gan of the American environmental movement—models the emphasis on decentralized, uncoordinated community action. Vinoba’s victory, however, did not mean that the underlying problems were solved. Landlessness would continue to dominate among India’s tribal pop­ ulation and lower castes. Voluntary land reform sometimes amounted to no redistribution at all. Without a cadastre to keep track of the land gifted for redistribution, land was never claimed; for want of an information infrastructure, much of the work of Vinoba’s pilgrimage disappeared into thin air. Overall, India’s voluntary land reform paled in scale besides Ireland’s or Mexico’s, let alone those of the USSR or China. The shortcomings of Vinoba’s land reform lay chiefly with its failure to coordinate information, rather than with the idea of voluntary or decentralized action per se. Elsewhere, around the world, new plans for information infrastructures were being laid—this time, by decentralized communities working for participatory action. It stands to reason that a democratic movement coupled with information infrastructures might yet succeed where Vinoba’s movement had failed. The movement that Vinoba indirectly inspired—participatory research—was attracted to documentation. Participatory research initiatives spread through a shared culture of pamphlets, mimeographs, and conference programs: that is, the decentralized movement’s success depended on widely distributed access to the implements of mass publication. As the movement began to develop participatory maps, indigenous and impoverished communities were able to document evidence of indigenous ownership and local concerns about water pollution. Documentation, in turn, became the key to action, and sometimes to the ability to access the power of the state. Around the globe, other poor people—disenchanted with the state’s inaction— turned to their own resources and began to claim land rights on their own. Their initiatives depended not on gifts from the elite, but rather the ability of poor people to advance a claim to occupancy by squatting illegally on land they did not own. In the context of growing hostility toward the state, squatters in Britain and Latin America met with unlikely allies in the form of neoliberal theorists, some of whom supported the legalization of squatting as a form of legitimate economic activity. It is to that story—a nonspiritual form of voluntary land redistribution, and thus in some ways the mirror image of Vinoba’s activism—that we now turn.

12  •  The Technique of the Squat The Origins of Squatting After the Second World War

Ever since British civil servants managing native peoples around the world had encountered property systems unlike their own, people had begun to debate the history—and even the plausibility—of a system in which the planet’s soil belonged to all. In 2002, after decades of writing about housing policy in Britain and around the globe, the anarchist writer and social historian Colin Ward asserted a curious theory, that of the “one-night house.” According to Ward, it was a universal rule that anywhere in the world, if someone constructed a house between sundown and sunrise, the builder would have gained a moral entitlement to the house and land, enforced by occupation.1 Ward’s claim has little historical substantiation, but following the footsteps of nineteenth-century analysts of India, he believed that ancient cultures in both India and Europe had supported occupancy rights.2 (And, incidentally, Ward could point to many international films on the subject of squatters’ rights to housing.) Ward’s theory nevertheless encapsulated the idea of a universal right of occupation—a concept with origins in popular movements that, by the time Ward was writing, had captured the attention of academics and policy makers around the world. Beginning in the 1970s, journalists and policy makers began to document the activities of squatters who built one-night houses on empty land in the countryside or moved into abandoned houses in the city. Much like spiritual movements such as Vinoba’s, the significance of squatting grew at a moment when state programs for allocating access to land and housing had essentially failed. Squatting—decentralized, coordinated by individuals, available even in the absence of the state—appealed to individuals who rejected the role of the

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state in a functioning society, and who trusted markets and individual initiative to distribute resources fairly. As the World Bank under Robert McNamara was inaugurating an era in which international development would be guided by finance, the idea of a universal right to occupancy returned in a new guise. The new regime would banish state-led programs of land redistribution. Nonetheless, the idea of a right to occupancy would survive, however improbably, and even sprout new forms that were more suited to the emerging environment of neoliberal idealism. Too much of the world was already committed to the idea that people who lived in a place should have a right to stay there. Occupancy was being reimagined as a legitimate form of market activity. High-profile social scientists were theorizing that squatting was a legitimate technique to protest the failures of state commitments to housing. Economists were speculating that squatters, having housed themselves, proved that individuals could provide housing more rapidly and efficiently than the state. Thus, as state solutions for land redistribution and rent control were attacked, squatting was embraced, even promoted and celebrated, by development theorists and policy makers. In many places, those ideas changed policy. London and New York City, for instance, began to issue licenses to squatters.3 Across the Global South, governments began to issue “land titles” documenting squatters’ rights—thus allowing squatters to take out loans and make improvements on the basis of their claims. The free market came with a twist: in a global theater that broadly recognized that occupants had rights over property, land that was commodified and sold became, once again, subject to the right of occupation. When enough live on a given land and refuse to be moved, the culture around them tends to bend: whether the people are occupying a bus seat, a stool at a lunch counter, or a disused house in want of repairs. And in this increasingly market-centered era, it was not exactly lost on theorists of capital and people of means that inhabitation, like a force of nature, wore away at the claims of money. Occupancy would become a form of land redistribution in its own right, more widespread and enduring than any of the twentieth century’s state-run schemes for giving property to peasants. Squatters today spread across Africa and India, but it is fair to claim a much earlier date for when modern squatting started to wear away the hitherto-known laws of property: just after the Second World War.

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The Squatters Become a Cause Célèbre In the United Kingdom, the first squats appeared in the north, where a lack of housing led homeless families—some of them families of returning veterans— to break into and occupy former government war offices and other unused buildings. In August 1946, two families settled in Handsworth, Birmingham, in a ten-room house that had been an air raid shelter during the war. Other squats included an empty seven-bedroom house, a lodge under renovation by the Hereford Corporation—the future offices of the Hereford Agricultural Committee—and houses reserved for War Department police at an ordnance depot. A number of these spaces were empty, and some were under construction, but all were free of present occupants. The families, some with small children in tow, were ordered by police to move on. Troops secured other vacant homes in the area, and the local council bolted the doors of many.4 By September, the families had to leave their original sites, but they found new locations further out of town, where they joined with other families desperate for housing. Within a week, newspapers began to print stories about the homeless veterans who had set up dwellings n the abandoned military camps of Scotland and Salisbury—over four thousand people in all.5 A week after the first reports were published, another series of new and highly publicized squats appeared in London. Squatters encamped in the Abbey Lodge Hotel at Regent’s Park. Other hotels were occupied, including the Ivanhoe Hotel in Bloomsbury and a variety of properties in Kensington and on Buckingham Palace Road.6 In September, a thousand people settled at the Duchess of Bedford House in Kensington, a block of four-roomed flats in the hands of the Ministry of Works; and several dozen women, pushing prams and carrying babies, occupied the Fountain Court flats near Buckingham Palace.7 The squatters’ occupation was tolerated for several reasons: the government’s interwar commitment to housing policy, the level of organization of the squatters, and the publication of photographs of women with babes in arms among the derelict buildings played no small role. Also at play, however, was the tradition in British politics of policies oriented toward land reform, by which class privilege was understood to be most effectively countered by challenges to landlord monopoly. Land redistribution was still a vibrant matter of policy for the Labour Party, with a long tradition of support behind it. Visible episodes of squatting by returning servicemen helped to renew that clamor for land reform, pushing both official planning and unofficial self-build societies into the public imagination.

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The London squatters enjoyed widespread popular support. Newspapers reported that they were “mainly young married couples carrying the bare essentials for the night, suit cases with bedding.” They made a pitiful sight: “some young women had small babies in their arms.” Many of the squatters were residents of Stepney, one of London’s poor boroughs to the east, which during the 1930s had been characterized by organized rent strikes and union activity.8 On September 12, 1946, two thousand people gathered outside the Duchess of Bedford House and urged the police to allow them to bring the squatters bedding. They also donated gifts of money, chocolate, cigarettes, and soap. Supporters blocked traffic and delayed buses. “Crowds outside the flats,” observed the Times, “climbed the parapet and handed food and drink to the squatters through a window.”9 Soldiers and police, both groups sympathetic to the squatters, gathered outside the Communist Party–occupied flats in Kensington and distributed tea and coffee.10 The spectacle of mothers and veterans legitimately unable to find housing elsewhere won the support of public opinion— and also the Labour Party. The protests forced mainstream politicians to demonstrate their sincerity about solving the housing crisis. Aneurin Bevan, the radical Labour Party official who was charged with dealing with the squatters in his role as minister of health, repeatedly voiced his “sympathy” with the squatters. The Salisbury County Council, appealed to by servicemen squatting in abandoned military camps and willing to pay rent, wrote a plaintive letter to the prime minister “so that” (in the words of a moralizing reporter) “he might see for himself the straits to which local people were reduced by the housing shortage.”11 In Scotland, officials went even further. George Buchanan, joint undersecretary of state, told town planners at the Scottish National Housing and Town Planning Association in Glasgow that the military encampments in Scotland occupied by veterans’ families should be regarded as part of the government’s range of temporary housing.12 This popular support accrued in part as the result of strategic design. The London squats were politically organized to demonstrate both the importance of a postwar housing policy and the uses of Communist Party organization within the community to achieve particular political goals. The series of housing invasions that began in 1946 were directed by Communist Party officials, who complained about the empty flats, houses, and hotels vacated by government departments and still empty months later.13 Implicit in the stake of the squats was the very definition of the welfare state in Britain. Britain’s radical

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wing pressed for a fully inclusive state. Squatters and their defenders passed around petitions and chanted slogans during the squat protests. The squats were an intervention that would leave a lasting mark on discourse about the state. They seemed to be creating a government without government—a land redistribution scheme in which land was confiscated from the state by the people. Squatters were a shadow government, taking action where Parliament had failed—an observation that Colin Ward would make decades later when he wrote his theory of how cities could provide housing for all if only they were willing to build initiatives characterized by mutual aid: that is, if they were willing to spontaneously and routinely engage in voluntary activities for the mutual benefit of themselves and others—which meant exploring forms of action outside the formal arrangements ordinarily sanctioned by laws or contracts. Squatters could create their own infrastructure, and design the city around them in the shape of a more inclusive economy that would work to the benefit of all. A quarter century later, ideas about decentralized tinkering and people-built housing would become the subject of two groundbreaking books: in 1973, Small Is Beautiful, by the engineer-turned-development-theorist E. F. Schu­ macher, and in 1976, Housing by People, by the architect-turned-development-­ theorist John F. C. Turner. The latter book’s preface was written by Colin Ward, who in 1946 was living with other former servicemen among the squats. The promise of grassroots action was not the only lesson on exhibit in 1946, however. Even while the squatters occupied their flats in London, in Chicago, another set of ideas about housing was coming into shape. The young economist Milton Friedman had been contemplating the consequences of wartime price controls. Facing a housing crisis, many individuals in the wartime United States had moved in with in-laws, relatives, or strangers, “doubling up” with other families. In Friedman’s imagination, intimacy bred contempt. Pessimistic about the consequences of forced proximity, the economist took away a lesson that mirrored his education in nineteenth-century economic thought: there was no higher good than individual freedom—the virtue from which all other pleasures derived. For Friedman, circumstances that forced him to look to others for help were the most constraining conditions imaginable.14 Faced with similar conditions, however, not everyone in 1946 took away the same lesson. Friedman’s British contemporary Colin Ward participated in some of these squats as a young man and wrote about them later as evidence that popular movements could effectively govern the city.15 As a serviceman returning to London after the Second World War, he had faced the same dearth

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of housing that Friedman encountered in New York. Unlike Friedman, who identified hardship with the animosity of intimacy, Ward sought for a solution with the people around him—not with the invisible hand of the market. Many veterans returning from the front faced the same housing shortage in London as did Ward, and many of them had studied the skills of plumbing and wiring that could render disused offices into habitable accommodations. Ward was among the soldiers who turned these skills into creating an immediate solution to the crisis in the form of squats. Those squats were tolerated for decades by a government embarrassed by its inability to house its returning servicemen. From these experiences, Ward gleaned an inspiring lesson about the intense creativity of strangers thrown together in a common space. This was the creativity of intimacy—and the power of strangers united to transform policies— that would inform his writings over the decades that followed, and influence how an enormous number of Britons would come to interpret the postwar experience. Outbreaks of squatting, by and large, were far from individual in their origin. They emerged out of cooperation—directed by Communist Party officials, participated in by Britons whose experience of wartime solidarity informed their postwar availability for collaboration. The success of the postwar squatters reflected intense patterns of often spontaneous collaboration to devise order from chaos. Solutions of this kind would not have been possible for individuals like Milton Friedman, for whom “doubling up” with individuals outside one’s immediate family was imagined chiefly as a burden. Friedman could imagine abstract strangers coming to one another’s aid, chiefly motivated by self-interested financial investments: thus investors, developers, landlords, and construction workers might provide housing for the needy, motivated by the promise of return on capital. Friedman’s ideas of where aid might come from were constrained by a limited set of experience. Having little experience of the kind of radical collaboration that informed the London squats, Friedman could scarcely conceive of a world in which strangers collaborated to make a better world with whatever individuals fate had flung in their path, whether or not they were possessed of means. Many of Friedman’s British contemporaries, however, witnessed a case study in mutual aid playing out before their eyes. Through the cooperative efforts of participants who were willing to work together in the absence of a government authority, the squats survived and flourished. Some fifteen hundred squatters

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in Kensington turned to a similar pattern of community planning, forming “scouting parties” that searched the neighborhoods of the rich for empty houses and offices fit for “requisitioning.”16 As the Times described it: “Consultations were held under lamp-posts in the rain, and there appeared to be an elaborate system of communications by messengers.”17 An hour after one such reconnoitering, new squats had been set up in Moray House, the prewar home of Lord Ilchester. Reports of the squatters’ encampments in military sites, organized by returning servicemen rather than by the Communist Party, evidenced an even greater degree of self-organization. Squatters who had trained as electricians and carpenters altered war offices and Nissen huts to make them suitable for habitation.18 In 1946, when London’s squatters began to assert their claims to occupancy rights, geographers in West Bengal were beginning their efforts to map soil to inform the redistribution of land, and India, still part of the British Empire, heartily expected that a land redistribution was to come with independence. In the same year Borges published his story “On Exactitude in Science,” which mocked the efforts of bureaucrats to map the world, the squatters were taking the governance of housing into their own hands. Squatting, as much as either of these ventures, represented a theory of governance and a critique of the state. Squats also signaled different politics to different observers. For liberals, the squats seemed to dramatize the need for the state to take a more active role in land policy; they would be part of the context that underwrote the passing of the UK Town and Country Planning Act in 1947, which empowered urban planners to stop any form of development whatsoever. For Friedman, reading about other housing crises from Chicago, postwar limits to housing spelled not a need for more regulation but a need for less. Which lesson would be more lasting?

Squatting as Politics and Network After the war in the developing world, we find many striking accounts of people who attempted to put into material form the optimistic notion that strangers could unite their energies to remake policies in land. After 1951, the Indian ascetic Vinoba Bhave led direct-action campaigns that depended on the willingness of strangers to “give away” their own precious land and to administer the allocation of gifts. Elsewhere, in the Andes and the Himalayas, landless peasants were taking matters into their own hands, seizing land for the

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landless through activities variously known as “land invasions”—a term that stressed the capacity of such movements to erupt into violence—or as “squats,” a term that validated their actions, and sympathetically characterized their struggles as essentially the same as those of squatters in postwar London, or of the white settlers who had previously “squatted” on indigenous land in Australia or North America. The ingenious irony of dubbing these indigenous movements “squats” was that the participants were, in fact, trying to reverse the politics of colonization that marked the claims of so-called squatters in the nineteenth-century Australian Outback. Like Vinoba’s campaign, and like the state-led land redistribution programs of postwar India, squats in the developing world aimed to right the wrongs of empire. In the developing world, squats were typically imagined as initiatives taken on behalf of indigenous peoples. By “squatting,” native people aimed to take land back from the colonizers who had stolen it from their ancestors: they were taking world history, as well as land, back for themselves. One of the most vivid accounts of squatting in the developing world was released in 1972 by Hugo Blanco, the Peruvian organizer of Quechua land claims. By 1972, Blanco was already celebrated in American and British circles, where solidarity committees had spread news of his high-drama trial. Facing the death sentence for treason, Blanco had defied the military judge by lecturing to him about the history of peasant land claims, and leading a courtroom filled with peasants in the chant, “Land or Death” until the day’s proceedings were shut down.19 Chants and crowds were a technique, or a tactic, for a skilled organizer like Blanco. They showed that strangers could spontaneously respond to a passionate story—using their voices and their bodies to disrupt unfair proceedings. For Blanco, squatting was another such tactic: a way of intervening in policy, suited to the collaborative actions of strangers. Blanco outlined squatting as one of the few ways in which illiterate Quechua peasants could assert their land claims before an authoritarian government little willing to hear their cause. Circulating after 1966 through socialist and anarchist publications in London, Blanco’s story became an inspiration far beyond Peru.20 It seemed to confirm the validity and power of spontaneous organization from below. It lent seriousness and inspiration to the struggles of contemporary students and working-­ class people—and so, when a housing crisis peaked in London in 1968, Blanco’s campaigns provided the template for action. Blanco’s squatting campaign began with an eviction. When a peasant was evicted from the Aranjuez hacienda on which he labored, the Communist Party

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organized a “gigantic gathering” on the farm on the final day of the lease.21 Mass public protests were called to supplement de jure rights to land fought in the courts of elites: symbolic acts of physical occupation, squatting, and embodied possession that appealed to the conscience of participants and observers alike. By occupying public space, the movement dramatized indigenous Quechua land claims. Impressed by the night marches and public occupations, judges ruled in favor of landless farmers and indigenous tenants: the people of Peru, they declared, had a right to occupy the land thus claimed. In Land or Death, his reflections on the Peruvian land movement, Blanco explained that public space offered a critical venue for dissent. It was the public spaces of the city that allowed illiterate peasants to rally, using their bodies as a form of propaganda from below, and simultaneously as a means of distributing messages. Public space allowed the Quechua to share with one another their prophetic endorsement of the right to occupy their ancient territory. Formerly “degraded and humiliated on the streets,” sneered at in “plazas, in stores, markets, and public transportation,” through the act of occupying public space, the Quechua momentarily dominated the city of Cuzco.22 In the mass meetings for land redistribution that Blanco led in the 1960s, the sight of ponchos, the smell of coca, and the sound of the Quechuan language now dominated the plazas during the peasant marches, “tearing away the centuries of oppression,” he recalled. “The Indian,” Blanco wrote, became “master of plazas and streets, of the entire street and the sidewalk.”23 Marching together encouraged participants to collectively resist eviction. More marches impressed government officials, who reasoned that enforcing eviction would be a never-­ ending battle. Occupying public space thus turned the eviction into a symbol of a right to land rather than a legal question of paper title.24 The technique of using public space to dramatize a story has a long history, stretching back in Europe to the riots of the French Revolution—and everywhere reflecting the agency of the crowd.25 Advocates of land redistribution around the globe have used concepts of the agency of crowds and public space to call attention to their cause—in India, from Vinoba’s dramatization of the plight of the poor to the landless peoples’ marches for land reform current today. The Quechua had followers. The details of Blanco’s campaign were published in London in 1966 and emulated soon thereafter. In 1968, London’s squatters had begun a concerted campaign of public performance, designed like the communist strike of 1946 to “test public sympathy” by creating spectacles for the media that would dramatize housing as a common good. Several

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times in the 1970s, the cover of the Times featured images of undergraduates occupying buildings around London, flying banners from university offices or private houses that they had temporarily claimed in the name of the public. Their occupation was an action undertaken in the name of inclusion—­ honoring marginalized groups such as the disabled, the poor, and the homeless who did not meet the requirements of Britain’s public housing projects.26 Squatting returned to London two years after Ken Loach’s gut-wrenching drama of eviction, Cathy Come Home, was released on UK television. It was seven years after Hugo Blanco had led an uprising of indigenous Quechua people who claimed rights to their land in Peru. It was a year after Latino activists in the United States occupied the Río Arriba courthouse in New Mexico, taking the local sheriff hostage in the process of asserting the Spanish land grants that had been neglected by white lawyers, and at a time when racist policies at the Department of Agriculture caused some thirty-three thousand African Americans to lose their rights to land. It was the same year that landless laborers in Uttar Pradesh would begin their own squats on land that their ancestors had lost under British rule generations before, braving vigilante gangs armed by the landlords. Within a year, leaders of the Student Non-­ Violent Coordinating Committee would begin to discuss a program of reparations in land to African Americans. The squats of London partook of the zeitgeist of all these other movements—one part struggle for restorative justice, one part campaign for attention to the plight of the dispossessed. It was not lost on contemporary observers that the London squats of 1968 factored into a global pattern—one in which citizens were using squatting to protest structural patterns of inequality in questions of land access. In 1979, Kevin Kearns, a young American geographer doing his dissertation work in London, traversed the squats by foot. Kearns had a theory that squatting represented a new form of community that took the laws of landownership into its own hands. Kearns surveyed London’s abounding squats by foot, visiting forty-nine in all. He mapped London’s neighborhoods, photographing the “Homes, Not Cars” protest signs hanging from squat windows and the murals squatters had painted on the sides of buildings. Kearns’s research revealed that a shift in London’s planning policy classified squatting as a “viable form of tenure.”27 Like the London squatters of 1946, the squatters whom Kearns met decades later understood themselves as seeking a right to housing long promised by the government that Parliament had nevertheless failed to supply. Kearns was impressed by the organization, scale, and spread of squatting over the previous decade in Britain; organized movements of communists and

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student sympathizers had forced local community councils to accommodate homeless persons. Under a new program wherein local councils licensed squatters who registered, London’s 1,500 squatters rose to 25,000—a significant, if not overwhelming, proportion of the 190,000 homeless who waited on city lists for housing. The 20,000 squatters in the crowded districts of inner London made up seventy percent of the population. They lived, free of rent, for a license fee of between $2 and $5.28 All of these people had previously been excluded from the housing market altogether because of prohibitive costs. Kearns understood squatters as masters of performance art, appealing to a universal right to housing. Squatting was a difficult existence, a form of limbo, characterized by ephemeral community and an ascetic lifestyle. It was exclusive for reasons of pragmatism; the squatters were principally white, young (between twenty and thirty-five), single men; immigrants feared deportation too much to risk the law. Nevertheless, Kearns glimpsed the emergence of new principles at the squats that hinted at the creation of social systems whose implications were larger than mere protest. For example, he observed an astonishing range of flexibility in how squatters organized their communities. No common ideology held them together. “Very few squatters are political radicals or “social drop-outs,” he noticed.29 They were united by underground communications that left little trace: “Most ‘squattable’ dwellings are detected by means of the squatters’ ‘bush telegraph,’ a highly effective oral information channel, or through the assistance of an extensive network of squatter advisory organizations,” Kearns observed.30 They were efficient architectural innovators, removing walls or creating extensions to meet their requirements. They worked on the cheap, rehabilitating abandoned properties at a fraction of the official cost. For contemporary observers like Kearns, squatting was proof positive of the feasibility of a post-expert system dreamed of by earlier radicals. As a former squatter himself, Colin Ward actively advocated the demise of the welfare state in his anarchist journal, Freedom, and collaborated with UN officials to urge the adaptation of British squatter society as a model for international urbanism in the developing world. Writing in 1977, Ward discerned a mounting tide of rebellion against the state in Britain, witnessed by new forms of organization such as “tenant control,” “self-build housing associations,” “tenants’ cooperatives,” and “dweller-controlled rehabilitation.”31 The tactics of squatting, Ward asserted, offered an alternative to government, wrought by the self-organized actions of individuals. According to Kearns, squatters were, in fact, working successfully to alter

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property law to encompass the property rights of individuals on the edge of society. The experiments thus anticipated an unprecedented transformation of the state toward accepting the flexible, ephemeral, and participatory: the creation of a licensed, authorized sector of squatter families, adopted by almost every housing agency in London between 1969 and 1972, presaged the inclusion of squatting—and with it the housing rights of poor Londoners—in official culture. The key to policy change was middle-class sympathy for the family. Squatting families—like the one depicted in Loach’s 1966 documentary Cathy Come Home—made up 40 percent of the squatting community as a whole. Their presence among the squatters was a key point of public interest in the squatters’ plight. In response, civil servants felt compelled to contrive a “quasilegal framework” that protected them from sudden eviction and allowed for temporary stay.32 Their actions, Kearns observed, were functionally changing the custom of the city, such that squatting was becoming “a viable, alternative form of housing tenure.”33 These were magnificent claims: a people’s rebellion of building and use, accruing from small gestures, mounted until it created a full-fledged revolution in housing. Through small actions, the people were rebelling not against planning, but against the use of common law by privileged elites. By applying their initiatives with tenacity, they retooled the law itself into an instrument for social justice. Kearns’s idea—of the squat as a successful anticipation of a radically expanded state, responsive to spontaneous action from below, expanding in such a way as to recognize the rights of all subjects—appealed to many constituents who were already deep in the process of rebellion.

Squatting Becomes a Theory of Economic Development Meanwhile, squatting was taking on another face throughout the developing world. When land reform schemes failed in India and Peru, poor peasants took action. Sometimes they invaded the fields of nearby landlords, executing a land redistribution scheme of their own. Sometimes they moved to the nearest city, cobbling together squats from discarded building material. Whether they were evicted or not depended on the whims of local government. But squatting was taking the form of a historical fact—signifying that peoples around the world believed in rights of occupancy. Many social scientists who watched these movements were taken aback. They had expected peasant uprisings that would take the form of a hundred

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independent states, each of them passing its own Homestead Act. What they saw instead was a worldwide grassroots revolution of communities persuaded that they had a right to land. Anthropologist Gerrit Huizer—sometime consultant to the FAO, sometime adviser to the government of El Salvador on drinking water and road improvement—drew attention to “land invasion” as a peasants’ strategy for restorative justice, and urged the potential of squatting to create a culture of gradual, long-term mediation between post-colonial elites and organized peasants.34 Like Kevin Kearns, who had concluded that the squatters of London were making legitimate forms of political community and economic claims, Huizer was persuaded that squatting in the developing world was becoming a major mode of political engagement. Land occupations and squats, Huizer urged, should be understood not as a crime against property but as a form of nonviolent political activity intended to force the readjustment of regimes, whether capitalist or communist. Huizer explained the general pattern he had observed among peasant groups in Guatemala and Mexico, where “peaceful and non-violent” land invasions faced down “the intransigence or even violence of the landed elite.”35 When violence erupted, it “generally came first from the landlords’ or government’s side in this escalation process,” recorded Huizer.36 By contrast, “peasants became willing to use violence only once they were actually suffering, as a kind of self-­ defence.”37 Successful squatting actions, protests, and petitions in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru had achieved a readjustment of political economy in favor of the landless peasants—it had returned to them rights of access to their traditional lands. Understanding squatting as legitimate meant that the international networks of development economics might soon begin to reckon with ways of supporting squatters, whose numbers expanded the ranks of small farmers in need of support. An appropriate state policy, Huizer urged, would therefore take a line of thinking advanced by William Thiesenhuisen of the Land Tenure Center: government officials must embrace organizations of peasant movements, recognizing squatters and other informal and temporary activists as “legitimate.”38 This legitimation, Huizer concluded, was the only way developing world societies could escape perpetual cycles of violence in which a series of elites would suppress one another. Development scholars should therefore rethink the category of “violence”—the supposedly lawless peasants were in fact working within the only set of political options they had to achieve an economic system that accommodated their interests.

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The principal advocate of squatter culture for international development was a Briton teaching at the Harvard School of Design, John F. C. Turner, a reader of Colin Ward’s anarchist journal Freedom. Introducing one of Turner’s publications, Ward described him as “the pre-eminent British link with a world-­ wide network of advocates of alternatives in housing,” and touted Turner’s close friendships with Ivan Illich in Mexico and Paolo Freire in Chile as evidence of his radical sensibilities.39 Turner had been a conscientious objector to military service in his youth. Conversations about international development later drew him to tilt his studies at London’s Architectural Association School toward the changing shape of cities in the developing world. Those conversations led to him accompanying a team of researchers that headed to Peru from 1957 to 1965. When he returned to the United States, he began teaching and publishing about his observations, delivering a paper titled “Uncontrolled Urban Settlement” to the United Nations in 1966. He published his manifesto for a U.S. urban self-help housing movement, Freedom to Build (1972), followed closely thereafter by a treatise on the role of informal development in international architecture, Housing by People (1976).40 In Turner, squatting would gain its boldest interpreter, defender, and promoter. Turner anticipated a political consensus of dissatisfaction with the rigidity of bureaucracy. Both “the corporate-capitalist right” and the “state-capitalist left,” he wrote, “have little or no confidence in the housing capability of centrally administered systems.” Both, he reckoned, were attracted by informality, and would “see the signs of an alternate future in the surviving US owner-­ builders and in the burgeoning squatter-settlers of the Third World.”41 Ward went much further than Turner, prophesying that the developing world would be a frontier of self-help utopianism. In Bombay and São Paulo, Ward prophesied, the poor had a “freedom of manouevre which has been totally lost by the poor of the decaying cities of the rich world,” places like London, Glasgow, New York, or Detroit. In cities of the “developed world,” he argued, an “enormous investment in mass housing” was more damaging than freeing. His argument was cultural and social: the “hierarchical organization of large-scale works and services” created “a culture of poverty,” whose endless regulations “deprived” people “of the last shred of personal autonomy and human dignity, because they have nothing they can depend on apart from the machinery of welfare.”42 From the viewpoint of Turner and his colleagues, self-help aimed to reverse the bureaucratization and shadowy manipulation of development in the hands of capitalists. Aid had become “a cold-war weapon and a vehicle of

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economic and ideological imperialism,” Ward explained in his 1976 preface to Turner’s Housing by People.43 By contrast, informal development would bring control over building and design back to a territory’s own inhabitants. Turner argued that recognizing squatters could boost the efficiency of developing world markets. People of very low income were resourceful, he reasoned, and therefore able to outpace the expectations of lenders in terms of paying off mortgages. Echoing the conclusions of E. F. Schumacher and the appropriate technology movement, Turner complained about an essential divide between rich and poor as one source of wrong impressions in development strategies. Developing world elites, he argued, fled to air-conditioned, Western-style suburbs during their visits to the developed world, and therefore missed what was important about traditional building types, including poor people’s ways of creatively dealing with variables of climate and local building materials. “The very wealthy can effectively demand costly simulations of traditional forms,” while the very poor were forced into high-rise buildings.44 Squatters weren’t merely potential recipients of state welfare, Turner explained: they were also potential inventers and entrepreneurs—artists and carriers of indigenous traditions whose sustainable designs for architecture could enrich the lifestyles of the wealthy. Ward, the former squatter and anarchist, agreed with this assessment. Squatters’ low-impact building tended to maximize material resources, creating low-­ impact cities. Those efficiencies were impressive, a class of “immense achievements of the poor” showing “ways out” to “those of us who reject . . . consumer society’s values and whose sense of insecurity increases as we observe our growing dependency on pyramidal structures, centralizing technologies, and non-renewable resources.”45 With their resiliency intact, squatters prefigured an age of sustainable economics. Finally, Ward and Turner drew direct connections between their hopes for a squatter-run society in the United Kingdom and the creation of squatter utopias in the developing world. In economic and architectural creativity implemented from below, Ward and Turner thought they had discerned the emergence of a global network of ideas wherein poor people in both the developed and developing worlds could unite in a common struggle. This was an empowering prophecy, envisioning a world where poor people’s networks remade the globe according to the collective knowledge of the many. Their conclusions were not lost on such contemporaries as Kevin Kearns, who restated their arguments in his own work on the legitimacy of squatter organizing in London. Planning policy that embraced squatters, Kearns recog-

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nized, footnoting Turner, amounted to a revolution in property law, connecting London’s poor with their “third world counterparts.”46 To observers from the social sciences, squatting looked, by the end of the 1970s, like a possible solution for the problems of poor people in rich and poor countries alike, promising participatory governance while providing modest security for the insecure. The theory of squatters as entrepreneurs soon began to seize attention beyond the social sciences. In 1974, the World Bank’s report, Bank Policy on Land Reform, weighed in on the subject. Even as the policy report attacked inter­ national efforts at land redistribution, it nevertheless classified squatting as an approved form of it. Although it challenged the rights of property owners, squatting returned unproductive land to dynamic use on the market, the report explained.47 In other words, squatters were reclassified as entrepreneurs— just as Turner had argued. The World Bank would thenceforth become one of the loudest advocates of programs designed to support squatters through the power of debt. World Bank economists soon swarmed over squats worldwide, keen to document their project’s success. In 1974, the institution published a report about the efficacy of giving out titles to squatters in Zambia as a means of encouraging development. A series of new projects at the World Bank followed, marking a shift to market-based land reform. Thailand became the first site where the new policy was enacted. A land titling project—which created formal documentation for squatters, reclassifying their occupation as ownership and opening the possibility of creating mortgages that would allow them to improve their property—began in 1982. By 1984, analysts reported that a similar program in Nairobi had executed a successful transformation to a consumer society in which market transactions provided housing for the very poor. Market-­assisted land reform projects began in 1994 in South Africa and Colombia, extended in 1997 to Brazil and Guatemala.48 Squatting was being lifted up as a model for international development— and the pinnacle of this new attitude, perhaps, was the celebration of squatting by economist Hernando de Soto in his best-selling book The Other Path (1986), which praised land titling as a means for winning shanty dwellers away from the Maoist guerrilla insurgency of Peru’s Shining Path.49 Proponents of market-­ based ideology, fed up with the failures of the state, greeted the squatters not as victims but as heralds of a new world order. Meanwhile, the new policies justified the lowering of standards in land and housing policy. Arguments for efficiency and environmentalism urged that

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governments do more with less. In this way, they justified World Bank housing projects that made no provision for basic sanitation, focusing instead on issues of paper title and legal security.50 Squatting was also becoming a mechanism for creating loans around the world—and for roping poorer nations into international chains of debt. The new policies thus helped to solidify the financial ties between developing nations and the World Bank—a relationship with profound and long-term consequences. Where land titling was granted after the fact, squatting became the mechanism for bringing the very poor into the marketplace; a victory for the market was declared over the makeshift houses they cobbled together for themselves from plywood and corrugated tin. Bank economists invented rating systems for estimating the approximate worth of squatter dwellings, on which the inhabitants would raise collateral.51 It was a recipe for the spiraling indebtedness of developing world nations, which some analysts have linked to the deflation of developing world currencies and the normalization of austerity politics around the world. Those consequences were hardly the ones imagined by the architects of squatting before it became World Bank policy. For Turner, the history of squatting offered nothing less than the model of a coming global rebellion against planning and authority. With their respect for traditional architecture, the people were facing down “uniform housing estates” which, Turner suggested, were secretly designed with the modernist objective of “segregating categories of people,” motivated by “the emotional disturbance of those who fear freedom.”52 Turner interpreted these struggles in terms of class experience, expressed in lack of empathy on the part of those who were designing development. Turner insisted that the tide of squatting offered proof that the global poor were rising against the state, demanding to take the allocation of resources into their own hands. He saw independently developed squatter towns as evidence of a broadcast rebellion against forms of authority typical of socialism and development at large. He recounted numerous experiences visiting slums in Greece, Turkey, Chile, and Peru, where he had witnessed the contrasting reactions of urban planners and working-class citizens; planners, as a class, Turner observed, embraced the idea of ridding “poor people of their dreadful slums which were in fact their pride and joy.”53 Turner and his cohort foresaw a future of self-determination that would lift up the poor, retaining the virtues of the welfare state while making room for working-class initiative from below. At such a time of intellectual ferment, squatting began to look like a solution

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for housing crises among the poorest people in the world. Through the 1950s and ’60s, state measures for land redistribution had been endorsed by U.S. policy makers and backed by the United Nations. Dissertations in social science—opining on the opportunities and best practices for agrarian reforms— flowed through the academic presses of the world, landing on the tables of international bureaucrats. These bureaucrats read eagerly about the prospects for a historically informed, accountable land reform as the root of a new redistributionist policy that favored participation by the many in agriculture in the Global South. As the World Bank embraced market-based idealism, however, land redistribution was jettisoned as a path to peaceful reform—while squatting remained. And as squatting was being canonized by the World Bank as an institution of capitalist development, land redistribution—once the favored approach in developing nations and at the FAO—lay broken and discarded. In the era of the squatter, poverty was increasingly understood as a longterm feature of human existence, systemic and not subject to relief.

Conclusion: Occupation as Technique We have inherited a planet remade by squatters. As a phenomenon of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the global rise of urban squatting has taken place on a massive scale: in 2003, 72 percent of Africans and 58 percent of Indians were squatters, having no secure title to their land.54 While the particular conditions and movements behind these numbers vary enormously, many squatters around the world share today a common historical background in the mass migration of refugees from international conflict and land seizures related to the Green Revolution; more broadly, they demonstrate how present-day poverty reflects the colonial alienation of land.55 It is easy to talk about squatters as victims. Squatters around the world today share the experience of attempted remediations of their condition from above— including policy work regarding titling and credit support that has been administered since the 1950s by international government organs, many of whose suppositions now draw upon the celebration of the squatter as a neoliberal subject.56 If squatters’ political movements are a bellwether of citizenship alienated from basic rights—as Partha Chatterjee and others have argued—then the conditions of urban poverty today are desperate, despite more than half a century of policy work directly focused on better housing and legal titles.57 In the West today, squatters in Berlin and Amsterdam are sometimes heralded as creative self-governance and protest cultures.58 Only rarely are the urban

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squatting cultures of Europe and the slum-dwelling cultures of the developing world examined side by side as contemporary responses to the problem of land rights. Yet both are part of the same phenomenon, connected to the ongoing conversation about occupation, and enabled, proselytized, and protected by similar sets of ideas about the effectiveness of grassroots movements. Recent studies have suggested that the conclusions of Turner and Ward were overly optimistic about how much control global squatters can claim over their destinies. In Planet of Slums (2005), journalist Mike Davis described the fascination economists have with supporting squatters via land titling. Embraced as a panacea, land titling allowed development agencies to turn a blind eye to the hundreds of new squatter cities—most of them filled with landless peasants fleeing drought and famine—that had begun to cover the nations of the Global South. More recent studies by social scientists have only underscored the con­ clusions Davis reached. In most places, land titling campaigns—organized by well-meaning economists in the hopes of rendering occupation into property—harmed peasants’ abilities to lay claims to land. Because it is expensive to conduct paper surveys, only the richest of the squatters were able to afford to have their property rights ratified. In places such as South Africa, the official recognition of squatters’ rights was accompanied by new divides of opportunity and by mounting race and class antagonism and violence.59 Around the world, what actually happened in those decades catalyzed the reversal of land redistribution in many places. Spiraling real estate prices in Delhi and Shanghai drove the proliferation of shantytowns and slums, none of which came with access to government amenities such as clean water or sewerage. Meanwhile, local gifts of land were made to woo international companies, or declared permanently tax-free, as tenants were evicted and small farmers had their land confiscated. For the impoverished masses in many places, hopes of occupancy and security were vanishing.60 Squatters were not the vindicated heroes of the last forty years, as radicals like Turner hoped they would be and as economists like de Soto claimed after the fact. Global squatters were at best a small group of beneficiaries of new policies, and at worst the unwitting accomplices of neoliberalism. Squatters were witnesses and survivors of the collapse of socialized land and housing planning, the mass failure of conversations about how to provide a better system. In London, they were among the last to contest the rising price of rent and the privatization of public housing. In the end, they became the carriers

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of a tradition of dreams in which international conversations about land and housing mattered. One can imagine the bitter irony with which an activist like Colin Ward might have glimpsed his arguments being repurposed to serve the very forces that would displace millions of people around the globe. The ideas of Ward and Turner armed economists at the World Bank with tools for dismantling land redistribution.61 As a result, squatting was mainstreamed as a way of life for much of the world’s population. Conversations about land redistribution and housing for the developing world were postponed indefinitely—an agenda item to be reached after industrialization and the repayment of loans, whenever that might be. If the era of squatters had a heroic element, therefore, it was neither in their approach to policy nor their reinvention of political culture, but in their ability to survive—a talent almost certainly buttressed by the powers of international connectivity. That conversation was all the more important because of the fragility of the land reform initiatives of twentieth-century Labour and international governance when faced with movements of international capital. Indeed, Kearns’s argument about how squatters gradually retool traditional governance and law has found more evidence to sustain it than Turner’s claims of a working-class revolution against authority. Squatters retooled—and created anew—techniques for addressing the crisis of homelessness, using protest and occupation to draw attention to the otherwise invisible needs of the many.62 The extended version of such an argument is that squatting shows the public what it has lost. By occupying neighborhoods of vacant skyscrapers and mansions, squatters called attention to the problem with finance capital, which put whole neighborhoods beyond the reach of people in need of shelter. In neighborhoods without occupants, collectively owned investments in infrastructure such as sidewalks, roads, sewers, train stations, and even housing itself had been effectively captured by market investors who themselves never used these amenities. In the era of neoliberalism, however, the city—and the law—began to change. The technique of the squat has not weathered the most recent episodes of neoliberalism well. In 2012, squatting was declared illegal in Britain—a symptom, perhaps, of a society in which protecting property rights has triumphed over rights of occupancy, breaking with a century of tradition. Other tools would have to secure the landscape for those who still believed in a right of occupancy.

13  •  The Technique of the Map Indigenous Title, Rent Control, and Pollution

By the 1950s, the problem of paper had become notorious in India, where only 20 percent of the population could read and write.1 Partly through the advantages of literacy, rich families were dodging laws that required them to surrender their land. The laws were intended to reverse the power of British Empire, turning landless tenants into a generation of small farmers. But in the years after 1947, land redistribution had slipped from the Congress Party’s agenda. The Indian states, not the nation, would have to pass laws allocating land to the poor. Many Indian states passed “land ceilings”—laws that limited the amount of land that could be held by any single household. With access to their own surveyors and lawyers, wealthy families skirted the restrictions. Families able to hire lawyers found that they could entrust their land to children or cousins, officially escaping the ceiling, even while the family as a network retained its holdings. The process was mocked as an exercise in making “paper partitions,” because the rich were able to game the legislation through dealings done on paper, which meant that paper—not land—was the only thing they had to surrender.2 The origins of the paper partitions lay in the failure of a coordinated, mapped, and planned scheme to turn India’s land over to the poor. International observers took note: if land redistribution were to become a reality, peasants would need official maps detailing their occupancy, backed up by the state. Paper was thus at the heart of the tangled reasons that land reforms were failing. In 1963, after nearly five decades in India, the Christian missionaries Charlotte and William Wiser meditated on the role that written documents played in that failure. Expense prevented many poor families from learning to read. Every time a document needed an official stamp or signature, corrupt

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police or government officials saw an opportunity to enrich themselves. A culture of bureaucracy compounded these problems: Indian land redistribution programs required multiple forms and maps. Because it was expensive to process the necessary forms, many peasants couldn’t afford to claim their own land: they would have to hire intermediaries and pay bribes at every turn. The entire process was thus structured in such a way as to put land claims outside the grasp of the Indian peasants whom the laws were supposed to serve.3 In the years following the Wisers’ observations, a variety of citizen movements began to organize to improve poor people’s literacy, not only in India but around the world. Many of those movements would come to focus on issues of land access, effectively providing the documentation for a grassroots land redistribution. Like the literacy movement, the participatory mapping movement was international, highly diverse, and decentralized. It was connected by the ready availability of cheap paper—in the form of mimeographs, dot-matrix printouts, and other ways of sharing information. It was organized by literate elites and activists dedicated to the cause of overturning prohibitions that put land claims out of the reach of the many. Through experimentation, regular meetings, and a process of review, the movement developed tactics to turn face-to-face village meetings into detail-­ driven conversations about village land, water, and ownership. Sometimes an entire village would walk the land together, pointing to prominent features in the landscape and debating their significance. Participants would return to the meeting and take turns drawing what they had seen and explaining what it meant. The process eventually created a map, produced by illiterate as well as literate people, and the maps frequently supported legal claims about whose ancestors had worked the land, who should take responsibility for the well, or what factory was responsible for poisoning the fish. Participatory maps eliminated many of the barriers to democratic participation that the Wisers had documented. Maps supported legal claims among the landless and illiterate. They provided a document trail, and sometimes the document allowed communities to go to court to prosecute their rights. The story of the participatory map is truly a global one: while Indian trade unions and slum dwellers played a significant role, so did the Beaver and Cree people of Canada, researchers at the University of Sussex, and the poor renters of Appalachia. Connected by international conferences and publications, actors in the participatory mapping movement shared a common set of ideas: at the front of their agenda, from the very beginning, was what might happen when ordinary people could make claims on the state using the power of cheap paper.

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Participatory Maps in the Context of Land Redistribution By 1979, at least one serious effort to disrupt economies of rent by collecting data regarding land use had been successful: the Appalachian Land Owner­ ship Survey, begun under the direction of the Highlander Institute in Tennessee.4 Dramatizing the inequality of landownership in the poorest region of the United States, the survey aligned with contemporary ideas about the liber­ atory effects of participatory movements in which the people gathered and published their own data. It also drew directly on ideas circulating in India, conveyed via a series of widespread transmissions that defined a new global undertaking. Participatory mapping became a worldwide movement for teaching and refining a community’s mapmaking skills to achieve popular goals. The Appalachian map was indeed a people’s map: compiled by a community through the knowledge of that community. It would have been impossible had not a global movement promoting democratic participation suggested a format for how communities might collect, map, and analyze data for themselves. The radicality of the Appalachian map and others like it cannot be overstated. To make maps intended to truly act as the people’s documents, allowing communities to create their own knowledge and potentially govern themselves, was to reverse the trend of information and power over the landscape going back five centuries. The state use of paper maps and documents to intervene in property relations goes back to William Petty’s survey of Ireland, wherein maps laid out estates for the colonizers to seize. Historians are familiar with innumerable cases in which indigenous people were defrauded of their rights by the use of paper. Even the United Nations’ Soil Map of the World has been characterized as an “aggressively elitist endeavor,” a symptom of the world’s growing investment in top-down management, with expert soil scientists representing state power, the shock troops of capitalism in a Cold War world.5 The Appalachian map was designed to enable a detailed critique of landholding in a region and to facilitate its redistribution. In a sense, it was a longawaited realization of the failed efforts of the United Nations to provide a global soil map that would support land redistribution. The UN and Appalachian surveys, however, had one major thing in common: both envisioned the map as an instrument of popular power. The creators of both maps aimed to gather data about the cost of rent and the question of who owned how much property in an area—economic facts that could recast larger debates about the economy in favor of the peasant. Both looked to paper as an instrument of

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liberation—the paper a corollary to the appropriate technology movement in India and Britain. Paper could inform peasants about cheap kinds of technology within their grasp or new markets that would bring them fair prices. Paper could unify peasants into communities, cooperatives, and national movements. Maps of soil were particularly useful to peasants who needed to plan what species they would plant in that soil, or to make arguments about taxation or equity on a national basis. The Soil Map of the World arrived too late to help most post-colonial nations execute their land redistribution programs. By the 1970s, state-led land reform was in shambles in many parts of the world. Land reform was defeated in most of India; socialist land redistributions were imperiled across Latin America, where leaders could no longer count on U.S. support. Funding from the World Bank for state-led redistribution schemes was being axed in preference for plans in which the market and loans played major roles. Meanwhile, Vinoba Bhave’s free-style land reform from below offered the concept of another kind of democracy: entirely manufactured from the grassroots, completely voluntary, devoid of bureaucrats and experts, born of poor farmers’ conversations about human needs rather than decreed from above. Elsewhere, peasants, indigenous people, and organizers enacted small-scale interventions like rent strikes, pilgrimages, and squats. New techniques of occupation evolved alongside a discourse about “participation” and “self-government”; organizers imagined that they were creating more democratic and accountable forms of government than the elite networks of bureaucrats typical of most nations at midcentury. Indigenous and poor people’s movements, working together with social scientists, created their own information infrastructure: a decentralized network of peasants sharing information about their land, its maintenance, and toxic pollution via many-to-many paper maps. The participatory movement found especially energetic allies among British theorists of international economic development, who in the 1960s and 1970s offered a distinct tradition of thought about the economies of developing countries at odds with the more broadly acclaimed U.S. theories, which focused solely on economic growth. Various calls for mass participation in government appeared in the early twentieth century, many of them running in tandem with calls for land redistribution. Only after the collapse of many state-led land redistribution programs did the participatory research movement come together around theories of how urban government, education, and information more generally could be made responsive to the ideas of participants. Post-colonial theorists like Paolo

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Freire and Sherry Arnstein offered new ideas about how teachers, organizers, and city administrators could effectively engage the ideas of racial minorities and poor people, without condescension or pandering. Those ideas fed a global movement of participatory organizers and trainers working in the field of economic development, hailing from indigenous groups around the world and poor people’s movements in India—all connected by a global network of conferences, pamphlets, and training materials. Few of the early conversations—either from the social science of participation or the participatory research movement—explicitly dealt with issues of housing and land redistribution. That elision would change, however, as conversations arose about participation on indigenous lands, where the lack of strong rights to land remained an open grievance. Gradually, participatory research, indigenous movements, and the academic study of development would coalesce around the problem of rights to land, producing a new technique of occupancy: the participatory map. The technique originated as a people’s technique, born in peasant movements in the developing world for the purpose of helping poor communities gain control over the management and distribution of their own land. Unlike the rent strike, the public procession, or the squat, participatory mapping arrived after the collapse of state-led land reform. It was a technique of occupation that presumed that no state existed to redistribute land—and that any redistribution would necessarily be created by the people, for the people.

Participation and the Rise of the Walking Tour in Development Economics At the newly founded University of Sussex, economist Dudley Seers argued that the practice of foreign aid, with its links to charity and to Western investors, did little to build up local industries. Seers and his colleagues espoused a vision of economic development grounded in indigenous technology and housing for all.6 This was a vision of development supported by the United Nations and FAO, but increasingly at odds with the large-scale industrial farming and infrastructure development being proposed at the World Bank under Robert McNamara. Above all, the Sussex vision promoted social and cultural solutions over econometric ones, and this inclination made the university a home for those rethinking technology, data, and the role of participation in development.7

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Seers’s views echoed those of Indian critics of British Empire. From the early twentieth century, Indian nationalists had warned about the dangers of dependence on British investment capital, arguing that India’s economic development must depend on the adaptation of cheap, local technologies such as the spinning wheel for making homespun cloth. E. F. Schumacher translated Indian conversations for engineering departments in the West. First world engineers and third world farmers could collaborate, he reasoned, in designing cheap intermediate technologies that would advance less-developed countries on the road to industrialization. The appropriate technology movement (or AT for short) embraced the hope that informal governance and small-scale technology could decentralize wealth and thereby solve systematic economic exclusion. Researchers identified various technologies that could be retooled for global distribution, including cheap toilets and irrigation pumps. In Schumacher’s vision, the engineers of Britain and America would increasingly spend their time visiting poor villages, helping to inaugurate a second agrarian and industrial revolution with new waterwheels and solar panels form-fitted to the huts of Africa and India. The vision was radical: what Schumacher was proposing would require rethinking the entire research and development matrix that had evolved since World War II. Instead of committing their time to researching for big agriculture and its dependence on capital-intensive inputs, engineers in Schumacher’s system would become diplomatic envoys, carrying their knowledge to the sharecropper in the developing world. Many of the University of Sussex faculty embraced this vision, building on Schumacher’s ideas. In the Sussex Manifesto of 1970, they laid out a brave vision for development based on the needs of the developing world, with caveats about GNP as the measure of growth, wherein access to appropriate technology would play a vital role.8 In the eyes of Seers’s younger colleague Robert Chambers, the Manifesto and the academic conferences were not radical enough. Social science as a whole needed to change from an organ surveying populations on behalf of a distant state to an agent through which local populations organized their own response to political and material conditions on the ground. Chambers was an expert on land redistribution in Africa, especially resettlement schemes in Kenya and Tanzania. He had also published on extension programs and the use of small technology and indigenous technology to make small farmers more productive.9 In this domain, Chambers glimpsed an issue

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understood by few of his colleagues—alongside the problem of unequal distribution of land, he observed, ran a far deeper inequality: lack of access to information. Chambers’s critique took the form of an indictment of data and the institutions that administered it. Surveys and surveying knowledge (including the new punch-carded computer systems growing to buoy them) consumed a growing amount of researchers’ time—becoming, he argued, a distraction from the basic goal of helping poor communities.10 Chambers’s evaluation of social science thus ran in parallel to the critique I have leveled against publication at the FAO: once a route to enact change, publication had become a goal in itself, a replacement for neglected plans to challenge the legacy of colonial landholding in developing countries. Chambers reasoned that a development program truly committed to the developing world would reject the social science survey in favor of documentation of local conversations, with the researcher a facilitator of community discussion. Under Chambers’s influence, development scholars at Sussex began to contrive new techniques for researching appropriate policies designed to excavate local ways of knowing. One of the key techniques was walking in community. Walking with locals was necessary to correct biased opinions formed from traveling only good roads in rich districts, wrote Chambers.11 Claiming the walking tour as a tool of mutual instruction, Sussex organizers promoted community walks as methods designed specifically “to help ‘outsiders’ see at close range several items of interest and relevance which they would otherwise miss.”12 Objects of attention might include “traditional indigenous technologies,” medicinal plants, and fodder crops.13 The community walk for gathering data was itself a retooling of the appropriate technology version of the “transect survey,” Alexander von Humboldt’s technique of walking in a straight line up a mountain to identify ecological zones. By adapting Humboldt’s method to the task of economic inquiry, researchers at Sussex retooled a technique of data collection for the purposes of community—rather than expert—knowledge. Those studying village governance and technology began to walk in loops and zigzags, or to follow the course of rivers and streams, prompted by changes in the landscape to ask about local plants, local history, and infrastructure.14 For them, the transects were a way to align the outsider’s worldview with that of the local. Organizers advocated these walks as methods designed specifically “to help ‘outsiders’ see at close range several items of interest and relevance which they

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would otherwise miss.”15 The community—not the organizer—generated the categories of vegetation, land use, soil, and property management that merited discussion. “We once observed 3 sources of protein which would never have come to light in our usual survey method,” recalled James Mascarenhas: a single walk revealed pigeons raised under the eaves of houses, the netting of fish swimming in the paddy, and old women collecting snails for supper.16 In the community walk, activists had at last located a technique for managing information that subverted the hierarchy between experts and the people. By seamlessly blending social science interview techniques with the everyday experience of walking the landscape and discussing it as a practical object, the community walk was intended to excavate oral and tacit ways of knowing from sometimes illiterate communities. Inhabitants would discuss crops, soil, wells, and ownership in practical terms that arose from viewing each landscape, following their own intuitive categories rather than those imposed by the social scientist’s agenda. Crediting nonelites and nonexperts with their own understanding removed indigenous, colonized, and working-class people from the category of “primitive” once assigned by Western colonizers and anthropologists—instead underscoring the practical, interpersonal, and moral intelligence implicit in any given culture.17 Paul Richards, an anthropologist who joined many of the early gatherings, argued that positivist surveys, whatever their rigor, necessarily perpetuated the prejudices of those who compiled the questions. Richards was offering an early critique of expert maps and how they failed to represent indigenous, peasant, and working-class perspectives. It was better, he believed, to resort to another kind of mapping—messy, iterative, and never complete: a map that represented the work of many hands. By combining several disorderly surveys obtained through rapid appraisal, participatory organizers could capture the lively discursive way that a community conceived of its land far better than was possible with the single perfect surveys typical of state-run programs in the past. In Richards’s perspective, such maps would collapse the distance between mapmaker and map user in the same way that Bertolt Brecht’s theater invited audience members into the spectacle. “To be chafed constantly by ‘quickness’ and ‘dirtiness’ is to be reminded that all social-science methodologies lead to ‘constructed’ presentations of reality, that many such constructions are possible and that their differences require dialectical resolution,” he wrote.18 There was radical potential in such a practice, Richards reasoned, for it invited all map

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users—whatever their status in society—to react to every survey, map, and development directive in their world, bringing to bear their skills of critical awareness, resistance, and engagement in the creative framing of alternatives. In the work of the Sussex community, the labor of carefully observing the landscape and how individuals talked about it was explored as a new mode for social science—one that attempted to document native ways of knowing. Chambers’s technique ran in parallel to a similar approach in the work of Elinor Ostrom, who systematized historical and indigenous means of managing natural resources, demonstrating community knowing in such a way that it could be apprehended by modern forms of knowledge in the social sciences and among policy makers. Chambers, however, went even further. He was interested in inventing a kind of information infrastructure that could dramatically broaden democratic participation in the bureaucracy of development. To effect such a goal, he intuited, would imply a process of translation from local knowledge systems into formats that could circulate and be apprehended by the state. His insights were based largely on contemporary research that noted the exclusion of women and indigenous populations from the structures of power; so in the 1970s, Chambers and his colleagues at Sussex organized a series of conferences on women’s role in development and indigenous people’s knowledge systems, pushing the envelope of who counted in conversations about economic development. Chambers’s work pushed beyond mere documentation of women’s and indigenous voices to emphasize building information systems that helped subaltern populations to speak in ways that courts, development authorities, and academics could hear. Chambers thus followed Rajesh Tandon and the wider participatory research community in looking for tools to facilitate discourse and dialogue about current economic conditions within rural communities. Such tools recategorized researchers into “facilitators” who were urged to disappear, or merely to document conversations that expressed the ideas and labor of local communities. To merely document, as Ostrom had done, meant leaving an implicit division between local ways of knowing—among indigenous people who preserved their forests and fisheries—and expert ways of knowing, like Ostrom’s, in which counting and comparison remained the tests of empirical validity. Combined with Freirean organizing, walking tours could activate conver­ sations about best farming practices, and communicate collective desires to governments. Importantly, information would arise from and be channeled by

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the people, not by the expert. Expertise would be reduced to the talents of the organizer or literacy teacher in mediating between local will and government. Sussex staff began to supplement walking with training on diagram making to participatory leaders, showing how visual aids, used well, might become universal intermediaries between peasant consensus and policy change. Researchers at Sussex began to contemplate the power of drawings members of the participatory movement had made in their literacy classes. These pedagogic cartoons were receiving new scholarly endorsement, likened in the annals of the Sussex conferences to Venn diagrams or maps—tools for conveying rich information from the many to the many. The diagrams and maps that documented transects and community meetings were designed as political implements. In a manuscript documenting his experiments working with peasants in India, Gordon Conway argued that small farmers would have a chance of making their voices heard in development only if they become organized as a political force. He advocated the use of diagrams “in a readily understandable visual form” as a way of simplifying “often fairly complex information” in order to promote dialogue and understanding both among the farmers themselves and between the farmers and agents of development and governance. Conway was arguing about a kind of collaboration that produced living, evolving exchanges, utterly unlike the dry reports of most academic research centers engaged in international devel­ opment—and unlike most articles published in academic journals. When, in 1985, another Conway article documenting the process was rejected by the academic journal Nature, the irony was not lost on Conway; he knew that his subject was a technique for managing information—and a form of intellectual engagement—appropriate to democratic governance. The concept of grassroots documentation was utterly alien, however, to the journal he sent his manuscript to, as he acknowledged in a note to later readers.19 In the years that followed the publication of the Sussex Manifesto of 1970, the faculty at the University of Sussex were bent on producing a form of information that bridged peasant conversation and academic research, native knowledge of place and the maps and diagrams recognizable to the world of government, law, and science. At Sussex, the participatory movement’s tools were packaged into a shape officially endorsed by university experts and recognizable to policy makers. The university hosted a conference presenting the “Sussex Tool Kit” (now known as Rural Rapid Appraisal, or RRA) in 1979, a year after the publication of the final volume of the FAO/UNESCO Soil Map of the World, 188 years after the founding of the British Ordnance Survey, and 33

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years after Indian geographers in West Bengal had begun mapping soil to support land redistribution. It was a history-making intervention in the story of international development—and in the history of governmental documentation broadly writ. While indigenous people and movements would refine and further distribute participatory techniques, the University of Sussex conferences played an important role in preparing the world of international development to accept new interventions designed to communicate the needs of local people to centralized institutions. Another conference about participatory development took place at Sussex in 1980; and conferences on the tool kit soon began to appear around the world.20 By the 1990s, there were a legion of textbooks and numerous organizers trained by Chambers circulating around India and other parts of the developing world.21 Organizers immediately put the Sussex Tool Kit to work for the purpose of supporting land redistribution programs. One participant reported on his work in a village in Bangladesh in 1974–75; he had used RRA to create a report on exploitation of the rural poor emphasizing the many avenues by which the poor were held in place, including “tenancy, labour, moneylending, the market, lineage status, patron-client dyads, the co-operative, the systems of access to public resources and justice, and straight-forward coercion.”22 Another organizer, reporting on his experience of learning from RRA, explained that state-supplied irrigation technology had failed to support local needs for irrigation. Through participatory conversations and diagrams, local farmers had reached a consensus that the irrigation technology was poorly suited to their climate, and that irrigation technology could be better accomplished through the use of simple devices like rainwater capture.23 Participatory maps and conversations were doing what the state had failed to do: finding the correct fit between techniques, technology, and local needs, enacted in an efficient and flexible manner. By seeding community conversations about the landscape that unlocked the elements of poverty—including land tenure, usury, and drought—social scientists had turned themselves into facilitators of community self-knowledge. They had created an alternative information structure to the vertical files of social science notes on poverty and peasant rebellion collected by the FAO and other such institutions. Instead of a dead collection of published research, the Sussex researchers were forging a living information infrastructure that could potentially create a direct conduit from impoverished villages to national and international relief agencies.

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The Reform of the Map Critical of expert management as these movements were—and as dedicated to rethinking the development process—none of them before the late 1970s had yet begun to reimagine traditional maps of land tenure. The map was, after all, one of the foremost objects of empire, having been a tool of centralized administration and colonial rule since the origins of the cadastral map in sixteenth-century Europe. By the seventeenth century, European maps were helping settlers lay claim to the lands of other peoples around the globe. By the nineteenth century, expert civil engineers and urban planners were using maps to evict poor families from neighborhoods known to house working-­class radicals.24 In 1980, who would have imagined the map could be used to make a radical claim on the state by those traditionally excluded from participation? The indigenous people whose land was claimed by Canada did just that— and the fact that it was they who did so is striking. Of all of the groups of peasants that had lost their land through eviction, displacement, or indebtedness, the native tribes in North America had experienced the most extreme injustice: repeated incidents of force, fraud, and broken legal contracts. From the early 1970s, tribes in Alberta had noticed overdevelopment and pollution from expanding mining works encroaching on their territory.25 As they began to look for a way to ask the Canadian government to enforce their property rights in order to exclude miners from their territory, they became aware of the power of maps: in government courts, the map was a tool to mandate adherence to property law. Creating a map of native holdings undocumented by the state was no straightforward task. It depended on organizing families across tribes and sorting through oral history and hunting customs to find, document, and illustrate traditions of marking the land that would stand up in court as the native equivalent of surveying. After months of conversations, the natives began to recognize their hunting lines, interwoven across the whole of the territory, as a possible source of evidence about the tribes’ long occupation and government grants to territory. These hunting lines had been preserved in oral tradition and rehearsed through seasonal hunting rituals—one family to a hunting line, the exact territory of each line known to each family. Hugh Brody, a British geographer then embedded with the tribe to study its traditional sense of space, began encouraging family members to draw maps showing hunting tracks and traditional place-names. To his shock and delight, the tracks were rich with topographical information and never overlapped—incontestable evidence, he

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realized, of a native understanding of strict family rights to exclude others from property—a kind of claim that would stand up in court.26 All the tribe had to do was collect these traces on a single map. The maps came about following a series of presentations and petitions made by chiefs and councilors of seven of the northeast’s Indian bands—the Beaver and Cree peoples among them—to a select committee of the Canadian House of Commons in 1977, where the chiefs expressed concern about the construction of a natural gas pipeline. The Canadian government made money available for a land use study, and the study brought Brody to the tribe.27 The process of mapmaking was collaborative and democratic in the extreme, following exactly the pattern prescribed by Freirean organizers for participatory meetings. “The majority of the men and many of the women in seven of the region’s nine reserves drew maps of their land use,” Brody reported.28 The tribal members delivered to the Canadian government maps of animal species, one at a time, each detailing a hunting location and its hunter’s activities. The maps they created were richly detailed, encompassing five hundred people—proof that the natives, far from having died out, were still inhabiting land that their ancestors had inhabited continuously for generations. Presented in court, the maps accompanied a historical narrative that documented and denounced generations of industrial encroachment into the hunting and trapping lands occupied by the Indians. Faced with these maps, judges tended to rule in favor of the tribes’ sovereignty and against logging and mining companies that claimed a right on government land. A crowdsourced map, the Cree tribes found, could alter the outcome of court cases and the plans of government economists.29 The court case, and the mapping movement it triggered, coincided with what was perhaps the height of enthusiasm over the promise of mapping in development circles. Seven years before, the FAO had begun the publication of the Soil Map of the World, which was supposed to demonstrate that published maps would help local people to hang onto their land; the final volume was due in 1978, the year after the court case was filed. Yet the indigenous maps of 1977 demonstrated that native peoples could make a suit for their land using only the most basic tools and maps that they had contrived themselves. The events in Canada also unfolded against the backdrop of a global indigenous struggle to reassert indigenous rights to land. The court case took place three years after the occupation of Ganienkeh and Alcatraz Island—two territories in the United States with significance for indigenous persons that became the subject of symbolic squats as indigenous activists sought to reassert

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tribal claims to land. It was eight years after landless workers in Uttar Pradesh— many of them Adivasi—had clashed with vigilante gangs armed by local landlords. Ten years before the court case, in a standoff in New Mexico, Latinos and indigenous persons had clashed with federal authorities over the question of protecting land rights legally granted by the Spanish crown and endorsed by U.S. treaties. Sixteen years before, Hugo Blanco had led an uprising of indigenous Quechua people asserting their land rights in Peru; a decade after, students in London led solidarity marches in support of Blanco, rallying at the Peruvian embassy. These indigenous movements had employed a variety of methods for asserting and publicizing discarded land claims, including squatting, narrative, marches, and violent resistance. Collaborative maps were merely the newest in a long line of modern techniques contrived to contest the legal status of land. Within a few years of the appearance of the Canadian map, participatory organizers in Bombay were writing excitedly about the Cree experience in their newsletters. Before long, they were experimenting with participatory mapping themselves. They made maps of local squatter settlements and argued with the city about formally recognizing occupation—a step that would mean inducing government to call off projects for evicting the poorest residents and bulldozing the slums. Elsewhere in India, squatters organized for land rights, road maintenance, and getting municipal governments to clean out clogged sewers.30 A map-driven movement for control over the cities had begun. Conversations at the participatory conferences had already concentrated on land. This was, after all, the India of the 1970s, when campaigns for land reform were waged in every state, striving to overturn the colonial legacy of land monopolization inherited from the British. As the Cree experience had shown, the art of mapmaking could potentially create a powerful reversal of colonial hierarchies that had structurally excluded the poor and racial minorities from the governance of their own land. Participatory maps gave communities the tools with which to analyze the administration of their territories and argue for adjustments suited to their needs. These adjustments often resulted in a radically new organization of public spaces, created through the power of common property law, or restored traditional common rights to forests and aquifers. In the years following the first publications on the Cree experience, participatory maps were deployed around the developing world by other activists affiliated with the participatory movement, all seeking to reestablish the rights of the poor and indigenous to the land around them. In Thailand, indigenous

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people used Styrofoam maps to lobby for control over their ancestral territory. In Gujarat and Ethiopia, indigenous communities came up with cooperative systems for patrolling their woodlands and communally harvesting wood.31 Other projects specifically targeted community ownership of water. Indian NGOs worked with poor farmers on the participatory management of watersheds. Maps documented the exhaustion of local water aquifers and pointed out where hand pumps needed to be repaired. The map became a tool for facilitating consensus around a maintenance and repair schedule.32 In an era when the Rockefeller Foundation was pushing improved varieties of rice in­ appropriate to the seasonal fluxes of the Indian climate, and local government agriculture and credit authorities were emphasizing high-yielding grains of rice, peasants used participatory maps to overturn the decisions made by experts.33 Farmers explored village-directed development strategies whose ideas came from the people, rather than from institutional expertise. Participatory meetings helped villages come to a consensus about strategies for economic resilience, for example, allowing villages to choose to focus on traditional fodders that could be reseeded every year, instead of using proprietary seeds. After engaging in a participatory process, residents were able to successfully lobby local government for policies more appropriate to the local economy. The people of Kistagiri village debated the most appropriate crops to be grown on the basis of several factors: their effect on health, vulnerability to insects, nutritional value, availability, time to maturity, and seasonal growth. The villagers expressed a strong preference for pacchiguddy and juna soppy— cheap, indigenous grain foods—and they resolved that all credit and agricultural programs be changed to provide support for buying the seeds that met locals’ needs.34

The Accessibility of the Technique As development theorists at the University of Sussex understood, a movement centered around the poor requires particular tools. It needs techniques for the collection of data about territory as well as methods of representing that information to the people themselves, even where materials are scarce. Organizers therefore delved into the search for technologies appropriate to their undertaking. Conversations about appropriate technology in development shifted the search for maps from the professional surveys associated with the Soil Map of the World to simpler technologies. Participatory organizers believed that maps

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needed to be a truly appropriate technology, cheap and flexible enough for communities in the poorest parts of the developing world to undertake them. Organizers tended to make maps with whatever materials were at hand, using markers or even drawing in the dirt with a stick when markers weren’t available.35 Even later, when use of a geographic information system (GIS) became widespread elsewhere, GIS was rarely embraced by participatory organizers at PRIA or Sussex, because of the difficulty of setting up GIS stations in developing countries with little electric infrastructure. When the highest priority of mapping is not science, but rather the participation of as many people as possible under the terms of whatever environmental conditions confront them, new innovations need to be found. In the 1980s, Indian organizers developed “rangoli mapping”—a process of drawing maps in the dirt using rangoli, the colored rice powder traditionally used for making apotropaic threshold paintings during Divali and other festivals. In their hands, rangoli became an “appropriate technology” for drawing maps on the ground in places where markers and paper were scarce.36 The technology of participatory maps from the 1970s to 1990s was, for most, nothing more than some scraps of paper, some markers or chalk, a stick, a few training manuals, and perhaps a board game. Organizers had realized that even cheap materials could be used in a process that stressed new habits of mind, suited to the inclusion of persons formerly excluded from the institutions of rule. Participatory facilitators also experimented with techniques that would allow conversations about population growth, wages, climate, and political action. Some thought that aerial mapping could initiate dialogues about the larger ecosystem. Participatory methods could even be used over the scale of large swaths of communities, drawing together regions into conversations about their shared inhabitation of land. In 1992, for instance, 130 Nepalese villages participated in a large-scale land use survey, visually analyzing a map together and engaging in a dialogue about their ideas for regional development. Others experimented with asking villagers to draw time maps, designed to show the village fifty years in the past and fifty in the future.37 Maps became the tools for bringing to the village debates over Hardin’s theory of the tragedy of the commons or Malthus’s theory on population growth. Armed with maps they had made themselves, illiterate peasants made their own analysis of these warnings, asserting their own conclusions about the consequences of knowledge for village-level agriculture. What the participatory organizers of the 1980s and ’90s discovered was that all persons, including those with no property or rank whatsoever, felt committed

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to the conditions of their future, and were more than capable of creating institutions for improving their environment. “People in rural areas,” wrote James Mascarenhas, an organizer of poor farmers in Mysore, “are extremely skillful managers forced to live as they are under extremely marginal and vulnerable conditions.”38 Years of irrigating farms with the help of participatory communities had convinced Mascarenhas that deep conversations about population, political economy, and ecological threat were possible, even among peoples isolated from expert conversations. Participatory organizers began to look ahead to anticipate how the map could amplify grassroots consciousness of the ways that imperialism, monopoly capitalism, and expert rule had impoverished their ecosystem and their culture, and where there might be room for large-scale political change.

Participatory Land Reform Participatory conversations had many uses in terms of self-governance and the future of the community, but land and water management remained essential to communities in developing countries where land redistribution had been long expected. In cities, poor communities armed with participatory maps undertook urban planning on their own. Indigenous peoples in Canada used participatory mapping to plan their own sewer system. In Calcutta, slum dwellers organized drain-­cleaning brigades and kicked out corrupt garbage-collection contractors.39 Elsewhere, participatory processes led to land tenure and property renegotiation with the wider community. Participatory methods impressed those who were already at work to halt slum clearance in Ahmedabad, India, and in the Philippines. Asked in participatory process what their goals were, most communities insisted above all else “that there should be minimum disruption to the existing settlement pattern—relocation only if it is absolutely necessary.”40 Participatory conversations allowed a community to take a stand against displacement. Poor neighbors in certain towns even used participatory maps to renegotiate property lines within their own community. In the slums of Sri Lanka, neighbors meeting for a participatory debate decided that they valued equality and public space, so they redrew the plot lines in their squatter settlement accordingly.41 In certain communities, participatory research thus became a tool for executing a kind of participatory land reform: land redistribution as governed from below.

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The activists who composed the participatory movement broadened their constituency each year, reaching out to new groups ostracized because of gender, race, or class. By 1982, participatory techniques were being deployed among peasants and landless laborers in Chile, Peru, Botswana, Tanzania, India, South Korea, and among union workers in Norway, indigenous people in Canada, and urban blacks and rural industrial workers in the United States.42 Many of the earliest applications of participatory mapping involved protecting the commons. For example, after 1986 the Aga Khan Foundation began experimenting with participatory management of forests, encouraging villagers to devise their own schedules of patrolling their woodlands and organizing their cooperatives. In 1989, a project in Ethiopia reported on the use of community mapping and participatory research to devise a tree-management plan for the community.43 In a sense, the participatory map was helping to initiate the forms of col­ lective land management that Elinor Ostrom’s research was documenting as part of an ancient tradition; as Ostrom’s analysis would prove that community management could be economically efficient, the work of early community mappers proved that local communities, if given access to a facilitator, could develop their own plans to effectively manage natural resources. Participatory maps were also becoming a vehicle for convening poor people and opening up a conversation about their struggles and needs, and for documenting the alignment between peasant needs and their claims on land and other forms of property. The case of John Gaventa demonstrates the way a global conversation about land rights was evolving as the legal successes of the Beaver and Cree were attracting other activists into conversations about the use of maps to secure a new relationship with land. In 1978, Gaventa—fresh from Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and just beginning his role as director of research at the Highlander Institute in Tennessee (the same institution famous for training the American civil rights activist Rosa Parks)—organized a rent survey of the Appalachian Mountains. The survey proved that relatively high rents were a decisive factor in keeping Appalachian miners among the poorest laboring populations of the United States. It also proved that rents in Appalachia went to enrich a tiny minority of absentee landlords who, much like the landlords of nineteenth-century Ireland, rarely returned their income to the local economy in any way.44 The Appalachian Land Ownership Survey proved that a small brigade of facilitators could use the techniques of participatory mapping to develop a data-driven portrait of a community and its relationship to landowning.

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The Survey was published in 1978, one year after the Beaver and Cree peoples of Canada began their suit to defend their territory. It was the same year as the University of Sussex hosted a conference in which new ideas about participatory mapping would be debuted as part of an alternative “tool kit” for fostering development at a grassroots level. The two mapping initiatives—one indigenous in timber country, one working-class in coal country—demonstrated that the knowledge infrastructure of surveying could be engineered by ordinary people, even without the aid of UN surveyors and international soil scientists. The demonstration would be lasting, and it would unleash a new era in which grassroots movements looked to the infrastructures of knowledge making—such as publication and mapmaking—for the source of empowerment. Within a decade, a series of books heralded a new era for organizing across the Global South, among them Robert Chambers’s Rural Development: Putting the Last First (1984), and Orlando Fals Borda’s Knowledge and People’s Power (1985). A new era of “participatory” development was changing how movements organized—and sometimes, how experts taught. By 1982, Gaventa’s story was circulating in Indian pamphlets alongside stories of a land struggle by the indigenous Adivasi tribes of Dhulia district in Maharashtra, where the now landless laborers organized a “struggle for liberation of land and against atrocities.”45 In 1984, Gaventa was invited to Tamil Nadu to present the Appalachian Land Ownership Survey. The members of trade unions and literacy groups who attended his presentation saw in the survey a model for renegotiating landownership patterns in Indian farms and cities.46 As participatory research, maps and surveys did more than merely collect information: they also made possible a public response from communities actively engaged with the data being gathered. The work was premised on a new role for social science as the facilitator of public conversations within poor communities. In contrast with researchers at the FAO, participatory maps and research skills were forged by social scientists who turned their attention away from states and institutions toward poor communities on the ground. In doing so, social scientists often had to renegotiate their own role. John Gaventa’s experience of advising international communities, and Robert Chambers’s of launching the first conferences that documented participatory mapping, are both tales about outsiders for whom publication, journals, and bibliography were second to other channels of information. Chambers’s story embodies many of the ideological struggles and frustrations of his times. He persisted in organizing despite the hostility of an earlier generation of researchers to his blend of critically informed writing and

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activism. Denied tenure at the university, Chambers afterward argued that he was able to do what he did because he was off the tenure track—and therefore able to pursue writing that aligned with his values, even when it cut against the grain of expectation from his university department. In the 1980s, Chambers would author some of the era’s most powerful critiques of development economics, chastising professional institutions for their lack of faith in grassroots communities and their lack of interest in what those communities required to do their work.47 Through his position as adjunct at the University of Sussex, he continued to organize events to bring together activists and disseminate materials, keeping the movement going in its early days. Gaventa, for his part, had worked as the director of the Highlander Institute before beginning a career in development studies, which ultimately led to the directorship of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Neither Chambers nor Gaventa deserve credit, of course, for a movement that grew out of the Global South, and whose early adopters included the native peoples of Canada, Indian villagers, and Indian civil servants. Nevertheless, both are important embodiments of a model of embedded scholarship in the age of mass publication, one that in a sense echoed the committed, engaged scholarship of Doreen Warriner, Elinor Ostrom, and other scholars whose careers spanned activism, writing, and research. Participatory maps were the product not of any one hand, but of a community of researchers, activists, and indigenous peoples, motivated to work together on the problem of land rights in an era in which state-driven land reform and international land redistribution seemed to have failed. The ability of participatory maps to secure rights to land and water, and even to enliven conversations about gender, identity, and security, has been well documented in the development circles where participatory mapping is taught today.48 A global movement had been created—and at its the core was a consciousness of a universal right to occupation and the need for community movements to document the demand for that right.

The Co-optation of the Participatory Map by International Development As support for state-led land redistribution began to vanish, enthusiasm for the techniques of participatory mapping spread among academic and policy circles. After 1990, participation became defined by a new set of actors drawn from many development nonprofits and funded by organs of international gov-

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ernment like the United Nations and the World Bank.49 These individuals, few of whom fit the category of citizen-participants as defined by Arnstein, were impressed with the record to date, and enthusiastic about what participatory methods could do if they were funded more broadly and if they were wedded to up-to-date advances in technology. Despite its successes, there were implicit weaknesses in the mapping movement that made it vulnerable to external events. Participation had been widely adopted by institutions, governments, and NGOs as a means of cheap development without commitment of resources. But as bureaucrats came under pressure to cut budgets, among the first aspects of participatory mapping to suffer was the accompanying Freirean methods, thus diluting the maps’ democratic potential. Maps alone, as a technology stripped of support, could not create the holistic village dialogue dreamed of by organizers in the 1970s. That dream had rested on the inclusion of adult literacy programs, paid organizers, and legislative support for worker cooperatives. Critiques of the technique began to spread. Participatory initiatives from the 1960s were reexamined for evidence that they really had contributed to anticolonial struggles in Cote d’Ivoire and other parts of French Africa. When they were found wanting, the movements were accused of being “populisme bureaucratique” (bureaucratic populism) or “la reduction du peuple à l’exploitation dont il est victime” (the weakening of popular power by the exploitative forces that victimize the people).50 Such a criticism is echoed in the work of historian Daniel Immerwahr, who has argued that U.S.-sponsored “community development” strategies—a cousin of the participatory movements documented here—represented a distraction from political claims marginalized populations might make to material resources. In the Philippines, American development agents offered community development as a form of propaganda after abandoning an earlier land redistribution policy and instituting a campaign of violence against the Huk peasant movement, which demanded further rights to land.51 A critique similar to Immerwahr’s has been leveled at the participatory mapping initiatives deployed later by the World Bank. “What seemed to be local activism turns out to be a World Bank policy implemented through the conditionality of international aid,” wrote Ananya Roy of the urban planning department at Berkeley. By accepting World Bank funding in places where most change came from locally organized political parties, she argued, participatory organizers were undermining their own agenda of local control.52 Uma Kothari, a specialist in migration at the University of Manchester, made a similar charge.

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She believed that by the 1990s women’s voices were no longer being included in work organized around participatory techniques. Spaces for dissent were disappearing due to “a tidying up of people’s lives through the exclusion of anything messy that does not fit in with the clean tools and ideal structures implied by participatory techniques.”53 Roy and Kothari—both women social scientists from the Global South, armed with the validation of advanced degrees and powerful positions in Western academia—supplied ample evidence that the participation schemes spearheaded by the World Bank were watered down to the point of providing little if any control for local communities over natural resources. If participation did not lead to material change, what good were the meetings? The faults Roy and Kothari examined were real, but as both acknowledged, the problematic deployment of development tools lay with the political context in which they were rolled out, not with the techniques themselves. World Bank support to distribute participatory mapping materialized after that agency had for decades undercut FAO initiatives for a coordinated campaign for global land redistribution and the support of small farmers—this despite its origins as an international institution accountable to directives from the developing world concerned with undoing the legacy of racist exclusions to landholding. The World Bank and other U.S. agencies, in contrast to the FAO, specialized in short-term programs designed to spark technological innovation. As with the World Bank’s support of appropriate technology, its commitments to economic growth and Schumacherian experimentation underscored a program of international development that had little room for memory. Indeed, even as enthusiasm for the techniques of participation spread, the inclusive principles that had been baked into participatory methods began to be diluted. By the 2000s, American academics had begun to criticize the work of participatory organizers in the Delhi slums. Urban planners trained in the West had continued using the language of participation to boost their own credibility even as they veered from the movement’s philosophy.54 A program in Calcutta claimed to introduce “participatory” organizing, but this participation was just a traditional social science survey of the kind abjured by Robert Chambers—a paper form collected opinions from informants.55 In Cordoba, Argentina, in 2012, a World Bank report urged “participatory mapping,” which turned out to mean top-down dissemination of maps where flood-­ control measures would be implemented.56 It was the furthest thing from the kind of careful work to organize communities that Chambers and the Indian organizers had labored to create. There was no question, in the designers’

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minds, of using maps as a tool for organizing community-directed initiatives, let alone giving communities the power to democratically decide how World Bank funds would be best spent. The World Bank programs often deployed the language of participation without ceding either power or resources to popular movements. This hoarding of power was exactly what Sherry Arnstein criticized in her ladder of participation, the highest step of which was devolution of power and resources. When surveys or mere consultation were labeled “participation,” the word became a mere verbal talisman that bore little relation to its original meaning.

Assessing the Participatory Map Even while the organs of international development co-opted, exploited, and watered down the language of participatory governance, the technique of participatory mapmaking remained the people’s tool. The technique had been invented and refined by organizers working with by popular and indigenous movements. Whatever the international politics of participatory organizing, the contributions of the technique were not minimal. From the 1980s forward, par­ ticipatory training seminars supported community action to support fishermen, women’s leadership, cooperatives, and groundwater governance.57 Village by village, the lineaments of a new kind of international development was appearing—one where peasant voices were privileged above those of experts. Instead of funding choices being managed by the ideology of experts in Rome or New York, collective choices were made on the basis of local information, barely mediated by an organizer whose duty was chiefly to enable listening. In its application on the ground, participatory mapping also became the main venue for supporting land redistribution in the last decades of the twentieth century. In places like India, land redistribution allowed small communities to continue to support small farmers on a minimal level, despite the fact that international and national movements for land redistribution had already been diffused. In an era when the World Bank chiefly supported free market measures in the countryside, which largely benefited the richest peasants, participatory techniques became a fulcrum around which poor communities could mobilize to assert their own needs. Participatory maps went further in later decades, and pioneered new ways for local people to monitor the environmental conditions of their land and water. In Tamil Nadu, participatory maps allowed neighbors to identify a local

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Participatory mapping supports efforts to identify polluters (Resource Map: Problem of Tannery Effluents [Kamatchipuram], from K. Anbalagan, G. Karthikeyan, and N. Narayanasamy, “Assessing Pollution from Tannery Effluents in a South Indian Village,” PLA Notes 30:3–6, October 1997)

tannery that was polluting water in particular wells. In Louisiana, maps helped a poor black community suffering from high rates of cancer to sue a nearby chemical company. Maps helped some communities to self-organize around small-scale programs like preschools, well maintenance, or street lighting. Maps protected native peoples’ lands in Madagascar, the Himalayas, and the Philippines. Transferred to GIS, native maps produced in Canada are now being used to protect the area from tar sands developers.58 In cases that aimed for legislation against a corporate polluter, the maps were extremely successful. As they were realized on the ground, however, the power of participatory techniques to change the reality of peasants around the world was starkly limited. Participatory techniques could not make up for the facts of an era that believed in tracking inefficiency as the major means of regulating the economy. Participatory techniques rolled out among poor peasants did not persuade the rich to support new opportunities for communities that had been marginalized over generations. Simply put, the new forms of information could not make up for the collapse of national and international land reform. The most impressive feature of participatory mapmaking is, perhaps, how

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the technique might have worked if it had been initiated and established in an era marked by a different political reality. Participatory mapmaking, if supported by national and international commitments to redistribute land, might have supplied the maps of soil, water, and potential fertility needed to plot efficient small farms. It might have accompanied extension work funded by the state to promote technological and scientific innovations, allowing farmers to compare and choose the technologies from local, indigenous, and international sources most appropriate to their work. It might have supported a robust program in which the landless workers of each village and region became small farmers, supported by a democratic program of information sharing, financial support, and exchange. Through making maps and diagrams of the region’s features and needs, through regular sharing of the facts of poverty and success in the region, the participatory tool set might have contributed to governance by transparent means, accountable to the majority of local inhabitants. Thus the unanswered challenge of participatory mapping involves scale: can maps organize community action at the regional, national, or international scale? We can imagine—even if it is only speculation—a kind of international development aligned to the program of participatory research and mapping developed at Sussex and refined by developing world communities around the globe. FAO initiatives, at least at the time of the agency’s founding, derived from a democratic mandate to redistribute power. Had the FAO, rather than the World Bank, become the initiator of a campaign for participatory mapping, it might have devised an information infrastructure capable of conveying a wider democratic set of information and concerns with landholding, pollution, and indigenous rights, coordinated across international boundaries, with the goal of enabling international action in the service of occupancy. Such a mapping regime would be defined by the values of recognizing local forms of knowledge in relationship to the material world, amplifying local responses and demands, and transforming the social scientist from researcher to facilitator. This kind of project could not be accomplished by technology alone, although it might be coordinated over a planetary scale by information technology. Unfortunately, the fascination with silver bullet fixes by technology works against such a solution. When participatory maps reappeared in the West in the 1990s, rumors of global success shaped enthusiastic expectations. In 1995, U.S. vice president Al Gore argued that digital maps could become a tool for fighting global warming with broadcast consent.59 Everyone agreed: the coming of interactive technologies on the internet promised to attenuate depen-

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dence on the sociologist or geographer who operates as the intermediary between citizens and the map. For the better part of the last decade, pundits have predicted that participatory technology is on the cusp of solving the problem of access to city government. In these stories, technology often appears as the magic cure for problems of civic administration, promising to inject democratic consensus into the process of governance. Some interpreters hint that the new capability spells the close of the historical period Timothy Mitchell defined as the “rule of experts”— the inherently hierarchical structure of decision making that has governed civil engineering and urban planning projects since the emergence of the professions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.60 One of the seminal proofs of the coming victory of the masses over their government is the crowdsourced map, made and edited by countless untrained volunteers. Maps of this kind have made headlines since the early 2000s, appearing in every conceivable form—from collective maps of the city biking routes to maps of street trees (presumably owned by the public) that bear edible fruit, complete with information on when one will find them fruiting.61 Without a doubt, the creation of a mass informal resurvey of the city for evolving community and individual ends is new. But are electronic maps really changing the shape of government? Journalism has answered this question with a resounding yes. Stories about participatory maps surged after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, when the application Ushahidi was deployed to source geographically tabulated information about the wounded and their needs. Other news stories documented how students at the Harvard School of Public Health were using their summers to survey slum dwellers in Bombay about the best location for new public toilets.62 Many a reader has concluded that the participatory map heralds a new day of citizen participation in government, reshaping state-supplied bike routes, toilets, and medical response to accommodate the real-time needs and desires of the populace. But the kind of information infrastructure developed to coordinate the interests of women in developing nations and indigenous people required much more than an out-of-the box fix. The Sussex tool kit emphasized points designed to widen democratic participation in decision making and action at every level. Replacing surveys with community dialogue, using transect walks to excavate local ways of knowing, and implementing diagrams as a medium for collective discussion—these were tools that could be used by social scientists or ordinary citizens. They could mobilize villages, cities, regions, or even

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continents in dealing with issues like pollution, indigenous tenure, and homelessness—if the crucial techniques of democratic participation they rested on were but understood and supported. The legacy of participatory tools in land governance—like the legacy of Vinoba Bhave and decentralized governance in the absence of state action—is an assemblage of mixed results. The participatory maps, like Vinoba’s movement, can demonstrate clear achievements. The problem is that their scale is relatively trivial when measured against the achievements of national initiatives in the twentieth century. The raw count of farms redistributed by Vinoba pales in comparison to the area reallocated in Ireland, let alone that reapportioned by communist regimes.

Conclusion The process that was taught by development organizers as the participatory map comes to us from people far beyond Silicon Valley. Indigenous and post-­ colonial people around the world invented the crowdsourced map as their tool, and its primary goal was to manage public access to the basic necessities of land and water. Participatory tools of self-government have indisputable advantages. Historically, they have excelled in raising local conversations about indigenous land claims or in targeting polluters. But they also have their limits. Demands for redistributed land from the poor have rarely mounted from a local scale to include democratic participation about rent, land claims, or pollution on the scale of a nation or a globe. In more recent years, Silicon Valley has developed technologies allowing the many-to-many mapping scale to include thousands or even millions of participants. This conjures up intriguing questions that, perhaps, cannot be answered with certainty by the historian: could those techniques scale, given the peer-to-peer technologies that networked movements now have at their disposal? What would globally networked movements demand in their Magna Carta of land rights? Such a document would not necessarily propose the same idea of occupancy rights as those suggested where this book began—by Irish tenants in the 1880s. In nineteenth-century Europe, few varieties of indigenous land claims were understood. Most land redistribution programs focused solely on exclusive, individual title. The race question—and the collective or nonexclusive forms of ownership assumed by some indigenous societies—was only

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beginning to be taken seriously. Those ideas were challenged and expanded through the work of individuals like Elinor Ostrom—who validated the efficiency of many indigenous land management methods—or through the radicalized indigenous and African American movements that laid claims for reparations anew in the 1960s and ’70s. Today, we have the tools to perform a participatory mapping linking race and ethnicity to high rents, reparations in land, and eviction. In the 1880s, observers began to link a warming climate to increasing levels of atmospheric pollution. Collective reactions to those realities meant that minority and impoverished populations were forced to settle in floodplains or areas used by industry for disposing toxic waste. The tools of participatory mapping and the devices used to measure toxicity today make possible the creation and sharing of maps of toxicity, floodplain settlement, and the sources of carbon emissions, and we are able to link such maps to settlement patterns among indigenous, tribal, minority, and other landless populations. A Magna Carta of land rights for the twenty-first century would set out terms by which courts and communities could validate action based on information collected from below. It would also set climate change and the environment squarely in the middle of what it means to claim a right to occupancy.

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Epilogue Why Land Redistribution Matters in the Age of Climate Change

As the skeleton wrestles with the Nobleman in Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death, an hourglass stands on the table, its sand trickling away in a steady stream. The Nobleman turns to get away—but a bony foot, moving with the agility of a tango dancer, blocks him. The Nobleman realizes only then that he can’t escape. His efforts to dominate a transitory world, symbolized by his magnificent clothing—so different from the clothes worn by the starving peasants in other episodes of Holbein’s series—have gained him nothing. He cannot stop death; he cannot save his own life. While he neglects the hourglass, the last few grains of sand are slipping away. Just so, while the characters in this book worked through their projects, time—or political will—ran out. From our contemporary perspective, we can review the entire slow-motion collapse of the movement for occupancy rights, frame after frame, like someone holding up a strip of film against the light, poring for a full hour over frames that took a second to flicker by on the screen. While the administrators at international institutions like the United Nations were willing to prosecute justice, they found themselves increasingly forced to concentrate on publishing; meanwhile, national schemes for land redistribution came crashing down, in region after region, under the power of elites; Cold War politics hampered international cooperation; and voluntary movements—despite their vast potential to effect real change—did not put their growing energy into promoting technology that could coordinate action at an international scale. Looking back over these decades, we can see that none of these factors were inevitable; each part of this dynamic was contingent on a myriad of choices made, year after year, at individual and bureaucratic levels, choices informed

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Detail from Hans Holbein, “The Nobleman,” from The Dance of Death, 1523–25 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

by all the things one might expect—inertia, pessimism, utopianism, financial entanglements, ideological myopia, and a growing bibliocentrism—and the transition that resulted was greater than the sum of its parts. Although there were many piecemeal reallocations, the great dream of redistribution of the earth’s soil on a global scale was never realized during those optimistic decades. Naive accounts of land reform generally attribute its failures to an “inviolable right to property” or to “the disappearance of communism”— but I believe that another force was primarily driving these failures: an increasing attitude of unconditional skepticism directed at centralized administration of all kinds. At its best, skepticism toward the state underwrote experimentations with participatory politics at the grassroots. At its worst, skepticism paralyzed national and international initiatives for redistributive justice that had

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been decades in the making—replacing them with a series of empty promises grounded in the supposedly curative effects of deregulation. All the while, another process was quietly marking time through events as exigent as the grains of sand in Death’s hourglass. In 1974, the same year the World Bank pronounced against small farms, scientists were debating a new history of landscape recently exhumed in the form of ice core samples taken in Greenland. The archives of ice would tell stories that heated up the urgency of rights to occupancy—as they indicated, with the certainty of an emptying hourglass, the fact of massive displacements to come. Consulting the icebound archives of the earth’s atmosphere, geologists soon learned that new emergencies would imminently threaten an enormous number of people with displacement. A few decades later, peasants from Bangladesh to Somalia would receive the same message in the form of mudslides and floods and drought, which rendered their farms useless and their nations zones of starvation. The global land war, which began as an attempt to address the legacy of empire in history, was changing into a series of power struggles that would determine who would survive in the era of climate change. History offers little solace for such unprecedented conditions. It hardly even offers context for them—what the past offers, instead, is perspective: in studying the allocation of the earth and its relationship to inequality and democracy, humankind has been working on issues relevant to climate change for at least a century and a half. The history of human displacement and the role of international organization in mediating injustice have been subjects of deliberate research and wide debate since at least 1945. From a perspective of history as account, we can look at this imperfect record, and ask what lessons we have learned. Climate governance today runs in parallel with the longer history of attempts to govern the distribution of land. The likeness between them rests on three major features—the international and planetary nature of both challenges, the relationship of both issues to a shared colonial past, and the vulnerability of long-term strategies in both domains to changes in political ideology and the leanings of individual nations. I will also propose two causal dimensions of how climate change and land redistribution are bound up: first, how climate change compounds the conundrums of homelessness and land availability through the creation of climate refugees, and second, how solutions from the history of land distribution— especially small farming—promise to reduce emissions while making local economies more resilient to the results of a changing climate.

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Land Redistribution and Climate Governance as Twin Issues Land redistribution and climate governance are both matters that challenge us to contemplate injustice on a planetary scale. One may focus on land and the other on the atmosphere, but both concern the management of the limited natural resources of our planet; and both are existentially bound together with survival itself. A century ago, a failure to administer land in an economic fashion sometimes resulted in famine and mass starvation—while today, the poor management of atmospheric carbon could soon bring about sea-level rise, widespread drought, and other disruptions to welfare, human and ecological. Because of the planetary scale of climate change, climate politics requires international collaboration at a level for which there are few historical precedents— efforts to redistribute land offer one of the only cases in which international collaboration mobilized sustained action over decades. Plans to address land redistribution and climate change also share vulnerabilities relating to the relative novelty of planetary-scale collaboration. Serious-­ minded debates about what is best to be done can be sidelined by enchantment with new technologies, demographic fears, or market-based theory. Broken treaties and plans can reverse the progress made over generations. If world leaders abandon their commitments—as the United States did regarding support for land redistribution in 1974, and as U.S. president Donald Trump did in withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2019—they create a moral hazard for other nations, which must decide what to do about the “free rider.”1 Moves of this sort made by the United States can also undermine long-­ standing commitments to research and action, permanently harming the abilities of other nations to act. That was, of course, exactly what happened after the United States withdrew support for state-led land redistribution schemes after 1974—neither the FAO nor the nations that awaited FAO maps, technology, and extension services could continue with the pledge to support small farmers, and so protect the world’s poor from eviction and displacement. For anyone skeptical of the tangled nature of these issues, it might be illuminating to study the shared history of environmental struggles and land inequity. These are twin aspects of the long-term histories of colonizers and colonized. Accommodating small farmers in Ireland, Mexico, and India was an initiative taken to reverse the sins of colonialism—and it provided the descendants of near slaves with new opportunities. Likewise, the most promising current plans to limit carbon emissions all require the richest nations to lead the way by acknowledging the benefits they have enjoyed for centuries—

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accounting for them, if not atoning for them, by reducing industrial emissions— which are, to be sure, a palimpsest of their years of colonial exploitation. Old grievances related to land have already been compounded in recent decades by the early consequences of climate change. In 2011, representatives at the United Nations failed to ratify the petition for “peasant rights” of the global Via Campesina movement.2 Since the 1970s, stark economic divisions have increased with the rise of income inequality; disproportionate wealth enables the hoarding of natural resources like land and water—which have been privatized around the developing world through brazen land grabs that transfer public or democratically dispersed resources to private hands. Proliferating evictions, land grabs, and climate-driven displacement threaten the right to occupancy in countless places today—consuming the energy of poor people the world over in a desperate fight to survive.3 Meanwhile, protections once certain now waver, as squatters’ rights and global rights to housing are in peril. Although land redistribution would substantially answer most of these challenges, it is rarely advocated in the United States and Europe as a tool for fighting climate change. This is especially unfortunate, considering that land redistribution arguably represents the surest way to render poor communities resilient to climate change. The most recent UN report on climate change, in 2018, outlined goals to limit carbon, plant trees, halt deforestation, and court sustainable agriculture; almost all these demands require governments to exert a mandate over land. Managing land use also presents an achievable way of dealing with the surge of climate refugees already under way from drought-stricken areas such as Syria. Over a recent six-month period, 10.3 million people were displaced by climate change–induced events such as flooding and droughts—fourfold the number who were displaced by conflict over the same period, according to the Red Cross.4 If leading governments fail to meet the 2030 deadline for activating legislation, in the near future rising sea levels and drought will likely lead to even larger displacements across the globe. Such displacements would compound present-day issues around access to housing, water, and food. How nations and cities will integrate climate refugees remains an open question, but some students of agriculture think small farms still provide an answer. Leading advocates of sustainable agriculture have argued that small farms are more adaptable to changing temperature and rainfall than large industrial farms, for obvious reasons—as climatic conditions change, small farmers tending multiple crops can pivot with agility more easily than large-scale farmers, whose

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investments in a single crop, produced within long-term infrastructure, are inescapably constrained by expectations of climate stability.5 Land redistribution, in other words, directly suggests solutions for some of the most intractable problems raised by climate change—namely, refugee resettlement and the adaptability of the global food supply. Some climate activists advocate strategies specifically linked to land redistribution. Some argue that small farms provide a solution for fighting carbon emissions on a systematic and global level. In the Brazilian Amazon, the government has promised to redistribute land to farmers, and thus farm-friendly policies have become, in some instances, a force for deforestation—an example that shows how context matters.6 Climate change calls for a wide variety of appropriate responses, but the vast majority—from preserving indigenous land administration to capping emissions to supporting food security to transitioning to solar farms—imply some sort of land redistribution. Some observers have suggested that land redistribution would support an expansion of food security for communities whose livelihoods are endangered by a changing climate. Indigenous nations are still struggling for sovereignty over their own territory, a measure that would bring greater housing and food security— but indigenous sovereignty over lands rich in minerals and fossil fuels also requires that nations be willing to put a halt to further prospecting for carbon fuels.7 The rights of occupancy still offer important answers to countless human concerns: poverty, pandemic, food security, urban homelessness, immigration growing out of wrecked economies, and refugees from flooded or desertified zones. What is to be done to secure the commitments made by fickle nations? In 1976, when Arnold Toynbee published Mankind and Mother Earth, he agreed with thinkers as diverse as Gunnar Myrdal and William and Elizabeth Paddock: the world needed a concerted effort to invest in centralized organs of international governance that would administer a new era of commitment to aid and sustain small farmers.

Thinking About Rights of Occupancy at Scale Arguing for the importance of interventions at a global scale has not, over the last few decades, been a popular move in academia. Attention to working-­ class, peasant, and indigenous experience taught the social scientists of recent decades to beware “rule by experts,” to think through the “hermeneutics of

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suspicion,” and to question all forms of governance at scale as the possible intrusions of empire. Operations at scale have their rightful place, however, in any history of modern rights. The earliest events within that record of occupancy were the Magna Carta and its successor documents—which enshrined peasant rights to the forest on a national scale. While its provisions and freedoms were eroded at times, and had to be reasserted and redefended, the Magna Carta has remained relevant over eight centuries: without the promise of scale, the Magna Carta would have been just another piece of paper. Standing in contrast are the failures of short-term and experimental thinking in the twentieth century. Much of modern scholarship has been written under the spell of enchantment with short-term, decentralized, and spontaneous acts of the kind preached by Vinoba. Some histories of technology essentially equate the ability to scale with the cultural ambitions for rule and control that also characterize authoritarian rule and the oppression of minorities. Enlightenment mapping initiatives lend themselves, quite understandably, to being seen as metaphors for European racism—just as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles easily becomes an allegory for France’s imperial ambitions. Effective occupancy rights, however, require investments in technology. This includes large-scale investments in infrastructure, financial support for cooperatives, national and international policies, and small-scale technology suitable to making a single-acre farm productive. They also require cooperative institutions at the national and international level, coordinated grassroots movements, and the reinvention of old tactics in every generation. For a plan to resettle climate refugees on an enormous scale to be successful, the stewards of land would need access to information, technology, and infrastructure. Averting climate change likewise depends not merely on solutions formulated at the local level—if we are to limit carbon emissions, pollution, and the ramifications of changing climate, compulsory projects must be engaged at the global level. Climate change poses a challenge to the human institutions of our era, few of which presume that truly international cooperation is realistic. In 2015, representatives of member nations convened by the United Nations failed to agree to provisions to halt carbon emissions at 2 percent of their contemporary level. The hard targets for phasing out pollutants that marked previous treaties such as the Montreal Protocol of 1987 were missing. Hard targets were abandoned by the Copenhagen Treaty of 2009 in an attempt to recruit the con-

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sent of industrializing nations such as India and China, which were heavy polluters. Thereafter, the United Nations convened a gathering of nations who presented a series of totally voluntary and nonbinding agreements.8 There were strategic and diplomatic reasons for allowing India and China to forge a course toward sustainable development that diverged from that of the privileged nations of the West. But the use of voluntary agreements to manage climate change has left the world in a perilous position, with few nations on target to meet their climate goals. Nonbinding targets reflect the religion of the times. We live in an era prone to wishful thinking about consensus and the market, and yet it is an era that remains utterly skeptical about international agreements, regulations, and sacrifices for the greater good—an era enchanted with decentralized mechanisms rather than centralized ones. We abandoned international institutions once before, fantasizing about the power of free markets—leading the way to mass displacement and intractable poverty across the developing world.

Toynbee’s Argument That Climate Change Predicts an Era of International Governance In Mankind and Mother Earth, the historian Arnold Toynbee—already the author of numerous volumes on the history of the world—sounded an urgent call in 1976 for historians to learn about the failures of human institutions, given the reality of a changing climate. “In these bewildering circumstances, only one prediction can be made with certainty,” Toynbee wrote in tones of alarm.9 “Man, the child of Mother Earth, would not be able to survive the crime of matricide if he were to commit it.”10 Toynbee’s history reviewed the story of the exploitation of the earth with the goal of better understanding what pollution is, where it came from, and what to do about it. Like many scholars writing about climate today, Toynbee identified the roots of climate change as bound up with the industrial revolution. Toynbee’s incisive diagnosis sounds familiar enough to us today that it hardly needs an argument—the advent of industrialization only exacerbated social inequalities that had been gestating since the Neolithic period. Stranger to us now, perhaps, is his prescription for solving this ancient problem. Toynbee believed that the world was on the cusp of a new stage of consciousness in which humanity would choose rational measures that uplifted the living standards of all, while simultaneously protecting our planetary home.

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Our mutual imperilment in the face of climate change, Toynbee argued, would force humanity to confront the limits on collective action that had defined human experience until his day. For millennia, he explained, humanity had been able to eloquently put into words the conditions that would make for a better world—and yet its realization had always remained beyond our grasp. Human beings could imagine worlds defined by peace, charity, and the elimination of bias against the poor or strangers. All religions and spiritual traditions had aspired to realize those goals—and failed. Toynbee defined the historic conditions that prevented the further evolution of our species as a “morality gap”—a chasm between the altruism that human beings claimed to value and the reality they were prepared to tolerate within their own societies. In the past, Toynbee explained, progress toward eliminating the “morality gap” had been limited by the immovable realities of politics. A world run by the elite, divided into petty nations that were busy fighting each other for survival, could not address the fundamental conditions of cooperation for the greater good. Only democracies—which, other than a few experiments in antiquity, were a modern phenomenon—could potentially change the equation, as they fundamentally aspire, at least in principle, to a union that benefits the whole of society. Only recently had humans begun to examine in concrete and material terms the structural history and ongoing harm caused by the biases of race, class, and gender. Only international political alliances could create a venue where nations cooperated to solve their problems peacefully—and such institutions had only begun to function at the beginning of the twentieth century. Such limits to society, Toynbee believed, would have to be eliminated if humanity were to make further advances in the direction of peace and prosperity, let alone confront unfathomably disastrous changes to the planet’s climate—the impending threat to our very survival. To actualize a collective shift in morality, Toynbee argued, humanity would have to abandon the modes of political organization that had been dominant since the time of ancient Sumer: the dominance of the political group and the national border. Boundary making of this kind, Toynbee argued, undermined the principle of peace by encouraging individuals to empathize only with members of their own identity group. Nationalism was eventually compounded with more subtle versions of political boundaries—which included class bias and racism—producing a world where individuals principally identified with, and came to the aid of, others of their own kind. The principle means of addressing a morality gap, Toynbee explained, was to create new institutions genuinely responsible to the whole, rather than fa-

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voring given parts. Toynbee argued for one great international, democratic authority that would contain pollution and limit the evils unleashed by capitalism. Beneath that overarching unity, local self-government would dominate, with each locality legislating on a human scale. Small-scale governance would allow personal relationships to dominate over economic gain. In face-to-face communities such as these, empathy could again flourish. The “morality gap”— which Toynbee believed first appeared with the dawn of individualism—would be eliminated: instead, humanity’s focus would be mutual preservation of one another—and of the biosphere. Toynbee’s vision may have been somewhat utopian, but it approached head-on the problem of collective action that continues to inform our ideas about the limits of our responses to the climate. He was raising fundamental and timeless questions about prospects for peace and prosperity: must the laws of economic self-interestedness forever limit humanity’s ability to cooperate? Under what circumstances would human beings willingly sacrifice their privilege to ensure the common survival of all? Nowadays, we tend to consider Toynbee’s questions through the narrow lens of current social science. We agree that states can fail, and that within “failed states,” development is difficult. We believe that there are “economic incentives,” and that individuals with money seek them. We know that the history of the twentieth century was marked by bloodshed, and we warn against the forces of totalitarianism, fascism, and racial bias that unleashed its horrors. We ask less frequently, however, the questions that Toynbee raised about long-term trajectories toward peace and justice, and what principles support them—and we seldom come to the conclusion, as he did, that an unprecedented challenge might produce unprecedented institutions.11

Does Global Collaboration Have a Future? When he published Mankind and Mother Earth, Toynbee was urgently arguing for worldwide support of centralized initiatives to promote peace and collective survival in the face of climate change. What the world got, instead, was an era of chaos. After 1974, it became increasingly common for supports for small farmers and land redistribution to be coordinated by NGOs, rather than by long-­ standing research initiatives like those at the FAO. Historians of the postwar world have almost unanimously characterized the era of the NGO as piecemeal, ill-regulated, and often uncoordinated action; it is an era of “paradoxes,”

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in the assessment of the leading historian of the NGO.12 Today, private and auxiliary institutions are responsible for much of the work aimed at defending smallholder agriculture and occupancy rights. Founded in 1971, the Consultative Group for International Agrarian Research (CGIAR) is in many ways heir to the FAO’s mandate to collect research; the organization gathers research to advise farmers and local bodies about how to adjust to a changing climate. Typically, such groups operate with an emphasis on advising, distributing research, and/or sponsoring participatory self-governance, rather than through land redistribution per se—and in this way, they are heirs to the FAO’s programs of “technical assistance.” Far rarer are private programs that actively pursue programs of land redistribution. The United Nations’ International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), founded in 1978, targets the problem of access to land, providing funds for low-income farmers in the developing world, many of whom face particular challenges erupting out of climate change; many of IFAD’s more recent projects include elements of farmer-to-farmer decision making that incorporate participatory self-government initiatives.13 In North America, a private nonprofit called the Agrarian Trust oversees conversations about keeping farms in the hands of small farmers. In their focus on helping farmers to keep land, institutions of this kind necessarily take a retroactive rather than a proactive stance on the problem of redistribution. A philanthropic organization called Minnow recruits donations to support farmers of color and donations of land to indigenous communities. Despite high ambitions and serious efforts to integrate the best findings of the participatory era to support women farmers and indigenous peoples, such initiatives are limited. They cannot perform the work that Ireland accomplished in 1881: transforming an entire nation on the back of land redistribution—and turning a nation of renters into a nation of owners. They lack the mandate of nations and international treaties to support a full-scale program of land turnover and technological support. Their ambitions are too narrow; and even if their ambitions were greatly expanded, the nonprofit vehicle itself is simply ill suited to the scale of the problem such organizations hope to address. Modern efforts at land regulation, meanwhile, are mostly consigned to a political fringe. Their advocates do not have the leverage to shift the work of nations, so they lower their scopes to target individual communities—proposing small-scale land redistribution initiatives and justice work providing shelter: a land bank here, a community land trust there, perhaps a community garden. In light of this reality, we have to ask: following the line of mystics and

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squatters, who themselves had no other choice, have contemporary reformers given up any hope—or even any pretense—of attempting meaningful work at scale? If land redistribution and climate change are twin issues, the piecemeal and narrow pursuit of programs to protect the public good in terms of shared access to land portends little coordinated or meaningful action to protect the public good in terms of our shared atmosphere. In the era of climate change, many people have found themselves even further away from occupancy rights—the dream, that is, of a protected right to shelter, land, and water for all—than they were in the 1960s. After all, in that decade, at least one major world government organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, was directly countering the problem of displacement— through advocating policies for creating small farms around the world, and ensuring the viability of those farms. Between 1960 and 1980, 28.4 million people were displaced in Brazil by the conversion of smallholder plots to industrial-scale farms dedicated to export agriculture. In India, 20 million people were displaced over the same period by industrial agriculture.14 Given the reality of climate change and the certainty that climate refugees will multiply in future decades, it seems likely that two things will be newly relevant in the years to come—people’s right to occupy a place, and their techniques of asserting that right to occupancy. Distributed landownership has much to recommend it in an era of climate change, both as a way of settling refugees where they can become productive, and as a means to combat carbon emissions through small-scale farming, rather than the more environmentally destructive realities of industrial farming. Can the era of land redistribution offer guidance to those who worry about global governance and global displacement in our time? I believe that the past has much to tell us. For the sake of brevity, we can put these lessons under two basic headings: one about global governance, and one concerning inhabitation. When it comes to limiting carbon emissions, the story of the United Nations over the last half century speaks to our challenges in the current impasse—the clear lack of political will to take meaningful action to counter climate change. The Brundtland Report of 1987 framed this problem as a grim trade-off—we could either save the environment or improve the conditions of billions of humans through increased consumption.15 I would argue, on the contrary, that preventing further carbon emissions is our best long-term strategy for the security and welfare of the poor. But even so, scientific study and regulation of emissions will not house those who are already displaced because of desertification, rising floods, and intensifying

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weather. Refugees from climate-stricken areas require a right to occupy the earth, lest they spend their entire lives behind barbed wire in unheated tents, perishing through lack of food and medicine, utterly dependent on charity from the outside world. This requires us to pose complex questions from several angles: the importance of a right to land in human history, the strength and variety of government tools to defend the right to occupancy, and the techniques available to social movements dedicated to asserting that right. To reconcile development and the environment requires us to shift back to an earlier mode of thinking that has been largely eroded by ideological and bureaucratic changes over the last decades of the twentieth century: recognizing a right to occupancy. It requires us, in other words, to look at limiting carbon emissions as a way to guarantee the well-being of the mass of the planet’s inhabitants by ensuring their right to food, water, and shelter, despite rising sea levels. As Toynbee suggested, we must move beyond that primitive mindset in which international agreements and agencies have an eternal mandate to prioritize private property and economic growth over sustainability and equity. History shows us that international cooperation on a planetary scale is, in fact, a tangible possibility—and it need not be tossed into the dustbin of utopian dreams. International treaties emerged in the last century to defend the cause of peace; international agencies even energetically supported the transfer of private property after centuries of entrenched colonization. Global politics, rather than sound economic decision making, may have ultimately catalyzed the disappearance of land redistribution schemes—but it is by no means clear that today’s political and economic ideology will govern the world tomorrow. In recent years, the fundamentalist doctrine of free markets has been questioned by economists who place welfare more broadly at the center of conversations about how economies should be administered. For instance, in his study of how to promote economic growth, Korean Nobel Prize laureate and economist Ha-Joon Chang recommends land reforms paired with measures to make small farms profitable. Reviewing recent experiments in Chile and Ethiopia, Chang argues that experiments paying farmers to improve local prospects have been successful.16 One recent study of experiences in the developing world has concluded that land redistribution is more effective than progressive taxation in balancing unequal access to wealth and power.17 A worldwide response to climate change almost certainly needs a more aggressive position on land distribution: not only by helping the poor to keep their land, but also by granting them land—and supporting the means of keep-

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ing it. Working tenants, political refugees, and other marginal populations need houses—and as the crisis worsens, climate refugees will need a multitude of houses, and poor farmers who are displaced from coastal lands will only become self-sufficient entrepreneurs where they have a right to soil. If we are to change our mindset, as Toynbee urges, we must therefore consider, once again, how these ancient quandaries regarding land distribution are inseparable from the contemporary dilemma of climate change. This expansive suite of global challenges caused by climate change brings us face-to-face with two atavistic questions of money and power—how the economy works, and when and how international bodies take action. In recent years, new political movements have raised anew the question of economic equity, and successfully challenged the status quo on the ownership of property in the developed world. In Scotland, nineteenth-century critiques of the aristocracy were revived by activists. Wresting from elites the rights to local property, a new generation of leaders has pioneered the protection of wilderness areas, public parks, and low-rent zones from external manipulation. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2003 implemented a “community right to buy” that foregrounded communities’ traditional legal protections against speculation, artificial rent inflation, foreclosure, or eviction. Schemes of this kind defend the property rights of collectives rather than individuals. Modern redistribution schemes like those in Scotland have profited from research that demonstrates how collective title can enrich entire communities, while ensuring access to land and water and providing the technology to support it. Since the 1970s, reformers have challenged the idea of single-owner proprietorship as the sole model for land redistribution. Activist Vandana Shiva has privileged commons-type ownership—in contrast to the privatization of water and other resources in the developing world—as a viable practice of land management that offers an alternative to the rampant exploitation of the earth under unregulated capitalism. Commons ownership forms part of what she calls “earth democracy,” a movement that grows out of ecological concerns as well as care for the right of occupancy.18 What might a global initiative do today, if charged with the protection of poor people’s rights to land, water, and atmosphere? In the postwar twentieth century, such an initiative actually existed in the form of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization—which ostensibly organized a global government of land. An equivalent global government of the atmosphere is missing from today’s debates about climate change—perhaps because we have forgotten what a centralized global initiative can do to assert the common good.

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What can the FAO teach us? The story of the FAO may be most helpful in regard to climate change, where it helps us frame and illuminate crucial questions about the kind of protections a centralized international institution might provide to the world’s poor farmers and nations. Contemplating the precedents of the FAO’s global land redistribution schemes can challenge us to ask whether a broader, more centralized commitment to this bold endeavor—­ reversing the exclusions of colonialism via land redistribution—might profoundly diminish the gulf that exists today between rich and poor, or even close that gap forever. It dares us to think about the possibilities for new institutional commitments. For instance, if the advocates of land reform at the United Nations had possessed greater powers—such as access to an inter­ national court of law with power to enforce a right of occupation around the globe—national struggles for land redistribution might have been defended in such a court. Indigenous people and refugees lacked (and still lack) representation at the United Nations; if their voices had been heard as equals among the legally recognized “nations” at the United Nations, their basic rights might have found sovereign protection. A UN institution charged with enforcing rights to land and water might easily have been tasked with protecting the biosphere as well—and such an institution would clearly have been much more prepared to respond, in a timely and effective fashion, to scientists’ first warnings about climate change. Meanwhile, the failures of the FAO challenge us to inspect the limitations of centralized authorities in the history of development economics. The United States used trade and development institutions to enforce the interests of American industry. Lacking coercive powers or sufficient funding, FAO activities became distracted by publishing ventures bearing little relation to the FAO’s earlier mission. The inevitable systemic rot to which sweeping programs are vulnerable slowly grew—co-optation by capital, mission creep, and motivated elites distracted by other aims—chipping away at long-term potential. As much as we can learn from studying the FAO’s actions, the decades that followed its activities can also can teach us a great deal about how systems of governance can empower grassroots movements—and even be guided by them. The participatory movements beginning in the 1960s refined the tactics by which a trained organizer might arrive in a small village and inaugurate a meaningful conversation about where and how land, documentation, seeds or technology could be most meaningfully applied. With new ideas about participatory governance from that decade, the organizers of protests and participatory mapping initiatives came to emphasize forms of self-government in land

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that were increasingly more flexible in responding to information gathered by ordinary people. Today, citizen assemblies and online fora empower citizens in places like Ireland, Iceland, and Taiwan to take an active role in the drafting of government policy, while transparent ministries—like those inaugurated by Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement—have made accountable governance the default.19 Such techniques provide potential models for the participatory self-­ governance of land—tools that could be used to reimagine a kind of global land governance based on “democratic ecology”—in which local groups could monitor their own land, water, and air quality, and defend it in the appropriate courts and jurisdictions. In 1989, Wolfgang Sachs challenged those working for international development to reconsider their relationship with democracy. “All [ecological] strategies call for more centralism, in particular for a stronger state,” he wrote. “The real historical challenge, therefore, must be addressed . . . : how is it possible to build ecological societies with less government and less professional dominance?”20 By reviewing the participatory actions of the past and their techniques, we can learn about the ways that social movements have made claims to land. What follows is an attempt to distill into reduced form the practical lessons of the century that this book has explored, as they intersect with the values of occupancy and participation—and as they apply to an age in which questions of climate become pivotal for all other concerns.

Techniques of Occupancy as a Program for Democratic Ecology After examining the history of occupancy throughout this book, it might be beneficial to pause for a moment and reflect on the diversity of techniques used by inhabitants to defend their rights over the last century. At times, the techniques of occupancy were cobbled together in a rudimentary fashion, desperately, spontaneously—and at other times, they were coldly algebraic, patiently orchestrated, and targeted with precision. Again and again, we see that these techniques, however humble, have been remarkably transformative on a global scale—and they continue to offer possibilities in our own contemporary struggles in this age of mass displacement. Many of the techniques directly reflect the values of participatory democracy, which are more relevant than ever as we face the monumental challenges of climate change. Let us therefore briefly contemplate how each of the techniques relates to

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the pressing issue of climate change and the related claims of vulnerable populations. What follows, of course, is less an issue of history than of working out the implications of the past according to the facts of contemporary change, as readily collected from the pages of the newspaper. 1. Marches. Perhaps marches are the most familiar elements of current movements, but many are short term and disconnected from clear, achievable policy demands in comparison with meaningful historical precursors. The March for Science, the People’s Climate March, and the actions of Extinction Rebellion have dramatized in different ways a popular demand for coordinated action. Vinoba’s march to collect donations of land for the poor, however, created lasting change, in part, by the duration of its span: his pilgrimage for occupancy rights lasted twenty years. 2. Rent strikes. Coordinated strikes, by organizing the mass withholding of capital, have the deserved reputation of forcing elites into action. Historically, rent strikes precipitated almost every period in which rent control became policy, from Ireland in 1881 forward. Strikes today have but one corollary in climate action: Europe’s round of “school strikes” by schoolchildren protesting climate inaction on the model pioneered by Greta Thunberg in 2019. However moving, though, school strikes do not represent a mass diversion of capital, and are therefore less attached to immediate outcomes or changes of policy. Would rent strikes to turn apartment complexes solar be effective? Would tax strikes, on a county- or statewide basis, succeed in shifting climate policies? 3. Squatting. In 1945 and again in 1968, Britons used squatting to dramatize a housing crisis and shame the state into taking action. In India and Peru, squatting gave a voice to indigenous people and workers. Today, climate refugees are rejected at the border, hidden away in camps, and forced to risk their lives through perilous crossings. What sorts of actions would create acts of solidarity with climate refugees today? What sorts of squats would be an appropriate means of taking back land from the interests associated with exploitation today? 4. Reparations. Many land redistribution programs began as claims that colonialism unfairly took land and prohibited landownership for certain populations. Reparations of land offer a way to break the cycle of

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violence associated with legacies of colonization and racial injustice. In Ireland, discussions of reparations were taken seriously only when paired with the threat of an ongoing “land war” that took the form of rent strikes and incendiary protest. Today, reparations for indigenous peoples, Latinos, and African Americans are under discussion in North America. What sort of land war underscores the legitimacy of their claims? 5. Rent controls and land reforms. Rent control is currently under debate in many coastal cities. Multiple forms of rent control policies abound—some protecting incumbents rather than the poor; elsewhere, housing waivers protect families, but only on a temporary basis. As waters rise, inland cities will start to experience the pressure of expensive repairs and adjustments required to protect housing and ensure continued infrastructure of many sorts. Migration to other cities will create a rising pressure on rents. How will cities decide whether the market or the state is best able to relieve the housing situation? In the debate that follows, unresolved questions of rent control and land reform may revive. When cultures decide that occupancy rights must prevail over the right of unlimited accumulation, governments will have to take action, and rent controls and land reforms offer ample precedents for appropriate policies. 6. A coordinated international lobby working to support local programs for occupancy rights. Without a coordinated program for universal occupancy rights administered by an independent international authority, such as John Boyd Orr originally envisioned for the FAO, individual communities will be left to their own devices—small farmers, refugees, and indigenous communities all fighting alone for sovereignty over their territory. Facing a legion of assaults, they struggle to prepare the documents, lawsuits, and policies that would preserve their relationship with territory; as a union, they could combine their efforts. It is key that such a union have independent means of support—for instance, donated as a form of reparations from developed nations whose success has been bound up with the exploitation of indigenous communities and peasants. It is also crucial that such an organization retain control over its own budget, deploying it according to the needs of member nations rather than the directives of the world’s most developed nations or the corporations whose interests those nations sometimes represent.

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7. Cooperative enterprises and related unions. If cooperatives were available, small farmers could band together in rural unions that allowed them to fight for better prices, secure scientific advising and training, and make large-scale collective investments in machinery and infrastructure. In an age of climate change, small and independent producers are more vulnerable to fluctuations in rainfall—in part because they have less of a financial cushion to fall back on when harvests vary. Cooperative unions can protect small farmers against such eventualities—especially if they are supported by national political parties that can ensure an even playing field for cooperatives to compete against corporations and large farms.21 8. Participatory maps. Participatory mappers are now collecting their own data about the environment—and as technology expands, this tool will become even more ubiquitous. Taken up in citizen councils, that grassroots-collected data may turn into legislation and policy. Matt Desmond’s interactive website, evictionlab.org, today channels information about eviction laws and eviction rates to local communities; what would a similar interface for measuring toxic pollution look like? More information tends to enlarge opportunities for collective action. Land redistribution programs and land turnover remain relevant to indigenous, tribal, impoverished, and refugee populations around the world; multiple creative interventions based on real-time data would be required to equip these populations with the equivalent of participatory maps: tools that consolidate their experience into concrete, real-time demands and recommendations for a survivable world. 9. Technology and research focused on supporting small-scale farming. In an age of industrial agriculture, it is hard to imagine a centralized authority that would promote small-scale farming. In the developed world, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly advising industrial farms, and labor is considered less and less relevant as an input. Initiatives to support small-scale farming remain very relevant, however, in both the developed and developing world: 89.7 percent of American farms are classified as “small,” while in China, 90 percent of farms are less than 2.5 acres. Around the world, small farmers whose holdings are smaller than 24.7 acres produce 80 percent of the food supply.22 On small farms, questions about small-scale technology, cooperatives, and collaborative education programs remain

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highly relevant. The midcentury fantasy of small farmers supported by light infrastructure, small-scale technology, and worker-owned cooperatives seems more achievable than ever in a world where tiny, programmable sensors for monitoring moisture can mobilize a vast frontier of machine learning on behalf of peasants. Information ­infrastructure systems already distribute information about using drones and arduinos to increase the effectiveness of small-scale land administration. Conversations could continue to flow over existing crowdsourced infrastructure platforms such as Farm Hack (which supports small-scale technology), Public Lab (which supports mapping of pollution), and the Working World (which supports and funds worker-owned cooperatives). If somehow, through a twist of conscience, a centralized authority like the United Nations emerged that was morally determined and adequately funded to protect the world’s poor—what would such an institution need to do to materialize its ideals? I believe that it would need to effectively revisit the model of bibliography, research funding, and mapmaking embraced by twentieth-century initiatives. Perhaps the most meaningful institutions today are those democratic legislatures and courts that make themselves available to citizen councils and other groups working with information generated from below. Private and public foundations have experimented with distributing the tools to facilitate self-government. Few have a foolproof method to protect work of this kind against co-optation by moneyed interests—although the mass-disseminated grassroots movements of the U.S. New Deal do provide one model.23 Strong redistribution programs require a wide array of services, including technologies for the shared support and education of farmers. In a time of climate refugees, programs to settle migrants equipped with the tools to be productive, given worsening drought and changing conditions, are becoming more and more important. 10. Participatory self-governance at a global scale. The counterfactual use of history points to still unmapped horizons for what might come, if the values of the participatory movements are more widely embraced. For example, the United Nations, the only quasi-global government of land, evolved to mirror other institutions in its time as an expert-run bureaucracy, rather than a democratic and participatory agency. But what if it had been otherwise—what if the United

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Nations and its subsidiary centers, such as the FAO, had been designed as participatory institutions that were required to respond to popular grievances from below? In the age of the internet, those institutions might become robust clearinghouses for channeling public opinion and reports of climate crisis from around the world— and in return, distributing the policies, technology, research, and funding necessary to help those communities respond more actively. 11. Empathy. Empathy has been part of the tradition of women advocates since Fanny Parnell—these women’s mothers and grandmothers were prohibited from owning land, and they may have read in that prohibition a greater understanding of the plight of Irish tenants, Chinese peasants, and indigenous people denied a place to live. Empathy and world consciousness in general were foregrounded by Rainer Schickele as key to the operations of the FAO. Empathy, once regarded as the product of a careful study of social history and peasant experience around the world, should be considered—even more so than expertise or training in growth-based management—as one of the essential criteria for leaders of organizations fighting economic inequality. 12. Memory. An appreciation of long-term injustices and an understanding of specific cultural contexts have helped activists, politicians, social scientists, and the organizers of international institutions to treat occupancy claims and the practices used to defend them with care and consideration. In contrast with forms of expertise that favor selective readings of history, like those associated with Cold War perspectives in the United States, a long-term memory—typically grounded in the work of social history—seems to offer the best possible preparation for guiding movements, nations, and international bodies toward appropriate solutions. A thought experiment of this kind, of course, brings us out of the work of history and into pure conjecture; the experiment has definite limits. Given changing political contexts, techniques of occupation that were once feasible may no longer be so. Squatting is no longer a technique that lends itself to resistance in Great Britain; the right of occupation that protected British squatters has been challenged in the courts, and most so-called squatters in Britain today pay a rental fee to property companies to compensate for their role as “property guardians.” In the United States, the tax breaks on mortgages that

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once made a majority of Americans homeowners have been undermined. The nature of such a thought experiment, however, is the work of contemplation, opening up a series of counterfactual questions about the history that might have been. The techniques of the past thus offer templates for contemporary movements seeking to assert rights to land or water. But beyond that, they also suggest what governments more accountable to their citizenry might look like. One of the many uses of history is to provoke the imagination of how the failed solutions of the past, if recovered and redesigned, might still transform the future. Conversations about participation bring us to the question of the effectiveness of technology. The concept of democratizing power through the use of technology resonates with a vast number of contemporary movements. Ten years ago, the world learned how women in India and Egypt were contributing data via smartphones to decentralized “rape maps” that would raise the issue of sexual violence on a national stage. The rape maps have not ended sexual violence, but among other strategies they have helped to keep the issue in the international news. More recently, a memoir later made into an award-winning documentary shared how a young engineer turned bicycle parts into a wind turbine for his village in Malawi.24 Such measures—by documenting evils around the globe—could, in theory, offer material for police, courts, and legislatures to target, thus creating a system of governance responsive to information from below. Indeed, responsive technologies of this kind offer a glimpse of new ways of realizing democracy, beyond the irregular tempo of elections and ballots. A continually evolving map of concerns, updated by the people for the people, could directly channel the efforts of an engaged public into action. The impulse of participation, however, has another, more sinister face. The fantasy that decentralized technology is sufficient for social change echoes the idea of self-government, or decision making based on shared data collected by the community. Participatory self-government evolved on its own, without the support of state or high technology. However, modern innovations of decentralized self-government evolved, in many places, when social movements had no higher authority to call upon: when nations had abandoned land redistribution schemes and the power of the United Nations was deteriorating.25 Vinoba’s voluntary land redistribution pales in comparison to state-run programs in both democracies and communist countries. Participatory maps have helped

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to organize action on the level of the village but not, as of today, at the national level. Stories about the successes of crowdsourced maps, data, and technology suggest that no state is needed to enact impressive change: individuals working with the proper information can do it on their own. Coordination was held to be dangerous. It was, after all, claims to authority from outside experts that allowed American development agencies to prescribe “models” abstracted from long-term history and other “technical” initiatives, including watered-­ down approaches to participation—which, lacking ownership in local communities, typically failed to grow. Yet that fantasy has been proven to be pernicious and false. Without some form of coordination on a regional, national, or global scale—and without the tools of documentation—voluntary movements like squats and processions will accomplish little. Corruption came in the form of specific kinds of expertise and modeling that promised riches for all while refusing to disturb the balance of power for the elite. One is tempted to write a devil’s dictionary of development—a lexicon of the ideological blind spots and administrative blunders that have led, again and again, to abject failures in the global efforts to support occupancy rights. These unsubstantiated assumptions, disguised as forward-looking principles, are particularly relevant to the postwar twentieth century, when they were so often put forward as development assistance—while, unsurprisingly, they consistently undermined existing efforts for land redistribution and the support of peasants. Embraced as talismans—which would get the holder something without cost, and without a battle against the rich and powerful—these feeble ideological truisms courted disaster. This devil’s dictionary would somberly catalogue the common fallacies, paternalistic assumptions, and ideological catechisms that are, in so many words, vials of poison masquerading as panaceas. These grotesque errors are ubiquitous enough in the world of development that it would be appropriate to pause a bit to contemplate them. The list below offers only a humble draft of the poisonous principles that distort policy into a weapon against the weak. 1. The deregulation of markets is so great a force that it can ignite economic innovations capable of amending every problem—it can even solve vast historical imbalances of power. Deregulation alone will cause resources such as land, water, and housing to be distributed to those who need it most.

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2. Bigger loans to impoverished nations create opportunity for the poor. Industrialization or economic growth will automatically create the conditions for the enrichment of the poorest people. 3. A single powerful nation is a better guide to the development of the world’s affairs than a congress informed by the opinions, needs, and science of all peoples. 4. Single-owner proprietorship is the only means of equitably dividing land that we should consider—and it’s the only approach that has proven itself, over the years, as a sustainable, economically viable approach. 5. Appropriate technology, designed in the West and delivered to the poor of the world, has the miraculous power to enrich poor people and solve their problems. 6. Voluntary and uncoordinated actions by isolated individuals offer an effective way to gradually, cumulatively solve global problems, even deep structural problems such as homelessness, landlessness, hunger, poverty, and environmental pollution. 7. Uncoordinated research and grassroots publishing are such powerful tools that they can solve major problems on a global scale without the help of coordinated redistribution or coercive power. 8. Peasants have subconscious reasons for acting of which they are not even aware; analysts, therefore, cannot trust peasants when they say that they want land, housing, or other basic necessities. In fact, shadowy elites are using the peasants to further their own hidden agendas— for instance, the spread of communism or the enhancement of their own power—and the peasants don’t even realize it. For the sake of efficiency, I have concentrated on the dynamics that seem to be uniquely linked to debates in the postwar world. Such a catalogue is not a complete list of dangerous untruths embraced in the modern era as a whole, of course; we would have to append a long tally of prejudices about race and gender, the uniqueness of Western experience, and the superior utility of Western invention in general and in property law in particular—a list of poisons that have been thoroughly documented by other historians with greater care than I can provide here. The poisons of the postwar era and the beginning of the twenty-first century share the quality of referencing a kind of magical thinking regarding dismantling state programs. In the form of conferences, debates, and international

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policy making, these poisons acted with pernicious effect on the delicate bureaucracy of coordinated global efforts to improve the condition of the poor such as those attempted by the FAO. Most of the principles listed fly in the face of Hobbesian thought about the necessity for a Leviathan—an institutionalized union in the form of a nation-­ state or international superstate. They represent a fantasy of uncoordinated actions, mobilized by something—technology, research, publication, the market— imagined as a coordinating entity that substitutes for the state. To be sure, in the era of mass publication and automated information technology, many exchanges happened on their own. And expanded publication and information technology, importantly, broadened the terms of participation for many individuals—indigenous, poor, ethnic, female—who had previously been excluded from the terms of power: literacy, numeracy, landowning, voting. That extension of rights was surely an unequivocal good. But the advances of information technology in the twentieth century and the possibility of broadcast participation are not the same as projects that capture land for the landless, or halt land confiscations around the world. Only the Leviathan can do that. Will there one day be a hybrid Leviathan, forged from information and the ideas of many? What about a temporary autonomous culture—appearing out of tiny, individual initiatives and actions like mushrooms in the forest—working in the right season to repair and rework the undergrowth? What about multiple independent worlds—Zapatista, indigenous, peasant—each of them free to monitor the health of their local ecologies, to exclude polluters, and to pursue the well-being of their landscape through whatever means present themselves? Such visions of coexistence are being articulated by certain anthropologists working in our time.26 Historians have begun to tell long-term stories about local, indigenous, and peasant cultures, their struggles for survival, and the complications to which they are subjected in an age of expanding markets.27 Through careful study, social scientists have begun to document the ways in which expanding markets, international order, and even development enterprises threaten local cultures. Theorists of indigeneity urge the need for an international order that can protect the sovereignty of local cultures. Theorists of human rights assert that the world needs more such work: a global Leviathan to protect indigenous and local cultures, and the value of sustainable occupancy overall. Such is a project for further collaboration in the space where social science and theory meet action, organization, and material reality.

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Conclusion The battles of today are qualitatively different than those of the mid-twentieth century in one major respect: the challenge that climate change presents to human settlement. The United Nations convenes scientists who tell us that we have only a handful of years in which to act.28 Floods, landslides, famine, drought, and other natural events are increasingly displacing families from their land. Climate change has already created a swell of refugees, and the tide is expected to rise higher. Whether the poor, unprotected against rent hikes and eviction, become a permanent refugee class—or co-owners of a changing world—will determine the character of wealth, participation, and democracy in the twenty-first century. This book has told the story of a series of social movements before and after the rise of something like a global government of land—a government that sought to offer poor people around the world secure rights to land and shelter. The plan for the redistribution of earth’s territory was not exactly ecological in nature, but aspects of it, as imagined by different communities, would have had environmental aftereffects, including the protection of small farmers and agricultural laborers, who are among the individuals most vulnerable to displacement and whose carbon impact would have been minimal in comparison with today’s industrial farms; the creation of networks of credit and peasant-­ owned cooperatives that might have helped small farmers to adapt to a changing climate; the establishment of a recognized right to occupancy that might have provided a safety net for climate refugees around the world; and the advancement of networks for the grassroots monitoring of pollution of land and water through participatory mapping. What lessons does land redistribution provide for a future in which displacement is amplified? Will national governments and international authorities continue to deal with refugees by attrition, expediently herding victims of displacement into camps on borderlands, and supplying them with the minimum requirements for survival? Such a policy essentially treats the victims of displacement as prisoners of the state, while failing to treat the causes of displacement at their origin. The policy traditions of land redistribution suggest that states and communities must collaborate to create an opportunity for poor people to build a realizable future where they are. Such a systematic approach to land and water rights would necessarily take up where midcentury plans at the United Nations left off: with a global approach to provisioning poor persons around the world

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with land. The modern tools of digital surveying make it possible to announce legal protections first and survey them later, with the help of decentralized participatory mapping methods. The claim that an international legal authority is crucial in the twenty-first century has long been made, especially by advocates of human rights. A legal authority to which people can appeal for a right to land would need to be international, capable of recognizing indigenous sovereignty, and respectful of the human right not to be displaced. It would need to acknowledge a historical mandate to ordain redistributive measures, in line with the ideas of reparation that have circled the world for well over a century. There is no question that such concepts would face hostile rulings from certain quarters. In recent decades, even relatively minor activities at the United Nations have been denounced by certain American conservatives; meanwhile, liberal academics often associate the abuse of centralized power with the history of European and American empire abroad. What both critiques of centralization may miss is that many nations and peoples around the world have their own critiques of empire. Some theories of the role of land in economy and community, especially from the developing world, have been contrived within the expectation of centralized and international support for redistributive efforts. The discovery of occupancy rights challenges our thinking about how governance works in ways that directly impact how we might think about the climate. Understanding twentieth-century relationships to property helps us to adapt effective actions to address the current global climate crisis. What actions can we take that are local and grassroots yet also coordinated over an immense scale? What can we learn from the broadened senses in which ownership and property rights came to protect individuals and communities in the twentieth century? What does remedying the legacy of empire and racism look like and why must it extend to material protections, rather than merely psychological and social ones? Facing an era of climate change and the threat of mass displacement, we need to rely on history to put into context the mechanisms for governing, possessing, or contesting land, telling us not only the story about how land was taken away—a tale as old as empire—but also about the mechanisms of contestations and the patterns of land restoration that point the way toward hope for times yet to come. The twin issues of climate change and refugee crises—perhaps the most urgent calamities of our time—dramatize the fact that humanity is in turmoil

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over the rights of occupation. Who owns the right to occupy? How are land, water, and air pollution to be governed and regulated? As nations struggle to cap global warming, and as refugees clamor for relief, issues of occupancy become central to the debates of the twenty-first century. A survey of the right of occupation in history prompts us to think anew about the potential for global proposals to better the human condition—and about how coordinated action can be wedded to local tools for the amelioration of injustice.

Appendix A Note on Methodology and Terminology

In this methodological essay, I clarify my use of technical terminology for ideas and institutions related to property in land that appear throughout this book: land, redistribution, land reform, land consolidation, land use or land utilization, eviction, commons or common-pool systems, tenant right or rights, occupancy or occupancy rights, property, and theories of property in international development. I outline the distinctiveness of each term in its cultural and historical contexts. From science and technology studies, I have imported attention to technique, tool, information infrastructures, and publishing. These terms cover a wide variety of the surveying, mapping, management, and coordination strategies used in the twentieth century to normalize or to challenge property rights. From sociological, anthropological, and historical studies of governance, I draw an orientation toward bureaucracy, the official mind, and expertise. Concepts that ground my interpretation of the consequences of and counter-reactions to the expansion of governance include my orientation to radical traditions. I borrow an analytical concept from social science (resistance), and another from the humanities (empathy). Finally, a frequent subject of my attention is my subjects’ orientation toward history, especially to the longue durée.

Land The category of land, as the subject acted upon by technology, illuminates the space where abstract notions of property meet soil and rock. The evidence I have assembled shows a global movement for land redistribution in which “territory” was not synonymous with nationalism and ethnicity, but instead belonged to a global swell of movements critical of empire. My story suggests, moreover, that the mid-twentieth-century prosecution of land rights was one of the historical arenas where international government went the furthest toward experimenting with supporting universal laws, technology, and research to aid ordinary people.

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Concepts of land are nested in their historical context just as a river that flows through a terrain is part of the landscape, its coloring depending on the territory over which it flows. The idea of a global revolution in the distribution of land presumed that there was such a thing as a single category of “land” around the world—rather than geographical regions, each with its own destiny—and that relationships regarding that land had a polluted historical trajectory in need of repair or reform. That single definition often aligned with a Western conceit of land as a commodity that could be traded. Such an idea, however, would have been unfamiliar to many indigenous peoples around the world. It had already been challenged in Britain for decades by the time Vinoba led his march.1 Some readers may be inclined to dismiss out of hand all discussions of land as a romantic proxy for material issues of ownership and class. Marxist histories of land, for instance, tend to distill all issues of landownership into an inevitable clash between the propertied and the propertyless, or the capitalist and the collective. Readers in this vein tend to read episodes of enclosure and redistribution as one impulse of the “double-­ movement” of capitalism, and they tend to see land redistribution, participatory maps, and squats as irrelevant sideshows in the inevitable march of union organizing to command all the means of production.2 Still other readers may come to this book already persuaded of the necessity for treating the earth’s land and rivers as a commons, inherently owned by all—a position implicitly opposed to the individual ownership of land.3 I have less to say about how that ideology plays out, because such a perspective has never, to my understanding, been activated on a large scale. Throughout the discussion in this book I treat ideas about property law as embedded in social and political histories, institutions, and information. Others may come to this book already believing in the necessity of treating the earth and natural resources like a commons, based on nostalgia for premodern economies.4 “This vital stuff that lives beneath our feet is a treasury of all times. . . . How can any man own a thing so volatile and so rich?” asks the gardener treated by one novelist.5 For this category of readers, my book offers something important: a history of modern traditions for dealing with landownership—many of them deeply engaged with science, state and international government, bureaucracy, and free market economics—that nevertheless prioritized rights of occupation and developed a holistic approach to ensuring their preservation.

Redistribution By redistribution, I mean any type of legislation that increases the numbers of persons with access to land, whether by state collectivization or housing programs (as in Communist nations or socialist Europe), state-backed mortgages (as in the United

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States), willing buyer, willing seller programs in which the state encourages the creation of small farms from large landholdings (as in Ireland in the 1880s, postwar Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines), land ceilings (as in postwar India), voluntary land “gift” programs (as with Vinoba’s activism in India), and squats or “land invasions” where the working poor claim underused land for themselves (as in postwar London and New York City and parts of India and Latin America).6 For readers informed by classical political and economic theory, the idea that land redistribution is at the core of righting the wrongs of empire and capitalism may come across as misguided or tertiary. Such readers, working from critiques of land redistribution popular in the 1990s, might identify land rights with nationalisms or civil rights movements of various kinds, rather than granting the seemingly universal cause of a movement dedicated to ensuring shelter, land, and water for all. Because my history is organized around the question of occupancy rights, I have ignored a great deal of the land reforms of the twentieth century—and I have favored the term land redistribution to describe the major sweep of the legal reforms we encounter in this book. This term draws a distinction between broadcast landholding and other schemes that involved the command and control of labor. Land redistributions were characteristic of the reforms associated with the Irish Land War and the Mexican Revolution. In both cases, former tenants became owners. These events must be understood as a significant revolution in the history of property law; the laws put tillers of the soil and indigenous populations in charge of choices about the economy, thus breaking with colonial precedents. Former tenants in those places became decision makers in issues of agricultural and economic policy, for instance, whether to privilege agricultural commodities or food security. Land redistribution thus accomplished what mere land reform did not, devolving decisions about security, crops, investment, and technology to the laborers themselves.

Land Reform In its most specific usage, land reform signifies programs implemented by a state that redistributed land to smallholders while compensating former landowners, but the term is sometimes applied to a great variety of land redistribution schemes, including market-driven and violent or authoritarian programs. In most cases, I therefore prefer the term land redistribution, which encompasses a variety of forms of authority, to the more general umbrella land reform. Although the terms are often interchangeable, they encapsulate important distinctions. An unfamiliar term to many Americans, land reform encompasses a wide class of legislation that was extremely important in nineteenth-century British Empire, postwar Europe, and post-colonial nations, dealing in the use of the state to revisit labor and property rights related to land. I use “land reform” in treating pieces of legislation that were identified by that title in their time.

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Certain land reforms (outside the sphere of my book) restructured labor without redistributing land. Many such reforms targeted agricultural systems of sharecropping, such as those prevalent in parts of Italy since the medieval period and throughout the American South. The unreformed systems resembled slavery in that workers on the land lacked choice regarding their economic future. Contracts prevented rural laborers around the world from engaging in subsistence agriculture. Sven Beckert classifies these events as part of a “global Reconstruction,” wherein contracts were designed to replace slavery with new systems that would ensure continued labor for the manufacture of cotton.7 Sharecropping was ended in the United States by actions like the 1939 Missouri sharecroppers’ strike, and in Italy after 1964.8 The “land reform” in those instances meant that both rent and compensation for labor were defined by a contract both parties entered into voluntarily. Contracts protected laborers from exploitation, but not from displacement. No land changed hands. Labor was protected, but not occupancy. Other land reforms ended punitively high rents (like those in nineteenth-century Ireland and India). Others required landlords whose holdings surpassed a certain threshold to sell, typically at market prices. Land reforms were often accompanied by state-­ facilitated programs for arming farmers with modern education and technology. The role of contract and compensation in each of these reforms separates land reform from other categories of land redistribution—including land seizure by revolutionaries, typical of Communist regimes, as in the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, and China, as well as land seizure by squatters, typical of large cities and post-colonial nations. The Communist land seizures resulted in some of the most ambitious turnovers of land from landlords to peasants of any in the twentieth century. Communist collective agriculture was also marked by collapse, at least in the case of the Soviet Union. Land reform also encompasses a wide variety of economic policies only indirectly related to ownership, including land consolidation schemes and programs of credit and funding. I have tried, wherever possible, to specify the different ideologies that shaped these programs and to highlight their major differences.

Land Consolidation In several instances, state and international institutions facilitated the sale of tiny properties to consolidate splinters of land parcels—the result of historic land deals over centuries—into more economical, medium-sized farms, suited to mechanical farming. Typically, land consolidation schemes required centralized efforts to map the landscape and the patterns of landownership, as well as sometimes to identify the patterns of grazing or farming in each plot, and sometimes to marry this information to soil surveys. Land consolidation made for greater efficiencies in terms of mechanization, because it created geometrically contiguous plots that could be plowed by tractor and

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harvested by reaper. Consolidation also relieved farmers of time in transit dedicated to ferrying tools across multiple fields.9 Like all other strategies, land consolidation had its critics; among the most prominent was Wendell Berry, who believed that land usage patterns evolved over generations of negotiation, in which most farmers were incentivized to supply themselves with an array of types of soil suited to a diverse and sustainable agricultural portfolio that allowed individuals to become resilient to cycles of drought. Berry’s complaints reverberated with the concerns of many who watched peasant movements to claim land, which typically created fragmented holdings from consolidated plots. Berry also identified the increasing movement to consolidate large farms with an ecological crisis characterized by diminishing diversity of inhabitation.10 Many European nations had used the power of regional planning to encourage the consolidation of fields and the creation of larger, more efficient farms. In the developing world, however, arguments for land consolidation often—but not always—overlapped with arguments for industrial farming at scale that were antithetical to the aims of peasant land redistribution. Could the two causes be reconciled? Answering this question remained, for a time, one of the most pressing theoretical and ethical issues of economic development—a subject of perennial debate at the FAO and elsewhere.11

Land Use or Land Utilization In coordinating the consolidation of splinters, land reform sometimes partook of an even wider class of policies, related to the category of land use or land utilization, wherein experts advised various authorities about the best farming for each region as determined by soil, the balance of agriculture and industry, the shape of urban density, and the preservation of a region’s historical character. Land use regulations, like land reforms and land redistribution, implied the heavy presence of authority, typically as embodied by urban or regional planners and agronomic experts.

Eviction Among the many cultural and historical varieties of property encompassed by the terms indigenous title, commons, redistribution, and possessive individualism, only the last category unilaterally allowed the right of the landlord to evict: a right that had been insisted upon over centuries of conflict during which mass eviction accompanied genocide and the handover of property from native to settler populations. The right to evict was born of conquest. As nostalgia grew for collective or mutual rights, the trigger was typically the question of eviction: should advanced democracies still maintain the right to evict poor people from their homes or indigenous people from their land? Wars over this question drove most of the instances described in this book. In the past, large-scale

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social and political movements challenged the law of eviction. In many places today, including parts of Spain and the United States, the law of eviction is being challenged as a tool or as a principle.

Commons or Common-Pool Systems When writers refer to “property,” they often fail to include indigenous title, commons, or rights of occupancy. Instead, they generally equate the term property with individual proprietorship in severalty—that is, with the right of an individual to exclude others from land. Thanks to the work of postwar historians, we now understand the specific cultural context in which claims about individual rights to exclude were asserted as an ideal for property holding, if not an omnipresent rule, equivalent in its universality to Newton’s contemporary discovery of a law of gravity. In 1962, historian C. B. MacPherson identified the roots of “possessive individualism” with the laws of ownership that emerged alongside ideas about democracy and individual rights in the context of the English Civil War. MacPherson believed that an idea of the individual as a “moral whole” came into being at this time, and that Western notions of freedom leaned heavily on the concept of the individual as owner of his actions, his labor, and his land.12 The tradition identified with the right to exclude was codified by John Locke and other seventeenth-­ century writers in the context of new claims that linked property with political stability and individual responsibility with the efficient use of property for economic ends, which implied to contemporary farmers the right to evict. In other parts of the world, however, the ownership of land remained marked by collective and nonexclusive claims—for example, hunting grounds that other groups may use after a peace ceremony, or common grazing lands that village inhabitants may use with certain restrictions. Indeed, varieties of ownership traditions persist in many parts of the world today. The diversity of property systems has been understood by Westerners since at least 1851, when the English jurist Henry Maine penned his theory of collective property in India. Indian villages, Maine wrote, were an “assemblage of co-proprietors”; a child born in the village instantly became a co-owner of the common stock of village property.13 Stressing the profound gap between Western law (which he believed to be superior) and “ancient” laws, he characterized Indian law as marked by a species of communal ownership: “Ancient law, it must again be repeated, knows next to nothing of individuals.”14 While Maine chiefly intended his characterizations of Indian law as an argument about the potentially improving force of Western law, his depiction of a culture in which every individual possessed rights to land and water nevertheless offered a distant mirror for modern Britain at a moment when intellectuals were learning, thanks to recent scholarship, that most of Europe and Britain itself had once been collectively

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owned and managed. Meanwhile, contemporaries in Manchester and London were already thinking about cooperative factories and cities marked by shared roads, railways, parks, sewers, sidewalks, playgrounds, and public walking paths. Those spaces were being created and protected, by English activists such as Octavia Hill, who evangelized them as a reassertion of the lost collective rights of the English yeoman to the English “commons.”15

Tenant Right or Rights Besides individual right to landownership, individuals in Britain and some of its colonies also enjoyed a species of mutual rights that specifically protected tenants. A vestigial right acknowledged to exist in Ireland and parts of England—the so-called Ulster custom or tenant right and its variants—gave tenants certain shared rights with landowners: the right to compensation for any improvements to the land, and typically the right to sell their tenant share of the property, as well as protection against eviction. In the twentieth century, the precedent of mutual property rights enabled early rent controls and restrictions on eviction in Ireland. These rights were later promised to English citizens as a compromise over their lost collective common rights, then generalized to English residents of major cities as wartime and postwar measures meant to protect families.16 The creation and expansion of squatters’ rights in London from the 1940s to the 1970s represents the apex of this development: laws, precedents, and bureaucratic practices effectively gave squatters the same right not to be moved that had been hard won by Irish citizens during the Land War of the 1880s.

Occupancy or Occupancy Rights By occupancy, I refer to the right of persons not to be displaced. A right to occupancy was reinvented again and again over the course of the twentieth century, poured into new wineskins by many hands, co-created across improbable global alliances by acts of imagination and artistry, not all of them successful. In the nineteenth century, occupancy rights were reconsidered by British jurist Henry Maine as one of the disappearing vestiges of an ancient form of law that protected rich and poor alike. Through the process I describe here, however, occupancy rights became central to an argument for land redistribution in many parts of the world. For Colin Ward, the radical scholar of British housing, occupancy represented the essence of a universal principle of law that protected the inhabitant of a structure from eviction. For Vinoba, the leader of India’s voluntary land reform, the right to sell land was equivalent to mandating a “right to sell the blanket in difficulty.”17 Legislating a right to land sales was thus equivalent to decreeing that individuals had a right to sui-

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cide: something civilized lands forbid and no civilized legal system would defend because, even if classed as a possible action available for free citizens, it amounted to giving up a criterion of survival.18 Occupancy is the outgrowth of an ideology that sees eviction as fundamentally in­ appropriate to the long-term ability of the poor to survive economic uncertainty, and moreover as a corollary of a culture’s racism. Twentieth-century theorists of occupancy even went so far as to assert a universal right to occupancy defended in all ancient societies, including Britain, by the principle that a house built in a single night could not be torn down, or a universal rule that defending middle-class rights to homeownership is one of the foremost foundations of political and economic stability.19 Occupancy, unlike communism, can coexist peaceably within or alongside capitalism and personal property rights: squatters’ rights, for instance, such as exist in Texas (left over from frontier days), protect the family living in a house from eviction for nonpayment of rent. Occupancy was protected in many parts of the world in premodern times; but in the nineteenth century, and even more so in the twentieth, occupancy began to be protected again by the instantiation of collective and mutual rights and even explicit bars to eviction. Occupancy did not originate, in its most expansive ultimate form, through a political treatise; indeed, eviction and displacement per se have only recently become the subjects of political and sociological treatises. Occupancy as a concept, I argue, originated with the resistance of colonized inhabitants of a place—that is, the rent strikers, the previously colonized, the indigenous persons, the small farmers—who struggled against economic systems that would have inevitably resulted in their displacement. Inhabitants came to rely on a plurality of techniques and strategic alliances to defend their proposed right to “stay put,” to borrow the language of latter-day anti-gentrification organizers. A state-backed right to housing—as in contemporary Singapore, where every citizen is guaranteed housing—represents one mature instance of this way of thinking. Dealing with occupancy raises the question of whether inhabitants require a state to enforce their right. Classically, the nation was the defender of property rights—­ established, according to Locke, by an individual mixing labor with the soil. European nations, however, had no trouble invading the lands of other peoples around the globe and ignoring their property claims. Faced with the aftermath, a new debate about the site for protecting property rights began to unfold. Toynbee thought international collaboration was required to unify the cause of an international peasantry. Countercultural thinkers like Ward imagined a world where individuals and small communities could squat and build, counting on the support of the states around them to honor a newly universalized claim to housing. Both occupancy from above and occupancy from below were socially constructed positions, imprinted with the context of their time. The idea of an international super-

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state facilitating a broadened right to occupancy around the world—in part through extremely technical means like facilitating mapmaking—depended upon an age when global ventures were new and global states seemed plausible. The idea about grassroots or voluntary land claims such as squats, commons, or gifts, which held that states were essentially unnecessary, emerged from a later moment, when acolytes of the markets questioned the power of states to appropriately allocate resources. Both positions depended upon and presumed techniques that upheld the rights of occupancy.

Property When I invoke “property” in this book, I take care to specify and relativize whose definition of property I mean: the individual property rights advocated by aristocrats and utilitarians from Britain; the collective property rights as defined by indigenous people or romanticized by the English working class, colonial administrators, or later political theorists; or mutual property rights from the archaic Irish past, as defined by English law after the 1880s, as suggested by English squatters, or as advocated by development theorists in the 1960s who saw squatters around the world. History reveals that there is no single vision of “property” that remains free from the changing contexts of culture and time. A diversity of property rights—already recognized by legal history and even by political debate and legislation in Britain and elsewhere—forms the nineteenth-century background to twentieth-century wars and theory about “individual rights” and “collective rights,” much of which only obscures the myriad iterations of actual forms of property. In a globalized world, different forms of property were in play, and the rules of the game for the landlord, renter, or indigenous or homeless person were set up depending on how the argument had been most recently constructed by those in power. The “bundle” of property was constructed out of different sticks in different times and in different places: sometimes a right to exclude, sometimes a shared right owned with jointly with others, and sometimes a shared right in which tenant and landlord were regarded as co-participants with specific, detailed rights.20 One major force that refashioned the bundle of sticks, in almost every nation in the twentieth-century world, was the movement for redistribution of land. The historical evolution of property rights was apparent to many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators on property. For this reason, many authorities held that property more resembled a tree—constantly growing and evolving—than a “bundle of sticks,” as the current convention asserts. Recognizing the constant evolution of property discussions can cast light on many popular fantasies about how distributing title or eliminating ownership of land would remedy the human condition. One version of the libertarian perspective, for instance, credits the power of secure title—a paper contract over land—with the promise of opening economic opportunity to the poor, and thereby ending violence.

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Some classical liberals, upon reading this account, will yearn to revert to simple individual property rights over the genealogy of occupancy rights that I propose: indeed, in London, once the apex of squatters’ rights, squatting has lately been declared illegal again. But I believe that such a move, given a globalized world increasingly committed to acknowledging a diversity of democratic rights, is a gesture toward creating a walled, feudal stronghold, holding back the tide of legislation with wide precedent— and it will be ultimately in vain. There is no putting the chicken back in the egg.

Technique The story of those actions and alliances can be understood through what I call the “techniques” of occupation. A history of technical gestures reveals many other facets of how claims of ownership were changing—whether ownership was in tension or alignment with empires and racism in the past, whether making claims about ownership depends upon some technical expertise, or whether knowledge of the land and who owns it can be crowdsourced through democratic action. A technique suggests the refinement of the material objects used in a culture. The problem of what I call “technique” stems from a host of theoretical and practical questions about the effectiveness of different activist strategies—some of them coming from activist communities or contemporary journalistic accounts of information technology, others raised by intellectual communities that study the history of technology. Yet technique is also vague enough in its specification that it can refer to the use of the material landscape—for example, the occupation of public streets in a town by a march dedicated to some social movement—as a venue for publicizing a social cause. I intentionally blur the line in my usage of the term, drawing together actual technologies (for instance, maps) along with social practices (such as marches) in my catalogue. The term technique thus allows me to draw upon a highly diverse set of methods from the humanities and social sciences, for example, methods from cultural history that recognize memory and mysticism as social practices often engaged with intent; methods from social history that recognize marches as social practices undertaken with the explicit intention of engaging the politics of both participant and observer; and methods from the history of technology that understand maps as objects associated with social, political, and economic practices, each of which has a history. Borrowing from such a wide variety of approaches has allowed me to cast a wide net over the social, political, technical, and economic practices by which twentieth-century people identified, reinterpreted, and protected the highly diverse cultural object that we know as “land”—an object whose identity was far from settled with Locke. Techniques are cultivated by practitioners of art. They may be passed from culture to culture, and they evolve, just as the joints cut by settlers into wooden beams of old New England houses mirror carpentry techniques developed in certain parts of En-

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gland. Techniques are indicative of the artist and the culture, as art historians have long understood.21 The phrase “techniques of the occupier” is borrowed from Victorian literature. An influential book described how a proliferation of new practices—from viewing the city from above via hot air balloon to mapping time and movement via early motion picture devices—allowed individuals to describe the altered dramatic scale and speed of urban life. These “techniques of the observer” rendered human those experiences of scale that were transforming the experience of everyday life in Victorian times.22 In a similar way, the practices that I describe as “techniques of the occupier” represent human attempts to capture—and maybe even tame—the invisible forces of capital and empire that led to mass displacement in the modern era. Rights of occupation became an almost universal phenomenon around the world in the twentieth century, enforced according to an enormous array of legal and social techniques from rent strikes to squatting, many of them then new, many of them still evolving today. Understanding those practices requires the historian to look beyond land title and strict definitions of property rights to the cultural practices by which individuals asserted their claims about land in new and culturally specific ways. The Irish rent strike differed from the squats of London; the pilgrimage for land rights evolved in India after the failure of other methods. The invention of new techniques allowed individuals to take advantage of a moment when occupancy—at least for a while— seemed plausible as an answer for human misery, a possible direction for human history to take. Their evolution forms a history of how people reacted to the regimes of power around them. Following techniques as diverse as marches and rent strikes allows me to trace the shape of solidarity, democratic impulses, and even marginal successes in the history of twentieth-century agricultural development, where so many other scholars have found only exploitation. The history of technique, I believe, accurately retrieves the residue of collective action, both within bureaucracy and at the grassroots level.

Tool A “tool,” in the Heideggerian sense, is whatever extends human work, as the hammer extends the power of the arm.23 But such a definition raises the question of who defines the task for which the hammer is wielded. In the modern era, rulers began to use paper documents to describe the world. Applied to the purpose of solving a scientific mystery, or extracting revenue for the crown, such “paper tools” as these began to reshape beliefs about the world.24 Many historical accounts of Western property law follow particular tools, like the cadastral surveys used by European powers to define and tax land, or the trigonometric surveys used by European empires to map, tax, and control colonized parts of the world.25

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In the hands of rulers, tools for describing the landscape and its occupation became the means of excluding people from land so delineated, thus producing land rights as the exclusive domain of certain individuals. Meanwhile, however, there are micropolitics around the technologies of everyday life. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historiography, the work of speech acts, writing, and printing has long been used to excavate evidence of social practices among the working class. In the history of the twentieth century, new research has drawn attention to the material practices of sharing technology and information, from bicycles to business cards, especially in the work of historian of technology David Arnold and anthropologist Matthew Hull. Parsing the complex politics of interactions around implements such as these is no easy task, although both Arnold and Hull took care to do so. Another direction is to follow the implementation of information and technology for particular purposes, as several important historians of computation and governance have already done. Information historian Lisa Gitelman broke new ground when she showed how photocopiers became tools for enabling grassroots activism in the 1960s.26 Because of the work of such authors, I knew to take care in my approach to the participatory maps, vertical files, and other paper implements covered in this book. My distinction between techniques or tools draws principally upon the material specificity of certain objects. In the context of rights to land, the modern techniques that appeared at this moment include laws, policies, marches, or rent strikes, and ideas, information, or maps. The techniques properly identified as tools are more precise: cadastre, survey, census, and map, but also filing cabinet, bibliography, and mimeograph. While many books follow the history of the tools of empire, relatively less scholarship has been put toward identifying the tools of liberation. For that reason, a history that tacks between social techniques and material tools can illuminate the uses to which maps were put by international organizations and indigenous movements. One of the most important differences separating one body from the other, in the twentieth century, was not their access to tools, but rather their ability to work at scale.

Information Infrastructures The domain of information and its management is part of the history of technology. As twentieth-century people made assertions about rights to ownership, they frequently engaged in species of technical thinking about how land claims were to be made, turning to maps or expert consultants to their arguments. In the modern period, coordinated information systems—or “information infrastructures”—began to reshape how governments and foundations managed the data they collected about landownership. The metaphor of “infrastructure,” for my purposes, captures the deployment of technology to coordinate governance at scale.

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Information infrastructures such as global mapping programs, bibliographies, and other coordinated research publications informed the work of the United Nations and World Bank. They ran in parallel to the development of modern information sciences, with their influence over the development of military systems and the social sciences in advanced nations.27 For much of the twentieth century, such coordinated systems were outside the grasp of indigenous or other grassroots movements. An infrastructure is slightly different than a technique or a tool, as the term implies permanence, the work of centralized institutions, the fact of invisibility or things often taken for granted, and the need for maintenance. Infrastructures, unlike most tools or techniques, also operate at national or international scale, as with the canals, highways, and irrigation projects that shaped nineteenth-century frontier borderlands and made them profitable.28 How policies were deployed thus depended on implicit structures that packaged ideas, data, maps, and other kinds of information, organized at scale: the scale itself represented an important and distinctive feature of twentieth-century politics of technology. Consider how the changing scale at which tools such as maps were deployed from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. In the eighteenth century, the British army and its surveyors organized around a single mapping project—the Ordnance Survey—which gave us a modern, detailed map of Britain. The twentieth century, however, was marked by global maps, some of which—like the Soil Map of the World created by the FAO—were created with a democratic and post-colonial bias about who would use their contents and how. Systemic projects at the United Nations, as at many other contemporary institutions, were colored by a fascination with quantitative speciali­ zation and a deference to the educated expert who ran the systems in question. The administrators of those institutions were born of a world marked by what one writer called “ever proliferating systems—and quantities—of publication.”29 Theorists of physical infrastructure have long argued that roads and irrigation are guided by—and, in turn, express—an ideology. So too with information infrastructures. In the twentieth century, information infrastructures like map collections, bibliographies, and other databases came to play a parallel role to concrete infrastructure in the past: they rendered visible and connected remote areas, extending a conceit or a plan in a given direction. At the United Nations, elite intentions to support grassroots movements often took the form of work with institutions, research, and paper: advising policies here, offering maps in another place, creating bibliographies there, with mixed results, often under the influence of a midcentury fascination with information science and the power of publication, calculators, computers, and indices to transform societies. The often-invisible work of the United Nations, in its bibliographies and maps, supported housing, land redistribution, land taxation, and agricultural services around the world. It helped to forge modern agricultural studies, and left a lasting mark on the social, earth, and bio-

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logical sciences in the modern university system. Information infrastructure had become the field upon which struggles over property were fought, won, or lost. But the story of information infrastructure does not end with power in the hands of a computational elite. Increasingly, the structure of information was reconsidered by grassroots movements that tried to assert their own vision of the landscape. One of the most important pivots in the story occurs with the emergence of an international grassroots movement coordinated by pamphlets, conferences, organizing techniques, and mapping practices. In the form of many-to-many maps, grassroots movements proposed what some have called a “counter-mapping” to the global visions propounded from on high. A bottom-up information infrastructure, such as emerged around the developing world in the 1970s, was a game changer. The challenge posed by longue durée narratives is one of method when approaching an enormous scale of possible subjects, especially when dealing with the subjects in the modern age of printing or digitization. The libraries of nineteenth-century government measured their shelves in feet; but the stacks of twentieth-century government archives are measured in miles of shelves. Information in the twentieth century was produced on a far vaster scale. Particularizing the inquiry to follow a theme such as property or technology lends precision to a historical inquiry. Pondering how information and information technology can be major features of rapidly transforming conversations about technology, poverty, and rights can help to structure narratives of change by suggesting how abstract conversations were realized in the concrete form of maps, bibliographies, and files. Information technology itself functioned in the twentieth century as both an ideology of bureaucracy in the era of land redistribution, and as a subject of development, into which untold hours of planning, surveying, mapping, reporting, and bibliography making were plowed.30

Publishing This book examines the missteps that happened along the path of one global administration when publishing became a goal in itself. It tells the story of endless mapmaking and bibliography initiatives at the FAO that failed to reach the local governments and individual farmers for whom they were intended. In so doing, these stories raise questions about what it means to channel academic research into effective, accountable, participatory governance on behalf of the dispossessed. The case of development at the United Nations is, in many ways, a cautionary tale about how research-driven plans fail—and it offers us both warnings and matter for reflection to help guide future global initiatives. The stories in this book suggest that information, publishing, and technology may become ends in themselves, especially for social scientists and experts, even those who imagine themselves as allies of poor peoples’ movements around the world.

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A more relevant and effective information infrastructure for supporting the poor would echo the ones designed by the participatory mapping movement, in which peasants exchanged their own strategies in a neutral forum. A more democratic platform would echo the theories of participation proposed by Sherry Arnstein: devolving authority to local communities, rather than merely consulting them or treating them as clients. Scholars today often labor under the assumption that basic research slowly and cumulatively shifts policy and perhaps culture as well. But the land story sheds light on one significant process in the twentieth century wherein research failed to accomplish those ends. A mountain of research performed in the name of defending smallholders and occupancy rights was published even as leading national and international institutions turned away from those principles, attracted by new theories of the market. Publishing is thus submitted as a subject for critical thinking about the role of theory and politics in the history of development: when is publishing influential, and when is it not?

Bureaucracy Since Max Weber’s inquiries into the history of modern bureaucracy and its support of the modern state, many scholars have closely examined the issue of power around the study of bureaucracy and international economic development. In twentieth-century analyses, bureaucracy often appears as a force of political suppression. Students of development economics have emphasized how the institutions of the twentieth century became what Ferguson calls an “anti-politics machine,” suppressing the energies of persons attempting to organize for their own survival—that is, for politics from below—and many students of area studies have highlighted how anti-­ politics has played out on the ground in the denouement of ambitious international schemes.31 More recently, other scholars have drawn attention to the impact of international institutions long dismissed as ineffective or peripheral—opening up the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the World Bank to scrutiny, and thereby raising important questions about the collapse of some utopian prospects and the success of others.32

The Official Mind Watching the work of individuals and administrators embedded within international institutions gives the historian a close perspective on the arguments and realities that frustrated grand schemes. In-depth profiles of members of a civil service working with international politics gives a glimpse into the “official mind,” as historians such as

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Susan Pedersen have amply proved. Tracking the interchanges between institutions and peasant movements opens a wider perspective still. For this reason, my narrative of international development tacks between the low and the high. To follow official conversations, I track economists in the developing world such as Samar Sen, political theorists such as Doreen Warriner, international administrators such as Norris Dodd, and rank-and-file agents at the FAO such as Ardron Lewis. I carefully follow the exchanges and references, moving between the developing world and the developed world, looking for faults, rifts, and continuities.

Expertise Many institutions have aimed to repair poverty—from imperial governments in the nineteenth century to national or international development agencies. But as James C. Scott pointed out in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1996), those projects have also historically served the interests of modernization—by way of systematic education, turning individuals into servants of money-earning projects for the elite. Projects that have divided experts from peasants, keeping decision-making power with experts in the service of elite, have frequently recapitulated the divisions and exclusions of an earlier age. As I see it, Scott’s larger questions about the potential benefits and risks of world government, and his appreciation of independent, spontaneous, and self-governed initiatives hearken back to conversations from the 1960s and ’70s, when the prospect for something like a world government of land was being taken seriously—even if, during that same period, an increasing sensitivity to indigenous and working-class voices had begun revealing the cultural bias implicit in programs that depended on Western notions such as single-owner proprietorship. Scott belongs to a little-documented but nevertheless influential tradition in twentieth-­ century intellectual history. Alongside Amartya Sen, Elinor Ostrom, and E. F. Schu­ macher worked a cadre of economists and political theorists sometimes neglected by historians of development today. Their ideas were forged in a crucible of arguments about sustainability, property, technology, and development at a moment when the international administration of these ideas on behalf of peasants seemed likely, if not inevitable. Scott’s ideas deserve to be understood as one part of this tradition. Like the other writers in his tradition, Scott’s critique of empire and technology offered an implicit critique of other mainstream currents in the social sciences, especially classical definitions of property ownership. In the context of a global revolution in property, Scott and others were the titans who reconciled American intellectual research with global and post-colonial currents. As exiles from a future that never happened, their insights about property and gover-

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nance continue to illuminate a world that has forgotten the earlier chapters of the struggle. I believe that clarity about the shared elements of their project can help us to appreciate the relevance of their ideas to contemporary and future struggles.33 In his later work, Scott would identify alternatives to modernization by way of control, cataloguing historical and contemporary experiments with self-management from below, for instance, squatting, adventure playgrounds, and indigenous resistance. Indeed, the wars over occupancy that form the context of the United Nations’ efforts— from Irish peasant resistance to the Mexican, Soviet and Maoist revolutions—underscore how the struggle for democracy—and with it the struggle for political validation of indigenous voices, women’s voices, and the voices of previously colonized peoples— came to dominate the search for an alternative to international government. Scott’s questions about whether expert-run administrations can overcome the hierarchies upon which they were founded motivate many of the questions behind this book. Norris Dodd’s answer was that information could overcome hierarchy and result in collaboration. The experiments of the Soil Map of the World and the FAO bibliographies represent instances of failure, where noble efforts collapsed because of questions of time, coordination, and expense; the decentralized participatory mapping movement, however, represents a victory for peasants, whose successes should prompt us to ask questions about how participatory mechanisms of the same sort can scale.

Resistance Scott’s longue durée perspective on resistance—the subject of his book The Art of Not Being Governed (2009)— prompts us to reexamine narratives of history in the twentieth century. As other scholars have long understood, much of the enterprise of world governance in the twentieth century partook of a view of history, writ upon the developmental stages from political infancy to adulthood, that borrowed its imagination of linear progress from Enlightenment syntheses of knowledge and biological understandings of evolution in particular.

Empathy The opposite of anti-politics is solidarity, or empathy: alliances that amplify the voices of the oppressed. The story of the UN advisers and agents—Doreen Warriner, Paul Yates, John Boyd Orr, Norris Dodd, and Rainer Schickele in particular—demonstrates an early commitment to anti-racism at the FAO. FAO administrators looked to Indian economists such as Samar Sen for an understanding of empire, attempting to put Sen’s ideas into action. In my account, empathy is one of the key techniques used to defend rights of occupancy over the longue durée—whether because empathy expanded the mindset of women like Elinor Ostrom to look into the conditions of property in other

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cultures or because empathy with women and minorities was routine for activists arranging the structure of participatory meetings. Empathy marks the solidarities that underwrote ideas about global land redistribution from the beginning. Social scientists like Doreen Warriner turned to land redistribution after deep acts of empathy, like the organization of the Prague Kindertransport.34 Scholars and activists like Robert Chambers, John Gaventa, and Rajesh Tandon abandoned the cause of publishing for its own sake, promoting instead forms of community knowledge making such as participatory maps that allowed peasants, villagers, or slum dwellers to come to know each other and make plans. Their contemporary counterparts include the founders of Public Lab and Farm Hack, who distribute plans for do-it-yourself small technologies that can make farms productive, as well as the many other hackers at work on technologies to enable a secure and direct democracy that will accurately poll public opinion. There are surely more examples, as well as contemporary individuals in each category beyond my personal acquaintance, who embody such virtues as these. They dem­ onstrate the many flavors of engagement—from the abstract and intellectual to the face-to-face and social—that enable communities to understand where they are and where they might be going. To borrow the language of Lauren Berlant, critical “feeling” contributed as much as critical “thinking” to twentieth-century politics. How we judge such acts will tell us much about how to understand other attempts to improve the human condition.

The Longue Durée In surveying struggles about occupancy rights over a century, I have made use of an old-fashioned historical strategy—synthesis over the long term or, according to the Annales school of history, the longue durée—that looks for patterns in the formation of nations or regions, drawing upon sources geological, economic, and cultural to establish wider patterns of belonging and culture. That perspective has been reinvented by historians who use it as a tool for exploring concepts and for comparing structures shaped over relatively long moments of institutional and intellectual evolution. Many humanists—from archaeologists to literary theorists to historians—have also begun taking on long questions through the subject matter of the Anthropocene, that long era of time (since the Neolithic or since the Victorian Age, depending on how one measures) when human interventions began to accelerate the warming of the planet. Such scholars seek a different kind of longue durée than Karl Wittfogel, whose writing totalized cultural patterns from India and China under headings such as “oriental despotism,” a move that reflected his belief in the determinative influence of regional geography on political systems over millennia.35 A long-term perspective offers the service of decoding the social construction and

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deconstruction of supposedly immutable themes such as “property” and “land use,” noting how these terms evolved in light of changing institutions and social pressures, for example, the post-colonial pressure to atone for the ravages associated with European capitalism and colonization in particular. Terms so wide-ranging as property cannot be identified, I argue, with any similarly amorphous category such as “capitalism.” The long-term view of history likewise helps to trace international connections around an important set of arguments—land redistribution—as they intersected on the world scene between 1881 (the date of the most significant of the Irish land redistribution and rent control laws) and 1974 (the date of the World Bank’s Policy on Land Reform, which essentially ends international funding for land redistribution. Longue durée analysis here overlaps with transnational histories, which study the exchanges across national and regional borders. Strong continuities connect Irish, Indian, Egyptian, and later Scottish conversations about redistributing land to reverse the power dynamics of empire. Viewed in a shorter time period, the connections are so scattered as to be impossible to trace. Individual movements, nation by nation, ethnicity by ethnicity, appear insignificant to all but a tiny group of specialists, and the global exchange of views and strategies for land redistribution disappears. The longer story, however, is highly suggestive for a more general perspective on technology, the aspirations of humanitarianism, the shape of international governance, and critiques of the state—topics of general interest to many scholars who do not identify as experts on land use or housing. Such a transnational story necessarily recasts prominent figures in many contemporary textbooks, especially the United States and the World Bank, whose policies dominate the history of the postwar period. From the 1880s to the 1920s, the clashes over property law most influential to world events occurred in Ireland, India, and Mexico; while it is possible to tell an American story about each of these events, the more intriguing question is how they related to each other and informed global initiatives that departed from American policy altogether.36 The longue durée story of property also underscores the exceptional and reactionary nature of the post–civil rights American position on land redistribution within a larger collection of world movements explicitly identified with correcting the sins of European empire. By allowing the historian to forge a narrative arc over the length of several professional generations, the long-term perspective produces a story that can track the development of a conversation about land from its international constellation, the creation of many international institutions and movements, until its assassination. One of the advantages of the longue durée perspective is the opportunity to ask anew, “What was new here?” or “What really mattered?” For a scholar trained in eighteenthand nineteenth-century conversations about political economy, different turning points emerge as a source of discontinuity and fascination. From a longue durée perspective, I was drawn to those transnational movements whose expansion coincided with the

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apex and decline of British Empire. For that reason, this book ranges promiscuously across national borders, following the transnational paths of activists and policy makers as well as their discourse. I have therefore collected events that follow the work of British Empire—where conversations in Ireland and India were pivotal, and where British experience with land was perhaps most fully expressed by the British citizens and subjects who organized and ran the FAO. The lasting influence of Ireland and India seemed abundantly clear to a historian of Britain—and that longue durée perspective does much to explain the seriousness with which Irish institutions and Indian economics were taken at the United Nations, as well as the assumptions about technology that eventually became part of participatory discourse in some circles.

Archives All the arguments in the present book rest on my use of archival materials, historical materials in libraries, and secondary reading as digested by traditional reading habits. To track conversations about institutions in this book, I immersed myself in archives to which only limited access is permitted, and to which few if any indices exist—especially the FAO Archive in Rome. I took many photographs and followed up with administrators’ other writings—but beyond a doubt, a great deal more material of excellent quality remains within the archives. My work represents only one pass through a voluminous archive; there will doubtless be others. The FAO Library (which houses most of the bibliographies and catalogues, separate from the FAO Archive) provided me with a bird’s-­eye view of the evolution of information management at the FAO and the role of bibliography and mapmaking in its work. Papers of some of the civil servants of the FAO, notably Norris Dodd, wound up at the Hoover Archives at Stanford, while John Lossing Buck’s papers are held at the Ford and Rockefeller Archives; these archives therefore furnished me with a profile of the official mind. From bibliographies, I tracked conversations about development economics and land redistribution to two major academic archives: the Land Tenure Center of the University of Wisconsin and the Library of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex. I visited those institutions and inspected their archives, which gave me a close portrait of the teaching, conference organizing, paper writing, and grant applications submitted at each. Given the pressure of time, I was unable to pursue the papers of Rainer Schickele at the University of North Dakota, or those of many other individuals who participated in this moment; deeper profiles of such institutions and individuals and their role in the wider course of affairs await the attention of other scholars. To explore the activities of participatory organizers and movements, I consulted two further archives—the Center for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) and the Archive of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex (IDS). Both are es-

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sentially repositories collected by activists for the purpose of sharing pamphlets, training manuals, and conference reports from an enormous variety of social movements. I supplemented that archival work with newspaper reports and secondary readings, and from the voluminous printed accounts of experiences of activists like John Gaventa and Rajesh Tandon over the same years, as well as with published commentary on current events by prescient social scientists and historians such as Raphael Samuel. To understand free market idealism in the United Kingdom and the United States, I consulted the papers of the Institute of Economic Affairs, London, held at the Hoover Archives at Stanford University. Much of the remainder of my research was enabled through the widening availability of digital resources, including the records of the Times of India, the World Bank, the Soil Map of the World (available through the FAO’s online portal), JSTOR, the British Library Newspaper Collection, the Hathi Trust, the Internet Archive, and many other collections of journals and magazine articles.

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Timeline

1881 1910–20

1916

1918 1945 1945–55 1947

1951 1951–56 1951–69

The Land Act (Ireland) inaugurates the world’s first land reform and rent control. Following Gustavo Madero’s promise of land redistribution, spontaneous rebellions break out across Mexico, culminating in the Mexican Revolution. Perhaps 1.4 million individuals die in the effort to establish a nation less divided by class and where land would be equitably distributed. In 1917, the new Mexican Constitution grants the government the power to expropriate foreign-owned resources and to redistribute land. Mohandas Gandhi begins visiting districts in India characterized by punitive rent, starting with Champaran. Rajendra Prasad travels with him, recording the statements of peasants. Britain’s prime minister David Lloyd George promises that the government will provide “homes fit for heroes.” The FAO is officially established on October 16 at a conference in Quebec City. The Chinese Communist Party begins an era of land redistribution focused on family farms. China’s Communist Party publishes the Outline Land Law, which sets the principle of equal landholding, encouraging peasants in the countryside to take action. Violence over land redistribution reaches its peak, with 250,000 landlords slain. In India, land redistribution is a priority in the first Five-Year Plan. China’s Communist Party begins the process of collectivized land reform. Crop production grows and mortality declines. Vinoba Bhave begins a pilgrimage of fifty thousand miles to advocate for voluntary land redistribution in India. Some 44 million acres are pledged, but only 3.8 million acres are actually redistributed.

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1952

1967 1968

1969



1969–71 1974 1977

In Guatemala, the Árbenz government passes Decreto 900, a land reform law that would redistribute unused land greater than 224 acres (0.91 square kilometers) to local peasants, compensating landowners through government bonds. In Tierra Amarillo, New Mexico, Latino activists asserting their commu­ nity’s rights to land exchange gunfire with federal troops. Squatters and students in London begin a campaign of public spectacles protesting the failure of the UK government to provide adequate housing for all. In the Indian states of Bengal, Orissa, and Kerala, violent clashes begin because land reforms have been delayed, but Naxalites and other communist movements continue to press for redistribution. James Forman, a former leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, issues a “Black Manifesto” calling for $200 million in federal payments to repay the loss of farmland by African Americans. Native Americans and their supporters occupy Alcatraz Island. The World Bank’s Bank Policy on Land Reform recommends an end to all programs supporting small farmers. The Indian state of West Bengal inaugurates a series of land reforms limiting the holding of land and protecting the rights of tenants.

Notes

Introduction 1. Classical historian Walter Scheidel, in his survey of world empires, tells us that income equality, historically, has appeared only in the aftermath of genocide, warfare, or plague: Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). For an argument about the trajectory of progress in human civilization, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Penguin, 2012). 2. For Buddhist discourses on social justice, see examples of the genre of manuals of kingship in metered verse, which present the Buddha’s teaching to a king, including “Ratna¯val¯ı” (“Precious Garland”) by Na¯ga¯rjuna and “rGyal po lugs kyi bstan bcos sa gzhi skyong ba’i rgyan” (“A Treatise on Ethics for Kings”) by Mi Pham rGya mTsho, both discussed in Joshua Eaton, “The Lion’s Roar” (MA thesis, Harvard University, 2010), 110–31; the latter is available in a full English translation in José Ignacio Cabezón, The Just King: The Tibetan Buddhist Classic on Leading an Ethical Life (Boulder, Colo.: Snow Lion, 2017). Both manuals advise lowering rates of taxation and mercies such as charity for the victims of drought and famine. For Assyrian kings and their policies of displacement, see Busteay Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-­ Assyrian Empire (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1979), 2–32. For Jewish law and its roots in an early land redistribution movement, see William G. Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites, and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerd­mans, 2003). For Jesus and the differing records of the same text, Alastair Mc­ Intosh, “Towards Third Millennium Christianity: Activism, Nonviolence and the Mystical Imperative” (lecture given at Rawtenstall, Lancashire, March 23, 2019); I am grateful to Dougald Hine for a copy of this text. For “the poor,” see Luke 6:20; for “the meek shall inherit the earth” and the “poor in spirit,” Matthew 5:3–5; for extended commentary and interpretation in the context of Jesus’s other messages about poverty and the earth, Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical

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Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress, 2002). For Plato and Aristotle, Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Knopf), 8–9. For the exile of Jews and Muslims from Christian Europe, and of Jews, Christians, and Buddhists from Islamic territories, see Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Expulsion as an Issue in World History,” Journal of World History 7:2 (Fall 1996): 165–80, esp. 172–73. 3. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976 [1867–83]); for “original sin,” see 873. For a discussion of Marx on enclosure and the British radical tradition, see Susan Marks, A False Tree of Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 257–58, and throughout for protection of land against confiscation in contrast with more recent discourse about human rights. For Marx’s early documentation of the loss of access to forests, Karl Marx, “Debates on the Law of the Theft of Wood,” Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly (1842), reprinted in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International, 1975) 1:224–31 (thanks to Alex Gourevitch for this reference); Peter Linebaugh, “Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate,” Crime and Social Justice 6 (Fall–Winter 1976): 5–16. For fifteenth-century enclosure, Leonard Cantor, The Changing English Countryside, 1400–1700 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017), 29–43. For plague, see Scheidel, Great Leveler, 289–342; Karl F. Helleiner, “The Population of Europe from the Black Death to the Eve of the Vital Revolution,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, ed. E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 4:60–61; Joan Thirsk, Rural England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 39. 4. For the Highland clearances and their relationship to other displacements, see Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Tom Brooking, Lands for the People? The Highland Clearances and the Colonisation of New Zealand: A Biography of John McKenzie (Dunedin, N.Z.: University of Otago Press, 1996). For the clearances in detail, see Eric Richards, Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances: Homicide, Eviction and the Price of Progress (Edinburgh: Polygon at Edinburgh, 1999); Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil, new ed. (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008); Eric Richards, Debating the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Thomas Devine connects the clearances directly to Scotland’s failed land redistribution legislation of 1886: Thomas M. Devine, Clearance and Improvement: Land, Power and People in Scotland, 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2010), 32–83, 177–91, 209–27. The Highland clearances function in my narration as synecdoche for an enormous range of economic hardships that motivated European migration to what Ken Pomeranz called the “ghost acres” opened by European colonization: the Irish, the Iroquois, the Inuit, the Aborigine, the Maori, and the Mao Mao were all displaced in order to secure land to feed Europe: Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 201–2. A number of impor-

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tant books supply our modern chronology of settler-driven land capture: John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Lynette Russell, Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); John McLaren, A. R. Buck, and Nancy E. Wright, Despotic Dominion: Property Rights in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005); Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). For massacre and resettlement in the territories later assumed by the United States, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon, 2014); Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic (New York: Norton, 2020); and Xuefei Ren, “The Changing Right to the City,” City and Community 8:4 (2009): 407–32. For Dante’s quote, see Paradiso XVII: “You will leave behind each thing beloved most dearly: this is the first shaft shot from the bow of exile. You will taste the salt in another’s bread; and feel how hard is the path of walking down and climbing up the another’s stairs” (trans. Chaim Bertman). 5. For the classical account of urban renewal and slum clearance, see Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker (New York: Vintage, 1974); for critical and historical retrospectives, see Jim Yelling, “Urban Renewal and Regeneration in Historical Perspective,” Area 22:2 (1990): 196–97; Hayden Lorimer, “Caught in the Nick of Time: Archives and Fieldwork,” in Dydia DeLyser, ed., The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010), 264–65; for Mumbai and Shanghai, see Liza Weinstein, “Mumbai’s Development Mafias: Globalization, Organized Crime and Land Development,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32:1 (2008): 22–39. Figures on dams and eviction are given in Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 41. For dams and displacement in India, see Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History (London: Penguin, 2018), 210–13, 292–96. For locations where climate has produced refugees in the contemporary world, see Marine Frank, “UNHCR’s Perspectives and Activities on Displacement in the Context of Climate Change,” in Robert McLeman and François Gemenne, eds., Routledge Handbook of Environmental Displacement and Migration (New York: Routledge, 2018), 404; Saskia Sassen, Expulsions (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 55, 152–54, 202–7. 6. The term the new enclosures may have first been used by James Ferguson in The Anti-politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For modern land grabs as seen through state-driven assignments of free trade zones under neoliberal policy, which frequently violate the property rights of peasants in India today, see Michael Levien, “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Dispossession in India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 39:3–4 (2012): 933–69; Sassen, Expulsions, 80–116;

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Ben White et al., “The New Enclosures: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Land Deals,” Journal of Peasant Studies 39:3–4 (2012): 619–47; Ben White et al., eds., The New Enclosures (New York: Routledge, 2013); Lorenzo Cotula, “The New Enclosures? Polanyi, International Investment Law and the Global Land Rush,” Third World Quarterly 34:9 (2013): 1605–29; Madeline Fairbarn, Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). For events in contemporary Britain, see Brett Chistophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (New York: Verso, 2019). 7. Euripides, Electra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 70. 8. For the New Deal and land redistribution, see Phoebe Cutler, The Public Landscape of the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). For the limited opportunities afforded to nonwhite citizens, see Peter d’Errico, “Native Americans in America,” Wicazo Sa Review 14:1 (1999): 7–28. Charles Geisler tells the story of changing land regimes in North America from the Indian land wars to eminent domain and public housing, arguing that poverty among minority groups is a direct consequence of the lack of access to strong property rights. For “homes fit for heroes,” see Clare V. J. Griffiths, Labour and the Countryside: The Politics of Rural Britain, 1918–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Kevin Morgan, “The Problem of the Epoch?” Twentieth Century British History 16: (2005): 227–55. Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001); Jeremy Burchardt, The Allotment Movement in England (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2002). For a general background, see Brian Short, Land and Society in Edwardian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For India, see Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); for Ireland, David Steele, Irish Land and British Politics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974). For Ireland’s land purchase acts, see Fergus Campbell, “Irish Popular Politics and the Making of the Wyndham Land Act,” Historical Journal 45:4 (2002): 755–73. 9. For Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, see Ethan B. Kapstein, Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and US Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 93–123. For Latin America, see Kapstein, Seeds of Stability, 164–200; and Miguel Tuebal, “Peasant Struggles for Land and Agrarian Reform in Latin America,” in A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay, eds., Peasants and Globalization (London: Routledge, 2012), 148–66. For figures of redistribution in Latin America, see Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8, 131–32. For Singapore, see Anne Haila, Urban Land Rent (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley and Sons, 2016); for China: Brian James DeMare, Land Wars (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2019). 10. For a long-term survey of land redistribution, see Elias Tuma, “Agrarian Reform in Historical Perspective Revisited,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 21:1

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(1979): 3–29. For a broader perspective on the rationale behind these trends, see an important article that identifies, among other things, how certain European humanists pushed for sovereign states in order to protect the principle of universal access to property rights in the developing world: Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, “Empire and Globalisation,” International History Review 36:1 (2014): 142–70. 11.  Occupancy as a claim differs from the Lockean right to exclude. In the appendix, I explain my use of the term and contrast it with similar terms such as land redistribution, land reform, and property. I will gradually introduce and specify my usage of the word technique, although I also expand on the usage of terms such as technique, tool, and information infrastructure in the appendix. 12. For riots against enclosure, Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500– 1640,” in Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice, 1500–1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 54–109; Alan Everett, “Farm Labourers, 1500– 1640,” in Rural Society: Landowners, Peasants and Labourers, 1500–1750, ed. C. G. A. Clay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 161–230. For revolts by ryots against the Raj, see Subhas Bhattacharya, “The Indigo Revolt of Bengal,” Social Scientist 5:12 (1977): 13–23; for revolts of tenant farmers in Ireland, see James S. Donnelly, “Irish Agrarian Rebellion,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 83:C (1983): 293–331. E. P. Thompson considered the high incidence of rioting in the nineteenth century as a reaction against enclosure: Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 62–63, 150, 159, 445. Thompson’s account of enclosure is secondary, but subsequent accounts have placed the practice at the root of ongoing nineteenth-century struggles over the land. See Alun Howkins, “From Diggers to Dongas: The Land in English Radicalism, 1649–2000,” History Workshop Journal 54:1 (2002): 1–23. For marches about land in Ireland, Clare Murphy, “Varieties of Crowd Activity from Fenianism to the Land War, 1867–79,” in Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920, ed. Eoin Magennis and Peter Jupp (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 2000), 173–86. For the concept of “rough music,” see E. P. Thompson, “Rough Music Reconsidered,” Folklore 103 (1992): 3–26. Thomas More offered his critique of sheep that “consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities” in his Utopia; for the original passage, see More, “Utopia,” in Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21–22, quote on 22. The modern analysis of More’s indictment of enclosure dates from the work of Karl Krautsky (famous for other writings on what he called “the agrarian problem),” in Thomas More and His Utopia (London: A. C. Black, 1927), originally published in German in 1888. For More in context, compared to other contemporary pamphlets on enclosure, Cantor, Changing English Countryside, 33. For an expansion on the parallels between More’s view of displacement and economics in the developing world, see Christopher Kendrick, “More’s Utopia and Uneven Development,” Boundary 2 13:2–3 (1985): 233–66.

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13. For historical connections around the slow progress of property rights from Locke through Jefferson to the American suburbs, see Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). The classic account of Locke in his historical context is C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). For more recent accounts of Locke as a theorist of agrarian capitalism who meditated on property in the context of the formation of early capitalism in the aftermath of the English Civil War, see David Ormrod, English Grain Exports and the Structure of Agrarian Capitalism, 1700–1760 (Hull, U.K.: Hull University Press, 1985), 12–14; Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). For property disputes as one part of the context of the English Civil War, Christopher Brooks, “The Agrarian Problem in Revolutionary England,” in Jane Whittle, ed., Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440– 1660: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 183–99. 14. For “a mission appointed by God” in Locke, see Adam Seagrave, The Foundations of Natural Morality: On the Compatibility of Natural Law and Natural Right (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). For divine missions and contemporary drives to make land profitable under empire, see the discussion of the role of Protestantism in imperium and dominium in David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Armitage also demonstrates the contingency of these concepts and the emergence of a secularized version of empire. 15. For an overview of recent discussions of the limits of Locke and his entanglements with the contemporary politics of empire, see John Quiggen’s assessment of recent debates over Locke in a colonial context. “Given his reputation as a defender of property rights and personal freedom, Locke has been accused of hypocrisy for his role in promoting and benefiting from slavery and the expropriation of indigenous populations, actions that would seem to contradict his philosophical position. This is too charitable.” “John Locke Against Freedom,” Jacobin Magazine, June 2015, jacobinmag .com/2015/06/locke-treatise-slavery-private-property. I am indebted to Ariel Ron for this quotation. 16. For an overview of land redistributions in Europe at a grand scale and their consequences, see Johan F. M. Swinnen, “Political Reforms, Rural Crises, and Land Tenure in Western Europe,” Food Policy 27:4 (August 2002): 371–94; and Susan Reynolds, Before Eminent Domain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). For Frederick the Great and America as the same model, see Linklater, Owning the Earth. For the Danish reforms under Count Christian Reventlow (1748–1827), which made two-thirds of Danish farmers landowners, see H. Arnold Barton, “The Danish Agrarian Reforms, 1784–1814, and the Historians,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 36:1 (1988): 46–61; Karen J. Friedmann, “Bureaucracy, Land Reform, and Technological Progress: Denmark, 1755–1810,” Food Research Institute Studies 17:2 (1979): 219–54. For the Swedish case, see Sven Dahl, “Strip Fields and Enclosure in Sweden,” Scandinavian

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Economic History Review 9:1 (1961): 56–67. A more complex picture of land redistribution during the French Revolution is given by Noelle Plack in Common Land, Wine and the French Revolution (London: Routledge, 2016), 7–13; Plack turns from initial rebellions to the land redistributions that followed during the revolution and later decades. French leaders followed the model of Frederick II, redistributing aristocratic estates and common land to nonaristocratic buyers under the name of “reform” in order to fund the fledgling republic. For a more general argument about land reform as a “kulak” development to create a middle-class buffer against revolution, see Al McCoy, “Land Reform as Counter-revolution,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 3:1 (1971): 14–49; D. A. Low, The Egalitarian Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 17. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London: John W. Parker, 1848), 1:399. 18. For examples of contemporary historiographies of landholding, George Charles Brodrick, English Land and English Landlords (London: Cobden Club, 1881); Russell Montague Garnier, History of the English Landed Interest (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892); Richard H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green 1912); E. C. K. Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure (London: Macmillan, 1912). For consensus in favor of land redistribution across party lines in the years leading up to 1914, when World War I disrupted the conversation, see Paul Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880–1914 (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2008). For British politics after 1918, Griffiths, Labour and the Countryside, esp. 109–315; Brian Short, The National Farm Survey (Wallingford, U.K.: CABI, 2000). For the further evolution of the conversation about land after 1945 as it became a dominant aspect of Labour conversations in postwar Britain, see Michael Tichelar, “The Conflict over Property Rights During the Second World War: The Labour Party’s Abandonment of Land Nationalization,” Twentieth Century British History 14:2 (2003): 165–88; Peter Weiler, “Labour and the Land: From Municipalization to the Land Commission, 1951–1971,” Twentieth Century British History 19:3 (2008): 314–43, and Peter Weiler, “Labour and the Land: The Making of the Community Land Act, 1976,” Contemporary British History 27:4 (2013): 389–420. For the census of landowners in 1876 and its effects on public opinion, see Eileen Spring, “Landowners, Lawyers, and Land Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century England,” American Journal of Legal History 21:1 (1977): 50. 19. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1863), 1:35. For early laws encouraging settlement, Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005). For the importance of land redistribution movements to nineteenth-century American politics, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); for nineteenth-­

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century movements to extend land claims, see Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999); Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Charles W. McCurdy, The Anti-rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839–1865, Studies in Legal History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Tom Summerhill and James C. Scott, eds., Transatlantic Rebels: Agrarian Radicalism in Comparative Context (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004). For 1.6 million and other figures, Alison Morretta, Homesteading and Settling the Frontier (London: Cavendish Square, 2017), 6–7. 20. For compensation for slavery, see the more detailed case of reparations given by Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 84–86. For reparations as a question about land, see M. T. Brown, “Latin American Inequalities and Reparations,” in Margit Ystanes and Iselin Åsedotter Strønen, eds., The Social Life of Economic Inequality in Latin America (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 263. 21. For the quotation, Laurent Dubois, Haiti (New York: Henry Holt, 2012), 103; see also 100–102. 22. Race and prior claims to the land of Haiti are among the many issues enfolded in the contemporary controversy over reparations from France. See Dionne Jackson Miller, “Haiti: Aristide’s Call for Reparations Unlikely to Die,” Inter Press Service News, March 12, 2004. 23. The role of European states and European displacement in the global story of colonial confiscations and massacres relies on the theory of “settler colonialism,” which emphasizes the element of race in violent confrontations over land around the world from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. See Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism (New York: Springer, 2010); Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 24. Only in the late twentieth century did indigenous claims to land in settler-­ colonial landscapes begin to achieve their ends. The deeper history of indigenous land claims, collective and nonexclusive title, and resistance to settler colonialism is told in Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). The general question of why indigenous land claims became effective only at this late date is beyond the compass of this book. 25. I introduce the wording “indigenous labor colonies” to characterize Ireland, Mexico, and India, in contrast to “settler colonies” such as the United States, Haiti, and Australia, although indigenous must be used with enormous caution when referring to Mexicans of Spanish descent, the Irish (those who, in other places—for example, North America—would assume white privilege), or non-Adivasi Indians. I entertain the com-

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plicated distinction between settler and indigenous labor colonies because in certain land reforms, Mexico and India granted indigenous land claims long denied in the United States. In settler colonies such as the United States and Canada, indigenous people had a more difficult time asserting their claims to occupancy. 26. For rents designed to appreciate over time, departing with Mughal precedents in India, Rohan D’Souza, “Rigidity and the Affliction of Capitalist Property: Colonial Land Revenue and the Recasting of Nature,” Studies in History 20:2 (2004): 237–72. For an overview of British taxation policies in India and their roots in utilitarianism, see Peter G. Robb, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1997). For the ideology of property law in Britain’s colonization of India, Anand V. Swamy, “Land and Law in Colonial India,” in Debin Ma, Jan Van Zanden, and Jan Luiten, eds., Law and Long-Term Economic Change (Palo Alto: Stanford Economics and Finance, 2011), 138–57. In Ireland, the penal laws of 1702–3 and 1709 forbade Catholics from inheriting property; see Louis Cullen, “Catholics Under the Penal Laws,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an Dá Chultúr (1986): 23–36. For a long-term comparison of the consequences of land rights being invested in landlords—as opposed to small proprietors— during empire, see Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer, “History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India,” American Economic Review 95:4 (2005): 1190–1213. For famine in Ireland and its relationship to empire and land rights, see Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999); Michelle Burge McAlpin, Subject to Famine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). For the economic roots of these transformations, see Amiya Kumar Bagchi, “Nineteenth-Century Imperialism and Structural Transformation in Colonized Countries,” in A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay, eds., Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Agrarian Transformation and Development (London: Routledge, 2012), 83–110. 27. For global connections between movements that contested imperial land regimes, see Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India (London: Springer, 2009), esp. 46–75; Ely M. Janis, A Greater Ireland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). For a general portrait of various critiques of empire, see Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For specific examples of individuals whose land activism traversed continents, see Malcolm Campbell, “Michael Davitt’s Pacific World,” Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 4:1 (2010): 131–44; Sean Farrell, “Irish Rebel, Imperial Reformer,” in Timothy G. McMahon et al., eds., Ireland in an Imperial World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 69–89; Patrick O’Farrell, “Charles Gavan Duffy,” Clogher Record 3 (1975): 63–77; J. E. Parnaby, “Charles Gavan Duffy in Australia,” in Oliver MacDonagh et al., eds., Irish Culture and Nationalism, 1750–1950 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 56–68; Harold Schiffrin and Pow-Key Sohn, “Henry George on Two Continents,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2:01 (June 1959): 85– 109. For Indian critics and connections between India and Ireland, see Sartori, Liberal-

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ism in Empire, 76–77, and especially references to George Campbell (52–59, 62–68, 92–93). For the Spanish, German, and French cases, Paul Babie and Jessica Viven-­ Wilksch, eds., Léon Duguit and the Social Obligation Norm of Property (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2019). For the birth of a new anti-empire critique based on land in Ireland, see Dennis Gwynn, Young Ireland and 1848 (Cork: Cork University Press 1949); Gerry Kearns, “ ‘Up to the Sun and Down to the Centre,’ ” Historical Geography 42 (2014): 130–51. For popular movements advocating the legal protection of tenants in Ireland, see Norman Dunbar Palmer, The Irish Land League Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940). For reparations, Kearns, “ ‘Up to the Sun’ ”; James Godkin, The Land-War in Ireland: A History for the Times (London: Macmillan, 1870). For the struggles to secure legislation, L. Perry Curtis, Depiction of Eviction in Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2011); for Scotland, see Iain Fraser Grigor, Highland Resistance (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2000); Ewen A. Cameron, Land for the People? (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell, 1996). For legal land in India, see Sartori, Liberalism in Empire, 29, 67–89. 28. For the case of the abusiveness of Britain’s empire in India writ large, see Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire (New York: Penguin, 2018); for the ecological dimensions of that abuse and famine, Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (London: Verso, 2001). For a contemporary tally of coercive practices in Ireland, Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (London: Harper and Brothers, 1904). For strictures on the press and shared policies more generally in British India and Ireland, see S. B. Cook, Imperial Affinities (New Delhi: Sage, 1993). For shared land policies, see Silvestri, Ireland and India, esp. 54, 68. For imprisonment in India, Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); in Ireland, Niamh O’Sullivan, Every Dark Hour (New York: Liberties, 2013). 29. So far as I am aware, the reparations argument for Ireland arose with James Godkin, The Land-War in Ireland: A History for the Times (London: Macmillan, 1870). I believe Godkin was the first writer to present Ireland as the defender of its national territory against a centuries-long “land war” against the occupying power of England, which had installed an alien system of property rights. Land reform, he explained, was necessary in order to reverse the sins of history. See also William Anderson O’Conor, History of the Irish People (London: John Heywood, 1887), 2:60. For the Land War and the plan of campaign—the parliamentary front—in detail, Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996), 94–142. For the uptake of the term land war in Parliament during the 1880s, in which the meaning of the phrase was fleshed out in a series of emotional debates, see, for instance, the speech of John Morley, who asked, “Why, Sir, what is the whole history of Ireland but a history of an incessant land war?” or a speech of Viscount Wolmer, whose rejoinder to Lord Salisbury’s pronouncement that the Land War “must stop” was “It could not be made to cease as long as it was in the power of certain landlords, enemies

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of their class and of their country, to inflict upon men who could not pay[,] punishments.” See John Morley, Speech, House of Commons (September 21, 1886); Viscount Wolmer, Speech, House of Commons (April 26, 1887). 30. For marches, Clare Murphy, “Varieties of Crowd Activity from Fenianism to the Land War, 1867–79,” in Eoin Magennis and Peter Jupp, eds., Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720– 1920 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 2000), 176, 179. For arson, Terence Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland (Dublin: Wolfhound, 2001), 286. For a fictionalized account of Land War Ireland that presents the English perception that contemporary assassinations were directly related to rent strikes, see Anthony Trollope, The Landleaguers (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883). For actual assassinations and bombings carried out by the Irish Fenians in conjunction with the Irish struggle for independence (which partially overlapped with the Land War), see M. J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916 (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2006). 31. For a history of the 1870 act, see Steele, Irish Land. Most of the later legislation has a less detailed biography. In one comprehensive review of the later legislation, F. S. L. Lyons concludes that the land acts were a source of “steady and undramatic, but nevertheless profound, social and economic change.” Lyons, “The Aftermath of Parnell, 1891–1903,” in W. E. Vaughn, ed., A New History of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 6:99. For the land court, see “Opening of the New Land Court,” Morning Post, October 21, 1881. 32. Irish independence in 1921 ended the payments on these colonial-era mortgages. See Paul M. Canning, “The Impact of Éamon de Valera,” Albion 15:3 (1983): 179–205. For landlords investing in property elsewhere, see Patrick Cosgrove, “Irish Landlords and the Wyndham Land Act, 1903,” in Terence A. M. Dooley and Christopher Ridgway, eds., The Irish Country House (Dublin: Four Courts, 2011). One critique of the Irish land reform is that it effectively cut Ireland off from opportunities for investment and economic growth, especially when independence severed the country from Britain, a former trading partner. For this account, see Timothy W. Guinnane and Ronald I. Miller, “The Limits to Land Reform,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 45:3 (1997): 591–612. Such a critique renders Ireland an instructive case study in sustainable, rather than growth-oriented, economics. For the role of reparations in Ireland, see Godkin, The Land-War in Ireland; the so-called Bessborough Report: Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the Working of the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1870 (London: Parliament, House of Commons, 1881). For Ireland’s revolution, Palmer, The Irish Land League Crisis; Curtis, Depiction of Eviction in Ireland. For the Indian land reform legislation and its ineffectiveness, Robb, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort, esp. 151, 157–58; for the story of the abortive crofters’ movement in Scotland and its unsatisfied demands for land redistribution, even while it succeeded in securing anti-eviction measures and a rent control act, Cameron, Land for the People? 31–71. For an encapsulation of the long endeavor to realize occupancy rights in Ireland,

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see L. Perry Curtis, “The Battering Ram and Irish Evictions, 1887–90,” Éire-Ireland 42:3 (2007): 207–28. For the economic questionability of the proposition, arguing that capital flight followed, Cormac Ó Gráda, “Irish Agriculture After the Land War,” in Stanley Engerman and Jacob Metzer, eds., Land Rights, Ethno-Nationality and Sovereignty in History (London: Routledge, 2005), 131–52; for claims that the farms allotted were too small to be economically productive, Terence A. M Dooley, “The Land for the People”: The Land Question in Independent Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004), 94–95. The issue of whether small farms could be made productive by supplemental technology was a contemporary question in Ireland. Another, more positive perspective on the outcome for both tenants and landlords is offered in Lyons, “The Aftermath of Parnell,” 99–100. Relatively little has been published about the land court. For a very general portrait, consider the details given in a contemporary article, “Opening of the New Land Court.” For “technology,” I refer principally to the work of Horace Plunkett and the Irish Department of Agriculture. For Plunkett’s model, which stressed the state support of cooperatives to aid small farmers, see Horace Plunkett, Co-operation and the New Agricultural Policy (London: P. S. King and Son, 1935); Trevor West, Horace Plunkett: Co-operation and Politics (Gerrards Cross, U.K.: Colin Smythe, 1986). 33. The number of results from a Google Books or newspaper search for the phrase “land to the tiller” or “to the tiller belongs the soil” is almost overwhelming. For a rough sample, consider Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (New York: Macmillan, 1927); Tsung-han Shen, Land to the Tiller in Free China (Taipei: China Culture, 1954); Ronald J. Herring, Land to the Tiller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Kevin J. Middlebrook, Land for the Tiller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972). 34. In the case of the Bengal Tenancy Act (1885), the outcome was more complicated than in Ireland, largely because the lines of caste exclusion traced by the legislation protected a small minority against a majority of sharecroppers. As Peter Robb has explained, despite the nominal concern for occupier-cultivators, in India one result of the 1885 act was to speed up land transfers and thus land alienation, especially among all castes not specifically protected by the legislation. Robb, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort, 140–51. Sartori gives an extended commentary on the failures of 1885 to fulfill the promise that he detects in 1869: see Liberalism in Empire, 130–35. For the memory of these failures as pivotal for ethnic politics and the fate of modern Pakistan, see chapter 5 in Sartori’s book. For links between the Bengal Act and Ireland via George Campbell and the act’s relationship to later acts in different provinces, see Dietmar Rothermund, “The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 and Its Influence on Legislation in Other Provinces,” Bengal Past and Present 86:2 (1967): 90–105. For Mexico, John Wo­ mack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1969). For Mexican in­ fluence on the United States, see Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the

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Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 35. For race and homeland in the land settlement programs of the League of Nations, see Susan Pedersen, “Settler Colonialism at the Bar of the League of Nations,” in Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2012), 113–34. 36. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings. 37. For American empire and land reform, Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010): 72–107; Kapstein, Seeds of Stability, 164–66. For “willing buyer, willing seller,” see Kenneth H. Parsons, “Social Conflicts and Agricultural Programs,” Journal of Farm Economics 23:4 (1941): 751. Parsons was a founder of the influential Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin. 38. For cheap printed tracts, see Practicable Land Nationalization (London: Fabian Society, 1890); Allotments and How to Get Them (London: Fabian Society, 1894); Parish Council Cottages and How to Get Them (London: Fabian Society, 1894); Houses for the People (London: Fabian Society, 1900); Capital and Land (London: Fabian Society, 1908). For context, see A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); David M. Ricci, “Fabian Socialism,” Journal of British Studies 9:1 (1969): 105–21; Peter Beilharz, Labour’s Utopias (New York: Routledge, 1991). For instances of rent strikes that echo the Irish case, Seán Damer, Rent Strike! The Clydebank Rent Strike of the 1920s (Clydebank, Scotland: Clydebank District Library, 1982); Dave Burn, Rent Strike, St. Pancras 1960 (London: Pluto Press for Architectural Radicals Students Educators, 1972); “Les Glasgow Rent Strikes de 1915,” Revue Lisa 6:4 (2009): 40–56; M. I. Jackson, “Harlem’s Rent Strike and Rat War,” American Studies 47:1 (2006): 53–79; Anders Corr, No Trespassing! (Boston: South End, 1999). For a history of rent control as policy, see John W. Willis, “Short History of Rent Control Laws,” Cornell Law Quarterly 36 (1950–51): 54; Haila, Urban Land Rent. For ideas about land as reparations to the victims of colonization spreading from the 1880s to New Zealand, in 1913 to South Africa with the Native Land Act, and later in the twentieth century to Australia, Canada, and the United States as they dealt with the land claims of indigenous people, Dinah Shelton, “The Present Value of Past Wrongs,” in Federico Lenzerini, ed., Reparations for Indigenous Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 55–56. For New Zealand, see W. J. Gardner, A Pastoral Kingdom Divided: Cheviot, 1889– 94 (Wellington, N.Z.: Bridget Williams, 1992). Some reforms put limits on eviction; others subsidize housing costs for inhabitants below a certain income threshold; and still others merely cap taxes or rents—which protects incumbent occupants but hurts the poor. For examples of the latter, K. Nalder, “The Paradox of Prop. 13: The Informed Public’s Misunderstanding of California’s Third Rail,” California Journal of Politics and Policy 2: 3 (2010): 7.

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39. The concept of development, first promulgated in the West, enshrined the idea that all nations could aspire to the economic opportunity and political stability characteristic of Europe and North America. In the postwar world, development also became a profession for social scientists, frequently employed by national, international, or private institutions dedicated to understanding and leveraging agricultural and industrial production in the developing world. For the idea of development, Gilbert Rist, The History of Development (London: Zed, 1996), 8–68; David C. Engerman, “The Romance of Economic Development and New Histories of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 28:1 (2004): 23–54; Sara Lorenzini, Global Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 9–13. For development as a profession after the Second World War, Lorenzini, Global Development, 93–94. Midcentury conversations about small-scale technology anticipated the later theorization of global poverty through the language of “underdeveloped” economies that resulted from the legacy of empire. For “underdevelopment,” see Samir Amin, Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review, 1976). Amin’s emphasis was on the balance of payments rather than technology, but it replicated Indian conversations about the logic of capital. 40. For four-fifths of the population in 1945 being rural, see Amalia Ribi Forclaz, “From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955,” International History Review 41:2 (2019): 351, quoting Frank MacDougall. In general, the FAO has received little coverage compared to attention paid to grander themes of the United Nations, such as the Security Council or Human Rights Commission. For profiles of other offices at the United Nations, see Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man (New York: Vintage, 2006); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Treatments of the FAO include John B. O’Brien, “F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,” Australian Journal of Politics & History 46:2 (2000): 164– 74; Amy L. Sayward, The United Nations in International History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), and Sayward, The Birth of Development (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006); Perrin Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Ruth Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics’: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1945–1965,” in M. Frey, S. Kunkel, and C. R. Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (London: Springer, 2014), 75–100; and Ribi Forclaz, “From Reconstruction to Development.” Sayward’s account of the FAO is driven by a history of development that stresses attempts by the agency to increase food production and supplement nutrition. To this end, she emphasizes tensions over the World Food Program, and the determinative role of the United States on the question of whether the FAO would actively provide food assistance to nations facing famine. While this is obviously an essential story for a history of international development, I have not had space here to fully explore the question of famine in relation to the FAO’s activities regarding land redistribution. Our

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accounts therefore focus on different arms of the FAO, different initiatives, and different moments; future historians of international development will have to find a way of reconciling these approaches. O’Brien, Jachertz, and Ribi Forclaz are consulted throughout, as are the two official histories of the FAO: Ralph Wesley Phillips, FAO: Its Organization and Work and United States Participation, FAS-M 93 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, 1960); and Edouard Saouma, FAO in the Front Line of Development (Rome: FAO, 1993). 41. For statistics, Farshad Araghi, “The Great Global Enclosure of Our Times,” in Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick H. Buttel, eds., Hungry for Profit (New York: Monthly Review, 2011), 146. For India, Ashutosh Varshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For India’s land reforms as a “failure,” J. S. Uppal, Indian Economic Planning: Three Decades of Development (Delhi: Macmillan India, 1984), 52. 42. For linkages between authoritarianism and land redistribution movements in the twentieth century, see D. Anthony Low, The Egalitarian Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael Albertus, Sofia Fenner, and Dan Slater, Coercive Distribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For “grievance theory” and a history of ideas about how peasant grievances lie at the root of political action around occupancy rights, see Kapstein, Seeds of Stability, vii–ix, 35–53, and for the implications of that idea for the present, 256–66. 43. Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Cristóbal Kay, and A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, “Agrarian Reform and Rural Development: Historical Overview and Current Issues,” in A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., and Cristóbal Kay, eds., Land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization: Perspectives from Developing and Transition Countries (London: Routledge, 2007), 1. 44. Keith Griffin, Azizur Rahman Khan, and Amy Ickowitz, “Poverty and the Distribution of Land,” Journal of Agrarian Change 2:3 (2002): 320. For inequality and landlessness, Rekha Bandyopadhyay, “Global Review of Land Reform: A Critical Perspective,” Economic and Political Weekly 31:11 (1996): 688. For displacement as a force that compounds poverty, Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown, 2016). 45. For food insecurity, Raj Patel, The World Bank and Agriculture: A Critical Review of the World Bank’s World Development Report (Johannesburg: ActionAid, 2008), 6, 8, 25; Peter Rosset, “Food Sovereignty and Alternative Paradigms to Confront Land Grabbing and the Food and Climate Crises,” Development 54:1 (2011): 21–30; Miguel Altieri, “Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty,” Monthly Review 61:3 (2009): 102– 13. For ecology, see Solon L. Barraclough et al., eds, Rural Development and the Environment (Geneva: UNRISD and UNEP, 1997); Rosset, “Food Sovereignty,” and Altieri, “Agroecology.” 46. For quotation, Hari K. Nagarajan, Songqing Jin, and Klaus Deininger, Land

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Reforms, Poverty Reduction, and Economic Growth: Evidence from India (New York: World Bank, 2007), 2. For a comparison showing the productivity of large farms, Bandyopad­ hyay, “Global Review.” For a masterful synthesis of research showing the productivity of small farms, see John W. Mellor, Agricultural Development and Economic Transformation: Promoting Growth with Poverty Reduction (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017). For the study finding that small farms across Brazil were 1.5 to 5.6 times as productive per acre as large ones, R. A. Berry and W. R. Cline, Agrarian Structure and Productivity in Developing Countries: A Study Prepared for the International Labour Office Within the Framework of the World Employment Programme (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 47. For small farms as much more sensitive to rainfall than large ones, Mark R. Rosenzweig and Hans P. Binswanger, Wealth, Weather Risk, and the Composition and Profitability of Agricultural Investments (New York: World Bank, 1992). 48. For land inequality and public goods, World Bank Development Report 2006 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2006), 162. For land reform as a symptom of failed states, focusing on Zimbabwe, see Steven Scalet and David Schmidtz, “Famine, Poverty, and Property Rights,” in Christopher W. Morris, ed., Amartya Sen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For the success of Asian land reforms, Kapstein, Seeds of Stability, 93–132; for the failures of Latin America, Kapstein, Seeds of Stability, 164– 94, and Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution. In the cases that I consider—India and Britain—instability was a relatively minor factor. For understanding authoritarianism and violence as the reflection of underlying grievances, Kapstein, Seeds of Stability, 228–29. 49. For indigenous populations and exclusion, Kapstein, Seeds of Stability, 228–29. 50. Doreen Warriner, Land Reform and Economic Development (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt, 1955), 1. 51. For “unchanging laws of property,” see Scalet and Schmidtz, “Famine, Poverty, and Property Rights”; for “aggressive imperialism of postwar America,” Cullather, The Hungry World. 52. For the failures of land redistribution in India, see Varshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside; for the failures of land redistribution in Latin America, see Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution. 53. For an intellectual history of neoliberal or libertarian ideas, see Daniel T. Rod­ gers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), chapter 2; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For a historical overview of the rise of market thinking in global land policies, see A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Cristóbal Kay, and Saturnino M. Borras Jr., “The Political Economy of Land,” in Akram-Lodhi and Kay, Peasants and Global-

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ization, 214–38; and Nigel Swain, “Getting Land in Central Europe,” in R. G. Abrahams, ed., After Socialism (Oxford: Berghahn, 1996), chapter 8. Market-based land redistribution dominated in the former Soviet bloc in the years after 1989: J. David Stanfield and D. David Moyer, Building Linkages for Restructuring of Rights to Land in Eastern Europe and the Former USSR Countries (“Landlink”) (Madison: Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin, 1994). For a critique of how these supposedly democratizing reforms turned land over to the hands of large corporations, see Max Spoor, “Agrarian Reform and Transition,” Journal of Peasant Studies 39:1 (2012): 175–94. For the rise of private entities in global governance, see Peter Dobkin Hall, Philanthropy, the Welfare State and the Transformation of American Public and Private Institutions (Cambridge: Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University, 2000); Stephen Macekura, Of Limits and Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 154; Akira Iriye, “A Century of NGOs,” Diplomatic History 23:3 (1999): 421. Iriye argues that after the Second World War, the number of NGOs again began to swell as inter­ national development posed a challenge to the reforming mind that could not be met from within the nation-state, and alliances with the United Nations and World Bank posed the possibility of broader international action. See also Mark Mazower, Governing the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 322–31. 54. As the United States competed against Soviet powers for trade and aid, India and other nations secured deals from both sides. But deals such as these were won at the price of following visions dictated by the United States and Soviet Russia, typically heavy on industry, rather than the post-colonial visions articulated in the developing world and embraced by the United Nations, which promised security for peasants against displacement, an end to income inequality, and broadcast economic uplift through steady growth in the countryside. Dictates from Washington and Moscow thus increasingly sidelined projects at the United Nations. For aid, David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 51–84, 140–47, 228–29, 250– 51; Lorenzini, Global Development, 52–60. Scholars of international development have often stressed the utopianism and peripherality of humanitarian schemes at the United Nations. For the organization as a site of “humanitarian intervention,” Lorenzini, Global Development, 96–101 (she uses the phrase on 97), for low-cost loans at the United Nations, 100–101. The FAO’s humanitarian programs for food aid and low-cost loans routinely foundered when they clashed with alternative policies favored by the United States, which increasingly stressed aid—in the form of food, access to atomic power, and heavy industry—in return for political compliance with U.S. objectives in the Cold War. Amy L. S. Staples, “Norris E. Dodd and the Connections Between Domestic and International Agricultural Policy,” Agricultural History 74:2 (2000): 393–403. Amy Sayward (formerly Staples) explains that the FAO’s second director, Norris Dodd, imported radical ideas of stabilizing markets on behalf of smallholder farmers from the USDA. Under Dodd, the FAO would have become an organ for trading agricultural surpluses

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at low market rates to starving countries, regardless of their politics. Sayward claims that these adjustment roles were blocked by member nations of the FAO, especially the United States, which reserved its right to use agricultural surpluses as a political tool. The FAO was never able to become the direct organ of adjusting agricultural trade to feed the starving, as its founder had envisioned. Rather, it became a clearinghouse for technological knowledge and publishing, coordinating the sharing of international experts from all countries, not merely developed ones. I am indebted to Amy Sayward especially for insights about the circumstances of the FAO’s turn toward publishing. 55.  Bank Policy on Land Reform (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1974). 56. For a critique of property that focuses on participatory movements in the developing world and their unacknowledged claims, see Peter Rosset et al., Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform (Oakland, Calif.: New York: Food First, 2006). For a critique of property distribution as inefficient, see Michael A. Heller, “The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets,” Harvard Law Review 111:3 (1998): 621–88: “Once an anticommons emerges, collecting rights into usable private property bundles can be brutal and slow” (625). For an overview of peasant revolts in the era of neoliberalism, see Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, “The Resurgence of Rural Movements Under Neoliberalism,” in Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, eds., Reclaiming the Land (London: Zed, 2013), chapter 1. 57. For an overview of global squats, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2005); Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (New York: Routledge, 2005). For recent scholarship on the history of urban squatting in the developed world, see Minayo Nasiali, “Citizens, Squatters, and Asocials,” American Historical Review 119:2 (2014): 434–59; Mary Manjikian, Securitization of Property (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013). For arguments about the causal effect of squatting in broadening definitions of property rights—a major inspiration to this history—see Eduardo M. Peñalver and Sonio K. Katyal, Property Outlaws (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 58. For the canonical definition of “democratic ecology,” see Luc Ferry, New Ecological Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chapter 7. Among the works that have done the most to apply Ferry’s ideas to poor people’s movements are Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace (London: Zed, 2006); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); and John Clark, Between Earth and Empire (Oakland, Calif.: PM, 2019). 59. Indeed, as the stories ahead will show, in the twentieth century, economists and mystics from the Global South, indigenous activists, and women bibliographers and economists became some of the most important actors in the global struggle for a right to occupancy. 60. For dams and displacement, see David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton

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University Press, 2010), 57, 224, 232, 239–50; Amrith, Unruly Waters, 10–13, 292–96. For sterilization, Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). For thirsty seeds and the displacement of small farmers, see accounts of the “Green Revolution” and “Borewell Revolution,” for instance, John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Cullather, The Hungry World, 159–79. “The human condition” refers to James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). For an account as modernization as an American mission, see Ekbladh, The Great American Mission, 153–59, and for its human and environmental cost, 234–40. 61. For taxation at the border, see Duncan Kelly, Politics and the Anthropocene (London: Polity, 2019). For courts, see Tim Stephens, International Courts and Environmental Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For grassroots movements agitating in mutual solidarity, see Clark, Between Earth and Empire. For data-­ driven philanthropy, see Mary Ellen S. Capek and Molly Mead, Effective Philanthropy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

1. A Parade for Empire’s End 1. The picture I present is fabricated from two roughly contemporary sources; it is not a reflection of any single episode that conjoined both green sashes and a banner. For sashes, Clare Murphy, “Varieties of Crowd Activity from Fenianism to the Land War, 1867–79,” in Eoin Magennis and Peter Jupp, eds., Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 2000), 176, 179. For the Irish country house as a marker of social divisions in the landscape—which figured, for instance, in the arson of a large number of Irish country houses during the Land War and again during the struggle for Irish independence—see Terence Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland (Dublin: Wolfhound, 2001), 286. 2. For India, see Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 67–68; Peter G. Robb, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon, 1997), 76–98. For Ireland, see Paul Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1978), 191–232. For Scotland, see Iain Fraser Grigor, Highland Resistance (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2000); Ewen A. Cameron, Land for the People? (East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell, 1996). For Britain more generally and the work of the Fabians in creating this consensus, see Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 132–51. For the era of politics in Britain marked by conversations about redistribution that followed, Readman, Land and Nation; Short, Land and Society in Edwardian Britain. 3. For the origins of settler colonialism, see Paul Warde, Ecology, Economy and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For the Pacific, see Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University

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Press, 2007). In North America, property rights were overturned in some places and upheld in others, at least temporarily: Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For Ireland, see Louis Cullen, “Catholics Under the Penal Laws,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an Dá Chultúr (1986): 23–36; Thomas P. O’Neill, “The Irish Land Question, 1830–1850,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 44:175 (1955): 325–36. 4. The “New Departure” in Irish politics, as many historians define it, was marked by cooperation between revolutionary movements, which envisioned an armed revolt in Ireland, and gradualists, who worked within Britain’s Parliament to secure concessions favorable to nationalism. Jacobson, for instance, wraps several smaller movements into this arc: Isaac Butt’s Irish federalism, Charles Stewart Parnell’s Home Rule Movement, and Michael Davitt’s land agitation. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 26–27. 5. Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1812]), 162. For land agents and extractive economies in colonial Ireland, see Desmond Norton, Landlords, Tenants, Famine (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006); Ciarán J. Reilly, The Irish Land Agent (Dublin: Four Courts, 2014). For Edgeworth and her role in beginning a literary tradition of inquiry into absenteeism and the grounds of the Irish economy, see Sara L. Maurer, The Dispossessed State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 6. For the Irish famine in general, see Cormac Ó’Gráda, The Great Irish Famine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Crowley et al., Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012); Peter Gray, Famine, Land and Politics (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999). For journalists’ and other contemporaries’ views of the famine’s origins and aftermath, Gerry Kearns, “ ‘Up to the Sun and Down to the Centre,’ ” Historical Geography 42 (2014): 130–51. For a contemporary critique of “landlord power,” see Patrick Lavelle, The Irish Landlord Since the Revolution (Dublin: W. B. Kelly, 1870), esp. 12. 7. For the quotation, James Godkin, The Land-War in Ireland: A History for the Times (London: Macmillan, 1870), xi. For journalists, see Kearns, “ ‘Up to the Sun.’ ” For the history of reparations more generally, Bernard S. Bachrach, “Military Lands in Historical Perspective,” Journal of the Haskins Society 9 (1997): 95–122; Susan P. Mattern, Rome and the Enemy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 214. This precept of confiscation of the land of the enemy has been banned in modern international law since at least 1907: see J. H. W. Verziji, International Law in Historical Perspective (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff and Nordhoff, 1978), v. 9-a, 135. For a history of land reparations in the broader context of atoning for historical injustice and the connection with wartime land seizures, see Dinah Shelton, “The World of Atonement Reparations for Historical Injuries,” Miskolc Journal of International Law 1 (2004): 259–325. 8. For the double strategy of popular and high politics, see Fergus Campbell, “Irish

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Popular Politics and the Making of the Wyndham Land Act,” Historical Journal 45:4 (2002): 755–73. For the “tenant right” movement of the 1850s in general, see John Dunbabin, “Tenant Right in Britain and Ireland,” in John Dunbabin, ed., Rural Discontent in 19th-Century Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1974); Martin Dowling, Tenant Right and Agrarian Society in Ulster (Dublin: Irish Academic, 1999). For the Cavan crowd, see T. P. Cunningham, “The Cavan Tenant-Right Meeting of 1850,” Breifne: Journal of Cumann Seanchais Bhréifne 3 (1969): 417–42. 9. For crowds in subsequent decades, Stephen Ball, “Crowd Activity During the Irish Land War, 1879–90,” in Peter Jupp and Eoin Magennis, eds., Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 212–48; Clare Murphy, “Varieties of Crowd Activity from Fenianism to the Land War, 1867–79,” in Eoin Magennis and Peter Jupp, eds., Crowds in Ireland, c. 1720–1920 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 2000), 173–86. For Parnell as political spectacle, see James Loughlin, “Constructing the Po­ litical Spectacle,” in David Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., Parnell in Perspective (London: Routledge, 1991), 221–41; Christopher Morash, “Ghosts and Wires,” in Karen Steele et al., eds., Ireland and the New Journalism (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 21–34. For data collected by the farmers, see “Observations” (no date), “Land League Papers Co. Antrim,” MS 17,709 (1), National Library of Ireland, Dublin. 10. For a brief review of the acts and their consequences, see David Anthony Haggan, “The Land Purchase Acts: A Short Survey for the Use of Students,” Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 11 (1954): 207–15. For tenants becoming owners as the result of popular and high politics combined, Campbell, “Irish Popular Politics,” 755–73. For repair as the basis of legislation, see the Bessborough Report: Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the Working of the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act, 1870 (1881). 11. For rent strikes, see Murphy, “Varieties of Crowd Activity.” For Boycott, R. Barry O’Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 1846–1891 (London: Smith, Elder 1898), 237–41; Gerald le Grys Norgate, “Boycott, Charles Cunningham,” in Sidney Lee, ed., Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 Supplement (London: Smith, Elder 1901). 12. Today, working-class families in America frequently pay 80 or 90 percent of their income in rent. Indeed, one danger of negotiating for higher wages is that any increase will be siphoned back by the landowner class in the form of higher rent. Like wages, rents are determined by the rich. For general characterizations of the stress of impoverished families living with high rents in America, see Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118:1 (2012): 88–133; Matthew Desmond and Carl Gershenson, “Housing and Employment Insecurity Among the Working Poor,” Social Problems 63:1 (2016): 46–67. 13. For the quotation, see “The Ruined Homes of Ireland,” in Thomas Stanislaus Cleary, Songs of the Irish Land War (Dublin: W. P. Swan, 1888), 33–34. For the burning of leases, Marcus Scriven, Splendour and Squalor (London: Atlantic, 2009), 17.

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14. Sets of slides showing evictions of farmers and the Irish countryside were mass-produced for distribution. For a history of the slides including Gonne’s role in distributing them, see Fintan Cullen, “Marketing National Sentiment,” History Workshop Journal 54:1 (2002): 162–79. For Knock and the magic lantern as artifice, see Paul Carpenter, “Mimesis, Memory, and the Magic Lantern,” New Hibernia Review 15:2 (2011): 102–20. For Knock as a scene where contemporary critiques of landlord power and emphasis on community experience came to the fore, see Eugene Hynes, Knock (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008). 15. For land huts, Jane McL. Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 204–16; Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy, Women, Power and Consciousness in 19th Century Ireland (Dublin: Attic, 1995), 273. For journalism, see L. Perry Curtis, Depiction of Eviction in Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2011); Ely M. Janis, A Greater Ireland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 112–36; Morash, “Ghosts and Wires.” For the Parnell sisters more generally, see Patricia Groves, Petticoat Rebellion (Cork: Mercier, 2009); Theodore William Moody, “Anna Parnell and the Land League,” Hermathena 117 (1974): 5–17; Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell, 156–68. For monetary aid, see Janis, Greater Ireland; James J. Green, “American Catholics and the Irish Land League,” Catholic Historical Review 35:1 (1949): 19–42; James P. Rodechko, “An Irish-American Journalist and Catholicism,” Church History 39:4 (December 1970): 524–40; Edward T. O’Donnell, “ ‘Though Not an Irishman,’ ” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 56:4 (1997): 407–19. 16. For banner, Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Macmillan, 2007), 72. For figures, Simon Adams et al., World War II, Map by Map (London: Penguin Random House, 2019), 61. Richard Overy tempers the meaning of these figures somewhat in The Bombing War (London: Penguin, 2013), cxliii, where he argues that repairs to properties, and thus displacement, were constantly under way. 17. Lloyd George’s promise that England would be made “fit” for soldiers was given in a speech in Wolverhampton, November 24, 1918. For “homes fit for heroes,” see Lawrence R. Murphy, “Rebuilding Britain,” Historian 32:3 (1970): 410–27; Susan D. Pennybacker, “Unfit for Heroes?” Historical Journal 26:2 (1983); Peter Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Housing had been nominated for a mandate for socialism in the reports of the 1930s and it was recommended again after the war by the Beveridge Report. For liberal and conservative versions of land reform, see Paul Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880–1914 (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2008). 18. For theories of rent among English socialists, Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 132–51. My account of the dynamics of taxation of land value and reinvestment in housing stock and infrastructure is based primarily on Henry George’s theory of property taxation, which spread across Britain through his series of public speaking tours. See Henry George, Progress and

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Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (New York: Modern Library, 1879). While George’s influence on U.S. politics is sometimes dismissed, the literature on his influence in Britain is quite rich. Bernard Newton, “The Impact of Henry George on British Economists, III,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 31:1 (January 1972): 87–102. 19. The squatters included a number of electricians and carpenters qualified to alter the Nissen huts and war offices to make them suitable for habitation. Colin Ward described these postwar encampments as the outgrowth of anarchist circles among servicemen: in a postwar world, they preferred to remake their own communities out of available materials rather than wait for government experts to do so through authorized channels. Colin Ward, Chris Wilbert, and Damian F. White, Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (Oakland, Calif.: AK, 2011), 63–67. 20. For postwar state-built housing, Peter Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 21. British Committee for Solidarity with the Victims of Repression in Peru, Land or Death: The Case of Hugo Blanco (London: Socialist Current Publications, 1966), 2. This short pamphlet gave a reduced version of the autobiographical narrative and manifesto for land redistribution that Blanco would later publish under the same title in 1972. This pamphlet leaned on a published account of the trial: “25 Years in El Fronton for Hugo Blanco,” World Outlook, September 23, 1966. For further evidence of mobilization in London at that time, Ian R. Mitchell, “Peru and the Case of Hugo Blanco,” Anarchy 7:9 (September 1967): 282–85. 22. British Committee, Land or Death, 5. 23. British Committee, Land or Death, 5. 24. British Committee, Land or Death, 5. 25. For Warriner, see Doreen Warriner, Land Reform in Principle and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). For Tawney’s account of enclosure, see R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, 1912). For Richard Tawney in light of more recent research on agrarian politics in the seventeenth century, see Jane Whittle, “Introduction: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited,” in Jane Whittle, ed., Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440–1660: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 1–18; as well as at least two other chapters in the same book: Christopher Brooks, “The Agrarian Problem in Revolutionary England,” 183–99; David Ormrob, “Agrarian Capitalism and Merchant Capitalism: Tawney, Dobb, Brenner and Beyond,” 200–15. 26. Warriner, Land Reform in Principle and Practice, 9. 27. Warriner, Land Reform in Principle and Practice, 9. 28. For instances of Indian nationalists touring Ireland and meeting with or admiring Irish leaders, see Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 2014), 73; Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 2010), 147–48; Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 53–56; Sumit Sarkar, Modern India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989 [1983]), 146. For the period of rent strikes in the north that followed, Ashok Kumar Singh, Peasants Revolt and Agrarian Reforms (New Delhi: Commonwealth, 1988), 18–19, 27–33, 82–89, 93. For a firsthand account of Gandhi’s rent strikes, see Rajendra Prasad, Autobiography (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2010), esp. chapters 21 and 91 (on Champaran, 1916, and Bihar, 1933–34). 29. For the historical reality of debt in colonial India as a crisis, see Sartori, Liberalism in Empire, 139–41. For an account of Gandhi’s leadership in the rent strikes as a formative experience for the first generation of leaders of independent India, see Prasad, Autobiography, chapters 21 and 91. 30. Radhakamal Mukerjee, Principles of Comparative Economics (London: P. S. King and Son, 1921), 1:73. 31. Mukerjee, Principles of Comparative Economics, 2:171–72. 32. Mukerjee, Principles of Comparative Economics, 2:171–72. 33. Mukerjee, Principles of Comparative Economics, 1:118–22. 34. The story of Vinoba burning the school certificates is told in Shriman Narayan, Vinoba: His Life and Work (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1970), 31. 35. For British land policy in India after 1793 and its relationship to utilitarian thought, see Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (Paris: Mouton, 1963); Sartori, Liberalism and Empire: both underscore the role of extraction in the systems of property ownership and management that Britain imposed on India. For the wider relationship between land settlement and British investments in the nineteenth century, and the role of taxation, railroads, and currency devaluation in supporting British profits, see Manu Goswami, Producing India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 36. For the defeat of Indian land reform at the national level and its progress within the states, see Varshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside. 37. “The Earth for Man,” speech to the Federal Council of Churches (February 5, 1951), in “Personal Papers: FAO, 1948–1954,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 2:1, Hoover Institution Archives, Palo Alto.

2. Something Like a Global Government of Land 1. For the significance of Rome’s geography in terms of proximity to the developing world, see Ruth Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics’: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1945–1965,” in M. Frey, S. Kunkel, and C. R. Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (London: Springer, 2014), 85. 2. For Mexico, see John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1969). For the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan, see Ethan B. Kapstein, Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and US Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 93–132.

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3. Edmundo Flores, “Land Reform and the Alliance for Progress,” in Center of International Studies Policy Memorandum 27 (Princeton: Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, May 20, 1963), 2. 4. Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León de Leal, Empowering Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 105. 5. For an overview of Latin American land reforms, Peter Dorner, Latin American Land Reforms in Theory and Practice: A Retrospective Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). For a contemporary overview of land reforms in Latin America, focusing on the role of autocracy, see Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 6. Flores, “Land Reform,” 2. 7. For Zapata and peasants whose land rights had been overturned, Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. 8. For British narratives of enclosure and peasant struggle, see George Charles Brodrick, English Land and English Landlords (London: Cobden Club, 1881); Erwin Nasse, On the Agricultural Community of the Middle Ages, and Inclosures of the Sixteenth Century in England, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan 1872 [first German edition 1869; first English translation 1871]); Thomas Edward Scrutton, Land in Fetters, or; The History and Policy of the Laws Restraining the Alienation and Settlement of Land in England: Being the Yorke Prize Essay of the University of Cambridge for the Year 1885 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1886); R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green 1912); Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure; J. D. Chambers, “Enclosure and the Small Landowner,” Economic History Review 10:2 (1940): 118–27. For the lasting influence of this discourse on later European social science, consider the several social science studies of land redistribution in the postwar world whose titles explicitly reference “land and labour” in R. H. Tawney’s Land and Labour in China (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1932): Folke Dovring, Land and Labor in Europe, 1900– 1950: A Comparative Survey of Recent Agrarian History, Studies in Social Life 4 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956); Daniel Thorner and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1962); Kenneth Duncan, Ian Rutledge, and Colin Harding, Land and Labour in Latin America: Essays on the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 9. Warriner’s maternal grandfather was Thomas McNulty, “a clergyman of a slum parish in the Staffordshire Black Country who had had to leave Ireland because of his Fenian sympathies.” Sybil Oldfield, “Warriner, Doreen Agnes Rosemary Julia,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For narrative, see Doreen Warriner, “Winter in Prague,” Slavonic and East European Review 62 (1984): 209–40. Scholars credit much of the original workload and planning of the Prague kindertransport later ascribed to Nicholas Winton to Warriner: Laura E. Brade

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and Rose Holmes, “Troublesome Sainthood,” History and Memory 29:1 (Spring–Summer 2017): 11–14. 10. Paul Lamartine Yates, Food Production in Western Europe (London: Longman, 1940). 11. For Rose Lamartine Yates, see Gail Cameron, “Yates (née Janau), Rose Emma Lamartine (1875–1954), Women’s Activist,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. For Paul as a child in Rose’s garden, see photograph, “Hunger Striking Suffragettes Resting in the Garden,” January 2, 1912, WikiMedia Foundation, commons.wikimedia .org/wiki/File:Hunger_striking_Suffragettes_resting_in_the_garden_of_Dorset_Hall ,_Merton_Park.jpg. For Rowntree’s committee, see Waldorf Astor, Viscount Astor, and B. Seebohm Rowntree, British Agriculture: The Principles of Future Policy; A Report of an Enquiry Organized by Viscount Astor and B. Seebohm Rowntree, Written by Hubert D. Henderson in Collaboration with P. Lamartine Yates (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Pelican, 1939 [1938]). For the committee’s final report, see Yates, Food Production. For the committee in perspective, see Tim Lang, Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them (London: Penguin, 2020). For the contemporary politics of hunger striking, see James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 12. Paul Lamartine Yates and Doreen Warriner, Food and Farming in Post-war Europe (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 15. 13. Yates and Warriner, Food and Farming, 15. 14. Yates and Warriner, Food and Farming, 15; for planning, 17. For technology, Warriner, Land Reform and Economic Development, 6. 15. Yates and Warriner, Food and Farming, 17. 16. Yates and Warriner, Food and Farming, 17. 17. Warriner, Land Reform and Economic Development, 4. 18. John Boyd Orr, Food, Health and Income: Report on a Survey of Adequacy of Diet in Relation to Income (London: Macmillan, 1936). For the context of Orr’s writing and the food shortages of Europe, especially in 1947 and 1948, see Carin Martiin, Juan Pan-­ Montojo, and Paul Brassley, “European Agriculture, 1945–1965: An Introduction,” in Martiin, Juan Pan-Montojo, and Paul Brassley, eds., Agriculture in Capitalist Europe, 1945– 1960: From Food Shortages to Food Surpluses (London: Routledge, 2016), chapter 1. 19. Quoted in Ruth Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics’: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1945–1965,” in M. Frey, S. Kunkel, and C. R. Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (London: Springer, 2014), 79. 20. K. L. Blaxter, “Orr, John Boyd, Baron Boyd Orr (1880–1971), Nutritional Physiologist,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 21. For Orr’s proposals for the World Food Board, Amy L. S. Staples, “To Win the Peace: The Food and Agriculture Organization, Sir John Boyd Orr, and the World Food Board Proposals,” Peace & Change 28:4 (2003): 495–523, doi.org/10.1111/1468–0130

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.00273. For Orr’s proposals about the FAO as an independent policy-making institution and the resistance they faced, especially from Great Britain, Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics,’ ” 91. 22. John Boyd Orr, The White Man’s Dilemma (London: Unwin, 1964 [1953]), for “haves:” front page. For Kipling, see Patrick Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Its Afterlives,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 50:2 (2007): 172–91. 23. Orr, White Man’s Dilemma, 73. 24. Orr, White Man’s Dilemma, 73. 25. Staples, Birth of Development, 68–96. 26. “Artist in propaganda” is McDougall’s own phrase, quoted in John B. O’Brien, “F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,” Australian Journal of Politics & History 46:2 (2000): 164; for his fruit tree story, 167; for the London lobby, 168–69. 27. For a contrast between the thought of Orr and Russell, Karl Ittmann, Problem of Great Importance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 156–57. 28. Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning (New York: Henry Holt, 2010) focuses on white violence and the silencing of the record; David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged (New York: Norton, 2011), gives an account more centered on the original conflict over land. 29. Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Politics Out of Food,’ ” 78. 30. For the “four freedoms” speech, see Samuel Irving Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Random House and Harper and Brothers, 1940), 633–44. For McDougall’s role in noticing the speech as an opportunity to take action, O’Brien, “F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,” 173–74. 31. O’Brien, “F. L. McDougall and the Origins of the FAO,” 174. 32. For the prehistory of ideas about international concord, see Mazower, Governing the World, prologue and chapters 1–7. 33. Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Politics out of Food,’ ” 78. 34. Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 7. 35.  Report of the Conference of FAO, First Session (Washington, D.C.: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1946), 15. The full statement of “Committee A” about the work of the FAO can be found here: www.fao.org/3/x5584E/x5584e07 .htm. 36. Gunnar Myrdal, “The United Nations, Agriculture, and the World Economic Revolution,” Journal of Farm Economics 47:4 (1965): 889. For 700 million, see FAO Production Yearbook (Rome: FAO, 1954), note 1. 37. “The Earth for Man,” speech to the Federal Council of Churches (February 5, 1951), 3, “Personal Papers: FAO, 1948–1954,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 2:1, Hoover Institution Archives.

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38. The actual quotation is “Too many of the slogans of man . . . divide him, rather than unite him.” Dodd, “The Earth for Man,” 1. 39. For quotation, Dodd, “The Earth for Man,” 3. For Truman’s Point Four speech at his inauguration, January 20, 1949, see Stephen Macekura, “The Point Four Program and US International Development Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 128:1 (2013): 127– 60. For the Point Four in relationship to Norris Dodd and the FAO, see Amy L. Sayward, “Harry S. Truman and the Birth of Development,” in Raymond Geselbracht, Foreign Aid and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2014), 43–60. 40. For quotation, Norris Dodd, “World Food Problems and the Inter-dependence of Rural and Urban Regions,” address at a meeting of the World Assembly of Youth, Rome (September 7, 1953), 5, “Personal Papers: Speeches 1953–4,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:5, Hoover Institution Archives. For Dodd’s connections with the New Deal, see Staples, “Norris E. Dodd and the Connections,” 393–403. For outreach to youth as an innovation typical of the FAO, Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics,’ ” 91–92. 41. Dodd, “World Food Problems.” 42.  Report of the Sixth Session (Rome: FAO, 1951). The report’s guiding significance is discussed in Sofia Monsalve Suárez, The FAO and Its Work on Land Policy and Agrarian Reform, Land Policy Series (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute and 11.11.11, September 2008), 6. 43.  Report of the Sixth Session; Ralph W. Phillips, FAO: Its Origins, Formation, and Evolution, 1945–1981 (Rome: FAO, 1981). 44. “Declaration of Punta del Este, August 17, 1961,” in Barry Sklar and Virginia M. Hagen, Inter-American Relations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972). Authors such as Ethan Kapstein have placed the origin of early U.S. support for land redistribution in an ideology of private property with roots in the nineteenth century, visible in U.S. backing of land reform in Japan and the Philippines and in the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Punta del Este. See Kapstein, Seeds of Stability, 164–66. I believe that this ideology is partially responsible, but that the declaration and other U.S. actions of the time need to be viewed in the context of an international discourse about the failures of empire and the challenges of post-colonial nations embodied by activities at the FAO, with which American policy seems to have aligned during the 1940s and ’50s and broken in the late 1960s and ’70s. 45. For other agencies, see John F. Collins, “Culture, Content, and the Enclosure of Human Being,” Radical History Review 2011:109 (2011): 121–35. For the founding of the United Nations and Dodd’s clearinghouse scheme and its defeat, Staples, “Norris E. Dodd and the Connections,” 393–403. 46. Norris Dodd, “Three Lectures on the Implications of the FAO” (1952), 29, in “Personal Papers: Speeches 1950–2,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:4, Hoover Institution Archives.

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47. Dodd, “Three Lectures,” 29. 48. Folder “Branch Activities” (1952), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 1, FAO Archive, Rome. 49. Letter, F. L. McDougall to Sir Herbert Broadley (November 18, 1954), in folder “UN” (May 1952–55), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 10, Miscellaneous Files, FAO Archive. 50. For a detailed overview of the divisions, branches, their reorganization and leadership, see Phillips, FAO, chapter 11. For “Rural Welfare” as an approach and a department within the FAO, see Amalia Ribi Forclas, “From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955,” International History Review 41:2 (2019): 351–71. 51. For Horace Belshaw, Frank Holmes, “Horace Belshaw,” in Claudia Orange, ed., Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (Wellington: Bridget Williams, 1998); and Ribi Forclaz, “From Reconstruction to Development.” For the context of Lossing’s early work in China, see Randall E. Stross, The Stubborn Earth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 106–13. For Lossing’s theories of infrastructure, see John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937). Lossing’s book described the power of land mapping and title registration to enable the flow of credit and the organization of cooperatives and to somewhat remedy the poverty of farmers It is possible to overemphasize the inclination of these individuals. Buck’s position evolved over time; in 1937 his book recommended “a land program of keeping or restoring the land in the hands of those who work it, of consolidation of holdings and an accurate survey and registration of all land” (21). The data that Lossing collected in China has recently been revisited by a data archaeology project that has resulted in longwave comparisons between Lossing’s China and the present: Hao Hu, Funing Zhong, and Calum G. Turvey, eds., Chinese Agriculture in the 1930s: Investigations into John Lossing Buck’s Rediscovered ‘Land Utilization in China’ Microdata (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Sadly, this volume—extremely promising for our knowledge of long-term trends in China—was issued too recently for my research to benefit from it. More research into Lossing’s biography is ultimately needed for an appreciation of his contribution to land redistribution; the glimpse we see in 1937 of Lossing contrasts with the portrait that emerges twelve years later, when Buck disdained land redistribution, fair rent, and worker cooperatives in favor of pesticides and greater knowledge of pruning fruit trees. John Lossing Buck, “Fact and Theory About China’s Land,” Foreign Affairs, October 1949, 7. The influence of Buck’s experience at the FAO on his shifting ideas remains a subject that I have not had room to tackle here. 52. Ulf Hannerz, “Erich H. Jacoby, 1903–1979,” Ethnos 46:3–4 (1981): 146–51; Viola Stoehrel, “The Political Relevance of Erich H. Jacoby’s Writings on Transnational Corporations: A Latin American Perspective,” Ethnos 46:3–4 (1981): 152–59. Jacoby’s stint

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in the Philippines from 1940 to 1944 produced a manuscript later published as Agrarian Unrest in Southeast Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949). Among Jacoby’s prescient critiques was an early alarm about the adverse effects of the Green Revolution on tenant farmers: Erich H. Jacoby, “Effects of the ‘Green Revolution’ in South and South-East Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 6:1 (1972): 63–69. See also Erich H. Jacoby, “Agri-Business and the United Nations System,” Development and Change 9:2 (1978): 331–39. Rainer Schickele had worked on problems of small farms since his earliest days: Rainer Schickele, “Tenure Problems and Research Needs in the Middle West,” Journal of Farm Economics 19:1 (1937): 112–27. 53. Specifically, Dodd was addressing the overlapping matters of land, food, and agriculture. Norris E. Dodd, “The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” Agricultural History 23:2 (1949): 81. 54. Dodd, “The Food and Agriculture Organization,” 81. 55. For the idea of development, Rist, The History of Development, 8–68; Engerman, “The Romance of Economic Development,” 23–54. 56. Janken Myrdal, The Dovring Saga: A Story of Academic Immigration (London: Coronet, 2010); Michael Havinden, “Obituary: Sir John Higgs,” Agricultural History Review 34:2 (1986): 204–5. 57. Dovring, Land and Labor in Europe, 3. 58. “Almost all tenancy arrangements have some adverse effect on the incentives of the operator and cause him to employ fewer resources than he would if he did not have to give a substantial part of his output for the mere right to cultivate,” explained a group of experts assembled at MIT in 1964. David Hapgood and Max F. Millikan, “Policies for Promoting Agricultural Development: Report of a Conference on Productivity and Innovation in Agriculture in the Underdeveloped Countries,” in David Hapgood and Max F. Millikan, eds., Conference on Productivity and Innovation in Agriculture in the Underdeveloped Countries (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1965), 87. For the Irish case specifically applied to contemporary practice, see V. T. H. Delany, “Irish and Scottish Land Resettlement Legislation,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 8 (1959): 299–319; Roy Douglas, Land, People, & Politics: A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878–1952 (London: Allison and Busby, 1976). 59. Elias Tuma, Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). For similar studies that involve theories of agrarian changed based on histories of peasant revolt, see Dovring, Land and Labor in Europe; Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India; Vernon Rosco Carstensen, The Public Lands (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963); François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal; Peter Dorner, Land Tenure Reform and Agricultural Development in Latin America (Madison: Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin, 1966); William Thiesen-

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husen, Chile’s Experiments in Agrarian Reform (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966); Robert G. Dunbar, “The Role of Agricultural History in Economic Development,” Agricultural History 41:4 (1967): 329–44; Joan Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967); John Pomfret, The Struggle for Land in Ireland (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969); Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970). Most of these works made less use of contemporary categories like “capitalism” or “communism” than of diachronic categories like the spread of political participation and democracy. 60. Peter Dorner and Don Kanel, The Economic Case for Land Reform (Washington, D.C.: Agency for International Development, 1970), 1–2. According to Dorner and Kanel, this consensus was comprised of several overlapping tenets. First was a theory of the state as the developer of infrastructure to support smallholders. A second tenet emphasized the historical analysis of the heroic smallholder and his role in defeating feudalism. A final component was an economic consensus about the profitability of smallholder agriculture. 61. W. W. Rostow, “The Stages of Economic Growth,” Economic History Review 12:1 (1959): 1–16; The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966)—see 8–14 for the role of peasant disputes over land. For Rostow’s position on agrarian redistribution as a bar to communism, see W. W. Rostow, “Marx Was a City Boy,” Harper’s, February 1955; Lorenzini, Global Development, 61. In his article, Rostow argues that the real concerns of Eastern Europe were expressed in parties that labored for land reform in the fifty years before the First World War. For the influence of the English industrial revolution on American ideas about development, see David Cannadine, “The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880–1980,” Past & Present, no. 103 (May 1, 1984): 131–72. 62. For an overview of European influences on American theorists of modernization, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), chapter 2. For British histories of land written in dialogue with national debates over privilege, see William Ernest Montgomery, The History of Land Tenure in Ireland: Being the Yorke Prize Essay of the University of Cambridge for the Year 1888 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889); Six Essays on Commons Preservation: Written in Competition for Prizes Offered by Henry W. Peek (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1867); Thomas Edward Scrutton, Commons and Common Fields, or; The History and Policy of the Laws Relating to Commons and Enclosures in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1887); Scrutton, Land in Fetters; E. C. K. Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure (London: Macmillan, 1912); Tawney, The Agrarian Problem; Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). Tawney in particular is visible in the footnotes of Moore. For an overview of the work of the longue durée and

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the French Annales school, in particular with regard to land redistribution, see Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chapter 2. For “modernization,” Richard F. Wetzell et al., Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880–1980 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 52–55. For the role of experts in codifying modernization models, Uma Kothari, “Authority and Expertise: The Professionalisation of International Development and the Ordering of Dissent,” Antipode 37:3 (June 2005): 425–46. 63. On the importance of the “model” to development and the industrial revolution, see Cullather, The Hungry World, 79. For “modernization,” see Gilman, Mandarins of the Future; Lorenzini, Global Development, 51–53, 60–66, 88, 125, 129. For trade and loans, see Engerman, The Price of Aid. For Rostow and binding rules, Lorenzini, Global Development, 73–74. 64. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012 [1995]), 110. One characteristic of Rostow’s model as well as those that followed was the reduction of the “underdeveloped” world into a zone in need of investment from the “developed” world, thus creating the space for what Gabriel Rist called an “anti-colonial imperium.” Rist, History of Development, 75. 65. Many American policies for the developing world, by way of contrast, favored strategies that directly promised to enrich the United States and its corporations. See David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1, 62. 66. For an early indictment of modernization as an idea that insisted on a “total social process,” see Henry Bernstein, “Modernization Theory and the Sociological Study of Development,” Journal of Development Studies 7:2 (1971): 141–60. For models based on the English industrial revolution, see Cannadine, “Present and the Past.” For a trenchant critique of the use of long-term narratives and how “temporality justifies inequality” in particular versions of economic development theory, see Leonard Binder, “The Natural History of Development Theory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28:1 (1986): 3–33. My theory of land redistribution has its place in a known category of development thought of the twentieth century that stressed the importance of quality of life—resting alongside the work of development economists like Arthur Lewis, who linked landownership with a “leisure” economy wherein citizens enjoyed both opportunities for employment and ample time. Lewis’s concerns with labor and land redistributionists’ concern with land security likewise echo through the economic writings of later thinkers from the Global South such as Orlando Fals Borda, Arturo Escobar, and Ha-Joon Chang. For Lewis on land and leisure, see W. Arthur Lewis, Theory of Economic Growth (London: Routledge, 2013), 38–39, 91. See also Orlando Fals Borda, Knowledge and People’s Power: Lessons with Peasants in Nicaragua, Mexico and Columbia (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1985); Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans (London:

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Random House, 2007); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Un­ making of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 67. For “silver hoarding,” John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China: A Study of 16,786 Farms in 168 Localities, and 38,256 Farm Families in Twenty-Two Provinces in China, 1929–1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), 14; for the rest of Lossing’s recommendations, 14–22, esp. 21–22. For a detailed account of The Good Earth as a reflection of Pearl’s experiences with agricultural economics as she traveled with Lossing Buck through China, see Hilary Spurling, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 68. Buck, Land Utilization in China, 7. Lossing’s reference to graveyards occupying valuable farmland also appears in passing as a characterization of the House of Hwang in The Good Earth (6, 10). Nor were the links between the books invisible; Land Utilization cites The Good Earth as an accurate depiction of credit flows in Chinese kinship networks (18). 69. See literary scholar Chi Pang-Yuan’s account of traveling with Lewis, when he was teaching at Providence College, to visit Pearl Buck in Connecticut. See Chi PangYuan, A Great Flowing River (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 70. A long interview with Lewis was publicly posted on a website belonging to his son, Clayton Lewis, under the title “A. B. Lewis Reminiscences.” The site is no longer operational; I retain a transcription of the interview in my research archive. 71. For stories of child murder as based in Pearl’s candid conversations with Chinese women, see Hollinger, Protestants Abroad, 36. Hollinger also notes the absence of the word peasant through the entire novel; references to “farmers” made it easier to connect the experiences of the rural Chinese and rural workers in the West, he writes (35). 72. For “cruelty” and a few details about abuse, “Pearl Sues So She Can Rewed,” Oklahoma News, June 11, 1935, 10; I speculate that the details of Lossing’s abuse of Pearl escaped other biographers who worked before the era of mass keyword search of newspapers—Pearl commented on Lossing’s infidelity in her letters, but seems to have mentioned abuse only during the trial; Lossing gave an official statement denying it. For Pearl’s famous break with Presbyterianism and patriarchy, see Hollinger, Protestants Abroad, 34–38. Using Pearl’s letters, Peter Conn gives a vivid account of Lossing’s infidelity and general awfulness as a spouse: Peter J. Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 102–3. 73. Louis Cantor, A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1969), 32. 74. Curtis Eirksmoen, “Professor at What Is Now NDSU Was Investigated and Falsely Accused of Being Disloyal to U.S.,” Forum (Fargo, N.D.), August 17, 2019. I am grateful to Jess Gilbert for this citation. 75. Rainer Schickele, Agrarian Revolution and Economic Progress: A Primer for Development (New York: Praeger, 1968), 4–8.

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76. The textbook represents one strand of what scholars have called “alternative visions” of development that focused on experts’ abilities to unlock the unique human and cultural factors that might enable growth in each place. The phrase belongs to Nicole Sackley, ”Cosmopolitanism and the Uses of Tradition: Robert Redfield and Alternative Visions of Modernization During the Cold War,” Modern Intellectual History 9 (2012): 565–95, although I learned about it from Ribi Forclaz, “From Reconstruction to Development,” 353, who also credits Glenda Sluga,”The Human Story of Development: Alva Myrdal at the UN, 1949–1955” in M. Frey, S. Kunkel, and C. R. Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (London: Springer, 2014), 46–74. 77. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 5. 78. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 4. 79. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 31. 80. Rainer Schickele, “René Schickele,” Books Abroad 15:3 (1941): 273. 81. René Schickele, Himmlische Landschaft (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1932). 82. For the contrast with Nazi ideas about Heimat, see Áine McGillicuddy, René Schickele and Alsace (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 190. Schickele, “René Schickele.” 83. Schickele, “René Schickele,” 275. 84. Remembering his father René, Rainer wrote, “The landscape is the hero of many of his books,” reflecting that “moods and thoughts find expression through persons as well as through plants, clouds and hills.” Schickele, “René Schickele,” 243. 85. While consulting in Indonesia, Rainer Schickele strolled through the colonial-­ era Botanic Gardens, recording in his notes lily ponds, birds’ nests, tree ferns, mahogany, and teakwood, pausing to dwell on the “dense bamboo-grove with a small old cemetery in a weird light” that he saw along the way. Later the same day, he inspected the rice terraces at an experimental farm, where he was stricken by the wonder of earthly fertility. Rainer Schickele, “Notes from the Far East” (September 20–October 19, 1958), 6, in folder “Land and Water Development Director Tours/Trips—Dr. Schickele” (June 1951), LA—6/2, vol. 1. FAO Archive. Aberrant spelling and punctuation have been corrected. 86. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 7. 87. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 393. 88. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 395. Indeed, China’s modern economic reform dates from 1978. 89. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 395. 90. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 386, 390. 91. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 389. 92. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 389. 93. For UNESCO, Collins, “Culture, Content, and the Enclosure,” 121–35; Jo-Anne Pemberton, “The Changing Shape of Intellectual Cooperation,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 58:1 (2012): 34–50; Anna-Katharina Wöbse, “ ‘The World After All

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Was One,’ ” Contemporary European History 20:3 (2011): 331–48. Work touching on the FAO includes Perrin Selcer, “Fabricating Unity,” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 40:2 (2015): 174–201; Staples, “Norris E. Dodd and the Connections,” 393–403; Amy Sayward, The United Nations in International History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Sayward, The Birth of Development (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006); Perrin Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Amy Sayward (formerly Staples) mainly concentrates on the careers of a few leaders at the FAO such as Orr and Dodd; Selcer cites some of Schickele’s correspondence as evidence in his chapter 4 but does not otherwise treat Schickele in his book. 94. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 392–93. For “other social scientists of their generation,” Selcer, Postwar Origins, 27–61. 95. Wolfgang Sachs, “Preface to the New Edition,” The Development Dictionary (London: Zed, 2010 [1992]), ix. 96. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 391. 97. Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

3. Can Land Redistribution Scale with Population? 1. For Britain’s declining presence in international relations, see Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 18–19. For British reactions to decolonization, Ian Hall, “The Revolt Against the West: Decolonisation and Its Repercussions in British International Thought, 1945–75,” International History Review 33:1 (2011): 43–64. 2. Various answers to the questions that arose were on the table: democracy, industrialization, and education—the impulses that constituted what historian Tony Low called “the egalitarian moment” of world history, in that they promised to enrich not only poor nations but also poor people. For a broader history of the moment, see D. A. Low, The Egalitarian Moment: Asia and Africa, 1950–1980, the Wiles Lectures given at the Queen’s University of Belfast, 1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For an account centered on the black activists who designed new directions for former colonies, see Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 3. For studies in postcolonial nations regarding industrialization, see Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (London: Anthem, 2002); Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire, 153–61. 4. The ideas that I characterize as pertaining to “many U.S. economists” are typically associated with the impact of Joseph Schumpeter on development economics. See Gerald Nash, The Federal Landscape (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), xii–xiv. For Rostow’s understanding of economic growth as essential to development, which mandated leveraging large-scale technology, Rist, History of Development, 93–103. In

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Alfred Marshall’s theory of external economies of scale, land reform was characterized as a natural extension of other infrastructure programs such as dams, irrigation systems, roads, and rail, all grouped together under the category of “social overhead.” See Raup, “The Contribution of Land Reforms,” 13. The United Nations’ resolution for land reform, released at the 1955 land reform conference, implied public initiative, and that public initiative necessitated state-level loans for irrigation and road building. Iceland, India, Pakistan, and Peru received World Bank loans for specific land reform programs that paired resettlement with the construction of massive dams. See “Report of the Fifth United Nations Inter-agency Meeting on Agrarian Reform,” in folder “Land Reform 4th and 5th Inter-agency Meeting” (1957), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 5, FAO Archive. Sunil Amrith has documented the Indian story of dam building in detail. His work reveals Indian approaches more varied than the conversation about smallholder agriculture that I have captured here: Amrith, Unruly Waters, 175–228. 5. David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 31. 6. Rajendra Prasad, Autobiography (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010), 96. 7. For the earliest efforts in Champaran in Bihar, Prasad, Autobiography, 88; for later rent strikes, 94; for the lasting impact of Gandhi on Prasad, 437; for the success of later efforts where schools were being built, 93–96. 8. For the Famine Inquiry Commission’s proposal about maps, Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour, 184. At least three mapping initiatives of 1900–1945 are relevant in Britain: finance mapping, the Land Utilisation Survey, and the National Farm Survey. See Brian Short and Mick Reed, “An Edwardian Land Survey,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 8: (1986): 95–103; L. Dudley Stamp, “Britain Looks to the Land,” Foreign Affairs (January 1944): 267–74; L. Dudley Stamp, The Land Utilisation Survey of Britain (London: Land Utilisation Survey of Britain, 1943); Simon Rycroft and Denis Cosgrove, “Mapping the Modern Nation,” History 40:1 (1995): 91–105; Brian Short, The National Farm Survey, 1941–1943: State Surveillance and the Countryside in England and Wales in the Second World War (Oxford: CABI, 2000). 9. Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 153; for South Africa’s connection to India’s stance at the United Nations, 170. 10. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 167. 11. Quoted in Daniel Thorner and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1962), 75. 12. The latter legislation abolished absentee landlords in theory—but left a loophole in the form of a “land ceiling,” with the result that landholders registered their extended family as intermediary landlords collecting rent from the poor. The land reform of these states, in other words, never turned over land to the tiller. Thorner and

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Thorner, Land and Labour in India, 20, 77, 186; for the first Five-Year Plan, 75. For a detailed account of the consensus behind land redistribution and its later collapse, see Marcus Franda, West Bengal and the Federalizing Process in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 151–78. 13. For Patel’s position, see M. B. Desai, review of The Indian Land Problem and Legislation, by Govindlal D. Patel, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 298 (1955): 221; for Patel’s Western readership, see Frank J. Moore, “Land Reform and Social Justice in India,” Far Eastern Survey 24:8 (1955): 124–28; Paul Stimmel, review of The Indian Land Problem and Legislation (Bodenproblem und Bodengesetzgebung in Indien), by Govindlal D. Patel, Zeitschrift Für Ausländisches Und Internationales Privatrecht 20:3 (1955): 575–77; E. John Russell, review of Post-war Agricultural Problems and Policies in India; The Indian Land Problem and Legislation; Land Reforms in India, by S. Thirumalai, Govindlal D. Patel, and H. D. Malaviya, International Affairs 31:1 (1955): 118–19. For Moore’s use of Patel, see Moore, Dictatorship or Democracy, notes 176, 177, and 179. Patel’s publications about land tenure include Govindlal Dalsukhbhai Patel, The Indian Land Problem and Legislation (Bombay: N. M. Tripathi, 1954); Report on the Sabarkantha Field Study Project (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1964); The Land Revenue Settlements and the British Rule in India (Ahmedabad: Gujarat University, 1969); The Land Systems of Union Territories of India (Anand, Gujarat: Charotar Book Stall, 1970). 14. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 503; for Patel advocating land reform, 507. 15. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 506. 16. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 516. 17. For quotation, Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India, 19. I was unable to sufficiently excavate the independent thought of Alice Thorner; the story of her distinct contribution awaits another historian. One moving portrait of her is given by Utsa Patnaik, “Alice Thorner (1918–2005),” Monthly Review, September 21, 2005. For Malaviya, H. D. Malaviya, Land Reforms in India (New Delhi: All India Congress Committee, 1954), 49. Subsequent studies have borne out these claims. Banerjee and Iyer have proved the lasting influence of British landholding policies, demonstrating that areas left under landlord control had markedly lower rates of education, healthcare, and infrastructure than did parts of India where earlier British land reforms charged cultivators with land. See Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer, “Colonial Land Tenure, Electoral Competition, and Public Goods in India,” in Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, eds., Natural Experiments of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 185– 220; Banerjee and Iyer, “History, Institutions, and Economic Performance,” 1190–1213. 18. Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India, 71. 19. Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India, 71. 20. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 504–7; Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India, 72.

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21. Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India, 72. 22. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 504–7. 23. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 504–7. 24. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 506. 25. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 507. 26. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 507. 27. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 507. 28. For the origins of Malthusian debates in the cycles of famine and context of colonial settlement in eighteenth-century British Empire, see Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). For the afterlife of population as a concept in the League of Nations and in global development studies, see Alison Bashford, Global Population (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Adam Tooze tells the story of chilling German predictions based on studies of population, which produced a theory that the ability of smallholder agriculture to support population was strictly limited. See Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (London: Penguin, 2008), 177, 262, 472. For policies across Europe that facilitated land consolidation measures, see Erwin H. Karel and Yves Segers, “Structural Policy and the State: Changing Agricultural Society in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1945–1960,” in Carin Martiin, Juan Pan-Montojo, and Paul Brassley, eds., Agriculture in Capitalist Europe, 1945–1960: From Food Shortages to Food Surpluses (London: Routledge, 2016), 219–25. 29. Nikolaus Newiger, ed., Fundamental Problems of Agrarian Structure and Reform in Developing Countries (Bonn-Lengsdorf: German Foundation for Developing Countries, 1962), 171, 77, ICED, Hoover Institution Archives. 30. Newiger, Fundamental Problems of Agrarian Structure and Reform, 67. 31. Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949); William Vogt, Road to Survival (New York: W. Sloane, 1948); Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968). For these books as best sellers in America, see Sayward, “Harry S. Truman,” 51. 32. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Daedalus 101:1 (1972): 1–37. 33. For Geertz and CIA funding at MIT, David H. Price, “Subtle Means and Enticing Carrots: The Impact of Funding on American Cold War Anthropology,” Critique of Anthropology 23:4 (December 2003): 388–90; for “death squads” and “US-backed coup against Sukarno,” direct quotes that I have chosen not to place in quotation marks in the text because the phrases are in wide use, 390–91. For the politics of Sukarno, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 36:3 (1995): 409–40. 34. Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution (Berkeley: University of California Press,

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1963). The book would be condemned in many sections of the social science community; for later counterreactions, see Price, “Subtle Means,” 390; for the “tragedy of the commons,” Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162:3859 (1968): 1243–48. My interpretation borrows from Nils Gilman, “Involution and Development: The Case of Clifford Geertz,” in Jeffrey H. Cohen and Norbert Dannhaeuser, Economic Development: An Anthropological Approach (Lanham, Md.: Rowman Altamira, 2002), 6–7. 35. Sunil S. Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History (New York: Basic, 2018), 190. 36. Historians now believe that the famine could have been averted by Western aid, which was blocked by Winston Churchill and others for ideological reasons. Muhusree Mukerji, Churchill’s Secret War (New York: Basic, 2010). For an economist’s assessment of that famine and why it happened, see Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 37. R. A. Gopalaswami, “Part 1-A—Report,” in Census of India, 1951 (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1953), 206. 38. Samar Ranjan Sen, “The Problem of Population and Food Supply in India,” in Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Agricultural Economists, 15–22 August 1952 (London: Oxford University Press 1953), 66. 39. Sen, “Problem of Population,” 69. 40. Sen argued against Kingsley Davis’s generalizations about populations on several grounds. First, soil quality was variable, which meant that some land could support more humans than other land. Second, the connection between population and productivity was worsened without land redistribution because the relationship between tenants and technology differed from that between owners and technology. Whereas tenants rarely had the revenue or incentive to invest in new technology, owners did. India’s experience as a colony of tenant laborers need not determine the future of farming for a nation of owner-occupiers who could invest in the appropriate implements and techniques for making land profitable. For soil, Sen, “Problem of Population,” 68; for technology, 69. Sen’s graph, “Relation Between Density of Farm Population & Production per Man-Year” charted the first relationship—showing that the quality of land varied from place to place. Sen’s second idea suggested that the line might move, given enough investments in technology. 41. Sen, “Problem of Population,” 74–77. 42. Arthur Cotton, Public Works in India (London: Richardson Brothers, 1854): “Thus, India will become more and more impoverished while the railroads are constructing” (282). For consensus about the impoverishing effects of technology under British Empire and the need for small technology, see Ross Bassett, The Technological Indian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), esp. 79–105; David Arnold, Everyday Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). I am indebted to Zachary

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Leonard, PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, for this reference. The transition from a world where states threatened peasant livelihoods to a twentieth-century world where capital threatens peasants is laid out in Philip McMichael, “Peasants Make Their Own History,” Journal of Agrarian Change 8:2–3 (2008): 205–28. For the role of infrastructure projects from sewers to railways as an element of extractive empire in India, see S´ekhara Bandyopa¯dhya¯y˙a, From Plassey to Partition (Himayatnagar: Orient Blackswan, 2004), 127–29. Bandyopa¯dhya¯y˙a surveys some of the debates about railways and technology transfer. For railways in India, the classic topos of the critique of infrastructure, Manu Goswami, Producing India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chapter 3; and Daniel Thorner, “Capital Movement and Transportation,” Journal of Economic History 11:4 (1951): 389–402. For a broad critique of the role of technology in (British) empire, profiling the Suez Canal but also gunboats, Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). For a profound meditation on the ironies of infrastructure in colonized Ireland and the post-colonial importance of public utilities, see Michael Rubenstein, Public Works (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 18–25. For India under empire, including the railways, see Goswami, Producing. Similarly, in Mexico, expensive irrigation systems enriched large landholders while impoverishing peasants. For class conflict over the landscape in the era of Porfirio Díaz, see Clifton B. Kroeber, Man, Land, and Water (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 43. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London: John W. Parker, 1848 [1847]), 1:399. For Horace Plunkett’s model of technology-driven economic improvement in Ireland, which stressed the state support of cooperatives to aid small farmers, see Co-operation and the New Agricultural Policy (London: P. S. King and Son, 1935); West, Horace Plunkett: Co-operation and Politics. Modern scholarship stresses Plunkett’s limited accomplishments within Ireland: Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London: Profile, 2010), 67–69, although his international influence in the 1950s seems to have been much greater. Extension services in the American New Deal might offer another precedent for Sen’s research; see Gilbert, Planning Democracy; S. Thirumalai, Post-war Agricultural Problems and Policies in India (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1954). 44. For imperial networks of agricultural science, Joseph Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Monika van Beusekom, Negotiating Development: African Farmers and Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Arnold, “Agriculture and ‘Improvement’ in Early Colonial India: A Pre-history of Development,” Journal of Agrarian Change 5 (2005): 505–25. Historians of U.S. experience and influence have tended to concentrate on networks of agrarian expertise around plant breeding, mechanization, and pesticides and their deployment in conversations with Mexico and India. Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a

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Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Jack Ralph Kloppenburg, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Mona Domosh, “International Harvester, the US South, and the Makings of International Development in the Early 20th Century,” Political Geography 49 (2015): 17–29; Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 45. D. R. Gadgil, “Presidential Address,” in Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Indian Society of Agricultural Economics Held at Allahabad on December 26–28, 1954 (Bombay: Indian Society of Agricultural Economists, 1955). See Moore, “Land Reform and Social Justice,” 124. 46. For small-scale technology as a feature of development from India and Turkey, Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 19. For small technologies, Arnold, Everyday Technology, 3, 14–45, 60–63, 66, 74, 89, 110, 155, 165; for India-made bicycles, 101–4; for sewing machines, 103. 47. For milling in general, Arnold, Everyday Technology, 61–63; for women’s labor, 135–37, 140–41; for a timeline of adoption and American and British machines, 63–65, 114–16; for profits to the peasant, 115; for new factory owners, 65. Arnold also notes the ambivalent reaction of Gandhi and others to the rice mills: Gandhi warned of beri-beri and other nutritional deficiencies that might result from eating white rice, arguing also that release from labor weakened women and meant they had fewer opportunities for employment. Later, wartime legislation would limit the use of rice mills so as to ensure employment for women. Arnold, Everyday Technology, 61–63, 65. 48. Ross Knox Bassett, The Technological Indian (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 95–97; Arnold, Everyday Technology, 8–9, 11, 22, 39, 96–97 139–40, 173– 74; for the spinning wheel, 18–19. 49. Joan Robinson, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 [1956]), book 6, 322–23. For a commentary on these ideas in their historical context of Western economic traditions, see Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, Luigi Pasinetti, and Alesandro Roncaglia, The Economics of Joan Robinson (London: Routledge, 2005), 321–22. 50. Folke Dovring, “The Share of Agriculture in a Growing Population,” FAO Monthly Bulletin of Agricultural Economics and Statistics 8:8–9 (August–September 1959). The reference to 1963 is Philip Raup, explaining Dovring’s survey years later: he argued that population growth didn’t prove the need for urbanization; rather, it proved that moving families off the land was an “unrealistic goal” for most developing nations. Philip M. Raup, “The Contribution of Land Reforms to Agricultural Development,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 12:1 (1963): 5. Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1965). For a contemporary review essay that covers scholar-

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ship on small farm productivity, see Dorner and Kanel, The Economic Case for Land Reform. 51. Hapgood and Millikan, “Policies for Promoting Agricultural Development,” 84; for new data on Mexico, etc., 5–6. 52. For other instances of contemporary research on the economic viability of small farmers, see N. Georgescu-Rogen, “Economic Theory and Agrarian Economics,” Oxford Economic Papers, n.s., 12:1 (February 1960): 15–22, 29–32. For further elaboration of the promise of leisure resulting from land reform, see Raup, “The Contribution of Land Reforms to Agricultural Development,” 1–21. John Mellor’s work in South Asia showed that when small farmers embraced new technology appropriate to their work, they could rapidly draw themselves and their communities out of poverty. Mellor forcefully argued for the productivity of small farms on the basis of decades of experimentation in India, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. John Mellor, The Economics of Agricultural Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966). For Mellor’s place in a historical narrative, and for a history of debates over smallholder productivity, see C. B. Barrett, M. R. Carter, and C. P. Timmer, “A Century-Long Perspective on Agricultural Development,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 92:2 (2010): 447–68; John Mellor and B. F. Johnston, “The Role of Agriculture in Economic Development,” American Economic Review 51 (1961): 566–93; B. F. Johnston, and P. Kilby, Agriculture and Structural Transformation: (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). B. F. Johnston and W. C. Clark, Redesigning Rural Development: A Strategic Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Also related is a 2007 World Bank Report that presents a large volume of evidence that “a farm structure based on owner-operated units is more efficient than one based on wage labor.” Nagarajan, Jin, and Deininger, Land Reforms, 2. 53. With the “hungry world,” I refer to President Lyndon Johnson’s characterization of the rest of the world and the title of Cullather’s book covering U.S. responses to a perceived demographic crisis abroad. Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks in Independence, Mo.” (January 20, 1966), republished in Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, “The American Presidency Project,” www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/239069. The phrase was used earlier as the title of an article that laid out the prospects for a UN-led de­ velopment paradigm emphasizing the exploitation of “wastelands” around the world: Howard R. Tolley, “Farmers in a Hungry World,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 95:1 (1951): 54–61. 54. For the hoe story, see Norris Dodd, “Hoes and ‘Show-How’ Come First,” New York Times Magazine, October 2, 1949, sec. 6, in “Personal Papers: FAO” (1948–1954), Norris E. Dodd Papers, 2:1, Hoover Institution Archives, 1. The location of the school is unidentified, but the image accompanying the article, taken by John Gutmann, implies that the class is in China. For Dodd’s biography, “Profile,” in “Personal Papers: Biography,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:1, Hoover Institution Archives. Staples, The Birth of De-

notes to pages

1 1 8 – 1 2 0    477

velopment, 96–104, gives a portrait of Dodd as farmer, master of technical assistance, and innovator in information infrastructure. 55. For Dodd’s references to Asia, see “FAO Work and Aims in Asia,” draft article for United Asia Magazine, published in India, in “Personal Papers: FAO Speeches, Undated,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:2, Hoover Institution Archives; “Three Lectures on the Implications of the FAO” (1952), FAO Archive/52/6/3562; memo from Dodd to Divisional Directors, “Notes on Pakistan—from Mr. Dodd” (March 22, 1949), in “Personal Papers: World Tour Report” (1949–1952), Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:7, Hoover Institution Archives. For Dodd’s quotations of Nehru, see Norris Dodd, “The Earth for Man,” speech to the Federal Council of Churches (February 5, 1951), 6–7, in “Personal Papers: FAO,” 1948–1954, Norris E. Dodd Papers 2:1, Hoover Institution Archives. 56. For conversion, Dodd, “FAO Work and Aims in Asia,” 3. For the Indian New Deal of seeds and manure, see S. R. Sen, “The Problem of Population and Food Supply in India,” in Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Agricultural Economists, 15–22 August 1952 (London: Oxford University Press 1953), 70. For the Bombay Milk Cooperative, see C. H. Brissenden, “The Bombay Milk Scheme,” International Journal of Dairy Technology 5:2 (1952): 108–14. 57. Memo from Dodd to Divisional Directors, 9. 58. Memo from Dodd to Divisional Directors, 9. 59. Norris E. Dodd, “The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” Agricultural History 23:2 (1949): 86. 60. Dodd, “The Food and Agriculture Organization,” 86. 61. Norris E. Dodd, “The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” Agricultural History 23:2 (April 1949): 86. 62. Staples, The Birth of Development, 97; for Dodd’s directorship, 96–102. 63. Norris Dodd, “The Faith, Philosophy, and Work of the FAO” (December 3–8, 1951), 8, in “Personal Papers: FAO Speeches, Undated,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:2, Hoover Institution Archives. 64. Dodd, “Faith, Philosophy, and Work of the FAO,” 8. 65. For the image of village community, Immerwahr, Thinking Small; and Cullather, Hungry World, 78–85; for the Raj, Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 2010), 50–52, 81–83. 66. Dodd, “Hoes and ‘Show-How,’ ” 1. For Dodd’s biography, “Personal Papers: Biography,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:1, Hoover Institution Archives. Dodd had also notably founded a chain of drug stores prior to becoming a civil servant. See also “Norris E. Dodd Dies: Ex-FAO Director,” New York Times, June 24, 1968. 67. Dodd, “FAO Work and Aims in Asia,” 3. 68. Dodd, “FAO Work and Aims in Asia,” 3. 69. Dodd, “FAO Work and Aims in Asia,” 3.

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70. Oscar Lewis, “Peasant Culture in India and Mexico: A Study in Contrast,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 16:4, ser. 2 (1954): 223. In Lewis’s hands, “plow culture” and “hoe culture” were fashioned into two archetypal categories that divided the entire world into those with modern technology and those without, the two distinguished by different land tenure systems and ways of life. I omit a discussion of this argument because it seems to be at odds with Dodd’s way of thinking about things and the ethos of small technology in general—the hoe being, for Lewis, the signature of a technologically immature society incapable of making a leap to modern development. This is material for a study in rival ideas about the larger cultural meaning of small-scale technology in the 1950s and ’60s. Oscar Lewis, “Plow Culture and Hoe Culture—A Study in Contrasts,” Rural Sociology 4:2 (1949): 116–27. For Dodd’s use of terms such as primitive, see, for instance, Dodd, “Hoes and ‘Show-How,’ ” 2, where he discusses “lifting agriculture out of the primitive stage that exists in many regions.” 71. Manning Nash, “Introducing Industry in Peasant Societies,” Science 130:3387 (1959): 1456–62. 72. For an instance of the view of technology as an infusion of rationality in a backward world, see Cullather, Hungry World, 86. As Dodd traveled through the United States and Europe, speaking about his travels in the developing world, he recited a story about villages facing malnourishment for want of basic technological education. Dodd’s talks after his trip to India were riddled with astonished remarks about Western technological progress in agriculture since the French Revolution. See, for example, Dodd, “Earth for Man,” 8. For Dodd invoking backwardness: Dodd, “Earth for Man”; Dodd, “Hoes and ‘Show-How.’ ” 73. Tolley, “Farmers in a Hungry World,” 61. 74. For quotation, “World Food Problems,” 8. For aquaculture, Dodd, “World Food Problems,” 8. For Derris-derived pesticide, Dodd, “Hoes and ‘Show-How,’ ” 2. The FAO could use its information not only to perfect existing knowledge of grain, but even to steer breeders in the direction of potential demands from the worldwide market of farmers. 75. Folder “Bolivia—Quesada Reports” (August 1955), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch, Land Tenure and Settlement 2, box 7, FAO Archive. 76. “Report on Land Tenure and Land Use Problems in the Trust Territories of Tanganyika and Ruanda-Urundi by Arthur Gaitskell” (1959), 43, in “Land Use Aspects” (1959), in Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/23, FAO Archive. 77. For bank loans, “Supervised Agricultural Credit” (1959), in Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 6/2, FAO Archive. For controlling access, “Agricultural Credit—General” (August 1962), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 6/1, vol. 2, FAO Archive. The World Bank

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was not invited in for early trips from the Rural Institutions Division until after the United Nations had already set up extension services and provisions. 78. Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India, 60–71 (for railways). For Schickele, see folder “Division’s Director Travels” (May 1961), in LA—6/2, FAO Archive. 79. Erich Jacoby, writing after his retirement from the FAO in 1971, explained: “Just as fertilizers without sufficient water result in serious crop failures, and irrigation without drainage leads to salination of the soil, the application of modern technology without a reorganization of the administrative and institutional framework leads to a bottleneck that prevents social and economic progress.” Erich H. Jacoby, “Man and Land,” 19 (conference presentation to the Caribbean Agro-Economic Society, 7th West Indies Agricultural Economics Conference, April 9–15, 1972, Grand Anse, Grenada). 80. Dodd, “Three Lectures,” 29. 81. Rainer Schickele, “Theories Concerning Land Tenure,” Journal of Farm Economics 34:5 (1952): 742. 82. Schickele, “Theories Concerning Land Tenure,” 742. 83. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 389. Schickele’s conceptualization of land reform’s psychological aspects drew on earlier writers like Frank Moore, who described the “psychological effect” of even small plots of land as an important “incentive” to productivity. See Moore, “Land Reform and Social Justice in India,” 125. Moore’s and Schickele’s positive valuation of land reform ennobling the peasant forms a counterweight to the more prevalent view, given by Wittfogel and others, of land reform as the psychological equivalent of brainwashing. 84. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 389. 85. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 389. 86. “Even if it can be proven that concentration of management and ownership in fact increases agricultural production efficiency, the family farm theory is not invalidated by such proof.” Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 389. 87. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 389. 88. For allusions to Schickele, see Erven J. Long, “Two Articles on Land Reform,” Spring Review of Land Reform, June 1970, 122, in the International Council for Educational Development Records (1969–1994), Hoover Institution Archives. For Wisconsin economists presenting evidence of the productivity of small farming, see Dorner and Kanel, The Economic Case for Land Reform. 89. Paul Lamartine Yates, So Bold an Aim (Rome: FAO, 1955), 68. 90. Kelsey Nowakowski, “Why We Need Small Farms,” National Geographic, Oc­ tober 12, 2018. Paul B. Thompson, The Agrarian Vision (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010). For climate, see Barraclough, Rural Development; Rosset, “Food Sovereignty”; Paul Hawken, Drawdown (New York: Penguin, 2017), 125; Altieri, “Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty,” 102–13; A. de Sherbinin et al., “Preparing for Resettlement Associated with Climate Change,” Science, October 28, 2011, 456–57.

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4. An Information Pipeline 1. Norris Dodd, “Hoes and ‘Show-How’ Come First,” New York Times Magazine, October 2, 1949, sec. 6, in “Personal Papers: FAO” (1948–1954), 1, Norris E. Dodd Papers 2:1 Hoover Institution Archives.” 2. For dams and highways, David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 53–54, 165–66; for American industry and agriculture, Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); for built-for-show demonstrations and “community development,” Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); for exploitation more generally, Michael E. Latham, The Right Kind of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Engerman, The Price of Aid. For Dodd arguing against the notion that hydroelectric dams, like those used to bring electricity to the Appalachian Mountains, were appropriate for developing nations, see Norris Dodd, “The Earth for Man,” speech to the Federal Council of Churches, February 5, 1951, 6–7, “Personal Papers: FAO” (1948–1954), Norris E. Dodd Papers 2:1, Hoover Institution Archives. Exceptions to this rule are the work of Perrin Selcer on the Soil Map of the World and that of Amy Sayward on the grain catalogues, both extremely influential on this project. See Perrin Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Amy L. S. Staples, The Birth of Development (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006). 3. My work on development beyond the sphere of the United States builds on important contributions by Susan Pedersen, Amy Sayward, Mark Mazower, and Perrin Selcer. See Staples, The Birth of Development; Selcer, Postwar Origins; Susan Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations,” American Historical Review 112:4 (2007): 1091–1117; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Stephen Macekura, Of Limits and Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Of these works, Sayward’s, Macekura’s, and Selcer’s have done the most to point to a conversation about information and technology. 4. For quotation, Norris Dodd, “Three Lectures on the Implications of the FAO” (1952), 29, in “Personal Papers: Speeches 1950–2,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:4, Hoover Institution Archives. “With this catalogue,” Dodd explained, “it will be possible for rice breeders, who wish to breed for certain definite characteristics, to send for information to FAO, which will then be in [the] position to name the types best calculated to meet their needs, and to inform them where to obtain the varieties.” Norris Dodd, “World Food Problems and the Inter-dependence of Rural and Urban Regions,” address at a

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meeting of the World Assembly of Youth, Rome (September 7, 1953), 5, “Personal Papers: Speeches 1953–4,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:5, Hoover Institution Archives. 5. Norris Dodd, “Speech Delivered by N. E. Dodd at the National Farmers Union Convention, Denver, Colorado” (March 16, 1954), 2, in “Personal Papers: Speeches 1950–2,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:4, Hoover Institution Archives. 6. Norris Dodd, “FAO Work and Aims in Asia,” draft article for United Asia Magazine, published in India, “Personal Papers: FAO Speeches, Undated,” 6, Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:2, Hoover Institution Archives; Dodd, “Three Lectures.” 7. Dodd, “FAO Work and Aims in Asia,” 6. 8. Dodd, “Three Lectures,” 26–30. My summary of Dodd’s vision for an information exchange overlaps in part with the project for an international food prices exchange program described in Amy L. S. Staples, “Norris E. Dodd and the Connections Between Domestic and International Agricultural Policy,” Agricultural History 74:2 (April 2000): 393–403. 9. Dodd compared agricultural officers without a plan to generals who don’t know against which foe to lead their troops. Dodd, “FAO Work and Aims in Asia,” 7. For the viability of small farms, Norris E. Dodd, “The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” Agricultural History 23:2 (April 1949): 81–86. For the training center, Dodd, “FAO Work and Aims in Asia,” 7. 10. Norris Dodd, “World Food Problems and the Inter-dependence of Rural and Urban Regions,” address at a meeting of the World Assembly of Youth, Rome (September 7, 1953), 5, “Personal Papers: Speeches 1953–4,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:5, Hoover Institution Archives. For Cold War conflicts in other branches of the United Nations, see Amy Sayward, The United Nations in International History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 21–54. 11. For contemporary theories of market exchanges as a level playing field and embodiment of rational opportunity in which information helped all players, see Fried­ rich August Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35:4 (September 1945): 519–30. For Hayek’s theories as being leveraged to support an American vision of individualism against collectivity, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 12. Dodd, “Earth for Man,” 9–10; for “mutual aid,” “Some Things That Need to be Said” (16 February 1953), 7, in “Personal Papers: Speeches 1953–4,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:5, Hoover Institution Archives. 13. For cooperatives, see John Curl, For All the People (Oakland, Calif.: PM, 2009); John Morley, British Agricultural Cooperatives (London: Hutchinson, 1975); Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible (Oakland, Calif.: PM, 2010), 23, 28–29; Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (New York: McClure, Philips, 1902), esp. 272–74. For cooperatives in India, see L. C. Jain and Karen Coelho, In the Wake of Freedom (New Delhi:

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Concept, 1996), which argues that Indian cooperatives would have effectively supported production among small farmers that rivaled industrial farming, if only cooperatives had achieved access to the powerful subsidies that industrial farmers had. The context of the Green Revolution and the influence of American foundations is, of course, crucial to understand as a background. See Cullather, The Hungry World. 14. Dodd, “World Food Problems,” 5. 15. For Dewey, see C. Kim Cummings, “John Dewey and the Rebuilding of Urban Community,” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 7 (2000): 97; for Gandhi, see Akhter Hameed Khan, Rural Development in Pakistan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 186. I am grateful to Jess Gilbert (in conversation) and John Clark (by email) for connecting these concepts for me. 16. For quotation and for demonstration farms, Dodd, “Hoes and ‘Show-How,’ ” 3. For buckets and wheel hoes, see Dodd, “Earth for Man.” 17. Demonstration of agricultural techniques has a long and complicated history. The conceit of the ordinary farmer and engineer helping each other was at least as old as the state-sponsored agricultural fairs of Napoleonic France, where new innovations were shown off to the masses. The state would make the marriage, and the two together would prosper. In the late nineteenth century, the British Empire began to experiment with research stations planted across India and Africa to investigate and promote new strains of livestock and the best method of planting. The imperial experiment was less concerned with small farms than with productivity. Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 18. Folder “Agricultural Education” (1959–71), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 2/2, FAO Archive. 19. Amalia Ribi Forclaz, “From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955,” International History Review 41:2 (2019): 361–62; for “folk knowledge,” 359. 20. Folder “Agricultural Institutes and Agricultural Advisers” (September 1946), Land and Water Development Division Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 1, FAO Archive. 21. The idea of the worker card catalogue was borrowed from Britain. The starting document was “List of Research Workers, Agriculture and Forestry, in the British Empire, 1939,” a catalogue of Linnaean societies and schools of agriculture and their faculty and major publications, based on which the FAO developed its “List of International Societies Having Reference to Agriculture,” published as an internal document in 1946. See folder “Agricultural Institutes and Agricultural Advisers” (September 1946), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 1, FAO Archive. 22. Folder “Mobilization of Human Resources for Rural Development” (1958), 70,

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Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 1/2, FAO Archive. 23. Howard R. Tolley, “Farmers in a Hungry World,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 95:1 (February 1951): 60. 24. “Personal Papers: Biography,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:1, Hoover Institution Archives. 25. The figure is Dodd’s own, articulated when he retired, and should therefore be treated with caution. “Speech Delivered by N. E. Dodd at the National Farmers Union Convention, Denver, Colorado—March 16, 1954,” 10, in “Personal Papers: Speeches 1950–2,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:4, Hoover Institution Archives. 26. Folder “Land Use—General” (1958), LA 4/1, vol. 1, 65, FAO Archive. 27. For FAO impressions of China, see Viggo Anderson Director, draft of “foreword” to Farmers Associations and Their Contribution Towards Agriculture and Rural Development in Taiwan (23 July 1964), in RU 2/6, vol. 1, FAO Archive. For the Bombay Milk Cooperative, see C. H. Brissenden, “The Bombay Milk Scheme,” International Journal of Dairy Technology 5:2 (January 1952): 108–14. For contemporary reporting in India, see “Farm Co-operatives,” Times of India, February 17, 1963. 28. Amartya Sen, “Why Planning?” Seminar 3 (November 1959): 15–17, www.india -seminar.com/2008/589/589_amartya_kr_sen.htm. 29. For the MIT conference, which explained, “Thus the scale of some of the land improvement, irrigation, input purchase, output sale, and fund-raising operations may be enlarged while the plowing, tilling, and harvesting operations continue to be performed on a small, family-farm scale,” see David Hapgood and Max F. Millikan, “Policies for Promoting Agricultural Development: Report of a Conference on Productivity and Innovation in Agriculture in the Underdeveloped Countries,” Technical Report (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1965), 85. For Sierra Leone, see letter, Kervin Nicholson (March 7, 1965), in folder “Rural Cooperatives,” Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 3/1, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 30. Letter, G. St. Siegens to Pier G. Brunori (8 June 1966), in RU 3/3, vol. 2, FAO Archive. 31. For cooperative experts appointed, see D. J. Walton and Viggo Anderson, memo, “FAO Support for Agricultural Cooperatives” (9 January 1969), in folder “Rural Cooperatives,” Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 3/1, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 32. “Land Tenure and Settlement, Land Tenure and Agrarian Reform” (1967), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/5/69, vol. 2, FAO Archive. 33. Margaret Digby, Co-operatives and Land Use (Rome: FAO, 1957). For Digby’s earlier studies, see Agricultural Co-operation in Czechoslovakia (London: G. Routledge

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and Sons, 1930); Producers and Consumers (London: Routledge, 1928); Digest of Co-­ operative Law at Home and Abroad (London: P. S. King and Son, 1933); Report on the Opportunities for Co-operative Organisation in Newfoundland and Labrador (London: Horace Plunkett Foundation, 1934); Co-operation; What It Means and How It Works (London: Longmans, Green, 1947); Horace Plunkett, an Anglo-American Irishman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949); A Short History of the Land Settlement Association (in England) (London: Horace Plunkett Foundation, 1955). 34. Folder “Rural Cooperatives,” Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 3/1, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 35. Ronald H. Gretton, “FAO and Agricultural Cooperatives” (August 1, 1966), in folder ‘Rural Cooperatives,’ ” Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 3/1, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 36. Jain and Coelho, In the Wake of Freedom. 37. For ceilings and their failure, J. S. Uppal, Indian Economic Planning: Three Decades of Development (Delhi: Macmillan India, 1984), 52–69. The Indian Planning Commission asked all states to cooperate in carrying through the 1950 census of landholdings in time for the United Nations’ deadline for the World Census of Agriculture. Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India, 75. 38. Rainer Schickele, “Theories Concerning Land Tenure,” Journal of Farm Economics 34:5 (1952): 743. 39. Schickele, “Theories,” 743. 40. Schickele, “Theories,” 743. 41. Rainer Schickele, Agrarian Revolution and Economic Progress: A Primer for Development (New York: Praeger, 1968), 6. 42. For quotation, see Sein Lin, “Asian Agrarian Reform: A Perspective,” 14, in “Land Tenure and Settlement, Land Reform Administration” (1969), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/6, vol. 2, FAO Archive; for FAO memo, see “Memo” in “Community Devt. (A. C. C. Inter-agency Affairs)” (1959), in FAO 12 Rural 112 RUD B/1, FAO Archive. For contemporary theories of elites, see C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1968]); Vilfredo Pareto, The Rise and Fall of the Elites (New York: Bedminster, 1968). 43. Gunnar Myrdal, “The United Nations, Agriculture, and the World Economic Revolution,” Journal of Farm Economics 47:4 (1965): 897. 44. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 6. 45. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 5. 46. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 396. 47. Hapgood and Millikan, “Policies for Promoting Agricultural Development,” 115. 48. Tolley, “Farmers in a Hungry World,” 60. 49. Dodd, “Hoes and ‘Show-How,’ ” 2. 50. Tolley, “Farmers in a Hungry World,” 61.

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51. Roy L. Prosterman, “Land Reform as Foreign Aid,” Foreign Policy, April 1, 1972, 128. 52. Prosterman, “Land Reform as Foreign Aid,” 128–41. 53. Dodd, “World Food Problems,” 6–7. 54. For the expanding budget and its sources at the United Nations, Ruth Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics’: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1945–1965,” in M. Frey, S. Kunkel, and C. R. Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (London: Springer, 2014), 89. For Peru, letter, Enrique A. Summers to Jakes de Geus (19 July 1965), in file “Agricultural Education” (1959–1971), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 2/2, FAO Archive. For instances of “political bargaining” for rural development services, see Engerman, The Price of Aid. 55. Myrdal, “The United Nations,” 417. 56. Myrdal, “The United Nations,” 417. 57. William Paddock and Elizabeth Paddock, We Don’t Know How (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1973); for “joke,” 152; for their ruling on land reform, 145–59. 58. The peak of FAO publication occurred in the 1970s, with 286 publications. Adriana Herrera, Jim Riddell, and Paolo Toselli, “Recent FAO Experiences in Land Reform and Land Tenure,” Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives 1 (1997): 54. 59. For Weber’s longue durée view of bureaucracy, see Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (New York: Bedminster, 1968). For historical instances of this broadening of paper in action at scale, see David Vincent, “Government and the Management of Information, 1844–2009,” in Simon Gunn and James Vernon, eds., The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), chapter 11. 60. For instance, Roger J. P. Kain, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman, Contested Spaces of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

5. On Failing to Make a Map in Time 1. For an early discussion of legal jargon and written law as a tool of the elite, see Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (London: J. Murray, 1861), 107–8. For more recent confrontations with the problem of literacy in the British Empire, see Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 2. Govindlal Dalsukhbhai Patel, The Indian Land Problem and Legislation (Bombay: N. M. Tripathi, 1954), 504–7; for “permanent gain,” 506. 3. For a survey of mapping initiatives, see Wolfram U. Drewes, “Factors in Carrying out Land Reform: Cadastre,” Spring Review of Land Reform, June 1970, 171, in the

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International Council for Educational Development Records, 1969–1994, Hoover Institution Archives. 4. The report is quoted in Daniel Thorner and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1962), 184. The original is in Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal (New Delhi: Manager of Publications, Government of India, 1945), 263–64. Words in brackets are my interpretations. 5. R. A. Gopalaswami, “Part 1-A—Report,” in Census Reports—1951 (New Delhi: Government of India, 1953), 50. For the effectiveness of the cadastres of West Bengal in tenant registration, see P. S. Appu, Land Reforms in India: A Survey of Policy, Legislation and Implementation (New Delhi: Vikas, 1997). 6. For West Bengal as a site of early experimentation with collecting documentation for land redistribution, see Marcus Franda, West Bengal and the Federalizing Process in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 151–57. For the map of Mouza Matpalsa, see Amal Kumar Sen, “Land Utilization and Agricultural Planning in Matpalsa Union of Birbhum West Bengal,” Geographical Review of India 19:4 (1957): 27. 7. For regional planning, see Gordon E. Cherry, “The History of Urban and Regional Planning,” Area 10:1 (1978): 32–34. For land use or land economics, see Stamp, The Land Utilisation Survey. For the American school, see Leonard Salter, A Critical Review of Research in Land Economics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948); Leonard A. Salter, “The Content of Land Economics and Research Methods Adapted to Its Needs,” Journal of Farm Economics 24:1 (1942): 226–47; Wellington Brink, Big Hugh (New York: Macmillan, 1951); Hugh H. Bennett, Soil Conservation (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service, 1936). The global reach of these conversations is particularly visible in the career of Patrick Geddes, the father of regional planning, whose career spanned Scotland, India, and Israel, and Hugh Bennett, who worked for the Department of Agriculture on studying soils to promote higher yields and prevent floods, and in the 1940s and ’50s studied the role of soil in economic development in South Africa and Venezuela. Indra Munshi, “Patrick Geddes,” Economic and Political Weekly 35:6 (2000): 485–91. For expectations about Indian requirements for land use planning, see L. S. Bhat, “Regional Planning in India,” Sankhya¯: The Indian Journal of Statistics, Series B (1960–2002) 32:3–4 (1970): 395. 8. Soil surveys were imported to India as the basis for taxation by the colonial government in 1847, and in the same year, Richard Griffith’s soil survey of Ireland was commenced for the purposes of rationalizing taxation. James R. Reilly, Richard Griffith and His Valuations of Ireland: With an Inventory of the Books of the General Valuation of Rateable Property in Ireland (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2000). For the importantion of soil science to India for taxation purposes, see Swamy, “Land and Law in Colonial India,” 138–57. 9. Sen, “Land Utilization and Agricultural Planning.” 10. Which is not, of course, to say that India historically lacked irrigation works or

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soil technology; before Britain’s intervention, most areas in India had indigenous forms of irrigation technology that were abandoned or neglected by the British. Meanwhile, in Britain, by the end of the nineteenth century, an era when the state replaced the landlord as the primary driver of development, Griffith’s careful taxonomy of soils formed the basis for the expert domains of land economics and regional planning, charged as they were with surveying the realm of possible collective riches and making recommendations to farmers, towns, and the state about the highest and best use of each parcel of territory. See Reilly, Richard Griffith. 11. “If Indian industrial growth takes place at the same rate as that of Great Britain,” he reasoned, “it will take India more than a hundred years before it can call itself an industrialised economy in any significant sense.” Amartya Sen, “Why Planning?” Seminar 3 (November 1959), republished online at www.india-seminar.com/2008/589 /589_amartya_kr_sen.htm. 12. For a history of the Ordnance Survey, see Rachel Hewitt, A Map of the Nation: The Biography of the Ordnance Survey (Cambridge: Granta, 2011). For the reform of Irish taxation laws in relation to soil maps, see Reilly, Richard Griffith. Perrin Selcer believes that postwar conversations about soil science were driven forward mainly by compe­ tition with Russia, which had an independent commitment to soil science from the 1890s. Perrin Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 140–41. 13. The soil surveys of Richard Griffith, begun in 1826, served as the basis for the divisions of land under the Irish land acts. See Notes upon the Government Valuation of Land in Ireland, Commonly Known as “Griffith’s Valuation” (Dublin: Irish Land Committee, 1880). For the Land Utilisation Survey, Simon Rycroft and Denis Cosgrove, “Mapping the Modern Nation,” History 40:1 (1995): 91–105; Stamp, The Land Utilisation Survey of Britain. 14. An excellent introduction to the intellectual and political history of land use planning and its implementation in Britain is John Sheail, An Environmental History of Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Macmillan, 2002), esp. 12–45. For rural planning in particular, another useful book is Short, The National Farm Survey. For an overlapping history of land use planning in the United States, see Sara M. Gregg, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), esp. chapter 3. The facilitation of schools and punishing of mansions that I describe is associated with the philosophy of Henry George, the American journalist whose treatises on land, empire, and development were one of the major influences on land use planning. More work needs to be done on these connections, but one midcentury assertion of George’s continuing relevance to later urban planning schemes in places such as Pittsburgh is Steven B. Cord, “Henry George’s Place in American History and Economics,” in Henry George, Dreamer or Realist? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 221–46. The best study

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158–160

of land use planning and the conflicts between private citizens and the state that arose in the aftermath of such efforts is probably Brian Short, Battle of the Fields: Rural Community and Authority in Britain During the Second World War (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2014). 15. L. Dudley Stamp, “Rural Planning,” Times (London), December 20, 1943; Rycroft and Cosgrove, “Mapping the Modern Nation,” 91–105; Sheail, Environmental History, 113–14. For nearly contemporary efforts to create a cadastre in Britain, see Short, The National Farm Survey. 16. Stamp, “Rural Planning,” 5. 17. Stamp, “Rural Planning,” 5. 18. Stamp, “Rural Planning,” 5. 19. For quotation, Stamp, “Rural Planning,” 5. Under this mandate, the Rural Land Utilisation officers watched over the 1943 development of Oxhey, one of the garden city–type developments organized to take up the housing shortage of bombed-out city centers. The Oxhey development project had much to boast about. First of all, it took away no fertile soil from the rest of the country. Moreover, it had been cheaply planned by a central authority and it employed a system of shared utilities instead of relying on waste-producing ribbon developments that used a single strand of utilities. See “Finance of Planning,” Times (London), December 28, 1945, 5. 20. In its final report in 1942, the Uthwatt Committee on Compensation and Betterment recommended that the state become the manager of all land outside cities, taking control from the landowning class as a whole. It recommended giving the government control over land development—a tax on any potential improvements on the countryside, designed to cap development and suburban sprawl, as well as authority over bombed-out ruins and slums and over suburban planning. This planning control, the committee proposed, would substitute for land nationalization—the more radical form of land reform proposed a generation before in the era of Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” of 1910. Land nationalization, the committee argued, would arouse political controversy and be too expensive for austerity Britain. Mere land planning, by contrast, could avert the aesthetic dangers of suburban sprawl while giving the government control over the geographical arrangement of nationalized industries and transportation. “State Control of Land Development,” Glasgow Herald, September 10, 1942, 4. Writing to the Times in 1946, Stamp defended the powers of the state in the name of aesthetic preservation of the “large garden and orchard,” “the ideal housing site,” and the “pleasing layout.” L. Dudley Stamp, “Planning of Villages,” Times (London), August 2, 1946, 5. 21. Rycroft and Cosgrove, “Mapping the Modern Nation.” 22. The reviewer of the field looked for a future run by “modern data-processing equipment.” Marion Clawson, “Recent Efforts to Improve Land Use Information,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 61:315 (1966): 654. One landmark use of in-

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1 6 0 – 1 6 2    489

formation management was developed in 1965 by the Urban Renewal Association and the Bureau of Public Roads: The Land Use Coding Manual, a fine-grained, interchangeable metric for describing land with specific geographical accuracy. Already in 1964 the American Bar Association had conducted a conference, and in 1966 a state governors’ convention was held on the topic. The review essay concluded by proposing a fully redacted, national system of land use planning in the United States that would offer a single system for the forestry service, mortgages, urban planners, and transport engineers, and that might also be extended as a survey of rent prices. Clawson discusses the American Bar Association’s proposal for collecting rent data at 653; my elucidation of the uses of data about rent is based on speculation. 23. Manu Goswami, Producing India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 52. 24. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 503. 25. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 503. 26. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 504. For an overview of the cause of abolishing the “intermediaries of ancient and British rule”—also known as “Zamindar abolitions”— see Pramod Kumar Agrawal, Land Reforms in India: Constitutional and Legal Approach (New Delhi: M.D., 1993), 15–18; David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 175–76, 208–17. 27. Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labour in India, 185. 28. The governor in Mysore, Mohanlal Sukhadia, urged the creation of an all-India land survey “that would plug loopholes in the land reforms and bring up to date the survey records in all states.” Mysore would host a conference. Hari Narayan, surveyor general for India, promised that the land survey would solve the resettlement problem. “Uniform Land Reform Opposed,” Times of India, June 6, 1972. 29. For quotation, “Draft Paragraphs for the Use of Mr. McDougall on Land Reform at the Next ECOSOC Discussions,” in folder “UN” (May 1952), 3, Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 10, Miscellaneous Files, FAO Archive. For meetings between FAO and India, see letter, F. L. McDougall to Sir Herbert Broadley (November 18, 1954). 30. “Draft Paragraphs,” 5. 31. One of the founders of the FAO, Australian economist F. L. McDougall, suggested that FAO’s advice be limited to a few fields, which might include cadastral surveys and land title registration. He noted the centrality of land tenure to the agency’s undertakings. “Draft Paragraphs,” 5. 32. For a survey of mapping initiatives, see Drewes, “Factors in Carrying out Land Reform.” 33. Folder “Branch Activities” (1952), in Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 1, FAO Archive. 34. FAO/55/3/1417B, annex 2, “FAO Progress Report,” 8, in folder “Land Reform

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163–167

4th and 5th Inter-agency Meeting” (1955), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 5, FAO Archive. 35. The soil survey of the United Kingdom was coordinated through the Soil Survey Board of Great Britain, with two research stations, one at Rothamsted and one at the Macaulay Institute of Soil Research. “Report on a Visit to European Soil Survey Centers by Dr. D. L. Bramao,” (October 19, 1955), in folder “Land and Water Development Director Tours/Trips—Dr. Schickele” (1951–6), FAO LA-6/2, vol. 1, p. 4. Another precedent to land mapping as a preamble to national land management is in China; see John Lossing Buck, “Chinese Agriculture,” in Land Utilization in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937), which promised that land mapping and title registration would ameliorate the poverty of farmers. Lossing’s involvement with the China study provided the basis for his appointment to manage the survey work at the FAO. 36. Marion Clawson, “Recent Efforts to Improve Land Use Information,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 61:315 (September 1966): 653. 37. Folder “Latin American Regional Office (Santiago),” 2, LA 8/2/61, FAO Archive. 38. Folder “Branch Activities” (1952), 60. 39. Charles S. Wright, Supplement to the Final Report of the Assessor of Soils (Santiago, Chile: FAO, 1964), 36. 40. Folder “Latin American Regional Office (Santiago),” 2. 41. Folder “Latin American Regional Office (Santiago),” 2. 42. For map, see folder “Latin American Regional Office (Santiago),” 108; for grasses and soils, 110, 122. 43. Folder “Land Reform 4th and 5th Inter-agency Meeting” (1955). 44. Howard R. Tolley, “Farmers in a Hungry World,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 95:1 (1951): 54–61. 45. Gunnar Myrdal, “The United Nations, Agriculture, and the World Economic Revolution,” Journal of Farm Economics 47:4 (November 1965): 894, 897. 46. “Certain Aspects of the Agrarian Policy of the Moroccan Government,” in folder “Land Tenure and Land Reform—General” (1962), 3, Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/5/66, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 47. For Lewis’s plan, see “Land Classification for Agricultural Development,” in folder “Land Classification,” Land and Water Branch, Land Tenure and Settlement, box 1, FAO Archive. 48. “Land Classification for Agricultural Development,” 5. 49. Letter, A. B. Lewis to J. Lossing Buck (February 18, 1952), in folder “Land Classification—Puerto Rico,” 3, Soils (2), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch, FAO Archive. 50. Lewis reported indignantly: “The money previously voted for land classification work, I find, has been completely used in generalizing and preparing for publication a land use map of the island.” Letter, A. B. Lewis to J. Lossing Buck, 3.

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51. Letter, A. B. Lewis to J. Lossing Buck, 4. 52. Letter, A. B. Lewis to J. Lossing Buck. 53. Letter, A. B. Lewis to J. Lossing Buck. For struggles in the 1960s to reconcile rival soil classification systems, see Selcer, Postwar Origins, 164–73. 54. For commentary on expense, see letter, A. B. Lewis to J. Lossing Buck. For the wider problem of competing soil categories, see Selcer, Postwar Origins, 133–72. For the funding of FAO projects in general and short-term grants based on member nations’ needs, which left little room for overhead or coordination in the FAO budget, Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics,’ ” 84–85. 55. “Notes on Branch Meeting” in folder “Branch Activities” (January 6, 1955). 56. “Notes on Branch Meeting” in folder “Branch Activities” (January 6, 1955). 57. L. Dudley Stamp, Land for Tomorrow: The Underdeveloped World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1952), 187–88, 193–97. 58. For details about Stamp’s involvement and the early funding for the survey, H. Boesch, “World Land Use Survey Commission,” in World Land Use Survey: Report of the Commission to the General Assembly of the IGU (Bern, Switzerland: Kumemerly and Frey, 1976), 5–6. From 1958, land use monographs began to appear, with profiles of Hong Kong (1958), Cyprus (1959), Tobago (1960), the Sudan (1965), and Santa Maria, eastern Madeira, and Zanzibar (1968) as well as shorter papers. For details about the later work of the World Land Use Survey, see A. Clark, “The World Land Use Survey,” in World Land Use Survey, 27. 59. Carroll was “speaking for most of us,” in the phrase of the notetaker. “Notes on Branch Meeting.” 60. For a different read on the meaning of scale in the FAO map, see Selcer, Postwar Origins, 134–35. Selcer views the map as a development tool imposed on member nations by the United Nations. 61. “Notes on Branch Meeting.” 62. Clark, “The World Land Use Survey,” 27. 63. Clark, “The World Land Use Survey,” 27. 64. Nikolaus Newiger, ed., Fundamental Problems of Agrarian Structure and Reform in Developing Countries (Bonn-Lengsdorf: German Foundation for Developing Countries, 1962), in Hoover Institution Archives, ICED, 87. For allies and the launching of the soil survey, see Selcer, Postwar Origins, 136–40. 65. My comments on the reconciliation of soil categories owe everything to Selcer, Postwar Origins, 140–54. 66. Dale W. Adams, “Factors in Carrying out Land Reform: Services and Supplies”; Drewes, “Factors in Carrying out Land Reform”; and E. B. Rice, Folke Dovring, Solon Barraclough, Mohamad Riad El Ghonemy, and Demetrios Christodoulou, “Land Reform: Regional Surveys,” in folder “The International Council for Educational Development Records” (1969–1994), 171, Hoover Institution Archives.

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67. “Soil Map of the World—Exhibition Pamphlet,” in folder “Speeches—Notes” (August 1964), Land and Water Development Division, Soils, Land Use and Conservation, box 3, FAO Archive. 68. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Soil Map of the World, vol. 4, South America (Paris: UNESCO, 1971), 2. 69. “Soil Map of the World—Exhibition Pamphlet.” 70. Perrin Selcer, “Fabricating Unity: The FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World,” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 40:2 (2015): 188nn68–70. 71. Letter, L. C. Arulpragnam to Solon Barraclough in Chile (May 13, 1968), in folder “Land Tenure and Settlement, Land Reform Administration” (1969), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/6, vol. 1, FAO Archive. Another administrator acknowledged the “serious administrative problems” faced by many countries in implementing land reform. Letter, Demetroius Christodoulou to M. Chebil, M. Perez, Jean Baptiste Yonke (April 3, 1968), in folder “Land Tenure and Settlement, Land Reform Administration” (1969), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/6, vol. 1, FAO Archive. While the FAO could help little with problems of “firm political backing,” FAO experts and their bibliographies could certainly assist with “difficulties springing from inadequate understanding and experience of the administrative requirements for the implementation of a sensitive and complex program such as land reform.” 72. Letter, J. Hashiguchi to L. C. Arulpragasam (December 13, 1968), in folder “Land Tenure and Settlement, Land Reform Administration” (1969), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/6, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 73. For quotation and Nairobi, see letter, J. K. Muthama to L. C. Arulpragasam (November 5, 1968), in folder “Land Tenure and Settlement, Land Reform Administration” (1969), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/6, vol. 1, FAO Archive. For institutes responding coyly, see letter, Erich Jacoby to L. C. Arulpragasam (December 4, 1968), in folder “Land Tenure and Settlement, Land Reform Administration” (1969), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/6, vol. 1, FAO Archive. For Italy, see letter, G. Barbero to Demetrius Christodoulou (September 3, 1968), in folder “Land Tenure and Settlement, Land Reform Administration” (1969), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/6, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 74. Letter, A. J. Smyth to Mr. Beek et al. (February 17, 1972), 65, in folder “Land Appraisal (Expert Panel)” (1970–72), LA 2/21, FAO Archive. 75. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 11. 76. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 11. 77. Schickele, Agrarian Revolution, 11. 78. Translated by Andrew Hurley, in a compilation titled Collected Fictions, published by Penguin in 1998.

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79. “Uniform Land Reform Opposed,” Times of India, June 6, 1972. 80. The FAO map came just in time for other endeavors. The first volume was published in 1970, the same year as the peak of land transfers in Latin America — approximately 321 million square acres in all. The land redistributions that ended sharecropping in West Bengal began just as the last volume was coming out. And a generation of free market land redistribution, or land titling, was still years away. The impact of the FAO’s soil maps (or of satellite-enabled maps) on later land reform programs will require the attention of future scholars; we won’t really be able to accurately assess the effectiveness of the FAO and its mapping programs until this knowledge is complete.

6. The Questionable Effectiveness of Bibliography 1. Norris E. Dodd, “The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” Agricultural History 23:2 (1949): 81–86. 2.  World Food Supply: Selected Bibliography (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1925); Mary S. Aslin, Catalogue of the Printed Books on Agriculture (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1926); Louise O. Bercaw et al., Farm Tenancy in the United States, 1925–35: A Beginning of a Bibliography (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics 1935); Dorothy Louise Campbell Culver Tompkins, Land Utilization: A Bibliography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935); Louise O. Bercaw and Mary G. Lacy, Crops Other Than Fruits, Vegetables, and Nuts: An Index to the Official Sources (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1930); Louise O. Bercaw and Mary G. Lacy, Fruits, Vegetables, and Nuts: An Index to the Official Sources (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1930); Louise O. Bercaw and Mary G. Lacy, Land, Farm Property, Irrigation, and Miscellaneous Items: An Index to the Official Sources (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1931); Louise O. Bercaw and Mary G. Lacy, Livestock and Livestock Products: An Index to the Official Sources (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1931); Louise O. Bercaw and Helen Emma Hennefrund, Distribution of Farm Income by Size: A Selected Bibliography (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1942); V. Montes Baffier et al., Story of the FAO Library: 65th Anniversary, 1952–2017 (Rome: FAO, 2017). The Lubin Library of Agriculture was the first body in the world to make itself responsible for organizing and distributing information about prices, products, and theories. See Olivia Rossetti Agresti, David Lubin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1922). 3. “Developing Land and Water Resources: An Introduction to the Work of the Land and Water Use Branch, Agriculture Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations” in folder “Branch Activities” (1953), Land and Water Development Division Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 1, FAO Archive. 4. For instance, FAO Documentation (1961–1995); FAO Library List of Selected Articles 4 (6) (June 1967); FAO Library List of Recent Accessions 67 (7/9) (July–September

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1967); Quarterly List of Publications and Main Documents (September 1966). Figures are approximate. Further specifications are in FAO Bibliography no. 5, 22–23. 5. “Draft Paragraphs for the Use of Mr. McDougall on Land Reform at the Next ECOSOC Discussions” (1954), 2. 6. Rainer Schickele, Agrarian Revolution and Economic Progress: A Primer for Development (New York: Praeger, 1968), 4. Nils Gilman has noted that faith in the heroic labors of bureaucrats and social scientists was not uncommon in the years after World War II. “Involution and Development: The Case of Clifford Geertz,” in Jeffrey H. Cohen and Norbert Dannhaeuser, Economic Development: An Anthropological Approach (Lanham, Md.: Rowman Altamira, 2002), 3. 7. “Developing Land and Water Resources: An Introduction to the Work of the Land and Water Use Branch, Agriculture Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” n.p., in folder “Branch Activities,” Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 1, FAO Archive, Rome. 8.  Land Reform: A Selected List of References for A.I.D. Technicians (Washington, D.C.: USAID, 1946). For USAID’s publications, see the conference papers gathered in the Spring Review of Land Reform (Washington, D.C.: USAID, 1970). 9. Flyer, “Conference on World Land Tenure Problems,” in “Invitation, Forms, and General Information,” in 9/2/1 Kenneth Parsons Gen Files, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives, University of Wisconsin, Madison. 10. Flyer, “Conference on World Land Tenure Problems.” 11. Folder “Conference on World Land Tenure Problems Sixth Carbons of Invitations,” in “Invitation, Forms, and General Information,” in 9/2/1 Kenneth Parsons Gen Files, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. 12. Loy Henderson, ambassador to India, was informed of nominations for potential attendees by Horace Holmes, visiting from India. The list included R. K. Patil of the National Planning Commission; K. B. Hatia, development commissioner of the United Provinces, Lucknow; and an unnamed “leader in the farmer’s movement.” See letter (August 16, 1951), in folder “Conference on World Land Tenure Problems Sixth Carbons of Invitations.” For actual participants, see Conference on World Land Tenure Problems, Part I: Papers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), 3–4. 13. Letter (August 6, 1951), 2, in folder “Brazil—Invitations,” 9/2/1 Kenneth Parsons Gen Files, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. For attendees from Mexico, see Conference on World Land Tenure Problems, 2. 14. Letter (August 28, 1951), in folder “England,” 9/2/1 Kenneth Parsons Gen Files, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. For attendees from England, see Conference on World Land Tenure Problems, 6. 15. Folder “Workshops,” 9/2/1 Kenneth Parsons Gen Files, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. 16. Flyer, “Conference on World Land Tenure Problems.”

notes to pages

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17. Philip Raup, “The Wisconsin Conference,” 9/2/1 Kenneth Parsons Gen Files, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. 18. “Report of the Steering Committee,” 9/2/1 Kenneth Parsons Gen Files, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. 19. “Memorandum of Information for Those Invited by the University of Wisconsin to Be Fellows in the Land Tenure Training Program,” 1, 9/2/1 Kenneth Parsons Gen Files, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. 20. “Memorandum of Information.” 21. “Memorandum of Information.” 22. Letter (August 17, 1951), folder “India,” 9/2/1 Kenneth Parsons Gen Files, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. The economist mentioned is K. C. Chakow, of whom I find no further reference in the Land Tenure Center papers or elsewhere. 23. Antonio J. Posada—who afterward was funded by the Land Tenure Center to write about CVC rural electrification in Colombia—wrote a B paper called “Colombia: The Pattern of the Land” for Economics 226 in March 1947. Posada argued for the “democratization of land practices”; in folder “Agricultural Economics Seminar Research Papers, Foreign Countries A-R,” 9/2/7-3, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. 24. Folder “Agricultural Economics Seminar Research Papers.” 25. “Land Tenure Center,” in “Agricultural Economics Publications: LTC Miscellaneous,” 9/2/00-11, box 1, Land Tenure Center Archives. 26. “Land Tenure Center.” 27. For a glimpse of the University of Wisconsin project, see “Conference on World Land Tenure Problems at the University of Wisconsin, October 8 to November 20, 1951,” Land Tenure Center Archives; Kenneth H. Parsons and John R. Commons, “John R. Commons’ Point of View,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 18:3 (1942): 245–66; William C. Thiesenhusen, Chile’s Experiments in Agrarian Reform (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966); Kenneth H. Parsons, “The Relevance of the Ideas of John R. Commons for the Formulation of Agricultural Development Policies,” Journal of Economic Issues 20:2 (June 1986): 281–95. 28. Carrie Maude Jones, review of Bibliography on Land Utilization, 1918–1936, by Louise O. Bercaw and Annie M. Hannay, and Land Utilization: A Bibliography, by Dorothy C. Culver,” Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics 14:3 (1938): 355. 29.  FAO Library Occasional Bibliographies (Rome: FAO, 1969), 1:14. 30.  FAO Library Occasional Bibliographies, 2:i. 31. Robert Virgil Williams, The Information Systems of International Inter-Governmental Organizations (Stamford, Conn.: Ablex, 1998), 75–77. 32. For the development of the genre in the eighteenth century and the origins of nineteenth-century subject bibliography, see G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The observations in this paragraph about the retreat of memory are my own.

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33. Orlando Fals Borda, Conocimiento y Poder Popular: Lecciones con Campesinos de Nicaragua, Mexico y Colombia (Bogota: Fundación Punta de Lanza, 1985); Knowledge and People’s Power: Lessons with Peasants in Nicaragua, Mexico and Columbia (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1985). 34. From nineteenth-century treatises on the English yeomen farmer to Richard Tawney’s predictions of a coming era of land reform in the 1920s, historical accounts of empire were launched against one another in a messy battle to determine the direction of future governance. Historians arrayed themselves on both sides. By the 1960s, however, the historical viewpoint of nineteenth-century historians who focused on conflict over land—including those of Oxford Regius Professor Goldwin Smith and Balliol College fellow Richard Tawney—was being sidelined, replaced by a bibliocracy that circulated the most recent economic accounts of grain sales and soil samples. Political economy split into a historical account and an econometric account of innovative systems. For social history, where the influence of Tawney remained marked, see John E. Pomfret, The Struggle for Land in Ireland, 1800–1923 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969); Samuel Clark, “The Importance of Agrarian Classes: Agrarian Class Structure and Collective Action in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” British Journal of Sociology 29:1 (1978): 22–40; Samuel Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); J. S. Donnelly, “Irish Agrarian Rebellion: The Whiteboys of 1769–76,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 83C (1983): 293–331; John William Knott, “Land, Kinship, and Identity: The Cultural Roots of Agrarian Agitation in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-­ Century Ireland,” Journal of Peasant Studies 12:1 (1984): 93–108. For tenant right, John Dunbabin, “Tenant Right in Britain and Ireland,” in John Dunbabin, ed., Rural Discontent in 19th-Century Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1974); William L. Feingold, “The Tenant’s Movement to Capture the Irish Poor Law Boards, 1877–1886,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 7:3 (1975): 216–31; E. D. Steele, “J. S. Mill and the Irish Question,” Historical Journal 13:3 (1970): 419–50; Steele, “II. J. S. Mill and the Irish Question,” Historical Journal 13:2 (1970): 216–36; Clive Dewey, “Celtic Agrarian Legislation and the Celtic Revival,” Past and Present 64 (1974): 30–70. For India and conflict over land, Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal; Thomas R. Metcalf, “II. The Influence of the Mutiny of 1857 on Land Policy in India,” Historical Journal 4:2 (1961): 152–63; Thomas R. Metcalf, “The Struggle over Land Tenure in India, 1860–1868,” Journal of Asian Studies 21:3 (1962): 295–307; Thomas R. Metcalf, “Laissez Faire and Tenant Right in Mid-Nineteenth Century India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 1:1 (1963): 74–81; Dietmar Rothermund, “The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 and Its Influence on Legislation in Other Provinces,” Bengal Past and Present 86:2 (1967): 90–105; E. D. Steele, “III. Ireland and the Empire in the 1860s: Imperial Precedents for Gladstone’s First Irish Land Act,” Historical Journal 11:1 (March 1968): 64–83; Karuna Moy Mukerji, “Land Transfers in Birbhum, 1928–1955: Some Implications of the Ben-

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gal Tenancy Act, 1885,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 8 (1971): 241–63; D. N. Dhanagare, “Peasant Protest and Politics—The Tebhaga Movement in Bengal (India), 1946–47,” Journal of Peasant Studies 3:3 (1976): 360–78; Adrienne Cooper, “Share­croppers and Landlords in Bengal, 1930–50: The Dependency Web and Its Implications,” Journal of Peasant Studies 10:2–3 (1983): 227–55. Thomas R. Metcalf even made explicit connections to current events in “Landlords Without Land: The U. P. Zamindars Today,” Pacific Affairs 40:1–2 (1967): 5–18. For the Mexican Revolution, François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1969); Peter M. Ward, “Social Interaction Patterns in Squatter Settlements in Mexico City,” Geoforum 9:4–5 (1978): 235–43; Linda B. Hall, “Alvaro Obregón and the Politics of Mexican Land Reform, 1920–1924,” Hispanic American Historical Review 60:2 (1980): 213–38; Michael Redclift, “Agrarian Populism in Mexico—the ‘Via Campesina,’ ” Journal of Peasant Studies 7:4 (1980): 492–502; Eric Van Young, “Mexican Rural History Since Chevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda,” Latin American Research Review 18:3 (1983): 5–61; Jeffery Brannon and Eric N. Baklanoff, “The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in Yucatán, Mexico,” World Development 12:11–12 (November 1984): 1131–41; Orlando Fals Borda, Knowledge and People’s Power: Lessons with Peasants in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Columbia (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1985); Alan Knight, “Land and Society in Revolutionary Mexico: The Destruction of the Great Haciendas,” Mexican Studies/Estudios mexicanos 7:1 (1991): 73–104. For anthropologists, see Paul Friedrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), vi, citing the influence of David M. Schneider (a scholar of Australian aborigine culture and editor of a major scholarly series) at the University of Chicago. For a sample of the evidence of “land” as a topic in contemporary social science, see Colin MacAndrews, “The Role and Potential Use of Land Settlements in Development Policies: Lessons from Past Experience,” SORU Sociologia Ruralis 19:2 (1979): 116–34; Ann K. S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1980); Andrew Jonah Grad, Land and Peasant in Japan (New York: International Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1979); Henry A. Landsberger, Rural Protest: Peasant Movements and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1974); Karl J. Pelzer, Planter and Peasant: Colonial Policy and the Agrarian Struggle in East Sumatra, 1863–1947 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978); John M. Cohen and Dov Weintraub, Land and Peasants in Imperial Ethiopia (Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1975); Swasti Mitter, Peasant Movements in West Bengal (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, Department of Land Economy, 1977); Samuel Popkin, “The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Peasant Society,” Theory and Society: Renewal and Critique in Social Theory 9:3 (1980): 411–71. For the early Scott, see James C. Scott, Exploitation in Rural Class Relations (New York: Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group of the Asia Society, 1975); James C. Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion

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and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); James C. Scott, “Revolution in the Revolution: Peasants and Commissars,” Theory and Society: Renewal and Critique in Social Theory 7:1–2 (1979): 97–134. 35. Histories of land tenures were—generally speaking—not collected into bibliographies. Classic histories of land tenure and the commons like Tawney’s, still included in bibliographies in the 1960s, were dropped in favor of new research in economics. 36. “Developing Land and Water Resources: An Introduction to the Work of the Land and Water Use Branch, Agriculture Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations” in folder “Branch Activities” (1953), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 1, FAO Archive. 37. William A. Dill, A Partial Bibliography on the Economic Evaluation of Sport Fishing and Fisheries Resources (Rome: FAO, 1964); Bibliography on Soil and Related Sciences for Latin America (Rome: FAO, 1966); Land and Water: Index 1945–1966 (Rome: FAO, 1968); Nutrition: Index 1945–1966 (Rome: FAO, 1968); Rural Institutions: Index 1945– 1966 (Rome: FAO, 1968); Fisheries: FAO Publications and Documents (1945–1969) (Rome: FAO, 1969); Food and Agricultural Industries: Annotated Bibliography, Author and Subject Index (Rome: FAO, 1970); Agricultural Cooperation: FAO Publications and Documents (1945–Sep. 1971) (Rome: FAO, 1971); Agricultural Engineering: FAO Publications and Documents (1945–May 1971) (Rome: FAO, 1971); Environment: Natural Resources and the Human Environment; FAO Publications and Documents (1967–1970) (Rome: FAO, 1971); Land Reform: FAO Publications and Documents (1945–April 1970) (Rome: FAO, 1971); Micro-­ economics of Agriculture: Production Economics and Farm Management; FAO Publications and Documents (1945–May 1971) (Rome: FAO, 1971); S. R. Pillay, A Bibliography of the Grey Mullets: Family Mugilidae (Rome: FAO, 1972); Education and Training: Annotated Bibliography, Author and Subject Index (Rome: FAO, 1972); James R. Dangel, An Annotated Bibliography of Interspecific Hybridization of Salmonidae (Rome: FAO, 1973); Food and Nutrition: Annotated Bibliography (Rome: FAO, 1973); Jean-Yves LeGall, Annotated Bibliography on Albacore Thunnus Alalunga of the Atlantic Ocean, 1962–72 (Rome: FAO, 1974); A Selected Bibliography on Oil Palm; D. Bap Reddy, Bibliography on Brown Plant­ hopper (Bangkok: FAO, Regional Office for Asia and the Far East, 1976); D. Calamari, Selected Bibliography on Studies and Research Relevant to Pollution in the Mediterranean (Rome: FAO, 1977); Berndt Müller-Haye, Bibliography of the Criollo Cattle of the Americas (Rome: FAO, 1977); A. G. Coche, The Cultivation of Fish in Cages: A General Bibliography (Rome: FAO, 1978); Bibliography of Residues of Agriculture, Fisheries, Forestry and Related Industries (Rome: FAO, 1978); A Selected Bibliography on the Economic Aspects of Aquaculture: 1969–1979 (Rome: FAO, 1979); Bibliography of Food and Agricultural Marketing (Rome: FAO, 1979); P. E. Smith and S. L. Richardson, Selected Bibliography on Pelagic Fish Egg and Larva Surveys (Rome: FAO, 1979); R. Ziesler, Bibliography of Latin American Freshwater Fish (Rome: FAO, 1979).

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38. Folder “Rural Cooperatives,” Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 3/1, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 39.  Provisional World Plan for Agriculture (Rome: FAO, 1970). 40. Gordon Hubert Bateman, A Bibliography of Low-Cost, Low-Skill Water Technologies: A Brief Appraisal of the Information Assembled by the I.T.D.G. Research Project on Low-Cost, Low-Skill Water Technologies (London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1974); Peter Barnes, The People’s Land: A Reader on Land Reform in the United States (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale, 1975); W. Dennis Keating, Rent and Eviction Controls: A Selected Annotated Bibliography (Monticello, Ill.: Council of Planning Librarians, 1976); Co-­ operative Bibliography (Geneva: ILO, 1973). 41. My mysterious statement about doubt here serves as a reminder of connections that I am unable to trace myself but that may be of interest to other scholars, between the increasing number of social science bibliographies in the service of internationally coordinated land management projects—which were on the point of becoming untenable in an age of neoliberalism—and a postmodern critique of the social science enterprise from elsewhere in the academy. A work important for thinking about the abundance of publications in the modern age, and the inevitable disintegration of unified collaboration, is Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979). 42. The Digital Library of the Commons is available at dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc. My impressions of the library and how it was constructed are the result of a visit to Ostrom in 2009, when I interviewed her and her staff about the origins of the library. The library’s documentation at that point was scant, and I have therefore opted for a narrative description of the archives based on my notes. For Ostrom’s own reflections on information as a commons, see C. Hess and E. Ostrom, “Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66:1–2 (2003): 111–45. 43. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162:3859 (1968): 1243–48. 44. My summary of these insights is based on the publication that resulted from Ostrom’s bibliographic labor: Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 45. The material reviewed by the workshop can be seen in the Digital Library of the Commons, dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc. 46. My assertions about the feminization of anthropology are based on anecdote and casual observation, but I explain my sources about bibliography below. 47. Jones, review of Bibliography on Land Utilization, 1918–1936,” 355. 48. For a discussion of the Parnells’ dependence on their family, see Groves, Petticoat Rebellion, 63. For married women’s property in England, see Lee Holcombe, Wives

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and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). In Britain, married women gained the right to inherit land in 1870, and the right to buy, sell, and manage property in 1882. 49. Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 50. See Ester Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970); for the preference of European empires for male labor, 64; for colonial-era prohibitions on women’s ownership of land, 48. A more theoretical approach than Boserup’s was offered by Judith Stacey, whose work anticipated later critiques of the insistence on male property titling in development economics. Judith Stacey, “China’s Socialist Revolution, Peasant Families, and the Uses of the Past,” Theory and Society 9:2 (1980): 269–81. For later feminist critiques of development, Nancy Baster, The Measurement of Women’s Participation in Development: The Use of Census Data, Discussion Paper 159 (Brighton, U.K.: Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, 1981); Elizabeth Daley, Women’s Land Rights and Privatization in Eastern Africa, ed. Birgit Englert (Melton: U.K.: James Currey, 2008); Annalisa Mauro and Sabine Pallas, Women’s Access to Land: The Role of Evidence-Based Advocacy for Women’s Rights (Rome: IFAD, 2009). 51. The conversation with the anonymous climate scientist is reported by journalist Dougald Hine in “Notes from Underground #8: The Lab and the Play,” Bella Caledonia, January 16, 2020, bellacaledonia.org.uk/2020/01/16/notes-from-underground -8-the-lab-and-the-play. He writes: “ ‘You have to understand,’ someone told me, ‘there’s no precedent for the attempt to create a process by which the findings of science feed directly into political negotiations.’ ” Hine later identified the individual as a climate scientist in a personal conversation.

7. The Peasant’s Calculator 1. Rainer Schickele, Agrarian Revolution and Economic Progress: A Primer for Development (New York: Praeger, 1968), 85. 2. Gerrit Huizer, “The Ujamaa Village Program in Tanzania: New Forms of Rural Development,” Studies in Comparative International Development, June 1, 1973, 184. 3. For fire, W. M. Adams, T. Potkanski, and J. E. G. Sutton, “Indigenous Farmer-­ Managed Irrigation in Sonjo, Tanzania,” Geographical Journal 160:1 (March 1994): 22. A similar case of fire as a prompt to displacement has been documented in the Ujamaa relationship with the Maasai. Elliot Fratkin and Robin Mearns, “Sustainability and Pastoral Livelihoods: Lessons from East African Maasai and Mongolia,” Human Organization 62:2 (2003): 112–22. A cursory survey suggests that accounts of forced displacement are missing from Western media coverage of Ujamaa in the 1970s and ’80s. See, for instance, Marvine Howe, “Tanzanian Self-Help Villages Crowded,” New York Times, October 5, 1970; Louisa Dawkins, “Reality Trip in Africa,” New York Times, October 8,

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1989. For Ostrom’s workshop, see Geert Diemer, Boubacar Fall, and Frans P. Huibers, “Promoting a Smallholder-Centered Approach to Irrigation: Lessons from Village Irrigation Schemes in the Senegal River Valley” (working paper, Digital Library of the Commons, 1991), dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/handle/10535/4595. 4. Bonny Ibhawoh and J. I. Dibua, “Deconstructing Ujamaa: The Legacy of Julius Nyerere in the Quest for Social and Economic Development,” African Journal of Political Science 8:1 (2003): 59–83. 5. Terry Shea, “Curta Handheld Calculator: How to Literally Crank out the Numbers,” Hemmings Motor News, March 2012; Cliff Stoll, “The Curious History of the First Pocket Calculator,” Scientific American, January 2004, 92–99. 6. Letter, C. R. Wharton to Jogaratnam (July 16, 1966), in folder “Ceylon, University of, many other universities,” Agricultural Development Council, General Conferences, IV 3B1.33, box 3, folder 44, Rockefeller Archive, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. 7. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (London: New Press, 2008). As Samuel Moyn explains, “Prebisch theorized that a world in which the north manufactured on the basis of the south’s raw materials would lock in and indeed accelerate global inequality. This argument led him to argue that Latin American (and presumably, other even less developed) nations should adopt relatively more autarkic approaches to political economy so as to generate indigenous manufacturing sectors to disrupt the downward spiral of dependency.” Samuel Moyn, Not Enough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 114. Prebisch was director of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), and later founder of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). 8. David Hapgood and Max F. Millikan, “Policies for Promoting Agricultural Development: Report of a Conference on Productivity and Innovation in Agriculture in the Underdeveloped Countries,” Technical Report (Cambridge: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1965), 98. 9. Asher is quoted in “Discussion” (no author provided), in Colin Legum, The First UN Development Decade and Its Lessons for the 1970’s (New York: Published in Cooperation with the Vienna Institute for Development [by] Praeger, 1970), 41. 10. Paul Bairoch, “Trends in 1960–67,” in Legum, First UN Development Decade, 43. 11. William D. Clark, “Creating Political Will,” in Legum, First UN Development Decade, 149. 12. Paul Bairoch, “Trends in 1960–67,” in Legum, First UN Development Decade, 43. 13. Bairoch, “Trends in 1960–67,” 43. 14. As William Clark explained, “All the aid, and more, that we pour out to the less-developed countries comes straight back in orders—that is why all developing countries have [an] acute balance of payment deficits.” Swiss economist Bruno Fritsch agreed, quoting Raúl Prebisch’s newly published study, Towards a Global Strategy for Development (New York: UNCTAD, 1968), which highlighted the near $20 billion cap-

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ital investment gap between rich nations and poor as the problem. See “Discussion,” in Legum, First UN Development Decade, 81. 15. “Discussion,” in Legum, First UN Development Decade, 38. 16. Collis Stocking, “India’s Crucial Years,” 6, FF 004753, Ford Foundation Archives, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. 17. Stocking, “India’s Crucial Years,” 6. 18. “Application for Research Grant” (1966), in folder 143, “Wisconsin, University of: Clark Robert C. (66–23),” American University Research Program, Agricultural Development Council, IV 3b1.23, ADC, AURP, Grants, Agricultural Development Council Archives, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. 19. “IBM Machines, 1959–6,” in Agricultural Development Council, Record Group IV 3B1.33, box 19, folder 271, American University Research Program, Agricultural Development Council, IV 3b1.23, ADC, AURP, Grants, Agricultural Development Council Archives. 20. Hapgood and Millikan, “Policies for Promoting Agricultural Development,” 106. 21. Hapgood and Millikan, “Policies for Promoting Agricultural Development,” 106. 22. Clark, “Creating Political Will,” 148. 23. For the “nerve center,” see “Report: Conference on Land Tenure and Related Problems” (1953), 2, in Ford Foundation Report #003240, box 18644, Ford Foundation Archives. The Rockefeller Foundation had been interested in improvement through information sharing since its earliest initiatives. As early as its experiments with malaria in the 1930s, the Rockefeller Foundation added the principle of informational organization to science. Fosdick 48, folder 3, “Allahabad Agricultural Institute: Agricultural Extension Training and Evaluation” (1955–63), Agricultural Development Council, Rec­ ord Group IV 3B1.33, box 1: Allahabad Agricultural Institute, Rockefeller Archive. 24. A. N. Singh, “Report of the Extension Department” (February 1957), in folder 1, “Allahabad Agricultural Institute: Agricultural Extension Training and Evaluation” (1955–63), box 1, Agricultural Development Council, Record Group IV 3B1.33, Rockefeller Archive. “Project—Teaching Material for Agricultural Economics,” 9, in folder 7: “Teaching Materials,” box 1: Allahabad Agricultural Institute, Agricultural Development Council, Record Group IV 3B1.33, Rockefeller Archive. 25. Singh, “Report of the Extension Department.” 26. Singh, “Report of the Extension Department.” 27. “Syllabus for Vikas-Mela Short Course,” in folder 1, “Allahabad Agricultural Institute: Agricultural Extension Training and Evaluation” (1955–63), box 1, Agricultural Development Council, Record Group IV 3B1.33, Rockefeller Archive. 28. “Annual Report of the Indian Agricultural Program” (1962–63) in folder 2337, box 121, 464 India, Rockefeller Archive.

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29. Quotation: “Indexed Bibliographies,” folder 5, “Training Materials,” Agricultural Development Council, IV3B1.4, Ford and Rockefeller Archives. For proposed reading material, letter, C. R. Wharton to Jogaratnam (July 16, 1966), in folder “Ceylon, University of, many other universities,” “Agricultural Development Council, General Conferences,” IV 3B1.33, box 3, folder 44, Rockefeller Archive. For reprinting and ADC expense, letter, T. Jogaratnam to R. Schickele (1970), in folder “Ceylon, University of, many other universities,” folder 31, “Agricultural Development Council, General Conferences,” IV 3B1.33, box 3, Rockefeller Archive. For books circulated and numbers, see unnamed manuscript describing books, in folder 7, “Training Materials,” Agricultural Development Council, IV3B1.4, Ford and Rockefeller Archives. 30. Unnamed manuscript describing books, in folder 7, “Training Materials.” 31. “Tentative Preliminary Draft, Training Materials, Agricultural Development,” 99 (September 1964), in folder 2, “Agricultural Development, Pre G.A.M,” box 1, Agricultural Development Council, IV3B1.4, Rockefeller Archive. 32. “Tentative Preliminary Draft,” 99–100. 33. “Tentative Preliminary Draft,” 204. 34. “Report on Land Tenure and Land Use Problems in the Trust Territories of Tanganyika and Ruanda-Urundi by Arthur Gaitskell” (1959), in “Land Use Aspects” (1959), in Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/23, FAO Archive. 35. For the FAO’s growing needs, Amalia Ribi Forclaz, “From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955,” International History Review 41:2 (2019): 362. Initially, FAO budgets came mainly through the EPTA (Expanded Program for Technical Assistance), after 1958 through the UNSF (UN Special Fund), and after 1966 the UNDP (the UN Development Programme; the merger of the two). For the EPTA, UNSF, and UNDP, Ruth Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics’: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1945–1965,” in M. Frey, S. Kunkel, and C. R. Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (London: Springer, 2014), 85. 36. For Shell and the 1966 Industry Cooperative Program, see Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics,’ ” 87; for “a more active interest in agriculture,” 88. For relationships between the FAO and the World Bank over extension, see “Supervised Agricultural Credit” (1959), in Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 6/2, FAO Archive. 37. Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics,’ ” 85, note 54. More research is needed to establish the exact ways in which the United States used this influence over funding. 38. “Agricultural Credit—General” (August 1962), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 6/1, vol. 2, FAO Archive. For “later,” I write from anecdotes shared by FAO officers with whom I spoke casually during my work at

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the archive. Research tracing the alignments of FAO policy and budgets is necessary to clarify the dynamics that I sketch out here. 39. See Suárez, “The FAO and Its Work,” 6. My assessments of the FAO as a “colony” of the World Bank are loosely triangulated from Phillips’s careful outline of FAO reorganization, Saouma’s history, and much reading in the FAO files, in particular the correspondence of Arthur Gaitskell, as evidence of an earlier moment of caution at the FAO, later made impossible by greater loans from the World Bank. For a long overview that sketches some of these realignments, see Saouma, FAO in the Front Line of Development. Focused on a later era, some scholars have discussed the contemporary withdrawal of U.S. funds from the FAO (under Saouma): Tobias Berger and Alejandro Esguerra, World Politics in Translation (London: Routledge, 2017). My research—which is not primarily focused on the World Bank—suggests that rigorous historical inquiry will be needed into the financial relationships between World Bank and the United Nations. 40. Norris Dodd, “The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” Agricultural History 23:2 (1949): 81–86. 41. Hapgood and Millikan, “Policies for Promoting Agricultural Development,” 84. 42.  Conference on the Further Development in the United Kingdom of Appropriate Technologies (London: Intermediate Technology Development Group, 1968), 1. 43. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 44. In his speech to the 1968 conference, Schumacher defined three gaps in which these blockages of information worked: “(1) the gap which always exists between the rich and the poor. (2) the gap which always exists between the educated and the uneducated. (3) the gap between town and country.” Conference on the Further Development, 5. 45. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, 7. 46. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, 6. 47. As land reform fell out of the appropriate technology conversation, it left behind only a reform on paper, run by “paper heroes,” as architecture critic Witold Rybczynski would jeeringly call its pioneers. Witold Rybczynski, Paper Heroes (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980). 48. Lane De Moll, Rainbook (New York: Schocken, 1977); Directory of Institutions and Individuals Active in Environmentally-Sound and Appropriate Technologies (Oxford: Published for the United Nations Environment Programme by Pergamon, 1979); Appropriate Technology Institutions (London: Intermediate Technology Development Group, 1987). Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 125–26. 49. Hugh Hanning, Conference on the Further Development in the United Kingdom of Appropriate Technologies (London: Intermediate Technology Development Group, 1968), 2.

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50. Hanning, Conference on the Further Development, 10–11. 51. Stephen Macekura, Of Limits and Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 154. In the rest of the surrounding chapter, Macekura gives an account of ITDG’s afterlife. 52. W. M. Adams, T. Potkanski, and J. E. G. Sutton, “Indigenous Farmer-Managed Irrigation in Sonjo, Tanzania,” Geographical Journal 160:1 (March 1994): 22.

8. China and the Battle over Memory 1. For the agrarian program of 1924 and the adoption of the slogan, see Marie-­ Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), 387–88. For “the land to those who till it”: Wittfogel, “Mao Tse-Tung,” 6. For “He who tills the land shall own it”: Frank C. Lee, “Land Redistribution in Communist China,” Pacific Affairs 21:1 (1948): 20. “Equal distribution of land” would be flagged as one of the party’s chief aims by in 1927; see Wittfogel, “Mao Tse-Tung,” 6. 2. “Land for the People,” Irish National Land League banner dated 1879. RTÉ Archives. 3. “He who tills the land shall own it” is a rendering of Jeremiah 27:11. 4. Wittfogel, “Mao Tse-Tung,” 5; also quoted in “Land Reform in China—II,” Economist, June 30, 1951, 1570. 5. Brian DeMare, Land Wars (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2019), 112. 6. For example, R. H. Tawney, Land and Labour in China (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1932); John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China: A Study of 16,786 Farms in 168 Localities, and 38,256 Farm Families in Twenty-Two Provinces in China, 1929–1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937). 7. Accounts of these attacks are stressed in the contemporary literature critical of Communism, esp. Frank Moraes, “Journey to China,” Times of India, June 24, 1952, 4; C. M. Chang, “Five Years of Communist Rule in China,” Foreign Affairs, October 1954, 100. In the north, a quest for an ideally egalitarian distribution of land resulted in neighbors murdering neighbors in ongoing quarrels and conspiracies; see Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). For an overview of the “confrontations” with landlords and the range of outcomes, see DeMare, Land Wars, 100–129; for the dunce cap, 102; for rumors of buried treasure, 110–11; for the official warnings against violence, 112; for 250,000, 113. DeMare notes that 250,000 was the official Communist figure. For the codification of the work of peasant associations in redistributing land after 1950, see Chris Brammall, Chinese Economic Development (London: Routledge, 2009), 94; for 1945–46 as “peak wildcatting” (my gloss on his explanation), 94. The period of extreme redistribution was ended by Mao, whose land reforms after 1950 consisted of a “wager on the strong” rather than a promise of extreme egalitarianism in landholding; the process remained bloody, with 700,000 slain in 1950–52 (95).

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8. For Manchuria, “Land Reform in China—II,” 1573. For food production and family incomes, see Zhou Feizhou and Camille Bourguignon, “Land Reform Throughout the 20th Century in China,” in Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize, Camille Bourguignon, and Rogerius Johannes Eugenius van den Brink, eds., Agricultural Land Redistribution: Toward Greater Consensus (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2009), 124. 9. Feizhou and Bourguignon, “Land Reform,” 126; Bramall, Chinese Economic Development, 95–96, 105–9. 10. Bramall, Chinese Economic Development, 118–28. 11. Moraes, “Journey to China.” 12. “Peiping’s Land Distribution Program Described by British Newsman,” Radio Free Asia, November 16, 1952, 9, Information and Reference Section, in Committee for a Free Asia, 5.4, Hoover Institution Archives. 13. “Peiping’s Land Distribution,” 2. 14. “Peiping’s Land Distribution,” 2. 15. For quotation, “Peasantry Reform in China: Plans Outlined,” Times of India, July 7, 1953. For Chinese-Indian relations in this period more generally, see Sunil S. Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts and Seas Have Shaped Asia’s History (New York: Basic, 2018), 215–16, which handles India’s relationship to Chinese dam development during the same period. 16. Surindar Suri, “Book Review: Land Reform in China,” Economic Weekly, April 29, 1961. 17. “Land Reform in China Praised: Mr. Mukerjee’s View,” Times of India, January 12, 1955. 18. “Peiping, Taking Credit for Giving Land to the Peasant, Now Admits They Will Take It Away Again in State Farms,” Manchester Guardian, December 9, 1952, 2, collected by Radio Free Asia in the Information and Reference Section, in Committee for a Free Asia, 5.4, Hoover Institution Archives. 19. Chang, “Five Years”; C. M. Chang, “Mao’s Stratagem of Land Reform,” Foreign Affairs, July 1951, 550–63. 20.  Land Reform in Free China (Taipei: Free China Review, 1953), 3. 21. For famine, Feizhou and Bourguignon, “Land Reform,” 126. For a thorough account of crimes and suffering associated with the famine, see Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine. 22. Wittfogel, “China and Russia,” 2–5, 8–10. 23. The masses were “herded into the collectives,” he wrote, in “the most gigantic socio-economic mass surrender known in history.” Wittfogel, “The End of the Chinese Peasantry,” 10. 24. Wittfogel, “Freedom Means Land Reform in Asia.” 25. Wittfogel, “Mao Tse-Tung,” 11.

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26. Wittfogel, “The End of the Chinese Peasantry,” 9. 27. For quotation, Karl A. Wittfogel, “The End of the Chinese Peasantry,” New Leader, February 13, 1956, 19, in Karl A. Wittfogel Papers, 75.6, Hoover Institution Archives; for more on duplicitousness, 8. For Wittfogel’s complicated political history and rehabilitation as one of the chief intellectuals of the American conservative establishment, see Neil Smith, “Rehabilitating a Renegade? The Geography and Politics of Karl August Wittfogel,” Dialectical Anthropology 12:1 (1987): 127–36. 28. For “control,” see Wittfogel, “The End of the Chinese Peasantry,” 10. Wittfogel explained, “The master strategists of the Kremlin have systematically analyzed this lesson of the October Revolution and they have carefully applied it to agrarian conditions in Asia.” Karl A. Wittfogel, “Asia’s Freedom . . . and the Land Question,” Survey, November 1950, 479, Karl A. Wittfogel Papers, 73.12, Hoover Institution Archives. 29. William Bredo, “Agrarian Reform in Vietnam,” 17–18, in Allan Goodman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 30. Indeed, in the 1970s, the phrase “a crisis of rising expectations” was applied by economists and political scientists to diagnose a variety of social ills, ranging from the Mexican Revolution to the crisis in higher education. Claudio J. Fuchs and Henry A. Landsberger, “ ‘Revolution of Rising Expectations’ or ‘Traditional Life Ways’? A Study of Income Aspirations in a Developing Country,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 21:2 (1973): 212–26; Anthony R. Oberschall, “Rising Expectations and Political Turmoil,” Journal of Development Studies 6:1 (1969): 5–22. 31. Wittfogel, “Freedom Means Land Reform in Asia.” 32. “Ten Oustanding Magazine Articles Selected by a Council of Librarians” (November 1950), in Karl A. Wittfogel Papers, 73.12, Hoover Institution Archive. 33. Wittfogel, “Freedom Means Land Reform in Asia,” 3. This article was reprinted in the Congressional Record in 1951. See also Wittfogel, “A New Policy for Asia.” 34. “The ability of the UN to carry through land reform in Korea quickly and generously will go far to determine the strength of native support for guerilla war on the ravaged peninsula,” he explained. Yet for the United Nations to be effective at promoting smallholder land-to-the-tiller reforms over class war in disguise, it would have to exile Communist interests, Wittfogel argued. Wittfogel, “Freedom Means Land Reform in Asia,” 3. 35. “2nd World Land Reform Conference” (May 1963), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 7/20, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 36. Doreen Warriner, Land Reform and Economic Development (Cairo: National Bank of Egypt, 1955), 3. 37. For Taiwan and Cuba, “Draft Paragraphs for the Use of Mr. McDougall on Land Reform at the next ECOSOC Discussions,” 2, in folder “UN” (May 1952), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 10, Miscellaneous

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Files, FAO Archive. For response around the world, Norris Dodd, “Three Lectures on the Implications of the FAO” (1952), 29, in “Personal Papers: Speeches 1950–2,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:4, Hoover Institution Archives, 29. 38. Karl A. Wittfogel, “The Strange Case of Indian Land Reform,” New Leader, February 22, 1954, 17, in Karl A. Wittfogel Papers (74.13), Hoover Institution Archives. C. Clyde Mitchell argued that the lesson of Korea and Japan was that land redistribution was America’s best tool for promoting political stability abroad. C. Clyde Mitchell, Land Reform in Asia: A Case Study (Washington, D.C.: National Planning Association, 1952). Chester Bowles, after visiting Hyderabad and Madras, argued in his Ambassador’s Report (New York: Harper, 1954) that halfway land reform measures were leaving those regions dangerously open to Communist influence. See also Wittfogel, “Indian Land Reform,” 18. 39. “Conference of the Council on Economic and Cultural Affairs, Inc. with Council Grantees Who Visited Asia and Attended the Tenth International Conference of Agricultural Economists at Mysore, India in the Summer of 1958” (January 17, 1959), 6, folder 1, “Conference: International Conference of Agricultural Economists Grantees,” in Conferences (1959–1962), IV 3B1.12, box 1, Agricultural Development Council Archive. 40. “Conference of the Council,” 13. 41. “Conference of the Council,” 13. 42. “Conference of the Council,” 86. 43. Kenneth H. Parsons, “Land Reform in the Postwar Era,” Land Economics 33:3 (1957): 216. 44. Parsons, “Land Reform,” 214. 45. Rainer Schickele, Agrarian Revolution and Economic Progress: A Primer for Development (New York: Praeger, 1968), 395. 46. Folke Dovring, the Swedish agrarian economist who worked at the FAO from 1953 to 1960, warned about the dangers involved in characterizing communist, socialist, and capitalist approaches to the economy as fundamentally opposed, arguing that much of political philosophy, of whatever kind, wasa system of “irrational values.” Folke Dovring, Land and Labor in Europe, 1900–1950 (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956), 2. As a historian reviewing the history of the first half of the twentieth century, he was inclined to see socialist, communist, and capitalist ideologies as points on a spectrum, all aiming to transform different spatial regions for development: “Socialism took the urban-industrial process of production as a point of departure,” he explained, “while Communist land policy strives to make farming industry operate in large enterprises.” The most significant divisions, he reasoned, were between communism and capitalism, with the former’s emphasis on scale and expert-led development, and the latter’s devolution-based hopes to “decentralize manufacturing industries into something akin to a family farm structure” (2).

notes to pages

2 4 3 – 2 4 8    509

47. Edmundo Flores, “Land Reform and the Alliance for Progress,” in Center of International Studies Policy Memorandum 27 (Princeton: Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, May 20, 1963). 48. Flores, “Land Reform,” 2. 49. Gunnar Myrdal, “The United Nations, Agriculture, and the World Economic Revolution,” Journal of Farm Economics 47:4 (November 1965): 897–98. 50. Howard R. Tolley, “Farmers in a Hungry World,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 95:1 (February 1951): 60. 51. Norris Dodd, “Some Things That Need to Be Said” (February 16, 1953), 6, in “Personal Papers: Speeches 1953–4,” Norris E. Dodd Papers 1:5, Hoover Institution Archives. 52. For Stalin’s accusations, Carter Malkasian, The Korean War (Oxford: Osprey, 2001). For Security Council actions, Michael Howard, “The United Nations and International Security,” in Adam Roberts and B. Kingsbury eds., United Nations, Divided World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). For the United Nations getting caught in the middle, see T. Weiss, D. Forsythe, and R. Coate, “The Reality of UN Security Efforts During the Cold War,” in The United Nations and Changing World Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), 46. 53. Folder “UN” (May 1952–56), Land and Water Development Division, Land and Water Use Branch Files, box 10, Miscellaneous Files, FAO Archive. 54. The letter’s writer complained after the Chilean press published the FAO’s congratulations to President Frei on the new agrarian reform. Letter from Ernesto Navarrette Benitez, in “Land Tenure and Land Reform—General” (1962), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/5/66, vol. 1, FAO Archive. For Anderson’s internal response, memo, “Letter of Sr. Benitez on the Chilean Agrarian Reform,” Viggo Anderson to B. R. Sen (1965), in “Land Tenure and Land Reform— General,” (1962–66), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/5, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 55. “Letter of Sr. Benitez on the Chilean Agrarian Reform.” 56. When consulted, Hernan Santa Cruz, the ADG in charge of Latin American Affairs, advised Sen that the original letter didn’t deserve a reply. Memo, Hernan Santa Cruz to B. R. Sen, “Mr. Navarrete’s letter, from Chile” (December 8, 1965), in “Land Tenure and Land Reform—General” (1962–66), Rural Institutes and Services Division, Rural Development Program, RU 4/5/66, vol. 1, FAO Archive. 57. Rainer Schickele, “Theories Concerning Land Tenure,” Journal of Farm Economics 34:5 (1952): 736. 58. Jachertz, “ ‘To Keep Food Out of Politics,’ ” 85–88. 59. Alice Thorner, “Excerpts from an FBI File,” Economic and Political Weekly, May 22, 1982, 878–84; Patnaik, “Alice Thorner.”

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60. Curtis Eriksmoen, “Professor at What Is Now NDSU Was Investigated and Falsely Accused of Being Disloyal to U.S.,” Forum (Fargo, N.D.), August 17, 2019. Schickele protested the case and was allowed to assume his work at the FAO in 1954. 61. Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 94–103. “McCarthy’s committee had an office in the UN building, checking for communist influences there, and from 1950 to 1953, during Trygve Lie’s weak secretariat, he scared off or fired many excellent specialists”; Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 2020), 100. 62. John Powell, “Peasants, Land Reform, and Revolutionary Movements,” SEADAG Reports (New York: Southeast Development Advisory Group of the Asia Society, 1974), 18, in Allan E. Goodman Papers, box 25, “Conference and Seminar Proceedings,” Hoover Institution Archives. 63. “Peasants, Land Reform, and Revolutionary Movements,” SEADAG Reports (New York: Southeast Development Advisory Group of the Asia Society, 1974), 18, in Allan E. Goodman Papers, box 25, “Conference and Seminar Proceedings,” Hoover Institution Archives. 64. “Peasants, Land Reform, and Revolutionary Movements,” SEADAG Reports (New York: Southeast Development Advisory Group of the Asia Society, 1974), 18, in Allan E. Goodman Papers, box 25, “Conference and Seminar Proceedings,” Hoover Institution Archives. 65. Introduction to SEADAG Reports, n.p. 66.  SEADAG Reports, 16. 67. A full account of Wittfogel’s intellectual evolution would necessarily take account of Wittfogel’s distinction between Communist land reforms, like those pursued by Mao and Stalin, and peaceful smallholder land reforms on the British model. Traditional land reforms, or “genuine land reforms,” as Wittfogel explained them, had as their direct aim the creation of political stability. Wittfogel, “Mao Tse-Tung,” 16. In Wittfogel’s early view of history, leaders could effectively combat despotism by promoting benevolent reforms to fashion a nation of smallholders before peasant dissent created an unmoored revolution. When Macarthur implemented land reform in Japan, he “accomplished what Stolypin had hoped to do but could not.” Wittfogel, “Asia’s Freedom,” 480. Praising the Japanese land reform, Wittfogel marveled approvingly at how 90 percent of all arable land in the island had become “the property of the peasants who till it.” Wittfogel, “Asia’s Freedom,” 480. In early articles, Wittfogel praised Chiang Kai-shek for wooing peasants away from Mao with promises of land, lauded the failed efforts of American land reform in South Korea, and commended Nehru and other leaders of newly independent former colonies for working with the promise of land. Pleading for U.S. intervention in China to help Chiang Kai-shek, Wittfogel advocated

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more American-led land reforms around the world, which he believed would become the pivotal strategy for winning the global war against communism. Karl Wittfogel, “Freedom Means Land Reform in Asia,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 16, 1950, in Karl A. Wittfogel Papers, 73.12, Hoover Institution Archive. 68. Here is the full passage: “The facts of history generally and of Asia’s great despotic monarchies particularly reveal that the power of an absolute managerial (or even a semi-managerial) state corrupts its rulers absolutely, however benevolent their intentions. A policy which, instead of creating an independent, educated, and democratic peasantry, makes the rural producer the slave-like tool of a state-centered totalitarian economy is nothing but reactionary Utopianism: progressive in words and retrogressive in deeds.” Wittfogel, “Mao Tse-Tung,” 19. 69. Wittfogel, “Mao Tse-Tung,” 19. 70. For “shirking,” see Justin Yifu Lin, “Collectivization and China’s Agricultural Crisis in 1959–1961,” Journal of Political Economy 98:6 (1990): 1228–52; Feizhou and Bourguignon, “Land Reform,” 124–26; Louis G. Putterman, Continuity and Change in China’s Rural Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a careful critique of Lin, Bramall, Chinese Economic Development, 128–29. 71. Daniel Thorner and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1962), 22–23. The Thorners thought they understood the historical mechanism of other changes, too, such as suffrage. They anticipated that suffrage would eventually lead to the abolition of class distinctions and of monopoly class ownership and landlordism. The first reforms after 1947 became corrupted. “To put matters bluntly,” they wrote, “the land reform legislation of India has been defectively conceived; bills with major loopholes have been presented to the legislatures; which in turn have seriously weakened the original bills by adding crippling amendments” (22). These corruptions meant that the idea had never been effectively tried. “To date, India has not yet had the kind of land reforms that could conceivably pave the way for a period of rapid agricultural development” (22). The result was that even when modern infrastructure was laid, as with the Sarda Canal, rich landlords were able to pay off state water engineers to receive better service than the poor workers of the land. Bribery, corruption, and evasion of the intent of reform were endemic in every part of the state machinery, and they were particularly grievous in land reform issues because the stakes of ownership were so high. Land ceilings were imposed, but the machinery of bureaucracy meant that they were often evaded. The term for this was paper partitions: a single piece of land was divided so as to appear that it had been divided among many (22; see also 28–29). The Thorners listed a score of recent failures, beginning with Vinoba Bhave’s bhoodan movement. Together with “community development” and the Grow More Food Campaign, all such voluntary movements, the Thorners argued, had been unable to make “headway against the strong and deeply-rooted forces” of landlordism

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(78). For a retrospective account of land ceilings as the source of the failure of Indian land reform, see Uppal, Indian Economic Planning, 52–69. 72. There is an argument that the cynic’s attitude toward land redistribution is typical of exiles. As another historian has suggested, Wittfogel, like Wolf Ladejinsky, was a refugee—one from the Holocaust, the other from Soviet Russia. Their Jewish identity would have excluded them from benefiting from the prewar land reforms in Europe. Disappointed by one utopia, they substituted for a right of occupation what they regarded as a more rational solution: the market. Nick Cullather hints at such associations in his discussion of the experience of exile among postwar economists: Cullather, The Hungry World, 146–49. 73. Karin Dovring, “Land Reform as a Propaganda Theme,” in Folke Dovring, Land and Labor in Europe, 1900–1950: With a Chapter on Land Reform as a Propaganda Theme by Karin Dovring (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1956), 297. While the Thorners shared joint authorship of their Land and Labor in India, Folke Dovring adopted the convention of specifying Karin’s chapter as separately authored, printed in a book otherwise his own. Thus I cite Karin separately here, and cite Folke Dovring separately when referring to other parts of the book. 74. Dovring insisted on materialism as one root of an orientation toward a shared reality; this is the general materialism of agrarian and social history, of course, as distinct from the ideological materialism of Marxist history, which sometimes overlaps with it. Politics and identity, according to Dovring, were matters of distraction, easily dispensed with when people focused on material results. If politicians concentrated their energies on the development of land rather than ideology, he reasoned, well-fed peasants and empowered urban workers might of their own accord ensure less repressive governments, developing both city and countryside, and thus whittling away at the supposed barriers between capitalism and communism. Land reform was more than a development strategy; it was the roadmap to peace. See Dovring, Land and Labor in Europe, 2. 75. The quotations reflect the titles of their books: Low, The Egalitarian Moment; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006 [1992]). 76. Like Wittfogel before him, Low borrowed from “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” promising to read the productions of anthropologists and other experts against the grain to show how so much midcentury liberal enthusiasm was caught up in processes that excluded the working class from the structures of rule. The phrase is originally from Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 32, although it has been recirculated abundantly since. See Rita Felski, “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” M/C Journal 15:1 (2011), which traces the twentieth-­ century history of the term and provides a critique of critique.

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77. D. Anthony Low, The Egalitarian Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Low insists that there was never a real possibility of peasant movements triumphing over local elites. The supposedly egalitarian movement of land reform was destined, perhaps even designed, to fail. 78. For Wittfogel and Ladejinsky as exiles, see Cullather, The Hungry World, 94– 103. Ladejinsky’s complex career and his reversal of position on land reform parallels Wittfogel’s reversals on Communism; the biographies of both have been the subject of a great deal of excellent research by American historians. David A. Conrad, “ ‘Before It Is Too Late’: Land Reform in South Vietnam, 1956–1968,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 21:1 (2014): 34–57. 79. Fukuyama, The End of History. 80. J. R. Kloppenburg, First the Seed (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Cullather, The Hungry World.

9. Racism, Skepticism, and the Cloak of Science in U.S. Debates About Land Redistribution 1. William Paddock and Elizabeth Paddock, We Don’t Know How (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1973), 147–49. 2. William Carson Paddock, transcript (University of Iowa, 1943); Elizabeth Jane Mills, transcript (University of Iowa, 1943). 3. Jim Handy, Revolution in the Countryside (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 4. 4. Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For squatters and their arrests, Stephen M. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 40. 5. Paddock and Paddock, We Don’t Know How, 161. When discussing this chapter, I use “William” or “Bill” rather than “William and Elizabeth” or “Bill and Liz,” since the anecdotes about Mexico and Guatemala are written in his voice and concern experiences that he had as a teenager. 6. William Paddock and Paul Paddock, Hungry Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964); Famine, 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). For Paul, see “Paul E. Paddock Jr., Writer on Famine,” New York Times, August 30, 1975. 7. “Well, What’s to Be Done? Hungry Nations, by William and Paul Paddock (Review),” New York Times, October 25, 1964, sec. BR, 3.

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8. Paddock and Paddock, Famine, 1975! 206. 9. Gunnar Myrdal, “The Worldwide Emancipation of Underdeveloped Nations,” Phi Delta Kappan 45:8 (1964): 414. 10. Flores, “Land Reform,” 10. For Myrdal, see Myrdal, “Worldwide Emancipation,” 414. 11. For references to the five-acre grievance, see Dorner, Latin American Land Reforms; Jim Hightower, “Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times,” in Richard Merrill, ed., Radical Agriculture (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 104–5. For Peru, see Hugo Blanco, Tierra o muerte (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1972), translated as Land or Death (New York: Pathfinder, 1972. 12. Maize Houghton, “The Northern New Mexico Lands of Life and Death,” Law and Society Journal at the University of California, Santa Barbara 8 (2008–9): 55–76. 13. Houghton, “The Northern New Mexico Lands of Life and Death,” 63–65. 14. Houghton, “The Northern New Mexico Lands of Life and Death,” 63–65. 15. See protest sign “Tierra o Muerte” (Tierra Amarilla, N.M., 1967), at the Museum of American History, accession number 1990.0654, americanhistory.si.edu /collections/search/object/nmah_1142283. 16. For thirty-three thousand farms, see Lester M. Salamon, Land and Minority Enterprise: The Crisis and the Opportunity (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Minority Business Enterprise, 1976), iii; for recommendations of a government program to correct this imbalance, 25. For racism at the USDA, which precipitated this dramatic decline in landownership, see Pete Daniel, Dispossession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). For African American claims to reparations in land, see Dan Berger and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “ ‘The Struggle Is for Land!’ Race, Territory, and National Liberation,” in The Hidden 1970s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 57–76. For Forman, see Russell Rickford, “ ‘We Can’t Grow Food on All This Concrete’: The Land Question, Agrarianism, and Black Nationalist Thought in the Late 1960s and 1970s,” Journal of American History 103:4 (2017): 968. Cullather highlights the fact that Wolf Ladejinsky gave congressional testimony about Sherman, linking landownership to enduring racism in the 1950s. He hints that Ladejinsky’s support of African American land rights might have been behind Ladejinsky’s failure to obtain a security clearance in 1954: “Americans approved of land reform for others, not for themselves,” he writes. Nick Cullather, The Hungry World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 103. For a broader international context, consider Dudziak’s discussion of the civil rights struggle, which she believes was taken with increasing seriousness in light of Soviet propaganda. See Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Land reform may have marked the limit of how far Americans were willing to be pushed. 17. For indigenous participation in the ejidos, see Raymond Craib, Cartographic

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Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 220–21; Elizabeth Anne Olson, Indigenous Knowledge and Development (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2014), 26–27. For tribal participation in bhoodan (generally esteemed a more limited case of success), see Mahendra Lal Patel, Agrarian Transformation in Tribal India (Springfield, Mo.: M.D., 1998), 169–206. 18. For Alcatraz and South Dakota, see Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior, Like a Hurricane (New York: The News, 1996); for Ganienkeh, Anders Corr, No Trespassing! (Boston: South End, 1999), 12; for further context on all three: Douglas William Brown, Indian Land Claims (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 75; Troy R. Johnson, The Occupation of Alcatraz Island (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Kent Blansett, Journey to Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). An important piece for reading these events in their international context is Mary Lawlor, “Indigenous Internationalism: Native Rights and the UN,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 1:3 (2003): 351–69. Lawlor’s chronology stresses indigenous efforts to be recognized by international bodies since at least the League of Nations, and UN commitments after 1982; the intensification of native claims in the 1970s may partially explain American reactions. 19. For the use of “public trust doctrine” to argue for an expanding federal intervention on behalf of the environment—an American species of land use planning that aligns with many of the global land administration traditions discussed in this book— see Carol M. Rose, “Joseph Sax and the Idea of the Public Trust,” Ecology Law Quarterly 25 (1998): 351–62. For a contemporary congressional inquiry into what environmentalism might require of the federal government, see One Third of the Nation’s Land (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970), 67–80, which lays out a detailed call for federal land use planning aligned with the environment. Wendell Berry, “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture,” in The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977), 27–38; for his use of “appropriate technology,” 37. My argument here is largely circumstantial; it was insufficiently central to the current project to trace American policy makers who explicitly confronted public domain theory or indigenous occupations as a potential attack on white landholding or an otherwise destabilizing assault to U.S. politics. Connections such as these will have to be followed by later historians. Mazower observes that in the 1970s America retreated from being the leader of environmentalism on the world stage to becoming its “chief opponent.” Mazower, Governing the World, 338. 20. Paddock and Paddock, We Don’t Know How, 162–63. 21. Paddock and Paddock, We Don’t Know How, 165. 22. Paddock and Paddock, We Don’t Know How, 171. 23. Paddock and Paddock, We Don’t Know How, 163. 24. Paddock and Paddock, We Don’t Know How, 164.

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25. Paddock and Paddock, We Don’t Know How, 149–51. 26. For the “two cultures” and the context of its writing, see Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 27. Richard J. Ward, review of We Don’t Know How, by William Paddock and Elizabeth Paddock, Review of Social Economy 32:1 (1974): 105–7. 28. Paddock and Paddock, We Don’t Know How. For notes on the Paddocks’ biographies, see Joe Holley, “William C. Paddock, 86; Fought Famine,” Washington Post, March 13, 2008; “Elizabeth Jane Mills,” Palm Beach Post, May 18, 2008; “William Carson Paddock,” New York Times, March 16, 2008. 29. Paddock and Paddock, We Don’t Know How, 169. 30. Tore Olsson, Agrarian Crossings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 188–90. 31. Steve Lubar, “ ‘Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate:’ A Cultural History of the Punch Card,” Journal of American Culture (1992): 43–55. 32. “Volatile Campus Mixture Is Boiling,” Milwaukee Sentinel, November 1, 1969. The article summarizes discussions in campus publications. 33. “22 Arrested in Drug Smuggling Ring,” Bulletin, July 6, 1974; “22 Arrests Break Up Chilean-US Drug Ring,” Daily News, July 8, 1974; “22 Persons Face Charges Connected with Drug-Smuggling Ring,” Lewiston Evening Journal, July 6, 1974; “Americans Arrested: US ‘Studying’ Chilean Regime,” Star-News, September 21, 1973, sec. A; “Charges Shock Prof’s Superior,” Milwaukee Sentinel, July 8, 1974, sec. 1; “Drug Ring Crippled by Arrests,” Herald-Journal, July 7, 1974; “Drug Ring Hard Hit by Arrests of 22 in US and Chile,” Sarasota Herald-Tribute, July 7, 1974; “Drug Smuggling Ring Hit,” Gadsden Times, July 6, 1974; “Six Americans Held in Chile,” Lodi News-Sentinel, September 21, 1973; “US-Chile Connection Alleged,” Milwaukee Journal, July 6, 1974. For what happened to Brown, I channel various anecdotal conversations with alumni of the Land Tenure Center at its fifty-year reunion in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2012; they linked the news stories to Brown’s depression and retirement from the center. Brown’s career was not central to the focus of research, and further inquiry into these events awaits another researcher. 34. “Practically without exception, it is to this group that the State Department turns for information about land reform in developing nations; in fact, the LTC has prepared studies for the State Department on virtually every Latin American country,” explained the report. It went on to attack Land Tenure Center members for sponsoring “development theory” and emphasizing the legacy of colonial rule, rather than foregrounding abuses of human rights by Marxist dictatorships. David Asman, “The Wisconsin Land Tenure Center,” Heritage Foundation Institutional Analysis: Spotlighting Federal Grants, no. 4 (January 13, 1983). 35. An editorial in a Lodi, California, newspaper complained that the Land Tenure

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Center was an example of budget corruption “that will really make your blood boil.” Uhler, “The National Budget Battle.” 36. “Center Gains from Karsten Support,” Milwaukee Sentinel, January 9, 1985, 1. 37. Lewis K. Uhler, “The National Budget Battle,” Lodi News-Sentinel, April 13, 1983, 6. 38. Jill Lepore, If Then (London: Norton, 2020); for progress measured in terms of deaths, 212–13, 215; for using computers and surveys, 241. 39. “Smallholders tend to consume more of their own produce and therefore market less, per unit of output, than do large farmers. This may necessitate food imports to meet the needs of urban consumers. On the other hand, the additional food consumed by small farm families might have otherwise been purchased if members of the family had moved to the city.” Bank Policy on Land Reform (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1974), 8. 40. The report explained that “land reform is rarely undertaken without considerable upheaval and loss of production. . . . The restructuring of land holdings is often accompanied by the destruction of traditional delivery systems for input needs and marketing, since these systems are almost always tied to the operations of the larger farmers that are dispossessed.” Bank Policy on Land Reform, 9. 41.  Bank Policy on Land Reform, 8. 42.  Bank Policy on Land Reform, 8. 43. The World Bank report pointed to a different problem—population pressure, as a result of which the “man-land ratio” across the globe is being challenged. The real issue is therefore not a more equal arrangement of holdings, but how much food is available. Bank Policy on Land Reform, 7. Cullather makes this point with reference to R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968). See Cullather, The Hungry World, 268, 344. 44. Moyn, Not Enough, 129, 133. 45. Moyn, Not Enough, 131–33. 46. Over the course of previous decades, the World Bank had continually opposed UN schemes that relied on a measure of financial independence, for example, the Special UN Fund for Economic Development (SUNFED), which would have made independent routes to development possible. For SUNFED and similar UN loan schemes opposed by the World Bank, see Lorenzini, Global Development, 100–101. For a view on what I call the shift of power from the United Nations to the World Bank, see Sofia Monsalve Suárez, contemporary historian of the United Nations, who writes that the importance of neutrality during the Cold War meant that “the FAO concentrated its activities on areas that were unlikely to be contested by member states (for example, agro-technical practical advice, technical assistance, and training and dissemination of know-how).” Suárez, “The FAO and Its Work,” 9. 47. The major land reforms ongoing today are in Brazil, South Africa, and Colom-

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282–285

bia. See Wendy Wolford, This Land Is Ours Now (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Cherryl Walker, Landmarked (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); Deborah James, Gaining Ground? “Rights” and “Property” in South African Land Reform (London: Cavendish (Glasshouse), 2009); Jacobo Grajales, “Land Grabbing, Legal Contention and Institutional Change in Colombia,” in Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions “from Below” (London: Routledge, 2017), 75–94; John D. Montgomery, International Dimensions of Land Reform (London: Routledge, 2019); Marta-Juanita Villaveces, Jean-Paul Faguet, and Fabio Sánchez, “The Perversion of Land Reform by Landed Elites: Power, Inequality and Development in Colombia” (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia-­ FCE-CID, 2018); Catherine Ammen and Christopher Mitchell, “Legitimacy, Inter­ national Accompaniment, and Land Reform in Colombia,” in Local Peacebuilding and Legitimacy (London: Routledge, 2018), 102–20. 48. Louis Althusser, “Contradiction et Surdetermination (Notes pour une Recherche),” La Pensée 106 (1962): 3–22; trans. as “Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an Investigation” by Ben Brewster in For Marx (London: Verso 2005).

10. A Neoliberal Rebellion in Britain Portions of this chapter were previously published in Jo Guldi, “World Neoliberalism as Rebellion from Below? British Squatters and the Global Interpretation of Poverty, 1946–1974,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 10:1 (2019), 29–57, doi.org/10.1353/hum.2019.0001. 1. Historian Daniel Rodgers characterizes neoliberalism as an intellectual movement with roots in a utopian infatuation with the freedom of information across economic departments and law schools in the 1950s and ’60s. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 41–76. David Harvey and Angus Burgin frame neoliberalism as a political movement originally: see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Both Rodgers and Harvey believe that neoliberalism entered policy as a putative solution to the stagnating incomes and rising inflation of the 1970s, albeit one that allowed an elite rebellion against regimes that depended upon taxation as the basis for social programs—for instance, the state reform of urban planning. For more technocratic explanations about the changes in banking during this era, see Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). For more on the rise of neoliberalism after the Second World War and the internationalism of the discourse, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion. 2. Milton Friedman and George Stigler, “Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem,” in James L. Doti and Dwight R. Lee, eds., The Market Economy: A Reader (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 1991), 151 (for “doubling up”). I am indebted to Jennifer Burns for steering me to this resource. Burns discusses “Roofs or Ceilings” in Jennifer Burns,

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Goddess of the Market (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and in “The Three ‘Furies’ of Libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand,” Journal of American History 102:3 (December 2015): 746–74. 3. Friedman and Stigler, “Roofs or Ceilings?” 151. 4. The phrase “Fabian Society for nonsocialists” is used casually by John Blundell, “Dr. Arthur Seldon CBE and the IEA,” Liberty Matters (blog), November 1, 2013, oll .libertyfund.org/page/seldon-and-the-iea. In context he appears to be quoting an oral narrative about the IEA’s founding that he received directly from Seldon, but I have no direct evidence of this phrase being used at the time. 5. For the logic of markets: J. B. Heath, Still Not Enough Competition? Business Restrictive Practices Re-examined. (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1963); George J. Stigler, The Intellectual and the Market Place (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1963); Harold Rose, Disclosure in Company Accounts (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1963); Harry Miller, The Way of Enterprise: A Study of the Origins, Problems and Achievements in the Growth of Post-war British Firms (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1963); Policy for Incomes? (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1964); Edward Victor Morgan, Monetary Policy for Stable Growth (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1964); Jossleyn Hennessy et al., Economic Miracles: Studies in the Resurgence of the French, German, and Italian Economies Since the Second World War (London: André Deutsch for the Institute of Economic Affairs, 1964); Ralph Harris and A. R. Prest, Ancient or Modern? Essays in Economic Efficiency and Growth (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1964); Malcolm Fisher, Macro-Economic Models: Nature, Purpose, and Limitations (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1964); John Ward Roche and Gomer Rhidian James, Getting and Spending: An Introduction to the Market Economy (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965); Dennis S. Lees, Freedom or Free-for-All? Essays in Welfare, Trade, and Choice (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965); Arthur Seldon, Rebirth of Britain: A Symposium of Essays (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1964). For education: E. G. West, Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965) and Education and the State (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965). For healthcare: Monopoly or Choice in Health Services? Contrasting Approaches to Principles and Practice in Britain and America (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1964); James M. Buchanan, The Inconsistencies of the National Health Service: A Study in the Conflict Between Individual Demand and Collective Supply (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965); Dennis S. Lees, Health Through Choice: An Economic Study of the British National Health Service (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965). For taxation: A. R. Prest, Reform for Purchase Tax (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1963); Colin Clark, Taxmanship: Principles and Proposals for the Reform of Taxation (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1964); C. T. Sandford, Taxing Inheritance and Capital Gains: Towards a Comprehensive System of Capital Taxation (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965). For the steel industry: Duncan Burn,

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J. R. Seale, and A. R. N. Ratcliff, Lessons from Central Forecasting: Three Essays on the Techniques and Fallibility of Statistical Measurement and Projection in Steel, Doctors and Social Insurance (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965); Duncan Burn, Lord Aldington, and Graham Hutton, The Future of Steel (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965). For farming, land, cities, and planning: Graham Hallett and Gwyn James, Farming for Consumers (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1963); Donald Denman, Land in the Market: A Fresh Look at Property, Land and Prices (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1964); William M. Clarke, The City in the World Economy (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965); John Brunner and Austen Harry Albu, The National Plan: A Preliminary Assessment (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965). For libraries: A. P. Herbert, Libraries: Free-for-All? Or the Rate for the Reading, an Appeal to Parliament from Authors and Publishers (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965). 6. Hamish Gray, The Cost of Council Housing (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1968); G. Polanyi, Planning in Britain (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1968); D. J. Reynolds, Economics, Town Planning and Traffic (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1966); G. J. Roth, A Self-Financing Road System (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1966); H. Smith, John Stuart Mill’s Other Island: A Study of the Economic Development of Hong Kong (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1966). 7. See John Blundell, “Seldon and the IEA,” where Blundell quotes a letter from Arthur Seldon dated October 24, 1969: “May we hope for something better from Margaret. She said one day here (or rather at Eaton Square) that she was one of a small group of Tory politicians like Enoch, Keith and you who saw the value of the market in economic affairs.” 8. Hamish Gray, “Local Authority Housing” (April 28, 1966) in “Research Projects File: Choice in Housing” (1966 Jan.–June), Institute of Economic Affairs, GB, 246.4, Hoover Institution Archives. 9. For quotation, Gray, “Local Authority Housing,” 53. 10. Gray, “Local Authority Housing,” 16. 11. Green belts were not left underdeveloped by incompetent bureaucrats out of a failure to calculate the possible revenue; rather, their history dates back to nineteenth-­ century public health initiatives regarding the importance of air circulation in the city, and later movements urging that the children of poor families have access to play spaces. See Octavia Hill, Our Common Land: And Other Short Essays (London: Macmillan, 1877); E. T. Ashton and A. F. Young, British Social Work in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1956), 119. 12. “Research Projects File: Choice in Housing, 1966 Jan.–June,” Institute of Economic Affairs, GB, 246.4, Hoover Institution Archives; “Research Projects File: Choice in Housing” (1966 Oct.–Dec.), Institute of Economic Affairs, GB, 246.5, Hoover Institution Archives; “Research Projects File: Choice in Housing” (1967 Jan.–Mar.), Institute of Economic Affairs, GB, 246.6, Hoover Institution Archives.

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13. “IEA Inquiry into the Market for Homes,” in “Research Projects File: Choice in Housing, General,” Institute of Economic Affairs, GB, 246.1, Hoover Institution Archives. 14. “Confidential: IEA Housing Research Programme, ‘A Market for Homes,’ ” in “Research Projects File: Choice in Housing, General,” Institute of Economic Affairs, GB, 246.1, Hoover Institution Archives. 15. Letter, G. E. Blundell, to W. Burns (October 18, 1966), Institute of Economic Affairs, GB, 246.1, Hoover Institution Archives. The project was funded by Messrs. Wates, John Laing, John Mclean, and E. R. Beecher, all construction firms. See letter, G. E. Blundell to A. C. Bryant (October 28, 1966); and letter, G. E. Blundell to E. R. Beecher (October 4, 1966), Institute of Economic Affairs, GB, 246.1, Hoover Institution Archives. 16. J. B. Heath, Not Enough Competition? (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961); A. Vice, Balance-Sheet for Take-overs (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961); B. S. Yamey, Resale Price Maintenance and Shoppers’ Choice (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960). 17. A. A. Walters, Government and the Land (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1974). 18. “Institute Points to Snags in Land Nationalization,” Times (London), February 25, 1974. 19. B. Howell and H. R. Parker, “The New British Planning Act,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 19:3 (1953): 139–46. 20. Simon Jenkins, Landlords to London: The Story of a Capital and Its Growth (London: Constable, 1975), 216; see also Oliver Marriott, The Property Boom (London: Abingdon, 1967). 21. Jenkins, Landlords to London. My analysis of the role of finance in Britain’s property market in the 1970s and ’80s leans heavily on Alan G. Hallsworth, “Short-­ Termism and Economic Restructuring in Britain,” Economic Geography 72:1 (1996): 23–37. The case study here is British—but it may have broader implications. Greta Krippner’s analysis of the rise of “financialization” in the United States during the 1970s and ’80s revolves around the repackaging of real estate, local infrastructure bonds, and currencies into new abstract commodities competing for transnational investors, as local government authorities competed for investment. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis. 22. Jenkins, Landlords to London, 237. 23. Margaret Reid and David Kynaston, The Secondary Banking Crisis, 1973–75 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 63. 24. Race was intensified after conservative England denied the children of its “colored subjects” further protection with the Nationality Act. The occupation that followed that act of exclusion—the 1982 Brixton Riots—had little of the deliberate planning and gentle persuasion characteristic of university occupations by well-educated students.

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The Brixton Riots were the outbursts of people long excluded, a symptom of rage against injustice pure and simple. Almuth Ebke, “From ‘Bloody Brixton’ to ‘Burning Britain’: Placing the Riots of 1981 in British Post-imperial History,” in A European Youth Revolt (London: Springer, 2016), 258–70; Wendy Laverick and Peter Joyce, “Policing, Social Disorder, and Responding to Racially Motivated Offending in the 1980s and 1990s,” in Racial and Religious Hate Crime (London: Springer, 2019), 83–133; Daniel Renshaw, “The Violent Frontline: Space, Ethnicity and Confronting the State in Edwardian Spital­ fields and 1980s Brixton,” Contemporary British History 32:2 (2018): 231–52. 25. Theorists of geography, notably David Harvey and Doreen Massey, have drawn attention to geographies of investment around the world since the 1970s as a pattern of accumulation by dispossession, in which monster profits appear only in geographies structurally devalued by the collapse of currency, real estate prices, or infrastructure. Doreen B. Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor (New York: Methuen, 1984), David Harvey, Spaces of Capital (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 26. Philip T. Kivell and Ian McKay, “Public Ownership of Urban Land,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 13:2 (1988): 177. 27. Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (New York: Modern Library, 1879); Edward T. O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 28. “A ‘Silly Little Diversion,’ ” Times (London), April 22, 1974, 44. 29. Bernard Levin, “Up with This the Voters Will Not Put,” Times (London), October 4, 1973, 22. 30. “A ‘Silly Little Diversion’ ”; “Harold’s Glass House,” Time, April 15, 1974, 65. Time summarizes the accounts of the Daily Mail and other papers that broke the story. 31. “A ‘Silly Little Diversion.’ ” 32. “A ‘Silly Little Diversion.’ ” 33. Stephen Dorril, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State (London: Fourth Estate, 1991) 239. For hoots, see “A ‘Silly Little Diversion.’ ” 34. A. Osman, “Mr Milhench Detained; Charges Expected During Weekend,” Times (London), November 9, 1974, 4. He would serve seventeen months of the sentence: “1974: Man Jailed for Forging PM’s Signature,” BBC, November 8, 1974, news .bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/8/newsid_2539000/2539513.stm. For the perspective of a journalist on these exchanges, see Chapman Pincher, “Politicians and Money,” in Inside Story: A Documentary of the Pursuit of Power (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 284–89. 35. M. Horsnell, “The Making of Mr. Ronald Milhench,” Times (London), April 19, 1974, 2; Osman, “Mr Milhench Detained,” 1. 36. George Monbiot, “A Land Reform Manifesto,” Guardian, February 22, 1995, www.monbiot.com/1995/02/22/a-land-reform-manifesto.

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37. John Plender, “London’s Big Bang in International Context,” International Affairs 63:1 (1986): 47. 38. John Rennie Short, “Yuppies, Yuffies and the New Urban Order,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 14:2 (January 1989): 173–88; quote on 176.

11. Techniques of the Mystic 1. For details on Harry Edwards and Sandra Schickele’s petition, Dick Hallgren, “San Jose Professor Joins Black Panthers,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 12, 1968. For McCarthyist files, hearings, reports, and prints of the House Committee on Un-American Activities: Subversive Influences in Riots, Looting, and Burning, parts 1–6 ([Washington, D.C.]: U.S. G.P.O., 1968), 2164. 2. Parag Cholkar, “Revisiting Bhoodan and Gramdan in the Context of Land Rights and Social Transformation,” in Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly, ed., Land Rights in India (London: Routledge, 2016), 231. 3. For a detailed chronology of the expected land redistribution, its postponement, and collapse, see Marcus Franda, “Center-State Relations and the Development of a Land Reform Policy for West Bengal,” in West Bengal and the Federalizing Process in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 151–78; Rajendra Prasad, Autobiography (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2010), 437–42; and Ashutosh Varshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside: Urban-Rural Struggles in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 28–47. India and Mexico are probably the most famous cases of reversals of land reform programs. See Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 184–86. Cases of relatively successful land reforms from the same era include Italy, Yugoslavia, and Egypt: See Davis McEntire, “Land Reform in Italy,” A.I.D. Spring Review of Land Reform: Country Papers (June 1970): 1–4; Folke Dovring, “Yugoslavia: Socialism by Consent?” A.I.D. Spring Review of Land Reform: Country Papers (June 1970); and Ray Bush, “Coalitions for Dispossession and Networks of Resistance? Land, Politics and Agrarian Reform in Egypt,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 38:3 (2011): 391–405. 4. For figures, see Cholkar, “Revisiting Bhoodan and Gramdan,” 231. 5. Patel supplies this interpretation. Mahendra Lal Patel, Agrarian Transformation in Tribal India (Delhi: M. D., 1998), 172. 6. M. L. Dantwala, “Agricultural Policy in India Since Independence,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics 31:4 (1976): 31–53. 7. For the Soviet delegation, David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 95–112. For changes in the Congress Party’s orientation and the implications of the second Five-Year Plan, Varshney, Democracy, Development, and the Countryside. 8. “Weekly Notes,” Economic Weekly, January 12, 1957, n.p.

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9. Crippled by the influence of elites, Thorner explained, India’s land reform had left vast tracks of the nation’s land in the hands of a few landholders. Even the Community Project at Etawah, the poster child of community development, was farmed by sharecroppers. Thorner and Thorner, Land and Labor in India, 19. Some even concluded that India provided evidence that land reform itself was bunk. American observers drew attention to the fact that India had issued abatements on evictions and land ceilings, but these were rarely enforced. “It is clear by now,” concluded Wolf Ladejinsky, watching matters for the Ford Foundation, “that mere proclamations to stop evictions and to live up to the new rental provisions, no matter how vociferously made, will not achieve the desired end.” Wolf Ladejinsky, “The Status of the Land Reform Program in India,” Ford Foundation Report #002269 (August 4, 1954), 34, Ford Foundation Archives. 10. Govindlal Dalsukhbhai Patel, The Indian Land Problem and Legislation (Bombay: N. M. Tripathi, 1954), 205. See also “Detachment from Property Is Bhoodan Philosophy,” Times of India, May 30, 1956, documenting Prasad’s support for bhoodan at a speech in Sarvodayapuram in Kerala, where a Marxist land reform would be passed four years later. 11. See Vinoba Bhave, Bhoodan Yajna (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1953); Talks on the Gita (Kashi: Sarva-Seva-Sangh-Prakashan, 1959); obituary, “Vinoba Bhave, Disciple of Gandhi,” Washington Post, November 16, 1982; Vinoba and Kalindi, Moved by Love (Hyderabad: Sat Sahitya Sahayogi Sangh, 1994). 12. K. Nagappa Gowda, The Bhagavadgita in the Nationalist Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 6. 13. “Weekly Notes,” Economic Weekly, January 12, 1957. 14. “Uniform Land Reform Opposed,” Times of India, June 6, 1972, 7. 15. I arrive at this figure from a variety of sources, including Cholkar, “Revisiting Bhoodan and Gramdan,” 231; and Patel, Agrarian Transformation, 170–72. Smaller numbers are given in Bimal Kumar Mandal, “Bhoodan Movement of India and Its Impact,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 76 (2015): 837–43. 16. For a count of donors, Geoffrey Ostergaard, Nonviolent Revolution in India (Sevagram: J. P. Amrit Kosh, 1985), 17. For the case of the landlords in Uttar Pradesh and Odisha, see Cholkar, “Revisiting Bhoodan and Gramdan,” 236. For 44 million acres pledged, see Mahendra Lal Patel, Agrarian Transformation in Tribal India (Delhi: M. D., 1998), 170–72, which argues that Vinoba Bhave gathered pledges for 44 million acres of land (178,062 sqaure kilometers), of which 4.3 million acres (17,401.5 square kilometers) were actually redistributed. Cholkar’s numbers, which I also quote, are especially conservative, as they neglect gramdan, or village land; Cholkar notes that donations for gramdan were as high as 37,775 villages, according to some counts. For “one third of India’s villages,” Mark Shepard, Gandhi Today (Santa Ana, Calif.: Seven Locks, 1987), 22.

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17. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 503. 18. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 504. 19. Patel, Indian Land Problem, 207. 20. Vinoba Bhave, Bhoodan (November 21, 1956), quoted in David Goodway, ed., For Anarchism (RLE Anarchy) (London: Routledge, 2013; electronic ed.). 21. The account is given in Geoffrey Ostergaard, The Gentle Anarchists: A Study of the Leaders of the Sarvodaya Movement for Non-violent Revolution in India (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 201–4. My interpretation leans on Geoffrey Ostergaard, “Indian Anarchism: The Curious Case of Vinoba Bhave, Anarchist ‘Saint of the Government,’ ” in Goodway, For Anarchism, chapter 7. 22. Sachidanand [sic], Sarvodaya in a Communist State (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1961). 23. For U.S. aid to India, see David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 51–84, 140–47, 228–29, 250–51; Engerman stresses that throughout this process, Indians took an active role, not only accepting aid but deliberately playing the Americans and Soviets off each other. For Dodd’s plan and its defeat, see Staples, “Norris E. Dodd and the Connections,” 393–403; Lorenzini, Global Development, 52–60; Amirth, Unruly Waters, 242–47. 24. Francine Frankel, India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 259 (for China’s independent cultivation of productive varieties of rice and intensification of irrigation as an alternative to American plans). Representatives from the Agricultural Development Council continued to assert through the 1970s that their Green Revolution was “neutral” regarding farm scale. Vernon W. Ruttan, The Green Revolution: Seven Generalizations (New York: Agricultural Development Council, 1977), 16. 25. Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010). 26. Dantwala argued against the elitism of big farm–oriented policies, that provided “rich men’s food” like milk rather than concentrating on high prices for grain available to the masses. Dantwala had advocated for land reform for years, especially urging loans to landless laborers at rates that would enable them to purchase land. Dantwala advocated a return to land reform as the only set of policies capable of reversing the continued immiseration of the Indian poor. For Dantwala, the duty of both the modern state and learned experts was to end poverty, and ending poverty would happen only with broadened access to land ownership. M. L. Dantwala, “Agricultural Policy in India Since Independence,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics 31:4 (1976): 31–53; Surendra Prasad Sinha, “Tribal Developments and Agrarian Reforms,” in Lalita Prasad Vidyarthi, ed., Tribal Development and Its Administration (New Delhi: Concept, 1981). 27. J. S. Uppal, Indian Economic Planning: Three Decades of Development (Delhi: Macmillan India, 1984), 72.

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28. For statistics on landownership, Sinha, “Tribal Developments and Agrarian Reforms,” 279. 29. A. Vaidyanathan, “Professor M. L. Dantwala: A Tribute,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics 53:4 (December 1998): 283–84. 30. Sinha, “Tribal Developments,” 278. 31. Sinha, “Tribal Developments,” 278–79. 32. Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Rome Declaration on Food Security and World Food Summit Plan of Action (Rome: FAO, 1996); Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History (London: Penguin, 2018), 260. 33. For a summary of (and argument against) the skeptical position associated with socialist land reform, see Mandal, “Bhoodan Movement”; the majority of writers cited here agree that gramdan and bhoodan represent the most effective land reform efforts in India. For special economic zones, see G. Palanithurai and R. Ramesh, Globalization and Rural Development (New Delhi: Concept, 2011), 114–15. 34. For trusteeship, Bidyut Chakrabarty, “Universal Benefit: Gandhi’s Doctrine of Trusteeship; A Review Article,” Modern Asian Studies 49:2 (2015): 572–608; Desai, review of The Indian Land Problem, 221–22. 35. Vikas Rawal, “Agrarian Reform and Land Markets,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 49:3 (2001): 611–29. 36. Cholkar, “Revisiting Bhoodan and Gramdan,” esp. 236, 240. 37. P. K. Agrawal, Land Reforms in India: Constitutional and Legal Approach, with Special Reference to Uttar Pradesh (New Delhi: M.D., 1993), 56. 38. “Detachment from Property Is Bhoodan Philosophy.” Similarly, Sushiya Nayar heralded bhoodan as a “bloodless revolution.” Sushiya Nayar, “Vinoba Bhave’s Bloodless Revolution,” Times of India, September 7, 1958. 39. For foreigners drawn to Vinoba, see Ostergaard, The Gentle Anarchists; John Hubley, Gramdan Lives! (Edinburgh: World Development Movement [ for] Third World First, 1973). For an early instance: “Bhoodan Tramp by Thousands: Two Foreigners Joining,” Times of India, January 24, 1956; Hallam Tennyson, Vinoba (Zürich: Diana Verl., 1957); Daniel P. Hoffman, India’s Social Miracle (Healdsburg, Calif.: Naturegraph, 1961); Charu Choudhury, Vinoba in Pakistan (Rajghat, Varanasi: Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan, 1964); Christopher Rand, The Twain Shall Meet (London: Gollancz, 1957). For Parsons, see Kenneth H. Parsons, “Land Reform in the Postwar Era,” Land Economics 33:3 (August 1957): 221. 40. For the new canon, see Edward Guinan, Peace and Nonviolence (New York: Paul­ ist, 1973); Colman McCarthy, obituary, “J. Edward Guinan, Onetime Catholic Priest Who Became an Advocate for the Dispossessed, Dies at 78,” Washington Post, January 3, 2015. For later spiritual interpretations of Vinoba’s legacy in the West, see Brooke Shelby Biggs, Brave Hearts, Rebel Spirits (Chichester, U.K.: Anita Roddick, 2003). For

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the canonical statement of contemporary Protestantism about the land as sacred, see Walter Brueggemann, The Land (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977). For Catholicism, Huizer, “Peasant Mobilization for Land Reform,” 60. Huizer draws attention to the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which in 1997 pronounced land reform—and specifically indigenous land rights—a high priority for Catholics. 41. Edward Shackleton, Heroes of Our Time (New York: Dutton, 1962); Robert Swann, The Community Land Trust (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Community Economic Development, 1972). 42. Vinoba Bhave, “Education or Manipulation?” in Kamla Bhasin and R. Vimala, eds., Readings on Poverty Politics and Development (Rome: FAO, 1980). 43. Satish Kumar, No Destination (Dartington: U.K.: Resurgence, 2000); Matt Hern, Everywhere All the Time (Oakland, Calif.: AK, 2008); Robert Graham, Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose, 2005). 44. For discussions of the logic of participation, see Rajesh Tandon, A Report on the Asian Regional Meeting of Participatory Research (New Delhi: Public Enterprises Centre for Continuing Education, 1979), PR/Workshop Reports: file no. 2, in the Archive of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia, New Delhi (hereafter PRIA Archive). See also “Introduction, Workshop on Participatory Research for Development and Change” (New Delhi, International Council for Adult Education and Public Enterprises Centre for Continuing Education, December 26, 1979), PR/Concept-R/4a PR/PD, PRIA Archive; “Regional Workshop: Participatory Research for Development and Change” (Guntur, Adhra Pradesh, December 26, 1979), PR/Workshop Reports: file no. 2, PRIA Archive; Marie-Andree Couillard, “Brief Note on the Participatory Research Network” (Universiti Sains Malaysia, 1980), MS-7, PRIA Archive; Jan de Vries, “Introduction,” in Helen Callaway, ed., Case Studies of Participatory Research (paper presented at the International Forum on Participatory Research, Llubljana, Yugoslavia: Netherlands Centre for Research and Development in Adult Education [Studiecentrum Nevo], 1980), PR3:3 IFP 1160, PRIA Archive; José Angel Divassón and Ada Martínez, “Analysis and Systematization of the Elements That Compose Group Processes” (Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, 1980), PR47b/M3111, PRIA Archive. 45. Tandon, A Report on the Asian Regional Meeting. In the year the pamphlet was published, 1979, Tandon helped to organize a participatory research conference of his own in New Delhi and Andhara Pradesh. The very next year, the Participatory Research Network met in Malaysia. The Netherlands Centre for Research and Development in Adult Education (Studiecentrum Nevo) sponsored an international forum in Yugoslavia on participatory research, a meeting that drew together Venezuelan youth educators in the Freirean tradition with women’s movement leaders in Maharshtra and civil rights leaders from the Highlander Research Center in the Appalachians. Couillard, “Brief Note;” de Vries, “Introduction;” José Angel Divassón and Ada Martínez, “Analysis and Systematization of the Elements That Compose Group Processes, Based on the

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Participative Research with Youth and Counseling Groups of People’s Action” (paper presented at the Seminar on Participative Research, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, April 12–22, 1980), PR47b/M3111, PRIA Archive; John Gaventa, “Land Ownership in Appalachia, USA” (paper presented at the Seminar on Participative Research, Llubljana, Yugoslavia, April 12–22, 1980), in Callaway, Case Studies of Participatory Research, 33–42, PR3:3 IFP 1160, PRIA Archive; Vijay P. Kanhare, “The Struggle in Dhlia” (paper presented at the International Forum on Participatory Research, Llubljana, Yugoslavia, April 12–22, 1980), PR/Case Studies: file no. 1, PRIA Archive. By 1984 there were also regional participatory research conferences in the Bahamas, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe. Pat Ellis, “Participatory Research—An Integral Part of the Developmental Process” (paper presented at the Bahamas Adult Education Association Seminar-Workshop, St. Michael, Barbados, April 25—May 3, 1983), M3218, PRIA Archive; The People’s Participation Programme in Africa (Harare, Zimbabwe: DSE and FAO, December 26, 1984), PR3 FAO 1161, PRIA Archive; Training of Trainers (Islamabad: International Labour Office, 1984), CB1:2, 1 ILO, PRIA Archive. The budding movement was further galvanized in 1976, when the UN Habitat Conference drew attention to the burgeoning size of Asian cities. Speakers, many of them from the Global South, called for the need for new participatory services. Yue-man Yeung and T. G McGee, Community Participation in Delivering Urban Services in Asia (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1986), 9. Most of the material in the archives from the 1970s and ’80s betrays dot-­ matrix printers and mimeographs as the primary means of distribution; the shape of the collection strongly suggests that the materials were gathered by Robert Chambers, Rajesh Tandon, and their associates as they traveled the world, sharing papers about their work and collecting the instruction materials of their colleagues for further use and dissemination. 46. Tandon, A Report on the Asian Regional Meeting, 3. 47. Lalith Lankatilleke and K. A. Jayaratne, Community Land Regularisation and Blocking-Out (Colombo, Sri Lanka: National Housing Development Authority, Ministry of Local Government Housing and Construction, 1988), TOP 18.4, 3, Archive of the Participation Resource Centre at the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex (hereafter PRC Archive at IDS). 48. Orlando Fals Borda, Knowledge and People’s Power: Lessons with Peasants in Nicaragua, Mexico and Columbia (New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1985). 49. My observations are premised on archival research in three collections of the material from meetings in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s: the Institute for Development Studies Library Archives at the University of Sussex, the Participatory Research Center within the Institute for Development Studies (separate from the library), and the Society for Participatory Research in Asia. Participants collected contemporary pamphlets and stored them with the stated purpose of offering the material for the training of

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other people affiliated with the movement (as opposed to for the purposes of forming an archive). 50. Paulo Freire, the former minister of education in Brazil whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed—published in Portuguese in 1968, and first translated into English and French in 1970—formulated a case for liberatory pedagogy at the village level in the making of larger political movements, warning against Western-style hierarchies and encouraging teachers to lessen the “distance between the teacher and the taught.” Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2005), 76. 51. Chambers noted as he observed Sheelu Francis and John Devavaram, two other organizers, working with women: “The womens [sic] group wiped out their original work and are now being dominated by one man who is telling them exactly what to do and this has undermined their confidence. As a result he is more or less dictating to them what to draw and they are sitting rather passively except for the one woman who is drawing. John Devavaram has now intervened and taken the man away. As a result, two women, who had opted out and had started to make their own small little map have come back into the group and more women are now taking part. This is a classic case of male domination inhibiting the creativity of women.” Robert Chambers, “Kethanaya­ kanpatti Village Near Tiruchulli Near Madurai” (January 29, 1991), 3, A: Participatory Approaches: RRA and Early Days of PRA.1572, PRC Archive at IDS. See also “PRA Methods” (1993), in B: Tools: Mapping.1357, PRC Archive at IDS; Rajesh Tandon, A Report on the Asian Regional Meeting; Pierre-Henri Bouyer, “Seeing, Reflection, Action,” Rural Extension Bulletin 7 (April 1995): 51; Marie-Therèse Feuerstein, “Establishing Rapport” (1979), in MET 9.2, 5, PRC Archive at IDS. 52. James Mascarenhas, “Participatory Rural Appraisal and Participatory Learning Methods,” Forests, Trees and People Newsletter (1991): 16. 53. Sherry Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35:4 (1969): 218. For readings that place Arnstein alongside the Black Panthers in counterreactions to the Model Cities program in the United States, see Sarah Rachel Segal, “ ‘By the People Most Affected’: Model Cities, Citizen Control, and the Broken Promises of Urban Renewal” (PhD diss., Washington University, St. Louis, 2019). 54. Arnstein, “Ladder,” 222–23. 55. See Robert Self, American Babylon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 56. Tandon, A Report on the Asian Regional Meeting, 5. 57. Robert Chambers, “Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived,” 12 (paper presented at the Rural Rapid Appraisal Conference, University of Sussex, Brighton, December 4–7, 1980), Archive of the Library at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex (hereafter IDS Library Archives). 58. James Mascarenhas, “Enhancing Participation in PRAs,” 5, Myrada PALM Se-

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ries 4:c (1990), A: Participatory Approaches: Attitudes and Behavior, 1462, PRC Archive at IDS. 59. Gordon Wood, “The Social and Scientific Context of RRA,” 4 (paper presented at the Rural Rapid Appraisal Conference, University of Sussex, Brighton, December 4–7, 1980), IDS Library Archives. 60. Lankatilleke and Jayaratne, Community Land Regularisation, 3. 61. Seán Damer and Cliff Hague, “Public Participation in Planning: A Review,” Town Planning Review 42:3 (1971): 217–32; Josephine Reynolds, “Public Participation in Planning,” Town Planning Review 40:2 (1969): 131; Anthony Roger Long, “Participation and the Community,” Progress in Planning 5 (1976): 61–134; W. C. Johnson, “Citizen Participation in Local Planning: A Comparison of US and British Experiences,” Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 2:1 (1984): 1–14; Cliff Hague and Arthur McCourt, “Comprehensive Planning, Public Participation and the Public Interest,” Urban Studies 11:2 (1974): 143–55; M. T. Fagence, “Citizen Participation in the Planning Process,’ ” Journal of the Royal Town Planning Institute 59 (1973): 188–91; M. J. Bruton, “Public Participation, Local Planning and Conflicts of Interest,” Policy and Politics 8:4 (1980): 423–42. 62. To the best of my knowledge, this movement has never previously been covered by historians, although a wide range of retrospective accounts of the movement have been published for smaller audiences. Martin Röseberg, “Participatory Methodologies of Research and Survey in Third World Rural Development” (doctoral diss., University of Reading, 1996), MET 1, PRC Archive at IDS; Budd Hall, “Looking Back, Looking Forward—Reflections on the International Participatory Research Network,” Forests, Trees and People Newsletter, August 1999, MET 1.12, PRC Archive at IDS; James Beebe, Rapid Assessment Process (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 2001); Rajesh Tandon, “The Historical Roots and Contemporary Urges in Participatory Research,” Focus (n.d.): 2–4, MET 1, PRC Archive at IDS; Robert Chambers, “The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal,” World Development 22:7 (1994): 953–69; Robert Chambers, “Participatory Mapping and Geographic Information Systems,” Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries 25 (2006).

12. The Technique of the Squat Portions of this chapter were previously published in Jo Guldi, “World Neoliberalism as Rebellion from Below? British Squatters and the Global Interpretation of Poverty, 1946–1974,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 10:1 (2019): 29–57, doi.org/10.1353/hum.2019.0001. 1. Colin Ward, Cotters and Squatters (Nottingham, U.K.: Five Leaves, 2002), 5–13. 2. While ancient customs indeed seem to have protected one-night houses in many places around the world, modern occupation rights were products of global anti-­ empire struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is a longer and more

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complicated history behind that arc as well, wrapped up with the history of settler colonialism: squatting law originally came into being on the frontiers of Australia and North America, which increasingly validated title by occupation rather than title by deed. Robert Home, “Squatting and Encroachment in British Colonial History,” in Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier, eds., Public Goods Versus Economic Interests: Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting (New York: Routledge, 2016), 84–102; Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier, “Introduction: Global Perspectives on Squatting,” in Anders and Sedlmaier, Public Goods. Historians such as Peter Linebaugh and Alun Howkins have discerned an unending tradition of peasant right to property, cultivated in Britain and grounded in the peasants’ experience of the commons. They point to the peasant-led rebellions against landowners in the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries and recurrent defenses of land—in Digger rebellions and Chartist building projects— as proof of this tradition. Peter Linebaugh, “Enclosures from the Bottom Up,” Radical History Review, no. 108 (October 1, 2010): 11–27; Alun Howkins, “The Use and Abuse of the English Commons, 1845–1914,” History Workshop Journal (September 6, 2014): 1–26; Alun Howkins, “From Diggers to Dongas: The Land in English Radicalism, 1649–2000,” History Workshop Journal, no. 54 (2002): 1–23. Ben Maddison has even argued that a coherent proletariat argument of rights survived enclosure and persisted in the periphery in places as diverse as Concord, Massachusetts, and Melbourne, Australia, where it was visible in the form of petitions against enclosure from the 1860s to the 1890s. Ben Maddison, “Radical Commons Discourse and the Challenges of Colonialism.” Radical History Review 2010:108 (2010): 29–48. Also relevant are recent studies on squatters’ claims to citizenship and the way that race worked against them: Nasiali, “Citizens, Squatters, and Asocials,” 434–59. 3. For London, Kevin Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69:4 (December 1979): 591, 594. For New York City, Amy Starecheski, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 4. “Empty Houses Taken Over,” Times (London), August 23, 1946, 2. 5. “Squatters in Scottish Military Camps,” Times (London), September 5, 1946, 2; “Squatters’ Appeal to City Council,” Times (London), September 3, 1946, 2. 6. “Hotel Squatters Besieged,” Times (London), September 13, 1946, 4. 7. “The London Flat Squatters” and “More Houses Taken Over,” Times (London), September 11, 1946, 4. 8. “1500 Squatters in London,” Times (London), September 9, 1946, 4. 9. “More Houses Taken Over,” 4. 10. “Communists Plan 10-Times Greater Squatter Invasion,” Ottawa Citizen, September 9, 1946, 1. 11. For quotation, “Squatters’ Appeal to City Council,” 2. For Aneuran Bevan’s sympathy, “1,500 Squatters in London,” 4.

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12. “Squatters in Scottish Military Camps,” 2. 13. “Communists Plan 10-Times Greater Squatter Invasion,” 1. 14. This interpretation of Milton Friedman leans heavily on the archival and primary source research of Jennifer Burns. Milton Friedman and George Stigler, “Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem,” in James L. Doti and Dwight R. Lee, eds., The Market Economy: A Reader (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 1991). The significance Friedman’s personal experience of wartime housing rationing and living with his in-laws had on his thought was the subject of a talk given by Burns at Harvard University. 15. Ward’s experiences squatting are discussed in Colin Ward, Chris Wilbert, and Damian F. White, Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (Oakland, Calif.: AK, 2011), 63–70; for the implications of squatting for city government, see 71–84, 100–124. 16. “1,500 Squatters in London,” 4. 17. “1,500 Squatters in London,” 4. 18. “1,500 Squatters in London”; “Squatters’ Appeal to City Council,” 2; Ward, Wilbert, and White, Autonomy, 64–74; for Nissen huts, 67. 19. The British Committee for Solidarity with the Victims of Repression in Peru, Land or Death: The Case of Hugo Blanco (London: Socialist Current Publications, 1966), 6. 20. For example, British Committee, Land or Death; Ian R. Mitchell, “Peru and the Case of Hugo Blanco,” Anarchy 7:9 (September 1967): 282–85. 21. Hugo Blanco, Land or Death: The Peasant Struggle in Peru (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), 48. This work was originally published in Spanish: Hugo Blanco, Tierra o muerte (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1972). 22. Blanco, Land or Death, 46. 23. Blanco, Land or Death, 47. 24. Blanco, Land or Death, 48–49. 25. George F. E. Rudé, The Crowd in History (New York: Wiley, 1964); E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50:1 (February 1971): 76–136. 26. For the politics of squatting in London after 1968, Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” 497. For British attention to Blanco and the Quechua, British Committee, Land or Death; “25 Years in El Fronton for Hugo Blanco,” World Outlook, September 23, 1966; Mitchell, “Peru and the Case of Hugo Blanco,” Anarchy 7, no. 9 (September 1967): 282–85. 27. Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” 597. 28. Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” 591, 594. 29. Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” 591. 30. Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” 591. 31. Colin Ward, preface to John F. C. Turner, Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments (New York: Marion Boyars, 1977 [1976]), xxxv.

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32. Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” 597. 33. Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” 597. 34. Gerrit Huizer, “Land Invasion as a Non-violent Strategy of Peasant Rebellion,” Journal of Peace Research 9:2 (January 1972): 121–32. 35. Huizer, “Land Invasion,” 131. 36. Huizer, “Land Invasion,” 131. 37. Huizer, “Land Invasion,” 131. 38. Huizer, “Land Invasion,” 129. 39. Ward, preface, xxxv. 40. John F. C. Turner, “Uncontrolled Urban Settlement,” International Social Development Review 1 (1968); R. Fichter and John F. C. Turner, Freedom to Build (New York: Macmillan, 1972): 107–28. 41. Ward, preface, xiv, xv. 42. Ward, preface, xxxiv; Ward softened this position on public housing by the end of his life, admitting the structural improvements to basic sanitation in working-class life that had resulted from generations of welfare state administration of public housing; Ward, Cotters and Squatters. 43. Ward, preface, xxxi. 44. For quotation, Turner, Housing by People, 10; for other details, 6; see also chapter 3. 45. Ward, preface, xv. 46. Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” 593 and note 21. 47.  Bank Policy on Land Reform (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1974), 7–8. 48. For Zambia, see Zambia-Lusaka Squatter Upgrading and Site and Services Project (World Bank, June 30, 1974). For Thailand, see Thailand—Land Reform Areas Project (New York: World Bank, 1982); Thailand’s 20 Year Program to Title Rural Land (New York: World Bank, 2004). For Nairobi, P. Amis, “Squatters or Tenants,” World Development 12:1 (January 1984): 87–96. For the 1990s, João Márcio Mendes Pereira, “The World Bank’s Contemporary Agrarian Policy: Aims, Logics and Lines of Action,” in Rural Development, Globalization and Crisis (XXV Congress of the Latin-American Sociology Association [ALAS]) (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2005). 49. For de Soto’s role in debates over land titling in Peru, see Helen Gyger, Improvised Cities: Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). 50. For a detailed critique of Turner, his overlap with World Bank initiatives, and his ultimate parting of ways with neoliberalism, see Gyger, Improvised Cities. 51. For approximation of the worth of dwellings, see E. Jimenez, The Value of Squatter Dwellings in Developing Countries (World Bank, January 31, 1982). 52. John F. C. Turner, Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 11.

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53. Turner, Housing by People, 19. 54. In 2003, UN figures showed that 10 percent of European city dwellers were squatters, in comparison with 32.2 percent of Latin Americans, 58 percent of Indians, and 71.9 percent of Africans. See The Challenge of Slums (London: Earthscan, 2003), xxv; Marcel Vellinga, Paul Oliver, and Alexander Bridge, Atlas of Vernacular Architecture of the World (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2007), 113–14; Neuwirth, Shadow Cities. 55. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2005); Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (New York: Routledge, 2005). On colonial alienations of land in general, see Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (Paris: Mouton, 1963); Anthony Hall, Earth into Property (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 56. Helen Gyger, “The Informal as a Project: Self-Help Housing in Peru, 1954– 1986” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013); Richard Harris, “The Silence of the Experts,” Habitat International 22:2 (1998): 165–89. So-called informal housing projects have origins in Soviet and fascist housing policy in the 1930s, as well as American and British ideas about international development. Richard Harris, “Slipping Through the Cracks,” Housing Studies 14:3 (1999): 281–309. 57. Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 14–15. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis sees squatters as victims of a neoliberal development strategy in which state and local governments in the developing world have been encouraged to take little responsibility for jobs, sanitation, or running water. See Davis, Planet of Slums. Anthropologists who have investigated the economic life of squatter settlements emphasize that only the richest squatters can afford to have their property rights ratified. In places like South Africa, the official recognition of squatters’ rights has thus been accompanied by new divides of opportunity and by mounting race and class antagonism and violence. T. A. Benjaminsen, S. Holden, C. Lund, and E. Sjaastad, “Formalisation of Land Rights: Some Empirical Evidence from Mali, Niger and South Africa,” Land Use Policy 26:1 (2009): 28–35. 58. For a celebration of European squatting, see Alexander Vasudevan, The Autonomous City (New York: Verso, 2017); Eduardo M. Peñalver and Sonio K. Katyal, Property Outlaws (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 59. Benjaminsen et al., “Formalisation of Land Rights”; Neuwirth, Shadow Cities. 60. Michael Levien, “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Dispossession in India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 39:3–4 (2012): 933–69. 61. Colin Ward seems to have had no such revelation—at least at the time he published Cotters and Squatters. John F. C. Turner might have been more aware. For the parting of the ways between Turner and de Soto, see Gyger, Improvised Cities. 62. For squatting as a legal technique, see C. G. Gonzalez, “Squatters, Pirates, and Entrepreneurs,” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 40:2 (2009): 239–59;

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D. Banik, Rights and Legal Empowerment in Eradicating Poverty (Burlington, Vt.: Farnham, 2008).

13. The Technique of the Map Portions of this chapter previously appeared in Jo Guldi, “A History of the Participatory Map,” originally published in Public Culture, vol. 29:1, 79–112, © 2017, Duke University Press; all rights reserved; republished by permission; www.dukeupress.edu. 1. Figures on literacy in 1950 published by the Indian Census in 2011, en.wiki pedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India#/media/File:Literacy_India_1901_2011_Detail.png. According to the lead article, in 2015, adult literacy in India was at 81 percent. 2. The Thorners recorded: “To forestall such ‘ceilings’ landlords nominally divided their property among their relations or friends so that each of the newly created holdings fell below the proposed maximum. For this process the disappointed tenants coined the expression, ‘paper partitions.’ ” Daniel Thorner and Alice Thorner, Land and Labour in India (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1962), 78. For the Thorners, these paper partitions demonstrated the need for the state to step in with further paper, providing a holistic, centralized survey of land. 3. The Wisers’ comments on land redistribution reflect the second edition of their book in 1963; the original edition, published in 1930, lacks such subtle insights, and mainly advertises the advantages of education for the poor. William and Charlotte Wiser, Behind Mud Walls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 164, 221 (for paper as an opportunity for corruption), 327 (for the cost of education). 4. John Gaventa, “Land Ownership in Appalachia, USA,” in Helen Callaway, ed., Case Studies of Participatory Research (paper presented at the Seminar on Participatory Research, Llubljana, Yugoslavia, April 12–22, 1980), 33–42, PR3:3 IFP 1160, PRIA Archive; Billy D. Horton, “The Appalachian Land Ownership Study,” in Peter Park, ed., Voices of Change (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1993). 5. For quotation, Perrin Selcer, The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 191. For William Petty, William J. Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006). For indigenous experiences of Western mapping, Raymond Craib, Cartographic Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); John R. Short, Cartographic Encounters (London: Reaktion, 2009); Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Barr and Countryman, Contested Spaces of Early America, 191. 6. See Dudley Seers, The Brain Drain from Poor Countries (Brighton, U.K.: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1969); Mike Faber and Dudley Seers, eds., The Crisis in Planning (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972); Dudley Seers, The Cultural Lag in Economics (Brighton, U.K.: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1978).

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7. E. Wayne Nafziger, From Seers to Sen (research paper 20, United Nations University, 2006); Richard Jolly, “Dudley Seers (1920–1983): His Contributions to Development Perspectives, Policy and Studies,” IDS Bulletin 20:3 (1989): 31–42; Escott Reid, “McNamara’s World Bank,” Foreign Affairs, July 1973, 794–810; William Clark, “Robert McNamara at the World Bank,” Foreign Affairs, October 1981), 167–84. 8. Adrian Ely and Martin Bell, The Original “Sussex Manifesto” (Brighton, U.K.: STEPS Center, 2009), 4–6; Esha Shah, Manifesting Utopia (Brighton, U.K.: STEPS Center, 2009), 7–10. 9. Robert Chambers, Settlement Schemes in Tropical Africa: A Study of Organizations and Development (London: Taylor and Francis, 1969); Robert Chambers, Two Frontiers in Rural Management: Agricultural Extension and Managing the Exploitation of Communal Natural Resources (Brighton, U.K.: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1975); Robert Chambers, Towards Rural Futures: An Approach Through the Planning of Technologies (Brighton, U.K.: Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1978). 10. Robert Chambers, Rural Development (London: Longman, 1984), 51–53. 11. “Travel on good roads . . . biases impressions and contacts against those who are poorer.” Chambers, “Rural Development Tourism,” 5. 12. James Mascarenhas, “Transects in PRA—Some Tips,” 1, PALM Series IV:E. (1990), B: Tools: Mapping.1495, PRC Archive at IDS. 13. Mascarenhas, “Transects in PRA,” 3. 14. Mascarenhas, “Transects in PRA,” 4–5. In the Participation Resource Centre in Sussex that houses the pamphlet collection of Robert Chambers and his community, there are roughly five documents dated before 1974, when participatory mapping took off under the direction of Chambers and a handful of other faculty affiliated with the Institute for Development Studies and occasionally consulting for the FAO. These earliest documents trace something of the mindset and background of those working on the problem of enfranchising farmers among the rural poor. One influence is Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1968), the classic case of liberatory pedagogy applied in Brazilian villages. Another is Oakland community organizer Sherry Arnstein’s article on participation for an urban planning journal in 1969 in which she contrasts planning policy formulated by authoritarian regimes for the betterment of black communities with truly participatory schemes that devolve control over urban architecture, budgets, teachers, and schools into the hands of local African American–led organizations. Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35:4 (1969): 216–24. A third is sixteen mimeographed pages from William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (London: W. Cobbett, 1830), among the first caustic analyses of enclosure, copied for students being trained in the proper dimensions and use of the “transect survey,” that method of walking and describing the landscape that was to become one of the foremost tools of the newly

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codified method of Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA). Cobbett was a radical journalist who documented the effects of Britain’s highway system on rural populations in the 1820s. See also Jules Pretty, “The Rural Rides of William Cobbett: RRA and Sustainable Agriculture in the 1820s,” RRA Notes 6 (1989): 13–17. 15. Mascarenhas, “Transects in PRA,” 1. 16. Mascarenhas, “Transects in PRA,” 3. 17. Scholars since at least Henry Sumner Maine (in Ancient Law [London: J. Murray, 1861]) had commented on the division between oral cultures and written cultures and the effects of this division in biasing legal traditions to reflect the desires of literate elites. Twentieth-century anthropological traditions, however, made oral traditions and tacit ways of knowing an explicit object of social science research for the first time. This tradition of research is typically associated with the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in documenting oral epic traditions. For an overview of the field’s development from the 1920s to the 1970s, see Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1980), 1–7. 18. Paul Richards, “Appraising Appraisal” (paper presented at the Rural Rapid Appraisal Conference, Brighton, 1980), 2, IDS Library Archives. 19. Gordon Conway, “Diagrams for Farmers,” TOO 2, IDS Participation Resource Centre, University of Sussex. For the rejected manuscript, Gordon Conway, “Conway on RRA for ‘Nature’ ” (1985), 3–5, 8–12, A: Participatory Approaches: RRA and Early Days of PRA, 1527, PRC Archive at IDS. An accompanying note reads: “This brief article . . . introduces the RRA methodology, tools, applications and future potential. Regarding the latter, Conway notes that it remains to be seen whether conventional journals will accept papers based on RRA.” 20. Conference papers from the 1979 and 1980 conferences are at the IDS Library, Rural Rapid Appraisal Conferences. In 1985 there was an international RRA conference in Khon Kaen University, Malaysia, followed by a 1991 conference in London hosted by the Aga Khan Foundation of New Delhi on RRA and its auxiliary methodology, PRA (Participatory Rapid Appraisal). Proceedings of the 1985 International Conference on Rapid Rural Appraisal (Khon Kaen: Rural Systems Research Project and Farming Systems Research Project, 1987); Rapid/Participatory Rural Appraisal Frontiers of Research: Proceedings of a Seminar Organised by the Aga Khan Foundation (UK) (Aga Khan Foundation, October 30, 1991), A: Participatory Approaches: RRA and Early Days of PRA, 1210, PRC Archive at IDS. 21. Krishna Kumar and World Bank, Rapid Appraisal Methods (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1993); Deepa Narayan, Participatory Development Tool Kit: Training Materials for Agencies and Communities (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1994); N. Narayanasamy and M. P. Boraian, Towards a Rural Immersion: A World Bank Journey (Tamil Nadu: Gandhigram Rural Institute, 1997). This search for new tools coalesced into a set of techniques for walking the land with people who lived there. Methods for walking in

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community had earlier been used by French activists in the 1960s, who early emphasized looking at the landscape as a means of understanding collective experience. As Pierre-Henri Bouyer described it, “seeing” formed the first phase of organization in an “attempt to describe the problems which bring them [any community] together— for example, erosion of their environment.” Pierre-Henri Bouyer, “Seeing, Reflection, Action,” Rural Extension Bulletin 7 (April 1995): 7. French activists moved on to Côte d’Ivoire where they organized the Groupe de Recherche et d’Appui à l’Autopromotion Paysanne, or GRAAP. The group went on to conduct participatory work in Burkina Faso. In 2006, Chambers’s student Neela Mukherjee published a textbook in which she described walking territory as key to participatory learning about farming, local plants, history, and infrastructure for farmers in the developing world seeking greater control over food sovereignty and their land. Neela Mukherjee, Participatory Learning and Action (New Delhi: Concept, 2002), chapter 5. Other textbooks collecting evidence of the widespread successful implementation of RRA and similar tool sets have been compiled, notably N. Narayanasamy, Participatory Rural Appraisal (New Delhi: Sage, 2009). 22. Wood, “The Social and Scientific Context of RRA,” appendix, i. 23. Peter Stern, “Small-Scale Technology in Water Resources Management,” 4 (paper presented at the Rural Rapid Appraisal Conference, University of Sussex, December 4–7, 1979), in IDS Library Archive. 24. Roger Kain, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003); Timothy Osborne and Nicholas Rose, “Governing Cities,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17:6 (1999): 737–60. 25.  Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project: A Report (Ottawa: Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 1976); Carol Brice-Bennett, Our Footprints Are Everywhere (Nain, Newfoundland: Labrador Inuit Association, 1977); Mike Robinson, Terry Garvin, and Gordon Hodgson, “Mapping How We Use Our Land: Using Participatory Action Research” (Canada/Alberta Partnership Agreement in Forestry, March 1994), B: Tools: Mapping.2128, PRC Archive at IDS. Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1981), xxii. 26. Brody, Maps and Dreams, 146–77. 27. Brody, Maps and Dreams, 21. 28. Brody, Maps and Dreams, 149. 29. Brody, Maps and Dreams, xxii. Robinson, Garvin, and Hodgson, “Mapping How We Use Our Land”; William v. British Columbia (2012 BCCA 285). 30. For references to the Cree experience, Society for Participatory Research in Asia, Participatory Research: An Introduction (Toronto: International Council for Adult Education, 1982), 16–18. For challenging evictions: Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres and Society for Participatory Research in Asia, New Delhi, We, the

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Invisible (Bombay: SPARC, 1985), in D3:32 SPA, PRIA Archive. For sewers, etc., Kamal Kar, “Participatory Impact Assessment of Calcutta Slum Improvement Project” (Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority, May 1997), in TOP 18.6, 3, PRC Archive at IDS. 31. For Styrofoam models in Thailand, see Tim Sharp, “Self-Defined Resource Management,” Gate, April 1998, TOO 5:53–56, PRC Archive at IDS. For Gujarat, see R. S. Prathan, N. J. Arul, and M. Poffenberger, Forest Protection Committees in Gujarat (New Delhi: Ford Foundation, 1987), 19. In 1989, Ian Scoones and Jennifer McCracken reported on the use of PRA to devise a tree management plan in Wollo in Ethiopia. Ian Scoones and Jennifer McCracken, eds., Participatory Rapid Rural Appraisal in Wollo: Peasant Association Planning for Natural Resource Management (London: IIED, 1989). 32. James Mascarenhas, “The Participatory Watershed Development Implementation Process: Some Practical Tips Drawn from Outreach in South India” (1996), 3044, D: Agriculture and NRM: Soil and Water Conservation, PRC Archive at IDS; Report of a Participatory Resource Appraisal Held in Kistagiri Village of Mahabub Nagar District (Hyderabad: Youth for Action, 1989), 15, A: Participatory Approaches: RRA and Early Days of PRA.1042, PRC Archive at IDS; Clive Lightfoot et al., Training Resource Book for Agro-Ecosystem Mapping (New Delhi: Ford Foundation, 1989), 2. 33. On the Rockefeller Foundation, see Cullather, The Hungry World; Raj Patel, “The Long Green Revolution,” Journal of Peasant Studies 40:1 (2013): 1–63. 34.  Report of a Participatory Resource Appraisal, esp. appendices 3–4; Rapid/Participatory Rural Appraisal Frontiers of Research, 89–92; Robert Chambers, “Participatory Mapping and Modelling: Notes for the Workshop on Participatory Micro-Watershed Development Convened by the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme and the Ford Foundation at Ahmedabad” (March 21, 1990), B: Tools: Mapping.1410, PRC Archive at IDS; The Doon Valley Integrated Watershed Management Program (Dehra Dun, Uttar Pradesh: Government of India, 1995), NAT 11.1, PRC Archive at IDS; Mascarenhas, “The Participatory Watershed,” 3044. 35. By the late 1990s, a computer-enabled faction of the participatory movement began to experiment with participatory GIS, or PGIS. The use of GIS remains contested within participatory conversations. See Robert Chambers, “Participatory Mapping and Geographic Information Systems: Whose Map? Who Is Empowered and Who Disempowered? Who Gains and Who Loses?” Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries 25:2 (2006): 1–11; Jo Abbot et al., “Participatory GIS: Opportunity or Oxymoron?” PLA Notes—International Institute for Environment and Development (1998). For using available materials as a method, see James Mascarenhas and P. D. Prem Kumar, “Participatory Mapping and Modelling Users’ Notes,” RRA Notes 12 (1991): 1; Rapid/Participatory Rural Appraisal Frontiers of Research, 87–89. 36. Rangoli was repurposed here for the purpose of “learning-with-farmers,” talking about land and water resources and opening up a conversation within the community.

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Rangoli powder was used on the ground, the outline drawn by the village Sarpanch (an elected office typically translated “decision maker”), and then details—such as the location of wells—were filled in by other residents. The entire map was then transferred to paper, and the villagers split up to walk a transect through the village. “Report of a Participatory Resource Appraisal,” 3; Mascarenhas and Kumar, “Participatory Mapping and Modelling,” 1–4, 9. 37. For aerial mapping, see Nick Abel and Michael Stocking, “Rapid Aerial Survey Techniques for Rural Areas,” (paper presented at the Rural Rapid Appraisal Conference, University of Sussex, December 5–7, 1979), Rural Rapid Appraisal Conference, IDS Library Archive; Robert E. Rhoades, “The Art of the Informal Agricultural Survey” (1982), 8–9, A: Participatory Approaches RRA and Early Days of PRA.1049, PRC Archive at IDS. For mass participation in Nepal, see Robert Chambers, “The Best of Both Worlds,” Q-Squared: Qualitative and Quantitative Poverty Appraisal (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 35–45. For time mapping, see Carolyn Jones, “Historical Transects” (1994), B: Tools: Calendars and Timelines.5155, PRC Archive at IDS; James Mascarenhas, “Participatory Rural Appraisal and Participatory Learning Methods,” Forests, Trees and People Newsletter 15:16 (1991): 16; Peter Cormack, Rus Alit, and Selina Adjebeng-­ Asem, “Who Holds the Stick? PRA Experiences in Ethiopia” (World Vision, Australia, July 1992), 3, 6–8, A: Participatory Approaches: RRA and Early Days of PRA.1002, PRC Archive at IDS. 38. Mascarenhas, “Participatory Rural Appraisal and Participatory Learning Methods,” 17. 39. For Canada, see Society for Participatory Research in Asia, Participatory Research: An Introduction (Toronto: International Council for Adult Education, 1982), 3. 40. By the early 1990s, the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights had begun organizing participatory programs with daylong community consultations between slum dwellers and the government. K. A. Jayaratne and Amarasiri De Silva, “Proceedings of the Consultative Meeting on Participatory Research in Urban Asia” (Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, Habitat International Coalition—Asia, April 1995), 29, 33, TOP 18.4, PRC Archives at IDS; Lankatilleke and Jayaratne, Community Land Regularisation, 3, 11. 41. Lankatilleke and Jayaratne, Community Land Regularisation, 3. 42. For a list of nations, see Ellis, “Participatory Research,” 5; the same publication also contains more detailed discussions of participatory case studies in most of the places mentioned in the pages that follow. 43. Scoones and McCracken, Participatory Rapid Rural Appraisal in Wollo; Prathan, Arul, and Poffenberger, “Forest Protection Committees.” 44.  Who Owns Appalachia? (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015 [1983]); Billy Horton, “The Appalachian Land Ownership Study: Research and Citizen Action in Appalachia,” in Peter Park, ed., Voices of Change: Participatory Research in the United States and Canada (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1993); Shaunna Scott, “The

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Appalachian Land Ownership Study Revisited,” Appalachian Journal 35:3 (2008): 236– 52; Shaunna Scott, “Discovering What the People Knew: The 1979 Appalachian Land Ownership Study,” Action Research 7:2 (2009): 185–205. 45. Society for Participatory Research in Asia, Participatory Research, 3–6. 46. Gaventa, “Land Ownership in Appalachia.” A slightly different account of the same project was published as John Gaventa, “Land Ownership in Appalachia, USA: A Citizens’ Research Project,” in Folke Dubell, Thord Erasmie, and Jan de Vries, eds., Research for the People, Research by the People (Linköping, Sweden: Linköping University, 1980), 118–30. For the Appalachian survey collected among other initiatives as the recommended exemplars for international participatory exercises, see Society for Participatory Research in Asia, Participatory Research, 26–30; the other examples laid out in the book include participatory research among peasants and landless laborers in Chile, Peru, Bostwana, Tanzania, India, and South Korea, and among union workers in Norway, indigenous people in Canada, and urban African Americans in the United States. For Gaventa’s travels in Tamil Nadu, see Juliet Merrifield and John Gaventa, “Report of a Participatory Research Adventure in India” (May 1984), PR/Concept-R/4a PR/PD, PRIA Archive. The final product of the survey was published as Who Owns Appalachia? For a retrospective study of the project, see Horton, “The Appalachian Land Ownership Study.” 47. Kees Biekart and Des Gasper, “Robert Chambers,” Development and Change 44:3 (2013): 705–25; Michael Parnwell, “Robert Chambers,” in David Simon, ed., Fifty Key Thinkers on Development (London: Routledge, 2006), 73–78; Robert Chambers, Rural Development: Putting the Last First (London: Longman, 1984). 48. Bob Dick, “Action Research Literature, 2008–2010: Themes and Trends,” Action Research 9:2 (2011): 122–43; Narayanasamy, Participatory Rural Appraisal; Andrea Cornwall, Sonia Corrêa, and Susie Jolly, Development with a Body (London: Zed, 2008); Andrea Cornwall, The Participation Reader (London: Zed, 2011); Andrea Cornwall and Garett Pratt, eds., Pathways to Participation (London: ITDG, 2003). 49. For a sample of the earliest publications related to the inroads of participation at the World Bank after 1994: Deepa Narayan, Participatory Development Tool Kit: Training Materials for Agencies & Communities (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1994); Jennifer Narayan Rietbergen-McCracken, Participation and Social Assessment: Tools and Techniques (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1996); A. Knox-Mcculloch, R. Meinzen-Dick, and P. Hazell, “Property Rights, Collective Action, and Technologies for Natural Resource Management: A Conceptual Framework” (CAPRi Systemwide Program on Collective Action and Property Rights, CAPRi Working Papers, International Food Policy Research Institute, October 1998); Zimbabwe: Land Reform Support Project (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1999); Robin Mearns, “Access to Land” (Policy Research Working Paper, Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1999); Klaus May Deininger, Can There Be Growth with Equity? An Initial Assessment of Land Reform in South Africa (Washington, D.C.: World

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Bank, 2000); Bettina Ng’weno, On Titling Collective Property, Participation, and Natural Resources Management: Implementing Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Demands (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2000). 50. Jean-Paul Cheaveau, “Participation paysanne et populisme bureaucratique: Essai d’histoire et de sociologie de la culture du developpement,” in J.-P. Jacob and P. Lavigne Delville, eds., Les Associations Paysannes en Afrique (Paris: APAD-IUED-­ Karthala, 1994); Jean-Paul Olivier de Sardan, “Populisme developpementiste et populisme en sciences sociales: Ideologie, action, connaissance,” Cahiers d’Études Africains, 3rd ser., 120:4 (1990): 475–92. Both quotations are cited in Karim Hussein, “Francophone and Anglophone Approaches to Local People’s Participation in Development: PRA, MARP and GRAAP; Origins, Motivations and Social Impact” (January 1996), MET 1, PRC Archive at IDS. 51. For the Huk insurgency and the United States’ abandoned land reform initiative, wherein American agents deployed what Immerwahr (and his sources) sometimes refer to the “technique” of literacy education and other community development practices, see Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 105–30. 52. Ananya Roy, “Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai,” Antipode 41:1 (2009): 159–79; Ananya Roy, “Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 71:2 (2005): 154–55. For a critique of Roy, see Robert M. Buckley, “Social Inclusion in Mumbai: Economics Matters Too,” Environment and Urbanization 23:1 (2011): 277–84. 53. Uma Kothari, “Authority and Expertise: The Professionalisation of International Development and the Ordering of Dissent,” Antipode 37:3 (June 2005): 441. 54. Nabeel Hamdi, Housing Without Houses (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990); Nabeel Hamdi and Reinhard Goethert, Action Planning for Cities (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley, 1997). 55. Kar, “Participatory Impact Assessment,” 4. 56. Abhas Kumar Jha, Robin Bloch, and Jessica Lamond, Cities and Flooding: A Guide to Integrated Urban Flood Risk Management for the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2012). 57. Perhaps the best introduction to modern participatory planning is Narayanasamy, Participatory Rural Appraisal. Narayanasamy begins his work with a discussion of the “redistribution of power” in which he reproduces Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation” (5). The rest of the book reviews several examples of participatory maps and initiatives; see 106–215. 58. N. Narayanasamy, “Assessing the Pollution from Tannery Effluents in a South Indian Village,” PLA Notes, October 1997, 3; Allen, “Narrating the Toxic Landscape”; Kar, “Participatory Impact Assessment”; Sheelu Francis, “Palm Training Experience in India, ODA Funded Slum Improvement Projects” (April 1994), PRC TOP 18.4, Archive

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at IDS; Good Practices in Participatory Mapping (Rome: International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2009), 21–22, 25. The struggle of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation against neighboring tar sands developers is ongoing and poorly documented, but there is evidence that the movement’s legal successes depend on continued GIS-enabled mapping of indigenous territory from below. Robinson, Garvin, and Hodgson, “Mapping How We Use Our Land,” 2128; Philippe Le Billon and Angela Carter, “Securing Alberta’s Tar Sands: Resistance and Criminalization on a New Energy Frontier,” in Matthew Schnurr and Larry Sawtuck, eds., Natural Resources and Social Conflict (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 170–92. 59. Gregg Herken, Cardinal Choices (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992), 219. Gore was not the only observer heralding a change. Geographer John Pickles boasted in 1994 that the new technologies were “transforming our ways of world­ making” or even creating “new modalities of commodity and consumer.” John Pickles, introduction to John Pickles, ed., Ground Truth (New York: Guilford, 1994), vii–viii. Geographer Justin Wood in 2005 collected interviews with planning agencies that had used participatory GIS, concluding that “children and the self-styled ‘cyber grannies’ worked together, using new multimedia technology to build a community website which expressed local identity.” Justin Wood, “ ‘How Green Is My Valley?’ Desktop Geographic Information Systems as a Community-Based Participatory Mapping Tool,” Area 37:2 (2005): 168. In 2002, the United Kingdom announced the Electronic Government Initiative, coupled with a 3-D GIS model of “Virtual London,” whose 3-D digital re-creation of the city would provide a forum where citizens could intervene in the planning process. Why citizens would be more willing to interact with bureaucrats and their plans in a 3-D re-creation of the city than in the real city, with its lobbies and live bureaucrats, was unclear. Paul Longley, Geographic Information Systems and Science (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley and Sons, 2005), 310. 60. For instance, Tina Rosenberg, “Crowdsourcing a Better World,” New York Times, March 28, 2011; Harold James Perkin, The Third Revolution (London: Routledge, 1996); Stephen Turner, “What Is the Problem with Experts?” Social Studies of Science 31:1 (2001): 123–49; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 61. “China Crowdmaps Pedestrian and Cyclist Problem Areas,” Atlantic Cities, July 2012, www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/07/china-crowdmaps-pedestrian-and -cyclist-problem-areas/2699; “Making Room for Delhi’s Bicycle Culture,” City Fix, October 7, 2011, thecityfix.com/blog/making-room-for-delhis-bicycle-culture; “Rethinking Urban Settings: Riding Bikes and Making Maps,” Forbes, April 6, 2012, www.forbes .com/sites/lorikozlowski/2012/04/06/rethinking-urban-settings-riding-bikes-and -making-maps; “The Future of Sustainable Urban Mobility,” City Fix, December 7, 2010, thecityfix.com/blog/megacities-on-the-move-make-the-poor-a-priority. For fruit maps, see the website Fallen Fruit, http://fallenfruit.org; Janet Owen Driggs, “Fallen

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Fruit and the ‘Thin End of the Wedge,’ ” KCET, April 2, 2013, www.kcet.org/arts/art bound/counties/los-angeles/del-aire-fruit-park.html. 62. Anand Giridharadas, “Ushahidi—Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis,” New York Times, March 13, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/weekinreview /14giridharadas.html; Heather Leson, “Ushahidi’s ‘Disruptive Deployers’: The People Behind the Stories,” PBS Mediashift Idea Lab, February 14, 2012, www.pbs.org/idealab /2012/02/ushahidis-disruptive-deployers-the-people-behind-the-stories044; Melissa Ulbright, “Al Jazeera, Ushahidi Join in Project to Connect Somalia Diaspora via SMS,” PBS Mediashift Idea Lab, January 6, 2012, www.pbs.org/idealab/2012/01/al-jazeera -ushahidi-join-in-project-to-connect-somalia-diaspora-via-sms003; see also Alka Marwaha, “Web Tool Maps Congo Conflict,” BBC, December 10, 2008, news.bbc.co.uk/2 /hi/7773648.stm; “Monitor: Mapping a Better World,” Economist, June 4, 2009, www .economist.com/node/13725877; “How Can Big Data Be Used for Social Good?” Guardian, May 30, 2013, www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/how-can-big-data-social -good; Samuel Loewenberg, “Mapping Toilets in a Mumbai Slum Yields Unexpected Results,” New York Times, July 22, 2012, india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/mapping -toilets-in-a-mumbai-slum-yields-unexpected-results.

Epilogue 1. Lisa Friedman, “Trump Serves Notice to Quit Paris Climate Agreement,” New York Times, November 4, 2019, sec. Climate, www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/climate /trump-paris-agreement-climate.html. 2. For Via Campesina and UN stagnation as a challenge for thinking about social justice at scale, see Marc Edelman and Carwil James, “Peasants’ Rights and the UN System: Quixotic Struggle? Or Emancipatory Idea Whose Time Has Come?” Journal of Peasant Studies 38:1 (2011): 81–108. 3. For global land grabs today and their origins, Michael Levien, “The Land Question: Special Economic Zones and the Political Economy of Dispossession in India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 39:3–4 (2012): 933–69; Madeleine Fairbairn, Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). 4.  Responding to Disasters and Displacement in a Changing Climate (Geneva: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 2020). 5. For the 2018 report, V. Masson-Delmotte et al., “Global Warming of 1.5°C,” IPCC Special Report (2018), www.ipcc.ch/sr15. For small farming and climate adaptability, Miguel A. Altieri et al., “Agroecology and the Design of Climate Change-Resilient Farming Systems,” Agronomy for Sustainable Development 35:3 (July 2015). For conjectures about small farm agriculture and resettlement as a means of dealing with climate change, Abrahm Lustgarten, “How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis,” New York Times, December 16, 2020, sec. Magazine. 6. Squatters are seen as both a driver of deforestation and as a possible solution

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to rampant deforestation. See Paulo Trevisani and Juan Forero, “Squatters Cut Down the Rainforest. Brazil Wants to Give Them the Land,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2020. 7. For one plan that demands massive land turnover, see Lee Billings, “An Astronomer’s Vision for an Energy Revolution,” Aeon Magazine, September 9, 2013, aeon.co /magazine/technology/if-roger-angel-talks-about-an-energy-revolution-the-world -needs-to-listen. Energy entrepreneur Roger Angel, the subject of Billings’s article, is worth quoting at length on the subject of land redistribution to support ecological development: “This has already happened twice in the nation’s history . . . when railroads were put in and the interstate highway system was built. When business wants it, it will happen . . . eventually when enough species have died and enough people have fried, we might actually want to do this. And if we don’t, in the end, our great grandchildren will say, ‘for God’s sake, why didn’t they build those transmission lines?’ This is what governments are for. This is what armies are for. If necessary, we should just go in and take the land.” The pattern of intensive farming in the Netherlands is often referenced in these contexts: Luca Locatelli, “This Tiny Country Feeds the World,” National Geographic, August 31, 2017, www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland -agriculture-sustainable-farming. For a powerful overview of the historical context of ecological crises and calls for perspective, see Jason W. Moore, “Ecological Crises and the Agrarian Question in World-Historical Perspective,” Monthly Review 60:6 (2008): 54–63. For poverty, see Alain de Janvry, “The Role of Land Reform in Economic Development,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics (May 1981): 385–92; Alain de Janvry et al., eds., Access to Land (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). For climate, see Barraclough et al., Rural Development and the Environment; Rosset, “Food Sovereignty,” 21–30; Hawken, Drawdown, 125; M. Altieri, “Agroecology, Small Farms, and Food Sovereignty,” Monthly Review 61:3 (2009): 102–13; de Sherbinin et al., “Preparing for Resettlement,” 456–57. 8. For a critical history of international cooperation in climate regulation that names these turning points and points to “binding” legislation as an issue, see Robert O. Keohane and David G. Victor, “Cooperation and Discord in Global Climate Policy,” Nature Climate Change 6:6 (June 2016): 570–75, doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2937. 9. Arnold Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth: A Narrative History of the World (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 588. 10. Toynbee, Mankind and Mother Earth, 588. 11. Among the writers currently raising questions about the long-term history of peace, rights, and racial concord are Moyn, Not Enough; Thomas Gregor, A Natural History of Peace (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996); Torbjorn L. Knutsen, History of International Relations Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Thomas W. Smith, History and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2003); A. Yurdusev, International Relations and the Philosophy of History: A Civilizational Ap-

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proach (London: Springer, 2003); Randall Lesaffer, Peace Treaties and International Law in European History: From the Late Middle Ages to World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Dr. Erik Goldstein and Erik Goldstein, Wars and Peace Treaties: 1816 to 1991 (London: Routledge, 2005); David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York: Macmillan International Higher Education, 2009); Antony Adolf, Peace: A World History (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2013); David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Lucian Ashworth, A History of International Thought: From the Origins of the Modern State to Academic International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014); Peter N. Stearns, Peace in World History (London: Routledge, 2014); Howard LeRoy Malchow, History and International Relations: From the Ancient World to the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); David Armitage, Theories of Empire, 1450–1800 (London: Routledge, 2016); Laust Schouenborg, International Institutions in World History: Divorcing International Relations Theory from the State and Stage Models (London: Routledge, 2016); C. H. Alexandrowicz, The Law of Nations in Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Christian Peterson, William M. Knoblauch, and Michael Loadenthal, The Routledge History of World Peace Since 1750 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2020). These books merit more attention from the public. 12. Stephen Macekura, Of Limits and Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 13. See, for example, Marenass Is Our Project (Rome: International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2004). 14. Huizer, “Peasant Mobilization for Land Reform,” 11. 15. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). This work is commonly known as the Brundtland Report. 16. Ha-Joon Chang, Public Policy and Agricultural Development (London: Routledge, 2012), 16–20. 17. Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 18. Paul Babie and Jessica Viven-Wilksch, eds., Léon Duguit and the Social Obligation Norm of Property (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2019); Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace (London: Zed, 2006). 19. Lessig, “On Iceland’s Crowdsourced Constitution,” Medium, May 14, 2016, medium.com/equal-citizens/on-icelands-crowdsourced-constitution-ad99aae75fce; Hélène Landemore, “Inclusive Constitution-Making: The Icelandic Experiment,” Jour-

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nal of Political Philosophy 23:2 (2015): 166–91, doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12032; “How Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly Helped Climate Action,” Resilience, April 29, 2019, www .resilience.org/stories/2019-04-29/how-irelands-citizens-assembly-helped-climate -action; “Toolkit for a Successful Movement: Digital Tools in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement,” SAIS Review of International Affairs (blog), May 2, 2020, saisreview.org/toolkit -for-a-successful-movement-digital-tools-in-taiwans-sunflower-movement. 20. Wolfgang Sachs, The Development Dictionary (London: Zed, 2010), 35. 21. For small farms as much more sensitive to rainfall than large ones, Mark R. Rosenzweig and Hans P. Binswanger, Wealth, Weather Risk, and the Composition and Profitability of Agricultural Investments (New York: World Bank, 1992). Some studies of cooperatives have found that their success depends on securing protections on a national level; without those protections, new cooperatives have trouble competing against corporate lobbies for commensurate support. See L. C. Jain and Karen Coelho, In the Wake of Freedom: India’s Tryst with Cooperatives (New Delhi: Concept, 1996). 22. For 80 percent of the world’s food supply, see The State of Food and Agriculture 2014 (Rome: FAO, 2014), vi. For 90 percent of farms in China under 2.5 acres, see “How China Plans to Feed 1.4 Growing Appetites,” National Geographic, February 2, 2018. For 89.7 percent of American farms as “small,” see Christine Whitt, James M. Macdonald, and Jessica E. Todd, “America’s Diverse Family Farms,” in Economic Information Bulletin, EIB-214 (Washington, D.C.: USDA, 2018); “small farms,” according to this report, are those whose gross cash farm income (GCFI) is less than $350,000 per year. For an overview of small farms worldwide, see Miguel Altieri and Parviz Koohafkan, Enduring Farms: Climate Change, Smallholders, and Traditional Farming Communities (Penang, Malaysia: Third World Network, 2008). 23. For grassroots action and participatory democracy in the New Deal, see Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 24. Sonia Paul, “Crowd-Mapping Sexual Violence in Syria in Real Time,” Mashable, March 30, 2012, mashable.com/2012/03/30/sexual-violence-syria; Neal Ungerleider, “HarassMap Asks Egyptian Women to Plot Points of Sexist Behavior via SMS,” Fast Company, October 27, 2010, www.fastcompany.com/1698251/harassmap-asks-egyptian -women-plot-points-sexist-behavior-sms; Farid Y. Farid, “The App That Wants to Make Egypt’s Streets Safer for Women,” Quartz Africa, June 29, 2015, qz.com/africa/434606 /the-app-that-wants-to-make-egypts-streets-safer-for-women; William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Chiwetel Ejiofor, director, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (Participant Media, BBC Films, British Film Institute, and Potboiler Productions, 2019). For democracy, Manuel Arriaga, Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen’s Guide to Reinventing Politics (London: Thistle, 2014). 25. My friend John Clark notes the Spanish Revolution, Chiapas, and Rojava as examples of longer-term decentralized communities of resistance, and points to worker

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cooperatives, intentional and “utopian” communities, and kibbutzim as alternative modern traditions pushed by other factors than the ones that I describe here. See Raul Zibechi, Dispersing Power (Oakland, Calif.: AK, 2010), and Zibechi, Territories in Resistance (Oakland, Calif.: AK, 2012). For an excellent overview of decentralized international communities of resistance and their work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, see John Clark, Between Earth and Empire (Oakland, Calif.: PM, 2019). 26. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 27. For long-term stories, Paul Keal, European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Moral Backwardness of International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). For complications in the age of expanding markets, see Tania Murray Li, Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 28. “Global Warming Report, an ‘Ear-Splitting Wake-Up Call’ Warns UN Chief,” UN News, October 7, 2018, news.un.org/en/story/2018/10/1022492.

Appendix 1. Tania Murray Li, “What Is Land?” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39:4 (October 2014): 589–602. As Allan Greer has recently pointed out, many critiques of displacement rely on an essentialized and ahistorical notion of “property” that groups together all landowners, all Western implements of landownership, all maps, and all leases into a single mass of imperialism. In fact, Western notions of property, especially ownership of land, underwent a series of revolutions from the feudal period of enclosure through early borderland encounters and into nineteenth-century empire. Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 2. Theories that individual property ownership is more productive and stable than collective forms of ownership became important to European empires especially in the nineteenth century, and then returned during the Cold War. For a discussion of the background for theories of why individual property ownership offers security, see Steven Scalet and David Schmidtz, “Famine, Poverty, and Property Rights,” in Christopher W. Morris, ed., Amartya Sen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The authors also offer the background for a counter-argument about how American attempts to spread single-proprietor ownership around the world have produced mass displacement: for the latter, see Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Important as these arguments are, the preponderance of storytelling about twentieth-­ century America and its Cold War enemies represents a species of hyper-focus that ignores dramas that much of the rest of the world was wrapped up in, for example, the

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decline of European empires and successive post-colonial experiments, some of which experienced a zone of freedom before U.S. policy directed them. For that reason, a British perspective offers a useful corrective to longue durée accounts based on the story of American empire, although almost any other perspective with a history of property discourse might be equally fruitful. For the German and Spanish traditions as they intersect with the French tradition, see Paul Babie and Jessica Viven-Wilksch, eds., Léon Duguit and the Social Obligation Norm of Property (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2019). In my writing on nineteenth-­ century British historiography I am keen to emphasize some of the connections to continental thinkers: Jo Guldi, “Global Questions About Rent and the Longue Durée of Urban Power, 1848 to the Present,” New Global Studies 12:1 (2018): 37–63. For the “double movement” of capitalism, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944). For a typical Marxist dismissal of land history as secondary to the history of production, see comments on the frontier in American history in Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955), 24; for such a position in world history—that is, identifying land redistribution as a political feint to promote a middle class in order to stop further radicalization—see D. A. Low, The Egalitarian Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a similar skepticism of American land-based fantasies in the context of the Vietnam War, Al McCoy, “Land Reform as Counter-revolution,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 3:1 (1971): 14–49. All this scholarship, of course, has merits in its own context; the question is whether such a position is sufficient to exhaust the interest of the history of landownership in general or land redistribution in particular. 3. For treating the earth’s land and river as a commons, see Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace (London: Zed, 2006); for endowing natural objects with human rights, Emilie Blake, “Are Water Body Personhood Rights the Future of Water Management in the United States?” Texas Environmental Law Journal 47 (2017); Gwendolyn J. Gordon, “Environmental Personhood,” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 43 (2018); Alf Hornborg, “Ecological Embeddedness and Personhood,” Anthropology Today 14:2 (1998): 3–5. A longer and transnational perspective makes the story of land redistribution more interesting than a sideshow of communism: it becomes a long and global story that explains the continuing attachment of movements around the world to land redistribution as a mode of politics. 4. There are many instances of contemporary manifestos on the commons, including some based on a commons of land and others based on a metaphorical commons of talent. Most such studies look to medieval forest law and grazing commons as a source, including Guy Standing, The Plunder of the Commons (London: Pelican, 2019); Heather Menzies, Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society, 2014); Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosure, and Resistance (Oakland, Calif.: PM, 2014).

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5. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Peculiar Ground (London: Fourth Estate; electronic ed.). 6. For American engagement in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam, see Ethan B. Kapstein, Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and US Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 93–123; Cullather, The Hungry World, esp. 78. For communist movements, see Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, “The Resurgence of Rural Movements,” in Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, eds., Reclaiming the Land (London: Zed, 2013). For Mexico and America, see John J. Dwyer, The Agrarian Dispute (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Timothy J. Henderson, The Worm in the Wheat (Dur­ ham: Duke University Press, 1998); and Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). For the Philippines, Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). For India and the United States, Cullather, The Hungry World; David Engerman, The Price of Aid (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). 7. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton (New York: Vintage, 2014), 274–81. Beckert hints at a longer dialectic between subsistence agriculture and commodity agriculture that required forced labor, debt, and other punitive contracts because it ran counter to the interests of labor (129–32). 8. For sharecroppers in America, see Louis Cantor, “A Prologue to the Protest Movement: The Missouri Sharecropper Roadside Demonstration of 1939,” Journal of American History 55:4 (1969): 804–22; Stephanie A. Carpenter, Oh Freedom After Awhile: The Missouri Sharecroppers Strike of 1939 (JSTOR, 2001); Kasia Kalina, “Rehabilitation as the Wage of Starvation: The 1941 Local 313 Sharecropper Strike’s Critical Theory of Normativity,” International Labor and Working-Class History 96 (2019): 60– 78; Ann Folino White, “Starving Where People Can See: The 1939 Bootheel Sharecroppers’ Demonstration,” TDR/The Drama Review 55:4 (2011): 14–32. For sharecroppers in Italy, Victoria Belco, “Sharecroppers, War, and Social Change in Central Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12:4 (2007): 397–405. 9.  Land Consolidation: Cheaper and More Simplified Methods, First European Seminar on Land Consolidation, Wiesbaden June 27–July 8, 1955 (Paris: Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, 1957). 10. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1986 [1977]), 175–91. Berry drew on contemporary anthropological research from the Andes that stressed the cultural, economic, and ecological forms of resilience associated with multiple fragmented holdings. He may have been influenced by recent work in agricultural history critical of land consolidation during the Highland clearances, for instance, Malcolm Gray, “The Consolidation of the Crofting System,” Agricultural History Review 5:1 (1957): 31–47. 11. For Europe, Ronald Gatty, “The Consolidation of Farming Lands in France,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 38:4 (1956): 911–22; Audrey M. Lambert,

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“Farm Consolidation in Western Europe,” Geography 48:1 (1963): 31–48. For research on the developing world at the FAO, Pedro Moral-Lopez and Erich H. Jacoby, Principles of Land Consolidation: A Comparative Study (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1962). Nikolaus Newiger, Fundamental Problems of Agrarian Structure and Reform in Developing Countries: Documentation on the International Conference Held from May 12 to 18, 1962 at Berlin-Tegel (Bonn-Lengsdorf: German Foundation for Developing Countries, 1962), 77. 12. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 3. For Locke’s revolution in property in the context of lawlike forces such as gravity describing the universe, and the limits of this comparison, see Michael Ayers, Locke (London: Routledge, 1993), esp. 26, 152. 13. Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (London: John Murray, 1920 [1861]), 272 (quote), partition of common property to newborns and all owners (273–75). Maine’s views on India are also considered to have justified a patriarchal regime of imperial management. See Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). For the afterlife of the concept of the “village” as it became central to American imaginaries of twentieth-century development, see Nicole Sackley, “The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction,” Journal of Global History 6:3 (November 2011): 481–504; Nicole Sackley, “Village Models: Etawah, India, and the Making and Remaking of Development in the Early Cold War,” Diplomatic History 37:4 (September 2013): 749–78. For inalienable landownership traditions today, Li, “What Is Land?” 14. Maine, Ancient Law, 270 (aberrant capitalization corrected). 15. Octavia Hill, Our Common Land and Other Short Essays (London: Macmillan, 1877); Robert Hunter, The Preservation of Open Spaces, and of Footpaths, and Other Rights of Way: A Practical Treatise on the Law of the Subject (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1896); Neil MacMaster, “The Battle for Mousehold Heath, 1857–1884,” Past and Present 127 (1990): 117–54; Howard L. Malchow, “Public Gardens and Social Action in Late Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 29:1 (1985): 97–124; Robert Allen, “The Battle for the Common,” Social History 22:1 (1997): 61–77; Ben Cowell, “The Commons Preservation Society and the Campaign for Berkhamsted Common, 1866–70,” Rural History 13:2 (2002): 145–61; Antony Taylor, “ ‘Commons-Stealers,’ ‘Land-Grabbers’ and ‘Jerry-­ Builders,’ ” International Review of Social History 40:3 (1995): 383–407. For public roads, Jo Guldi, Roads to Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); for sewers and sidewalks, Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). For the history of the European commons, see Erwin Nasse, On the Agricultural Community of the Middle Ages, and Inclosures of the Sixteenth Century in England, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan 1872 [first German edition 1869; first English translation 1871]). For an overview of these connections, see Guldi, “Global Questions About Rent.” For the Irish Land War in relation to debates over landownership in contemporary Britain,

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roused by a retrospective question of the ancient commons and the modern survey of landownership by the aristocracy, see David Cannadine, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 56–70. 16. For the role of “tenant right” and the “Ulster custom” in enabling Irish land reform, see David Steele, Irish Land and British Politics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 17. For quotation, Parag Cholkar, “Revisiting Bhoodan and Gramdan in the Context of Land Rights and Social Transformation,” in Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly, ed., Land Rights in India (London: Routledge, 2016), 238. For Maine on occupancy, which he believed to apply only to land with no explicit owner, see Maine, Ancient Law, 259–68. For Ward, see Colin Ward, Cotters and Squatters (Nottingham, U.K.: Five Leaves, 2002). 18. My paraphrase, before the colon, is a near quotation of Cholkar’s prose ascribed to Vinoba: Cholkar, “Revisiting Bhoodan and Gramdan, 238. 19. The image of the one-night house belongs to British housing activist, urban planner, and historian Colin Ward in Ward, Cotters and Squatters. For homeownership as the key to political and economic stability, see Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). For more on Colin Ward, see also David Goodway, “Obituary of Colin Ward,” City 14:3 (2010): 328–30; Colin Ward, Chris Wilbert, and Damian F. White, Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (Oakland, Calif.: AK, 2011). My own surveys of property history suggest that human history has been punctuated by large-scale moments of enclosure and property redistribution, some occasioned by war or plague, and others motivated by idealism and occasioned by the building of new institutions. For a truly ancient perspective on Ward and these pulses of longue durée history, see William Dever, Who Were the Early Israelites, and Where Did They Come From? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2003). For a general overview of contemporary actions on the right of occupation, including outbreaks of squatting and indigenous peoples’ actions, see Anders Corr, No Trespassing! (Boston: South End, 1999). 20. For the history of the “bundle of sticks” metaphor and an alternative historical framework for thinking of the natural evolution of the concept, see Anna Di Robilant, “Property: A Bundle of Sticks or a Tree?” Vanderbilt Law Review, 66:3 (2013): 869–932. For the dominance of the “bundle” metaphor in Anglo-American legal traditions, see Christopher Pierson, Just Property: A History of the Latin West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1:4. 21. For joints in the framing of old New England homes, see James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten (New York: Knopf, Doubleday, 1977), 102, 104. 22. Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October 45 (1988): 3–35. Meanwhile, social historians and anthropologists have long discussed what I call “technique” under the heading of “praxis,” or actions oriented toward social change. See Gajo Petrovic, “Praxis,” in Tom Bottomore et al., eds., The Dictionary of Marxist Thought (London:

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Blackwell, 1983), 435. The distinction between technique and praxis is an emphasis in the former on the way that slight differences in observing and representing the built environment can shift overall perception as well as action. 23. For Heidegger on tools, see Taylor Carmen, foreword to Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), xv. 24. The idiom of “paper tools” comes from Ursula Klein, Experiments, Models, Paper Tools (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), which Klein invoked to explain developments in the history of chemistry but which has since been widely applied elsewhere. See, for example, Mary Jo Nye and Stephen J. Weininger, “Paper Tools from the 1780s to the 1960s: Nomenclature, Classification, and Representations,” Ambix 65:1 (2018): 1–8. Equally important is a literature on the state use of maps; see Roger Kain, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82:3 (1992): 543–65; and James R. Akerman, The Imperial Map (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 25. Instead of categorizing the models of development according to American “high modernism” (dams and genetics), and “low modernism” (or community development) as two poles of control—classifications that have been important to several colleagues focused mainly on the American experience—I have focused upon three kinds of technological interventions: the physical tools of governance such as the map, the techniques of the occupier, and the information infrastructures such as bibliographies, pamphlets, and conferences that allowed techniques to scale to a global level. For “high modernism,” see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 89–95. Scott credits his use of the term modernism to David Harvey, The Condition of Post-modernity (Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 1989), 35. For “low modernism,” see Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 8, 61–63. The three categories that I use—technology, technique, and infrastructure—overlap with the “modernist” classifications, but allow me to underscore continuities with previous eras of governance that used similar tools in different ways. For cartography as the amanuensis of the state, see Kain, The Cadastral Map; Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 26. David Arnold, Everyday Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Matthew S. Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). For a specimen of nineteenth-century approaches to information, technology, and political agency that privileges the effectiveness of small techniques, see Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially

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his discussion of the fountain pen, 75–76. For computers and governance, Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Jon Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019). 27. For another account of the rise of information science in the postwar world and its bias toward quantitative elites, see Edwards, The Closed World. For me, the issue of the scale of information infrastructure is closely conjoined to a technical problem of the methods and scale appropriate to reading history. 28. For infrastructure, invisibility, and scale, see Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2015). For maintenance, Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture, and Society 24:3 (2007): 10–11; Jérôme Denis and David Pontille, “Material Ordering and the Care of Things,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 40:3 (2014): 338– 67. For nineteenth-century infrastructure and frontiers, see Daniel Worster, Rivers of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Guldi, Roads to Power; David Blackbourne, The Conquest of Nature (New York: Norton, 2007). 29. For quotation, W. Boyd Rayward, introduction to W. Boyd Rayward, ed., European Modernism and the Information Society (London: Ashgate, 2008), 4. For the Ordnance Survey, Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation (Cambridge: Granta, 2011); for modern maps at scale and the technologies and agendas behind them, see Bill Rankin, After the Map (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); for the UN Soil Map of the World, Perrin Selcer, “Fabricating Unity,” Historical Social Research 40:2 (2015): 174–201; for quantitative specialization, etc., Rayward, introduction. 30. It was in the course of pondering this weight of paper of different kinds that I began to make arguments to a few fellow historians about the significance of the longue durée, where it becomes difficult to see the forest for the trees. Those conversations eventually became talks and articles, and later a manifesto emerged that set out some reasons for thinking about the longue durée, the most important of which is to contest the relative hegemony of economists and growth-based economic policies in government, in favor of the pluralistic vision of human flourishing defended by many historians (most of them, as it happens, microhistorians in the last generation). Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 31. James Ferguson, The Anti-politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 32. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Amy Staples, The Birth of Development (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2006); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Paul

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Kennedy, The Parliament of Man (New York: Vintage, 2006); Jason A. Kirk, India and the World Bank: The Politics of Aid and Influence (New York: Anthem, 2011). 33. Scott, Seeing Like a State. See Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); and The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 34. My account of empathy leans on recent historical accounts of parallel movements where empathy prefigured the creation of social movements composed of cross-­ racial and cross-class alliances. Leela Gandhi has profiled figures such as the Irish organizer Annie Besant and her role in organizing match-girl workers in London and interracial movements in India; Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). Equally important to the present study is Jess Gilbert’s Planning Democracy, which probes the New Deal and finds evidence of “organic intellectuals”—that is, allies of grassroots movements—at work within its bureaucracy. 35. Lately, a longue durée framework has been revived for many studies of polity, including Alison Bashford’s Population: A Global History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); David Armitage’s Civil Wars (London: Penguin, 2017); and Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), all of which range over longer periods than this one. For each of these historians, the long-term comparison of different regimes allows the distancing of present-day ideas about poverty, revolution, and violence respectively. Longue durée histories have been particularly important in studies of economic inequality. To name but a few inquiries into the status of inequality in the longue durée: Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Michael Smith et al., eds., Ten Thousand Years of Inequality (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018). A moyenne durée framework of roughly fifty years has recently proved the vehicle for important studies of ideology and politics in international development, especially Engerman, The Price of Aid; Sara Lorenzini, Global Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020); and Stephen Macekura, Of Limits and Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Longue durée studies of property rights have long been a feature of political theory, especially Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Peter Garnsey, Thinking About Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Pierson, Just Property. A special set of histories of property over the long term focuses on the workings of enclosure and its implications for the continued accumulation of capital through dispossession: see W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955); Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Peasants and the Market Imperative: The Origins of Capitalism,” in A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay, eds., Peasants and Globalization (London: Routledge, 2012), 37–56. One particularly admirable interven-

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429

tion in this space that uses the longue durée perspective to open important questions about inequality via the comparison of India before and after independence, examined through studies of technology and water, is Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History (London: Penguin, 2018). For the Anthropocene, Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (New York: Verso, 2016); Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). For Wittfogel’s use of the longue durée, Neil Smith, “Rehabilitating a Renegade? The Geography and Politics of Karl August Wittfogel,” Dialectical Anthropology 12:1 (1987): 133. 36. Many scholars have indeed already approached these questions through an American lens. For the United States and Ireland during the Land War, Ely M. Janis, A Greater Ireland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). For the United States and India, Engerman, The Price of Aid. For the United States, India, and Mexico, Cullather, The Hungry World. For Mexico, Dana Markiewicz, The Mexican Revolution and the Limits of Agrarian Reform, 1915–1946 (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993); Henderson, The Worm in the Wheat; Dwyer, The Agrarian Dispute; and Olsson, Agrarian Crossings.

Index

Alsace, 90 American Agricultural Development Council, and Curta calculator, 213 ancient history, and rights to land, 3–4 Andersen, Viggo, 247 Appalachia, and participatory mapping, 356–57, 371, 372 Appalachian Land Ownership Survey, 356, 371, 372 appropriate technology (AT), 98–99, 222, 225–26, 227–28, 359, 369 Árbenz, Jacobo, and government, 261–62 Archive of the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex (IDS), 430–31 archives, use for book, 430–31 Arnstein, Sherry, 328–30 authoritarian rule, and redistribution, 64   Bairoch, Paul, 214–15 balance of payments, as measure of success, 215 banking, as path to development, 214 Bank Policy on Land Reform (World Bank), 29, 278–80, 349

African Americans, 266, 268, 311, 328–29, 330 “agrarian reform,” as land redistribution, 61 Agrarian Reform Institute, 250–52 Agrarian Revolution and Economic Progress (Schickele), 89, 92, 273 Agrarian Trust, 393 Agricultural Adjustment Agency, 139 Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC), 30–31, 209, 216 Agricultural Development Council, 218–19 agricultural information: access to, 113; dissemination in developing countries, 217–19; and new technologies, 216, 402; in Schumacher’s ideas, 224–25; and small farms, 363; smallscale technology and appropriate technology, 225–26; as solution to poverty, 217, 219, 225 agricultural production: and bibliographies, 193–95; on small farms, 20–21, 124, 401 Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grant Heirs), 268 Allahabad Agricultural Institute, 218

557

558  i n d e x

bargardars, and land reforms, 323 “basic needs,” as World Bank regime, 279 Belshaw, Horace, 75–76 Bengal, and West Bengal: famines, 58, 71; land reforms for bargardars, 323; mapmaking for redistribution, 155–56, 157; occupancy rights legislation, 15, 446n34 Bengal Tenancy Act (1885), 15, 446n34 Bercaw, Louise, 181 Berry, Wendell, 269, 415 Bevan, Aneurin, 337 Bhave, Vinoba. See Vinoba Bhave, Acharya bibliocracy, 275, 276, 281 Bibliographic Unit of FAO, 184 bibliographies: description and role, 179, 191–92, 196; as enterprise at FAO, 180–81, 182–83, 205, 244–45, 280–81; on land and water rights by Ostrom, 197, 198, 200–201, 499n42; and memory, 192–94; non-FAO efforts, 195–96; personnel at FAO, 180, 184, 186, 202, 203; politics of, 191–96; production at FAO, 182, 184, 190–91, 193, 195; purpose at FAO, 182, 195, 275, 281; scale and challenges, 190–91; as unending effort, 275; women as bibliographers, 180, 184, 202, 203 Bihar state, 100, 321 Black Panthers, 311 Blanco, Hugo, 45, 46, 267, 341–42 Borlaug, Norman, 262–63 Boserup, Ester, 116, 204 boundaries (political), and climate change, 390–91 Boycott, Charles Cunningham, 40 boycotts, 40

Britain: history of peasants and landlords, 79; and IEA publications, 290–91; landownership reforms in nineteenth century, 9; land reforms, 25, 26; land speculation by politicians, 300–302; land use planning, 157–59, 160, 488n20; Land War in Ireland, 14, 38; legacy of problems in India, 103–4; and market values, 208, 265, 284; and native land claims in 1950s, 69; “property game,” 295–96; property market in London, 297–300, 303–4; protest for Peruvian peasants (1968), 45–46; public land holdings, 299; and redistribution in Europe, 8–9; redistribution at home, 285, 303, 336; rights in ownership, 416, 417; social scientists in FAO, 62–63, 68; soil surveys, 163; taxation for infrastructure, 42–43; welfare state dissatis­ faction, 295–97 —and housing: bureaucracy and red tape, 295–97; campaigns (of 1946), 42–44; government housing problems, 296–97, 336–37; market in housing crisis, 297–98, 303; and neoliberalism, 284–85, 303–4, 305; prices for housing and land, 297–300, 303; privatization of public housing, 285, 291–92, 294; regulation and building, 291–94; squatters and squatting, 43–44, 336–40, 342–45, 353, 404 British Empire: “charges” against, 37–38; legacy of problems in India, 103–4, 112; and longue durée, 429, 430; movement against, 36–38; paper use for colonizer, 152, 160; peasants’ overturn, 60; and racial

i n d e x    559

injustice, 68–69; resistance in India, 25–26, 46–50; revolts in Ireland, 25; as study site, 22–23. See also colonies of Europe Brody, Hugh, 365–66 Brown, Marion R., 277 Brueggemann, Walter, 325 Buchanan, George, 337 Buck, John Lossing: in archives, 430; at FAO, 76, 139; on land use and agriculture in China, 54, 76, 83–85, 463n51; and maps, 165, 166; and redistribution, 53, 84; relationship with Pearl Buck, 86–87 Buck, Pearl S.: China and The Good Earth, 53–54, 82, 83; personal life, 86–87; prohibitions by U.S., 248 bureaucracy: in India, 153; in information of FAO, 183–84; for land and housing in Britain, 295–97; as problem, 274–75, 425 Burma, 139   Cafiero, Vittorio, 60 Canada, 308, 365–66 capitalism, 282 carbon emissions, 389–90, 394–95 Carroll, Thomas, 170 Castillo Armas, Carlos, 262 catalogues of FAO, 135, 136 Cathy Come Home (movie), 296–97 Center for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 430–31 Chambers, Robert, 359–60, 362, 372–73 Chang, C. M., 236 Chang, Ha-Joon, 395 charka (spinning wheel), 114–15 Charter of the Forest (1217), 7 Chile, 140, 164, 246–47

China: agrarian program of Sun Yat-­ sen, 229, 235; and collective investment, 84–85; collectivized farms, 232–33, 235, 236, 238, 254–55; criticisms of reforms, 236; and The Good Earth, 53–54, 82, 83; histories of agriculture and peasants, 82, 83–84; land reforms as political tool and ruse, 237, 239; redistribution, 49–50, 83–84; redistribution program of the Chinese Communist Party, 229–30, 231–37; and “shirking,” 255; and technology, 84–85; U.S. views of reforms, 230, 233–34, 235, 236–39 Chinese University of Hong Kong, 326 cinema, and redistribution, 61 cities, and participatory methods, 379 Clark, William D., 216–17 climate change: displacement and refugees, 385, 387, 394–95, 399, 408, 409–10; emergencies to come, 385, 408; and global government of atmosphere, 396–97; and inter­national governance for collective action, 388, 389–93, 394–95, 396–97, 409; models for partici­ patory actions, 397–98; nonbinding agreements and targets, 390; and occupancy rights, 395, 400, 409–10; redistribution and, 96, 385–88, 394, 395–96, 408–10; scientific consensus for ­policy, 205–6; and techniques of occupancy, 398–403 Cold War era, 246–48 collectivized farms and land reforms in China, 232–33, 235, 236, 238, 254–55 colonies of Europe: claims to land by indigenous people, 11–12, 69; and global law of land, 9–17; impact of

560  i n d e x

colonies of Europe (cont.) Locke’s theory, 9–10; independence, 59, 97–98; landownership, 9–10; and maps, 356, 365; and occupancy rights, 12–14, 15–17, 36; poverty fight, 54; redistribution programs, 17–20, 31 —former (post-independence), 70–71, 97–98; FAO and, 66, 67, 71–72; India as model, 99–105; land reforms, 71; maps, 161–62; new economic systems, 98, 99–100; redistribution programs, 17–20, 22, 31, 48–49, 50, 71, 101; squats of indigenous people, 340–42 Commission on People’s Involvement and Group Action, 141–42 commons (or common-pool systems): bibliographies and theory by Ostrom, 198–202; concepts in, 416–17; and land, 412; and market, 265; and ownership, 396; and right to exclude, 416 communes, in China, 232 communism, 240–41; FAO and, 245–46, 247; in India, 321, 322; and redistribution, 16, 17, 19, 29–30, 49–50, 61–62, 230, 238–40; and squatters in Britain, 337; and “third way,” 241–42, 243–44, 246; as threat for U.S., 87–88, 230, 245–46, 248–49, 254 Communist regimes: land seizures, 414; redistribution, 17, 19, 230, 238–40 community walks and data collection, 360–61, 362–63, 537–38n21 computers and IT, 216, 402 Congress Party (India), 102, 314 Consultative Group for International Agrarian Research (CGIAR), 393

contracts, in land reforms, 414 Conway, Gordon, 363 cooperation, 392–98, 407, 408–9; redistribution and climate change as twin issues, 386, 394; of strangers in squatting, 339–41; as technique for climate change, 400 cooperatives (co-ops), 140–41; and bibliographies, 195; and climate change, 401; FAO and, 141–43; in specific countries, 140, 142, 143, 232 corn breeding and hybrid corn, 260–61 Cotton, Arthur, 112 coverture, 203 creativity of intimacy, 339–41 crowdsourced maps, 366, 379, 380, 405 Culver, Dorothy, 181, 203 Curta calculator, 209–10, 212–13, 216, 219   Dante Alighieri, 4–5 Dantwala, Mohanlal Lallubhai, 320–21, 525n26 data. See information Davidson, Basil, 233–34 Davis, Kingsley, 106 Davis, Mike, 352 death, and inequality, 1 debt, and Indian insights for developing countries, 122–25 “Decade of Development,” 214–15 democratic ecology, 32, 36–38, 398; and techniques of occupancy, 398–407 deregulation, as problem, 405 Desai, Morajibhai, 323 Desmond, Matt, 401 developing countries: banking as path to development, 214; debt insights from India, 122–25; information dissemination, 217–19; land reforms

i n d e x    561

and FAO, 75; maps for redistribution, 153, 154, 163, 164, 166, 173; modernization model for policies and loans, 79–80; as new countries, 59; and plans of early FAO, 54, 55; population dynamics, 108; squats and squatting, 340–41, 345–48, 349–50; technology and the West, 120–21; as zones of despair, 263–64 development: as concept, 16, 448n39; cost, 147–50; failures and poisonous principles, 405–7; and market as path, 214–15; non-economic inclination, 358–59; science’s role, 134–37; viewed as fraud, 258–59, 262, 263, 270–71, 272, 273, 275–76 diagrams, 363 Díaz, Porfirio, 62 Digby, Margaret, 142 disasters, and redistribution, 96 displacement: in the future, 385, 387, 394–95, 399, 408, 409–10; of indigenous people, 4–5, 211; and power, 3–5; as problem, 394; undoing and occupancy rights, 5–7. See also eviction Dodd, Norris, 72, 75, 76, 133, 147, 264, 430; “The Earth for Man” campaign, 50–51, 54, 72, 91; and extension workers, 137–38; food aid plans, 320; goals and vision for FAO, 72, 132–33, 134–35, 137, 139, 146–47, 245–46; and hoes, 117, 120, 131; New York Times Magazine article, 131, 133, 146, 264; and participation, 139–40; redistribution scheme at FAO, 50–51, 72–73; science and information infrastructures of FAO, 127, 134–37; and statistics, 222; and technology, 117–21, 123, 127, 133

Dovring, Folke, 77–78, 116, 255–56, 508–9n46 Dovring, Karin, 256   “The Earth for Man” campaign, 50–51, 54, 72, 91 earth and natural resources, as commons, 412 economic growth: FAO in, 217, 221–22, 244–45; as path in market-based development, 207–8, 210, 213–15, 216–17; and redistribution, 82–83, 115–16, 117, 207–8, 214–15; and small farms, 116–17, 213; and small-scale technology, 213, 222–23 economists, and solutions to problems, 54–55, 98–99, 133 economy: and bibliographies, 193–95; and empathy, 86, 89–90, 92–93; Indian post-colonial changes, 99–100, 108–17; in modernization vs. redistribution models, 81; and population as problem, 105; in postcolonial moment, 105–8; redistribution as school of thought, 82; as single-track model, 79; small farms productivity, 20–21, 124; and squatters, 308, 350 Edwards, Harry, 311 “egalitarian moment” of the postwar era, 256 Egypt, redistribution reforms, 26–27 Ehrlich, Paul, 106 El Zamorano, the Pan American School of Agriculture (Honduras), 271 empathy: concept and uses of, 427–28; and economic development, 86, 89–90, 92–93; in FAO experts, 86, 91–92, 427; as technique and

562  i n d e x

empathy (cont.) methodology, 204, 330–31, 403; and women, 129, 204 “the enclosure movement”, 4 England, and property rights, 7–8. See also Britain Europe: contribution to global law of land, 7–10; empires of, 4–5, 59, 71, 97, 365. See also colonies of Europe eviction: in democracies, 415–16; indigenous people, 4–5, 211; and rights, 2, 7, 415. See also displacement exclusion, 8, 416 expertise, as problem, 426–27 extension and extension agents, 137–39, 148, 149–50, 218, 219   Fabians, push for occupancy rights, 16 families, and squatting, 336, 345 “family farm theory” (Schickele), 124 famine: Bengal, 58, 71; China, 233, 236, 255; India, 108–9, 264–65, 319–20; as legacy from empires, 71; and overpopulation, 106 Famine, 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? (Paddock and Paddock), 263–65, 273 Famine Inquiry Commission (India), 101, 108, 154–55 Fanshen (Hinton), 235, 238 farmer committees, and self-­ government, 139–40 farmers. See peasants farming, and land consolidation, 414–15 farm productivity. See agricultural production farms. See industrial-scale farming; small farms and small farmers

Federal Council of Churches, 72 feudalism, 145, 146 Field, Anthony, 300 field and forest, rights to, 7 Fisher, Anthony, 290 Flores, Edmundo, 61–62, 243, 267 food: aid and exports, 71, 320; system, costs of programs, 148 Food, Health, and Income (Orr), 66 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): Archives and Library, 184, 190–91, 430; branches and structure, 73, 75; budget and funding, 148, 149, 220–21, 248; creation and mandate, 16–17, 54, 58–59, 69–70, 72, 74; Dodd’s goals and vision, 72, 132–33, 134–35, 137, 139, 146–47; as global government of land, 28, 59, 60, 70, 396–97; headquarters in Rome, 57, 58, 59, 60; motto, 58; Orr’s objectives, 54, 66–67; problems and failures, 28, 33, 397; as publisher, 179–80, 424–25; purpose and vision, 26–27, 54, 57, 58, 59–60, 70, 72, 74; reexamination in twenty-first century, 302–3; social scientists in, 62–63, 68, 75–78; use of history into ideas and policies, 76–78, 79, 80, 247, 253; in Washington, 57, 59; World Bank influence, 220–21, 248, 278, 280 —and redistribution: campaign of Dodd, 50–51, 72–73; disappearance of redistribution schemes, 28, 29, 31, 278, 280–81, 451–52n54; as goal and agenda, 60, 72–74, 75, 76–77, 95, 175, 241, 247; and land reforms, 16–17, 26–27, 58, 64; maps, 153, 154, 163, 164, 166, 173; policies, 78; and redistributive justice, 72–73

i n d e x    563

—work and policy: and cost of devel­ opment, 147–50; debt-free plan of economic development, 123; and economic growth, 217, 221–22, 244–45; and empathy, 86, 91–92, 427; fairness and participation, 72; food exports and aid, 71, 320; former colonies in agenda, 71–72; and Indian economists’ theories, 133, 244; information production as problem, 28, 274; in land reforms, 73, 75; limits on power and authority, 74; and locally made technology, 120–21; and participatory mapping, 378; and plans for developing countries, 26–27, 55; and power of local elites, 145; report of 1951, 73; science’s role for development, 134–37; and smallscale technology, 55; soil systems maps, 162–64, 165, 167–68, 172; statistics collection, 222; and “technical assistance” of Dodd, 119; and technology, 81; and “third way,” 230, 241, 246, 247; use of history into ideas and policies, 76–78, 79, 80, 247, 253; white privilege in founders, 68, 69 FAOBIB, 191 FAO-DOC, and bibliographies, 190–91 Ford Foundation, 215, 217–18 forest and field, rights to, 7 Forman, James, 268 France, and Haiti reparations, 10–11 Free China Review pamphlet, 236 free market theory, 285–95 Freire, Paulo, 328 Freud, Sigmund, 239 Friedman, Milton, 285, 286–88, 338, 339 Fukuyama, Francis, 257

Gadgil, Dhananjay Ramchandra, 113 Gaitskill, Arthur, 122, 220 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 46, 47, 48, 100, 114, 312, 316, 323 Gaventa, John, 371, 372, 373 Geertz, Clifford, 107–8 gendered division of labor at FAO, 129, 180 gentrification, 304 geopolitical remapping, following World War II, 59 George, Henry, 299 Germany, 57–58, 105–6 “Ghost Town” (song), 298–99 GI Bill (1944), and occupancy rights, 6 gifts of land (bhoodan), Vinoba Bhave and, 49, 307, 312–13, 315, 316–19, 323, 324, 326, 332 global government: of atmosphere, 396–97; for culture, 407; for the future, 392–98, 407, 408–9; of land, 28, 59, 60, 70, 396–97, 408–9. See also international governance and order Gonne, Maud, 41 The Good Earth (Buck): description of farmers and peasant life, 53–54, 76, 82–83, 84–85, 231; as influence on scientists, 82–83, 85–86 Gopalaswami, R. A., 155 Gore, Al, 378 governance. See international governance and order governments. See global government; state gramdan in India, 319, 323–24 grassroots movements. See participatory movements Great Leap Forward, 230, 231, 232–33 Green Movement, in U.S., 269

564  i n d e x

Green Revolution, in India, 320–22 Guatemala: coup and massacre, 246, 261–62, 272; redistribution failure and undoing, 258, 262, 270, 271   Haiti, and reparations to France, 10–11 Hardin, Garrett, 265 Harris, Ralph, 293–94 Hayek, Friedrich von, 25, 288–90 Hennefrund, Helen Emma, 181 Heritage Foundation, 277 Herzstark, Curt, 212 hierarchies, and power, 328–31 Higgs, John, 77 Hinton, Bill, 235 hoes, as small-scale technology, 117, 120, 131 Holbein, Hans, 1, 2, 3, 383, 384 Homestead Act (U.S., 1862), 9, 266 Hot Springs conference (1943), 57, 69 housing: market as regulating force, 286–87, 289–90, 292, 303; and participatory movements, 338, 343–45; prices in U.S., 285–86, 338; regulation and building by state, 289–90, 291–94; in World War II, 285–86. See also Britain—and housing Huizer, Gerrit, 211, 346 Hungry Nations (Paddock and Paddock), 263 hunting lines of indigenous people in Canada, 365–66   ice core samples, 385 Immerwahr, Daniel, 374 imminent revolution theories, 63–64 inclusion, 331, 343, 375 indexes: for landlessness, 147; produc-

tion at FAO, 182, 191, 244; of social history, 252–53. See also bibliographies India, 12, 13; agriculture and policy, 319–22; appropriate technology, 98–99, 359, 369; collective property, 416; cooperatives, 140, 143; and debt of developing countries, 122–25; economic growth and change, 99–100, 101, 108–17, 215; economists’ theories and, 98–99, 133, 244; educational facilities and initiatives, 217–18; empire’s legacy of problems, 103–4, 112; famines, 108–9, 264–65, 319–20; information, 160–61; laws on paper (written laws), 152, 153, 160, 354; literacy, 354–55; participatory mapping, 331–32, 367, 368, 369, 376–77; population issues, 106, 108–9, 115, 320; as post-colonial model, 99–105; resistance to empire, 25–26, 46–50; satyagraha freedom struggle, 48, 50; and small-scale technology, 55, 98–99, 109–16, 117–18, 119–20 —and land: cadastre for landownership, 153, 154–57, 160–61; claims to land by inhabitants, 11–12; and international land politics, 101–2; land ceilings, 102, 242–43, 354; land laws legacy of British, 317; land question at independence, 98, 154; land reforms, 102–3, 104, 118, 242–43, 314–16, 318–19, 323, 511–12n71; land reforms and elites, 143, 312, 313, 314, 354; and land reforms in China, 235; land use planning, 157; productivity of land, 110–11; rent strikes, 46, 100–101; voluntary gifts of land, 49, 307, 312–13, 315, 316–19, 323, 324, 326, 332

i n d e x    565

—and redistribution: court rulings, 49, 312, 314, 316; and economic inequality, 103–4, 314, 322; and FAO, 27; mapmaking, 101, 154, 155–56; as post-independence option, 19, 25, 100–105, 108–9, 311–12, 313, 321, 332, 354–55; techniques, 307–8; Vinoba Bhave in, 31, 312, 313, 315–16, 318, 323, 332 The Indian Land Problem (Patel), 102, 315 indigenous labor colonies, 11–13, 442–43n25 indigenous people: community walks and data gathering, 360–61; displacement and eviction, 4–5, 211; information on governance, 198–99; land claims, 11–12, 69; landlessness in Peru, 45–46, 341–42; maps of landholdings in Canada, 308, 365–66; occupancy rights exclusion, 6; and participatory mapping, 358, 365–66, 372; protection of culture, 407; redistribution and land reforms, 21–22, 32, 266, 269; rights to land struggle, 366–67; squatting, 45–46, 340–42; territories in European expansion, 4–5 individualism, 416 individual rights, and exclusion, 416 Indonesia, 107–8 industrial-scale farming, 105, 106–7, 279, 320–21 inequality: climate change and redistribution as twin issues, 386–87; economy and redistribution in India, 103–4, 314, 322; as fact, 1–2; in sacred texts, 4 information: access to, 360; attacks on, 275; collection by market and state,

289, 302; FAO and, 183–84, 274–75; and land reforms, 186, 190, 192; and local ways of knowing, 360–64, 368–69; and participatory research movement, 327–28, 333, 372; and Rural Rapid Appraisal, 363–64, 379; technique and technology, 305, 368–70; as technique for climate change, 402. See also agricultural information —infrastructures: for actionable science, 205–6; ambition and intentions, 150–51, 178, 205, 217, 244–45, 422–24; and challenge of local elites, 143, 146; concept and ideologies, 422–24; and cooperatives, 142; cost of, 147, 148, 220; creation at FAO, 127–28, 133–34, 150; and economic growth, 221–22; and extension, 137–39; in failure of FAO, 28, 128, 151, 280–81; grassroots in redistribution’s collapse, 32; and land utilization, 159–60; paper production at FAO, 28, 127–28, 133, 180; and participatory movements, 32, 305, 424; as problem at FAO, 28, 274; resources issues, 171; role of projects at FAO, 145–46; science’s role for development, 134–37 information technology and computers, 216, 407 inheritance of land, for women, 203 Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), 290–91, 293–94, 295; housing and market in Britain, 265, 291–95, 297 institutions, and downward power, 326–28 Intermediate Technologies Development Group (ITDG), 223

566  i n d e x

International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), 393 International Geographical Congress, 169 international governance and order: climate change and redistribution as twin issues, 385–86, 409–10; and climate change collective action, 388, 389–93, 394–95, 396–97, 409; demise of institutions, 281–82; early to mid-twentieth century, 70–71; future of, 392–98, 407, 408–9; and local cultures, 407; market’s view in twenty-first century, 302–3; and participatory governance, 374, 375–76; and redistribution, 289, 384–86, 409–10; as technique for climate change, 400, 402–3. See also global government International Institute for Agriculture, 181 International Society of Soil Science pamphlet, 172 internet, and small-scale technology, 126 investment in land and real estate, 297–98, 303–4 Ireland, 12; casualties in land reforms, 234; claims to land by inhabitants, 11–12, 62; land protests by tenant farmers, 13–14, 36, 37, 39–42, 44; land system (pre-protests), 38–39; laws and land reforms, 14, 15, 25; as model for change, 14–15, 16, 17, 25, 38, 234; mutual property rights, 417; occupancy rights laws and demands, 13–15, 16, 38, 44; techniques and tactics, 14–15, 40, 41   Jachertz, Ruth, 221 Jacoby, Erich, 76

Japan, 216 Jenkins, Simon, 295, 298 Jewish law, 3–4 Jewish people, 15   Kearns, Kevin, 343–45, 348–49, 353 Kenya, native land claims (in 1950s), 69 Kerala state, 321, 322 Kikuyu people and incident, 69 “know-how” and “show-how,” 138 Kothari, Uma, 374–75   laborers, contracts in land reforms, 414 labor on land, as Locke’s theory, 7–8 Labour Party (UK), 300–301, 304, 337 Lacy, Mary G., 181 “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” (Arnstein), 328–29 Ladejinsky, Wolf, 249, 278, 315, 322 land: ceilings in India, 102, 242–43, 354; as commodity for World Bank, 279; as a commons, 412; concepts and ideologies, 411–12; consolidation, 105, 414–15; as “intoxicant,” 237–38; as investment, 298, 303–4. See also land squatters; redistribution —land use: as information, 159–60, 163–64; land-using vs. land-saving societies, 115; maps for, 157, 158, 159; planning, 157–59, 160, 488n20; and policies, 415 Land or Death (Blanco), 267, 342 Land and Labour in China (Tawney), 83–84, 85 landlessness index, 147 “landlordism,” 47, 144 landlords: acquisition of property, 8; in China, 231, 232, 233; and farmers in India, 46, 47, 48; in Ireland, 38–40,

i n d e x    567

41; as problem against actions, 143–44, 243 landownership: broadcast landownership, 9; in colonies and empires, 9–10, 59, 71; and commons, 396; former tenants in, 40, 413; in India, 153, 154–57, 160–61, 321–22; public land in Britain, 299; rights, 416, 417; traditions, 416; in U.S., 9, 267–68 Land Reform Act (Scotland, 2003), 396 land reforms: argument of Paddocks against, 269–76; and cadastres, 163; concept and examples, 413–14; conditions for, 19–20; death of, 256–57, 278–80; and information, 186, 190, 192; and literacy, 354–55; need on global scale, 59, 266–67; as political promise and bait, 237, 238, 239; psychological aspects, 230, 237–38, 251–52, 254, 276; quantitative study of rhetoric, 256; rebellion as measure, 252–53; and redistribution, 20, 21–22, 25–27, 61, 413; and smallscale technology, 118; survival today, 281; as technique for climate change, 400; at United Nations, 242; voluntary land reforms in West, 324–26; women’s work, 202–4 land squatters: in India, 324; and indigenous people, 340–42; as political activity, 345–46; as technique for climate change, 399; titling for, 349–50, 352; uprisings in Peru, 45–46, 341–42 Land Tenure Center (LTC), University of Wisconsin, 188, 189, 276–77, 430 “Land to the Tiller” slogan, 61 Land Utilisation Survey (Britain), 158, 159, 160

Land Utilization in China (J. L. Buck), 54, 83–84, 463n51 Land War in Ireland, 13–14, 38–42 Land and Water Division (FAO), 76 Land and Water Use Branch/Division (FAO), 91, 182, 184, 193, 221 Land and Water Utilization and Conservation Committee, 162 large-scale technologies, 122 Latin American countries, 45–46, 61, 74 Latinos in U.S., and land reforms, 267–68 law: colonies and global law of land, 9–17; and commons, 416; Europe and global law of land, 7–10; on rent control, 14, 38 lebensraum, 57–58 Legum, Colin, 214 Levin, Bernard, 300 Lewis, Ardron, 85–86, 165, 166–68, 173 Library of the Institute for Development Studies (University of Sussex), 430 Lin, Justin, 255 List of Publications and Main Documents, 182 literacy, and land reforms, 354–55 Liu Shao-chi, 231 Loach, Ken, 296 loans for farmers, 209, 219–21 Locke, John, 7–8, 9–10 London: empty homes and buildings, 297, 298–99; gentrification, 304; property market, 297–300, 303–4; protest for Peruvian peasants, 45–46; squatters and campaigns for homes, 43–44, 336–37, 343–45 long-handled hoe, as small-scale technology, 131

568  i n d e x

longue durée, 428–30 Low, Anthony, 256–57 Lubin, David, 181   MacPherson, C. B., 416 Magna Carta (1215), 7, 389 Maine, Henry, 416, 417 Malaviya, H. D., 103 Malefakis, Edward, 251 Manchester, England, 299 Mankind and Mother Earth (Toynbee), 390 Mao Tse-tung, 177, 230, 232–33, 235, 236 maps and mapmaking: challenges, 176–77; crowdsourced, 366, 379, 380, 405; for empire and colonizers, 356, 365; of indigenous land holdings in Canada, 308, 365–66; for landownership in India, 153, 154–57, 160–61; and redistribution in India, 101, 154, 155–56; reform of, 365–68; as technology, 369–70. See also participatory mapping —at FAO: for former colonies, 161–62; for land use, 157, 158, 159; local maps and global plans, 165–66, 167–68; projects, 153–54, 164–66, 168, 175–76, 178; questionnaire for nations, 173–75; for redistribution, 153, 154, 163, 164, 166, 173; and scale, 169–73, 423; soil surveys and systems, 162–64, 165, 167–68, 172; technology, 175; as venture, 128, 153, 166, 177–78 marches, as technique for climate change, 399 market: and commons, 265; free market theory, 285–95; in housing crisis of Britain, 297–98, 303; and information collection and dissemination,

219, 289, 302; occupancy and occupancy rights, 207–8, 335; as path for development, 207–8, 210, 213–15, 216–17; in redistribution schemes disappearance, 29, 30, 207, 208, 213–14; as regulating force in housing, 286–87, 289–90, 292, 303; and squatters, 308, 350; and technological change, 216, 222–23; view of international governance, 302–3. See also economy Married Women’s Property Act (Britain, 1882), 203 Marx, Karl, on enclosure, 4 Marxism, and land histories, 412 Mascarenhas, James, 328, 361, 370 Mazower, Mark, 101–2 McCarthy, Joseph, and McCarthyism, 88, 248, 249, 311 McDougall, Frank Lidgett, 68, 69–70, 75, 183 McNamara, Robert, 278–80 memory: and bibliographies, 192–94; as technique for climate change, 403 Mexico: claims by native inhabitants, 11–12, 62; description as colony, 12, 62; redistribution, 15, 100, 276; redistribution failures, 149–50, 270–71, 275–76; Revolution and land reforms, 62, 262; Revolution as influence, 61, 243 Milhench, Ronald, 301 Mill, John Stuart, 9, 113 Mills, Liz (Elizabeth Jane), 260. See also Paddock, William and Elizabeth minorities. See racialized groups modernization: and expertise, 426, 427; history as model for developing countries, 79–80; vs. redistribution model, 80–82, 94

i n d e x    569

Moore, Barrington, 79 Moraes, Frank, 233 “morality gap,” of Toynbee, 390–91 More, Thomas, 7 Morocco, maps for farming, 165 Mouza Matpalsa, West Bengal, 156, 157 movies, and redistribution, 61 Mukerjee, Radhakamal, 47–48 mutual rights, 417 Myrdal, Gunnar, 72, 144–45, 149, 243–44, 266–67   natives peoples and subjects. See indigenous people natural resources, as a commons, 412 Nazis and National Socialism, 90 neoliberalism, 284; and housing in Britain, 284–85, 303–4, 305; and redistribution, 303; and squatting, 335, 353 New Mexico, 267–68 New York Times Magazine, 131, 133, 146, 264 NGOs, and governance, 392–93 Nigeria, 216 “The Nobleman” (Holbein), 1, 2, 383, 384 numbers: to attack land reforms and redistribution, 245, 278–79; as counter-attack, 252–53 Nyerere, Julius, 92, 112, 210–11, 212   occupancy: concepts and theories, 417–19; and market, 207–8, 335; rebellion as measure, 252; as redistribution, 335; techniques, 33, 34, 398, 421; techniques for democratic ecology, 398–407 occupancy rights: and climate change, 395, 400, 409–10; collapse of move-

ment, 383–85; and colonized people, 11–13; concepts and theories, 417–19; definition, 2, 17, 417; failures and poisonous principles, 405–7; global push, 5–7, 15–17, 36; and landlessness index, 147; and land reforms in China, 234; and market values, 207–8, 335; and NGOs, 393; “onenight house” theory, 334; participatory actions, 308–9; reemergence (1930s), 5–7; and scale, 388–90; as struggle, 2–4, 5, 6; as technique for climate change, 400; techniques, 7, 14–15, 33; as tool for peace, 252; as universal right, 334, 335 official mind, glimpses into, 425–26 “one-night house” theory, 334 “On Exactitude in Science” (Borges), 176–77 Operation Barga, 323 Orr, John Boyd: as director general of FAO, 66, 68; early work, 66; on equality of races, 67–69; and FAO’s purpose, 54, 66–67; promotion of FAO, 66; and sacrifice of rich nations, 67, 261 Ostrom, Elinor: bibliography on land and water rights, 197, 198, 200–201, 499n42; on commons, 198–202; and community knowledge, 362, 371; indigenous people and land management schemes, 128–29, 180, 197; work and impact, 21, 196–97, 199, 202 Ostrom, Vincent, 198, 201 ownership of land. See landownership   Paddock, William and Elizabeth (Bill and Liz): argument against land reforms, 269–76; background,

570  i n d e x

Paddock, William and Elizabeth (cont.) beliefs, and work life, 260–61, 262, 271–72, 274–75, 276; and coordination, 274–75; critique of redistribution programs, 149–50, 259, 270–71; development as fraud, 258–59, 262, 263, 270–71, 272, 273, 275–76; in Guatemala, 258, 262; and history knowledge, 272–73, 274; views vs. Schickele’s, 273–74 Paddock, William and Paul, 245, 263–65, 273 Pakistan, and cooperatives, 142 pamphlets, 45, 46 Papaloapan (Guatemala), redistribution experiment, 258, 275–76 paper products: and laws in India, 152, 153, 160, 354; production at FAO, 28, 127–28, 133, 180; as regime in India, 160–61; as solution, 225–26, 357; use by colonizers, 152, 160 Pareto, Vilfredo, 144 Parnell, Anna and Fanny, 41–42, 202–3 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 40, 41 Parsons, Kenneth, 186, 243 participation and participatory democracy: infrastructure for, 139–43; ladder model of Arnstein, 328–30; vs. “landlordism,” 144; in self-governance, 380; in “third way,” 241; for Vinoba, 318; voluntary participation, 50 participatory governance: co-optation in international development, 373–76; in self-governance, 139–40, 332; as technique for climate change, 402–3 participatory mapping: assessment, 376–80; in community, 361–62; co-optation in international development, 373–76; description and as

technique, 331–32, 355, 358, 367–69, 371, 373, 376; examples, 356–57, 370–72, 376–77, 404; in India, 331–32, 367, 368, 369, 376–77; and indigenous people, 358, 365–66, 372; limitations and potential, 377–81, 404–5; as movement, 355, 356; “rangoli mapping,” 369, 539–40n36; and redistribution, 356–58, 376; as technique for climate change, 401 participatory movements: connections in protests, 44, 49, 51–52; criticisms, 374–76, 380; in housing and squatting, 338, 343–45; information gathering, 360–64, 368–69; and information infrastructures, 32, 305, 424; as model for climate change, 397–98; occupancy rights actions today, 308–9; and redistribution’s collapse, 31–32; techniques, 307–8, 313, 341, 342, 357, 397–98; and technology, 378–79, 404–5; in U.S., 311 participatory research movement: and citizen participation, 328–30; description and initiatives, 326–28, 330–32, 357–58, 527n45; and information, 327–28, 333, 372; inspirations, 327, 328, 333; and local communities, 362–63; scientists in, 371–72 Patel, Govindlal: on British laws in India, 317; land reforms in India, 315; and paper production in India, 160–61; on rationalization of bureaucracy, 153; and redistribution in India, 102, 103–4; work and influence, 102–3 Pawley, Martin, 294 peasants: battle for long-term history of redistribution, 253–54, 255–57; changes and rebellions in arc of

i n d e x    571

history, 60–61, 251, 252, 253–55; as consumers of western technology, 222–23, 226–27; economic opportunity, 123–25, 273; economic security and planning, 65; in Europe, 4, 7, 53; fallacies about, 406; and history of rebellions and redistribution, 76–78, 79, 80, 247, 251, 253; information gathering, 360–64, 368–69; land squats and occupancy rights, 345–46; meaning of Chinese land reforms, 234–36; poverty, 53–54; psychological consequences from redistribution, 250–52; support of FAO, 26–27, 64, 183; theories of imminent revolution, 63–64 Peru, 45–46, 148, 341–42 Philippines, 374 pilgrimage of Vinoba Bhave, 48, 49–50, 307, 311, 312–13, 316, 318 plant-breeding technology, 260–61 Plender, John, 302 Plunkett, Horace, 113 Plunkett Foundation, and cooperatives, 140–41 population (dynamics or growth): in developing countries, 108; and industrial-scale farming, 105, 106–7; issues in India, 106, 108–9, 115, 320; overpopulation fears, 106, 125; preparation for, 176; as problem, 105, 106, 115, 271; and small-scale technology in India, 109–16 post-colonial moment: and economy, 105–8; Indian rebellion in economics, 99–100, 108–17 post-colonial nations. See colonies of Europe—former poverty: climate change and the future, 408–9; for farmers, 53–54; informa-

tion as solution, 217, 219, 225; protests against, 44; redistribution as solution, 20, 31, 33–34, 44; and small-scale technology, 55, 223; and squatting, 348–51 Powell, John, 250–51, 252 power: from below, 341–42; and centralization, 409; and displacement, 3–5; of elite as problem, 144–45; and hierarchies, 328–31; institutions and downward power, 326–28; and public space, 342–43 Prasad, Rajendra, 100, 315 Prebisch, Raúl, 212, 213 The Private Future (Pawley), 294 property: concepts and forms, 416, 419–20; law and rights in Locke, 7–8; and longue durée, 429; market in Britain, 295–96, 297–300, 303–4; model documents, 7; mutual rights, 417 Prosterman, Roy, 147, 253 Provisional World Plan for Agriculture (FAO), 195 psychological aspects of land reforms, 230, 237–38, 251–52, 254, 276 public space, power in, as technique, 342–43 publishing at FAO, 179–80, 424–25. See also information infrastructures Puerto Rico, 166–68   Quebec conference (1945), 58–59, 66, 72 Quechua peasants and land struggle, 45, 341–42   race and equality, in Orr’s view, 67–69 racialized groups: in United Kingdom, 298–99; in United States, 6, 30, 265

572  i n d e x

racism and racial prejudice: in 1940s and ’50s globally, 68–69; in Orr’s objectives at FAO, 66, 67; and redistribution in U.S., 30, 265–69 “rangoli mapping,” 369, 539–40n36 real estate, as investment, 297–98, 303–4 redistribution (land redistribution), 412–13; and battle for long-term history, 253–54, 255–57; compensation in, 17, 104, 267; conference of 1951 in U.S., 187; connections in protests, 44, 49, 51; connection to climate change, 385–88, 394, 409–10; contemporary iterations, 32–33, 34; critique by Paddocks, 149–50, 259, 270–71; disappearance of schemes for, 27–33, 207–8; and economic independence for peasants, 64–65; as failure, 278–79, 307, 384–85; in the future, 34–35, 96, 408–9; and history as model, 79–80; and history of peasants rebellions, 76–78, 79, 80, 251; as inevitability around the world, 61–62, 251; and land reforms, 20, 21–22, 25–27, 61, 413; and longue durée, 429; vs. modernization model, 80–82, 94; and monarchs in eighteenth-century Europe, 8–9; as movement in 1940s and ’50s, 64; by nation, with area and beneficiaries, 18–19; in occupancy rights emergence, 6–7; and population dynamics as problem, 105, 106, 115; rebellion as measure, 252–53; reemergence, 282; as solution for poverty, 20, 31, 33–34, 44; as solution to problems, 54, 78, 95–96, 123; and tenants becoming owners, 40, 413; as theory and tool, 15–16, 33–34,

413–14. See also Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)—and redistribution redistributive justice, at FAO, 72–73 reforms. See land reforms rent control: Appalachian survey, 371; law in Britain for Ireland, 14, 38; and market, 286–87; as problem, 286; removal for housing, 286; as technique for climate change, 400; in U.S., 285–86, 338 rent strikes: in former colonies, 100; in India, 46, 100–101; land war in Ireland, 40–42; in Midwest (U.S.), 87; as technique for climate change, 399 reparations, 39, 40, 399–400 researchers, at FAO, 183 resistance, and longue durée, 427 “revenue-farming,” 47–48 rice milling, 114 Richards, Paul, 361–62 Robinson, Joan, 115–16 Rockefeller Foundation, 217–18, 242–43 Rome, as FAO headquarters, 57, 58, 59, 60 Rome Consensus: Bucks’s ideas in, 54; description and definition, 131; emergence, 94–95; global outlook, 70–74; as issue globally, 59–60, 96; and occupancy rights, 28; redistribution and land reforms, 26, 59–60; role, as ideology, 54, 96 “Roofs or Ceilings?” (Friedman), 285–87, 288 Rostow, W. W., 79 Roy, Ananya, 374, 375 Rural Rapid Appraisal (RRA), 363–64, 379 Rural Welfare Division (FAO), 75–76

i n d e x    573

Russell, Bertrand, 46 Russell, John, 68 Russia, and land reforms, 231, 234–35, 238   Sabean, David, 251 Sachs, Wolfgang, 94, 398 sacred texts, and inequality, 4 St. Cross College, Oxford (1968 conference), 223, 226–27 satyagraha, in India, 48, 50 Savannah conference (1974), 250–52 Sax, Joseph, 199 Schickele, Rainer: anti-racism, 87, 90; background and father, 90; beliefs, 88–89, 91, 92–93, 94; on bureaucrats’ purpose, 183; economic opportunity for peasants, 123–25, 273; on elites and landlords as problem, 143–44, 243; empathy and economic development, 86, 89–90, 92–93; at FAO, 76, 88, 89, 91; on feudalism, 145; and population, 176; and redistribution, 95, 176, 247; on smallscale technology, 212; support of African American communists, 87–88, 249; in Tanzania, 92, 211; vision vs. Paddocks’, 273–74; and World Land Use Survey, 169–70 Schickele, René, 90–91 Schickele, Sandra, 311 school strikes, and climate change, 399 Schumacher, E. F.: on housing, 338; and information for poverty, 225–26; small technology and “simple tools” approach, 223–25, 226, 227, 359 science, and information, 113, 204–6 Scotland, 282, 337, 396 Scott, James C., 250, 252, 426–27

seed catalogues, FAO, 135, 136 Seers, Dudley, 358, 359 Seldon, Arthur, 290 self-governance: from below, 329, 332; and Ostrom’s work, 197–98; and participation, 139–40, 332, 380; via consensus, 313, 318–19, 323–24 Sen, Amartya, 141, 157, 322 Sen, Samar Ranjan, 109–12, 113, 114, 115 “settler colonialism,” 11 “settler colonies,” vs. indigenous labor colonies, 442–43n25 severalty (in proprietorship), 416 sharecropping, in land reforms, 414 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 266 “shirking,” 255 Shiva, Vandana, 396 “show-how” and “know-how,” 138 “simple tools” approach, 224–25 Sinha, Surendra Prasad, 321–22 slavery, 10–11, 266, 267 small farms and small farmers: and climate change, 387–88, 401–2; diagrams and local information, 363; and economic growth, 116–17, 213; as economic opportunity for peasants, 124–25; in former colonies, 99; in The Good Earth, 82–83; vs. industrial agriculture in India, 320–21; information infrastructures creation, 127–28, 133–34, 150; and NGOs, 393; and population as problem, 105–6; productivity and economy, 20–21, 124, 401; redistribution schemes, disappearance of, 28; support of FAO in land reforms, 26–27; viability today, 125–26; in World Bank policy, 279 Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher), 226, 227–28

574  i n d e x

small-scale technology: and appropriate technology, 98–99, 227–28, 359; benefits, 114; Dodd’s program for, 123, 127; evidence, 117–20, 133; and internet, 126; and land reforms, 118; and growth in India, 55, 98–99, 117–18, 119–20; and population in India, 109–16; and redistribution, 30–31, 118–19; replacement by economic growth, 213, 222–23; “showhow” and “know-how,” 138; “simple tools” approach, 224–25; as solution to problems, 55, 223; as technique for climate change, 401–2; for transformation of developing countries, 131–32, 133, 209, 210, 359; turn to Western technology, 222–23, 226–27 social science, as agent of change, 359–60 social scientists: and bibliographies, 192–93; community walks and information gathering, 360–64; at FAO, 62–63, 68, 75–78; and information infrastructures, 145–46; and participatory research movement, 371–72; role, 145 Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 327 Soil Map of the World: description and financing, 171, 172–73, 174, 177, 357; outcome as failure, 153, 173, 177–78; outcome as success, 302–3, 493n80; as participatory mapping, 356–57; as plan, 128, 168; scale, 171–72 soil systems maps, FAO, 162–64, 165, 167–68, 172 Sonjo peoples, 211 Soto, Hernando de, 349 Soviet Union, 246. See also Russia

squatters and squatting: in Britain, 43–44, 296–97, 336–40, 343–45, 353, 404; and cooperation, 339–41; description and definition, 334–35; and developing countries, 340–41, 345–48, 349–50; in economy, 308, 350; and land, 45–46, 324, 340–42, 345–46, 399; legitimacy and support, 346–50; neoliberalism and, 335, 353; origin of term, 43; as politics, 340–45; and public space, 342–43; and redistribution, 31–32, 351, 352–53; rights, 417; rise in urban areas, 351; and the state, 334–35, 338, 340, 344–45; technique of, 308, 341, 353 Stamp, Dudley, 158, 159, 163, 169, 171–72 state: housing regulation and building, 289–90, 291–94; and information collection, 302; and occupancy, 418–19; organization of redistribution, 289; and squatting, 334–35, 338, 340, 344–45 Stilgoe, John, x–xi Stocking, Collis, 215 Study on Land Reform Implementation, 173–75 Sun Yat-sen, 229, 235 surveys, replacement for, 360, 361 Sussex Manifesto (1968), 359 “Sussex Tool Kit” (Rural Rapid Appraisal), 363–64, 379 Swann, Robert, 325, 332   Tandon, Rajesh, 327 Tanzania, 92, 112, 210, 211–12 Tawney, Richard, 79, 83–84 “technical assistance programs,” FAO, 119

i n d e x    575

technique(s), 24, 420–21, 422; in climate change, 398–403; in occupancy, 33, 34, 398, 421; in occupancy for democratic ecology, 398–407; in occupancy rights, 7, 14–15, 33; of the occupier, 421; in participatory movements, 307–8, 313, 341, 342, 357, 397–98 technology: in agriculture, 320–21, 401–2; appropriate technology (AT), 98–99, 222, 225–26, 227–28, 359, 369; in China, 84–85; and debt, 122; developing countries and the West, 120–21; and information as solution, 217–18; for maps, 175, 369–70; and markets as new path, 216, 222–23; in modernization vs. redistribution models, 80, 81; and participatory methods, 378–79, 404–5; role in development, 134; and scale, 112–13. See also small-scale technology tenant farmers in Ireland, 13–14, 36, 37, 39–42, 44, 413 tenant rights, concepts in, 417 Thailand, 349 Thatcher, Margaret, 285, 291 Thiesenhuisen, William, 346 “third way” (redistribution as peaceful path): as goal of FAO, 64–65, 230, 233, 241, 246, 247, 250; as theory, 241–44, 245, 255 Thirumalai, S., 113 Thorner, Daniel, 248–49, 255; with Alice Thorner, on land reforms in India, 103–4, 315, 511–12n71 Tijerina, Reies López, 267–68 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 9 Tolley, Howard, 121, 147, 244 tools, concept and uses of, 421–22 totalitarian societies theory, 238

Town and Country Planning Act (UK, 1947), 295, 340 Toynbee, Arnold, 388, 390–92, 395 “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin), 265 Truman, Harry S., 72 Tuma, Elias, 78 Turner, John F. C., 338, 347–48, 350, 352, 353   Ujamaa Program (Tanzania), 112, 211, 212 United Fruit Company, 261–62 United Nations, 59, 71, 122; challenge to authority, 280, 281–82; and climate change, 389–90, 394; and Cold War competition, 240, 246; conference on future work of, 57–58; and disappearance of redistribution schemes, 28, 280; and economic histories, 76; information infra­ structures, 423–24; as participatory institution, 402–3; and “third way,” 242; UNESCO, and FAO mapping project, 171 United States: abandonment of international commitments, 386; aid with ties, 320; anti-communism, 87–88, 230, 245–46, 248–49; and bibliographies, 181, 194; and Chinese land reforms, 230, 233–34, 235, 236–39; Cold War era events, 246, 250; and Curta calculator, 213; development as fraud, 258–59, 262, 263; focus on large-scale farming, 209–10; history into ideas and policies, 79–80; housing prices and rent control, 285–86, 338; influence on FAO, 221; information for land use, 160; intellectual divide (in 1970s), 273–74;

576  i n d e x

United States (cont.) landownership, 9, 267–68; and land reform, 265–67; land squats, 343; and market values, 207, 210; modernization model, 79–80, 81; occupancy rights in twentieth century, 6, 207; participatory mapping, 356; participatory movements, 311; prohibitions on Americans, 248–49; as savior to developing countries, 263–64; small farmers and The Good Earth, 82–83; and small-scale technology, 119, 223; technology in development projects, 134, 209; “third way” and land reforms, 242–43; universities, 186, 188–89, 194, 227; USAID bibliographies, 184, 186 —and redistribution: and battle for history, 253–54, 256; at home, 30, 259–60, 266; for indigenous people, 266, 269; policies in 1950s to ’70s, 74, 207–8; race and racism in, 30, 265–69; and disappearance of redistribution schemes, 28–30, 32, 207–8, 278, 451–52n54; renouncement of, 230, 236–37, 240, 248–49, 253, 269, 276–77, 386; support for, 96, 249, 264, 462n44 U.S. Constitution, as model, 7 U.S. v. Sandoval et al., 267 universal right, to occupancy rights, 334, 335 universities, in U.S., 186, 188–89, 194, 227 University of Sussex community, in local information and walking tours, 358, 359, 362, 363–64 University of Wisconsin (and Land Tenure Center), 188–89, 276–77 unused land, and mapping, 165

urban planning, and citizen participation, 328–30   Vienna conference (1968), 214–15 Vietnam, and Vietnam War, 264 Vinoba Bhave, Acharya: and land gifts, 49, 307, 312–13, 315, 316–19, 323–24, 326, 332; in land rights struggle, 48, 50; legacy of, 322–26, 327, 332–33; pilgrimage, 48, 49–50, 307, 311, 312–13, 316, 318; and redistribution, 31, 312, 313, 315–16, 318, 323, 332; technique of peaceful action, 307, 312–14, 315–16, 317, 318, 323, 325–26 visual aids, 363   Wahlen, F. T., 75, 246 walking tours and data collection, 360–61, 362–63, 537–38n21 Walters, Alan, 294 Ward, Colin: on occupancy rights, 334, 417; and squatting, 338–39, 344, 346–47, 348, 352, 353 Warriner, Doreen: influence on FAO, 81; and land reforms in Egypt, 26; redistribution and land reforms work, 26, 59, 64–65; World War II work, 63; and “third way,” 241 war veterans, housing in Britain, 42, 43, 336–37, 338–39, 340 Washington Consensus, 94 waste and wastefulness, 265, 269–70, 292–93 wasteland, mapping, 165 We Don’t Know How (W. and E. Paddock), 258–59, 270, 273 West Bengal, 155–56, 157, 323 Western nations: and battle of ideas with East, 240–41; racial prejudice in 1940s and ’50s globally, 68–69;

i n d e x    577

sacrifice in Orr’s views, 67, 261; superiority in modernization model, 79–80; views on technology in developing countries, 120–21; and voluntary land reforms of Vinoba Bhave, 324–26 The White Man’s Dilemma (Orr), 67, 261 white people and nations, 54, 67–68; settlers, landownership in U.S., 9, 267–68. See also Western nations Whitfield, Owen, 87 Williams, Marcia, 300 Wilson, Harold, 300–301 Wiser, Charlotte and William, 354 Wittfogel, Karl: responses to, 251–52; theories and views, 230, 237–39, 240, 242, 251–52, 253–54, 510–11n67 women: as bibliographers, 180, 184, 202, 203; and empathy, 129, 204; and feminization of social science, 201; labor in land reforms and redistribution, 202–4; in participa-

tory techniques, 375; as researchers, 129, 180 Workshop on Political Economy, 198 World Bank: audits on policy, 277; influence on FAO funding, 220–21, 248, 278, 280; and participatory governance, 374, 375–76; path of economic growth for developing countries, 215; and redistribution, 29, 278–80; squatting support, 349–50 World Land Reform Conference (1951), 186–88 World Land Use Survey, 169–71 world map, remaking after World War II, 59 World War II, and land, 57–58   Yates, Paul Lamartine, 63–65, 66, 125   El Zamorano, the Pan American School of Agriculture (Honduras), 271 Zapata, Emiliano, 61, 62, 243, 268 Zero Population Growth group, 271