Land Power

An award-winning political scientist shows that a society's path to prosperity, sustainability, and equality depends on who owns the land.

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power, political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career's worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis-and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.

Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.

Land Power is a fascinating book on the power of land inequality in history and the large land reshufflings of the past and present. It is a must-read to think about the coming struggles over land in the 21st century -- Thomas Piketty, New York Times–bestselling author of CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Land has always been a source of economic wealth. This captivating book demonstrates that it has also been a fountainhead of political and social power, profoundly shaping the organization and political structures of many societies -- Daron Acemoglu, co-author of POWER AND PROGRESS
"Land" - Four simple letters. Four enormous impacts: on racial divides, gender inequality, the struggle for development, and our precarious environment. In this powerful and compelling book, Michael Albertus re-invents how to think about that most simple but profound force shaping our lives - the ground beneath us -- Ben Ansell, author of WHY POLITICS FAILS
Land Power is an important book dealing with a timeless but underappreciated issue: who owns the land. It illuminates how social hierarchies and injustice have been historically built around unfair land rights and provides a fascinating array of examples of how reshuffling land can help tackle these pressing issues -- Francis Fukuyama, author of LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
A vigorously argued account of how patterns of landholding shape and are shaped by political power. Global in scope, Land Power is lively, well-informed, and highly illuminating -- Patrick Joyce, author of REMEMBERING PEASANTS
Now more than ever it's essential to talk about land use with the widest lens possible. Land Power offers new insights into how public and private initiatives worldwide can effectively safeguard ecosystems and societies for future generations of all life -- Kristine Tompkins, President and Co-founder of Tompkins Conservation

With a sweeping scope across history and around the world, Albertus offers his readers a novel view on the rise of the modern world. Land - who controls it, who owns it, who works it, and efforts to alter all this - sits at the basis of social power and political power in the modern world

-- Daniel Ziblatt, New York Times–bestselling coauthor of HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE
Magisterial, accessible, and compelling, Land Power vaults across time and geography to provide an extraordinarily learned account of the role of landed power in displacement, inequities, and exploitation. Spanning from 10,000 BC through a nineteenth-century cascade of land reallocations and into a dramatically transformed future, it reveals that the rise of the dispossessed is rarely a guarantee of justice for all, but the advent of a new set of winners and losers -- Margaret Levi, Stanford University

Michael Albertus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. The author of three previous books, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

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