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. In the 1700s and 1800s, European colonial powers and new nation-states snapped up indigenous land around the globe and granted it to landless settlers. In the 1900s, Soviets and Maoists appropriated masses of land for communal farming, Latin American nations toppled powerful landowners to form collectives and cooperatives among the landless, and East Asian countries handed parcels of lands to individual farmers in pursuit of development. Drawing on a career's worth of original research and extensive on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in 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.