Conflicts over land and territory will likely proliferate as the accelerating climate crisis collides with rising geopolitical tensions. The International Organization for Migration has estimated that between now and 2050, as many as a billion people will be displaced from their homes by the effects of climate change. This is already happening. In many parts of Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, unprecedented peaks of heat, prolonged droughts, more violent storms, and sea-level rise are pushing regions to the limit of ecological viability.
In Europe and North America, media coverage of “climate migrants” encourages the idea that people will move in large numbers to the world’s wealthiest countries. But doors are closing in an era of racialized hostility to migration. The overwhelming majority of people who are forced to leave their homes because of heat, aridity, or deluge will move within the borders of the countries where they live, almost all of them in the so-called global South. Their ability to sustain themselves will depend on access to land.
The political scientist Michael Albertus’s capacious and illuminating Land Power shows that the distribution of land ownership explains a great deal about where wealth and power reside in the world today. At the heart of Albertus’s story is what he calls “the Great Reshuffle”: a planet-spanning redistribution of land that began roughly 200 years ago, driven by the expansion of modern states and empires. During this period, the earth’s human population grew from one billion to eight billion. In many places for the first time, land became scarce and coveted. Its seizure and redistribution locked in patterns of racial domination, gender inequality, and environmental harm—what Albertus considers “the world’s greatest social ills.” But his account is far from fatalistic. As long as states learn from past failures, they can redistribute land in ways that avoid calamities and empower and uplift their citizens.
EXHAUSTING THE LAND
Societies have been “reshuffling” land for a very long time, at least since the last Ice Age, nearly 12,000 years ago. As one review of the evidence points out, scholars can trace a global “succession of land system regime shifts” back 3,000 years or more, with evidence from every continent of increased land clearance, the domestication of plants and animals, and more extensive cultivation. But the scale and intensity of land use underwent a marked change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leading to an increase in human population, the emergence of new elites enriched by trade and manufacturing, and an expansion in the capacity of states to control land and extract resources. These developments are what Albertus labels the Great Reshuffle. “Our lives today,” he writes, “are determined by the choices that were made when the land shifted hands during the Great Reshuffle.”
What changes catalyzed the transformation of this long-term process into the Great Reshuffle? Here, Albertus relies on a familiar narrative of modernity in which Europe looms large. The French Revolution, in his account, was the “turning point in human history.” Its leaders sanctioned the mass appropriation of lands from the nobility and their distribution to smaller farmers and the urban bourgeoisie. The revolution—and counterrevolutions across Europe—would speed the formation of nation-states in the nineteenth century. European nation-states made new claims on their subjects and their territory, which led to both the greater democratization of access to land and a rise in landlessness among the least powerful in society. Nation-states, he says, “firmed up their borders, established a monopoly on the use of force, and raised standing armies and centralized bureaucracies.”
Albertus’s account neglects the fact that imperial states and kingdoms in Asia did much the same during this period. A generation of scholarship in global history has demonstrated parallel and often comparable trajectories of intensified land use around the early modern world. The Mughal Empire’s hunger for land taxes, for instance, drove an assault on eastern India’s forests in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which redistributed land to pioneer cultivators willing to undertake that work of settlement. Similar incentives simultaneously drew Russian farmers to the forests in the steppes of Central Asia and Chinese settlers to what is now Sichuan Province during the same centuries—land grants, tax relief, and the prospect of land security. To “exhaust the land” was the guiding principle of Chinese provincial governors under both the Ming and Qing dynasties. Their aim was to leave no patch of land uncultivated in order to secure food for a growing population. To see the origins of the Great Reshuffle only in political developments in Europe underplays the extent to which this was a global process from the start, driven by the growing capacity of states to extract taxation, by the pressures of swelling populations with rising material expectations, and by the global movement of crops and animals in a period of extreme climatic instability.
A VACANT SOIL
The modern age, in Albertus’s view, is characterized by several types of rearrangements of land ownership. What he calls “settler reforms” cast the longest shadow, shaping the long-term development of global inequality. The term is Albertus’s rather mild moniker for the violent way European settlers seized swaths of the earth, dispossessing and often killing those who already inhabited them. “In a vacant Soyle,” wrote the New England clergyman John Cotton in 1630, “hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is.” The Narragansett leader Miantonomo countered this claim to property with an account of the settlers’ violence toward the land. “Our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods,” he said around 1640. “But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.”
Albertus furnishes a wealth of examples of how this settler revolution unfolded in North America, in Canada, and in Australia—and at whose cost. Land Power vividly shows the lasting consequences of this redistribution of land, for instance in the case of the Cahuilla Indians of California’s Coachella Valley, a people first confined to reservations and then evicted from even those lands in the 1950s. The conquest of the American West served as a model for would-be conquerors elsewhere. Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, imagined a future in which German settlers had at last subdued the “endless primeval forest” of eastern Europe and made there “a paradise, a European California.”
Ranged against these settler reforms, in Albertus’s schema, is the twentieth-century movement that sought to institute a very different relationship between states, lands, and populations: collective reforms, inaugurated in the early years of the Soviet Union before sweeping through China and across the decolonizing world in the second half of the twentieth century. Collectivization, in which states sought to industrialize agricultural production by eliminating private landholding, was an idea animated by legitimate moral and political imperatives—even as it often produced disasters.
Schemes of collectivization sought to overturn inequalities in landholding. Albertus’s account of their calamitous, violent failure is mostly familiar, but he shows clearly how and why they failed. In the name of liberating cultivators, states ended up exploiting them. Governments dismantled family farms. They expropriated agrarian surplus to force-feed industrialization, in the process bringing famine to Ukraine in the 1930s, for instance. They laid waste to soils and rivers and forests in their rush to achieve impossible targets. China’s Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s breakneck plan for rural industrialization that lasted from 1958 to 1962, caused famine and mass suffering while leaving a trail of environmental destruction.
Often in Land Power, examples of successful reforms come from Latin America, where Albertus has done fieldwork. In Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, collective or cooperative land reforms—less grandiose and more grassroots than the Soviet or Chinese variants—brought substantive and lasting social change. They were implemented by both right-wing populist-authoritarian regimes and left-leaning ones. The reforms gave small farmers security of tenure and made their farms more viable by grouping them in larger units managed either by the state or by farmers’ cooperatives. Albertus cites the assessment of the anthropologist Enrique Mayer on the impact of Peru’s land reforms of the late 1960s: the reforms “completed the abolition of all forms of servitude in rural estates, a momentous shift in the history of the Andes, akin to the abolition of slavery in the Americas.”
The most widespread type of land reform in the twentieth century is also the form that Albertus sees as the model for the most effective land reforms of the twentieth century: he calls them “tiller reforms.” Like collective reforms, tiller reforms also broke up landholdings, but their beneficiaries were small farmers—often former tenants or sharecroppers, who now gained formal ownership of the lands they had previously worked on behalf of large landowners. In Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan after World War II, tiller reforms went furthest in reversing rural inequality: they boosted the prosperity of farming families and provided them the security that facilitated social mobility through mass education. American support was crucial in all three countries. Emboldened U.S. and World Bank policymakers saw tiller reforms as both a panacea for rural distress and an alternative to communism. But the model ran aground in Vietnam, where the modest scale of enacted tiller reforms could not overcome support for the more revolutionary land transformation promised by the communists.
India emerges as an example of the downside of tiller reforms’ incrementalism. After independence in 1947, the Indian government viewed the redistribution of land as an essential way to tackle deep social and economic inequalities. Committed to democratic processes, and to gradual rather than revolutionary transformation, the Indian state undertook extensive reforms. Beginning in the 1950s, between 20 million and 25 million households gained ownership of plots of land through the government’s scheme to abolish the colonial-era zamindari system of tax-collecting landlords. Laws set a ceiling to the amount of land any one person could own. Tenant farmers across the country benefited from the greater security of tenancy. But by the start of the twenty-first century, when these reforms largely ended, they had barely had any effect in reducing rural inequality. Wealthy and well-connected farmers found ways to circumvent the changes or twist them to their own advantage. Distressingly, the consequences of certain reforms, such as those that made tenancies heritable, hurt women and deepened rural India’s “epidemic” of gender violence and discrimination.
The Great Reshuffle brought previously unimaginable abundance to some parts of the world and above all to the settler colonies of North America and Oceania. Indigenous and colonized people paid the price, dispossessed of their lands. Socialist and postcolonial states made several attempts to redistribute land to small farmers and landless rural people, with mixed results and many devastating consequences. The vast expansion in the variety and quantity of agricultural commodities land can produce has enabled the global population to more than triple since 1950. But unequal access to land has locked in deep disparities along the fault lines of race, class, and gender.
HUNGRY FOR MORE
Throughout Land Power, Albertus pays surprisingly little attention to the one factor that draws his story together, lending land its tremendous power in the first place: the demand for food. In Albertus’s account, population growth appears as a largely extraneous trigger for the Great Reshuffle, requiring little explanation. Yet the lifespans of Europeans and Americans lengthened in the nineteenth century precisely because swaths of prairie were planted with wheat and hundreds of millions of cattle, pigs, and poultry could be killed for meat in industrial facilities. As access to land and long-distance transportation of grain and meat improved the diets of even the poorest Europeans and Americans, the last quarter of the nineteenth century brought mass famines to Brazil, China, India, Java, and southern Africa. In each case, growing landlessness and the pressure to cultivate cash crops reduced local resilience in the face of prolonged droughts and other disasters, such as outbreaks of bubonic plague and cattle disease.
Despite a public focus on resource extraction, humanity still exerts its greatest impact on the natural world via agriculture. Agriculture accounts for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions: 31 percent of that from livestock and fisheries, 27 percent from crop production, and 24 percent from the clearance of forests for cultivation (of which only a third is land devoted directly to food for humans, and the rest is devoted to growing food for livestock). Food production is by far the most important cause of biodiversity loss. All the while, according to a 2021 UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimate, 3.1 billion people, or 42 percent of the global population, could not afford an adequately nutritious diet.
Toward the end of Land Power, Albertus suggests that a further reshuffle is already underway—a renewed redistribution of land in a warming world. He speculates about the potential impact of future population declines but has less to say about a more present phenomenon: the so-called global land grab, in which large investors, both international and domestic, are buying up huge tracts of land in low- and middle-income countries. Agricultural investment funds, which treat farmland as a distinct asset class, grew tenfold between 2005 and 2018, yielding a rise in speculative investments in farmland. A major new driver of land grabbing lies in countries’ and corporations’ quests to meet carbon reduction targets through offsets, which they purchase by acquiring carbon-absorbing forested areas. This so-called green grabbing now accounts for around a fifth of global land deals, often to the detriment of local people’s food security. Furthermore, many large land deals, whether they aim to secure grain or offset carbon, have failed—leaving ruin and abandonment in their wake.
SEEDS OF RENEWAL
Still, Albertus ends on a note of cautious optimism. Drawing examples from South Africa and Australia, he argues that it is possible, although formidably difficult, to begin to undo the degrading legacies of earlier land reshuffles. He highlights the halting, incomplete, but substantive land reforms enacted in South Africa after the fall of apartheid, where he says progress has been “both rocky and real.” Substantial lands have been redistributed to Black farmers since the 1990s, but the slow pace of change generates frustration in what remains one of the most unequal countries in the world; many South African land rights activists would see Albertus’s assessment as overly sanguine.
Albertus concludes in Australia, where he says land stands as a “bedrock for autonomy, self-determination, and symbolic parity” for indigenous Australians, centuries after their initial dispossession by white settlers. Restitution has gathered momentum since the 1990s, to the point that indigenous communities now claim rights or ownership over more than half of Australia’s lands—albeit very little in the country’s most prosperous coastal regions. “The seeds of justice are finally starting to blossom,” an Eastern Maar man in 2023 told reporters, after the state of Victoria recognized his community’s ownership of an expanse of coastal land.
In a book focused mostly on institutions, this is a salutary and moving reminder that ideas matter. Land has always been a source of identity and belonging as much as it has been a resource. Throughout the Great Reshuffle, conflicting ideas about how to value land—by its market price, its potential future value, or its spiritual significance—have animated conflicts around the world. Listen to people describing the most outlandish dreams of space colonization, and you’ll hear the echoes of a very old language of settler conquest. As climate change shuffles species around the planet and puts greater pressure on natural resources, humans urgently need a new way to talk about land and their attachments to it. But old narratives die hard.
Albertus believes that the world is on the threshold of a new global struggle for land. Territorial conquest is on the agenda in a more explicit way than it has been since the middle of the twentieth century. As climate change accelerates, lands that were previously too frozen to sustain large populations will become newly productive, sharpening the divide between those who benefit and those who suffer as a result of planetary warming. New sea routes will heighten the strategic value of places such as the Danish-ruled territory of Greenland—which the Trump administration has threatened to use force to take over—while spurring Russian and Chinese ambitions in the Antarctic. It is hard to reconcile the prospect of a violent new era of empire with the more optimistic thrust of Albertus’s book, which sees possibilities for social transformation in “shaking up who owns the land.” But one of the many strengths of Land Power is that it shows that opportunities for positive change can arise unexpectedly—and it is full of lessons for how to seize them.
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