No other institution wielded comparable transnational power over such a large body of the Irish diaspora than the Catholic Church, yet it was riven with internal divisions over the questions of land and labour during the 1880s, and its grip on Irish popular opinion was increasingly strained and contingent. In this chapter, the relationship of the Church to questions of land reform is discussed, particularly its role in sustaining radical critiques of liberal modernity and capitalism. It discusses the importance of priests to the Land League, and the challenges faced by the Catholic hierarchy in both Ireland and the United States to contain and direct the force of Irish land and labour radicalism. The chapter also looks closely at Henry George’s relationship with the religiosity, his use of theological arguments, and his tensions with the Catholic Church in the United States.

This chapter examines the role of land in the history of political thought, specifically with regard to the concepts of value, productivity, natural harmony, and independence, and how, via the notion of the body as a universal materialist foundation, these have been conceptualised in the history of land reform agitation, both in Ireland and beyond. It examines the ideas and influence of key figures such as Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, setting them in a much broader context of the long-standing tensions between liberal political economy and liberal individualism. The distinctiveness of land, based on the presumption of an individual natural right to life to which land was integral, formed the basis of this paradox in political thought. The chapter also analyses the place of land in Irish political economy, and the challenges faced by Irish economists in discarding references to moral purposiveness in economic thought.

This introductory chapter lays out the central importance of the interlocking influence of Henry George and the Irish Land War in animating a resurgent agrarianism in the 1880s, as well as the influence these political tendencies had on the trajectory of liberal political thought. It briefly explores the historiographical background of the late nineteenth century land question, particularly interpretations of the Irish Land War, and the uneasy place of Henry George in these narratives. The role of land in shaping Ireland’s distinctive political economy and its liminal place in the wider Anglophone world is also discussed. This introduction also assesses how the question of land can cut across the concerns of intellectual and social history in a way that enables connections to be made between popular attitudes and political thought, and explains how this methodological approach will be used. Finally, the chapter sets out the structure of the subsequent book.

The North Atlantic is best considered as an increasingly integrated economic and social region during the late nineteenth century, and this approach helps to clarify Ireland’s geopolitical place during the ideologically tumultuous 1880s. Using this framework, this chapter explores the place of Henry George and of the Irish Land War in this fractious period, detailing how technological and political developments reshaped long-standing assumptions. It explains how the Land War became an international event, with significance extending far beyond Ireland itself. The chapter also recounts George’s intellectual biography, setting the scene for the development of his most famous work, Progress and Poverty. The reaction to this book is assessed, particularly the most common arguments made by critics, and the ways in which these critiques developed commonalities across the political spectrum.

Zimbabwe’s longest election season span from the February 2000 referendum to the 2002 presidential election. In 2002, voters became wary and weary of violent elections. Politically motivated violence continued as Mugabe and Tsvangirai had their moment of reckoning as to who should be president of Zimbabwe. Over time, Mugabe become ever more dependent on violence and dictatorial methods, and less and less interested in the welfare of his people, treating Zimbabwe’s wealth and resources as rewards for loyal Zanu PF supporters, boasting that there was no vacancy at State House. A closer study of the incidence of election violence shows voter resilience amidst cyclical bouts of state-sponsored udlakela. Voter resilience in the ruling party and opposition showed the potential and capability of the electorate to recover from crises and shocks. Zimbabwe voter resilience revealed that no matter the number of violent disturbances Zimbabweans absorbed over time, they remained within a relatively similar political state domain without imploding. Voters in Zimbabwe were remarkably resilient, displaying abilities of self-organization under extreme periodic election stresses. They built capacity and adaptation in the face of election adversities without resorting to civil war.

The Unity Accord sealed between Mugabe and Nkomo and their supporters in 1987 not only drastically reduced violence against the Ndebele, but it also ended dissident activity generating a totally different election framework in the 1990 elections. Twenty seats reserved for whites were abolished. In 1989, Edgar Tekere, a former Zanu PF party stalwart disenchanted by Mugabe’s leadership style formed the urban-based Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM). ZUM and independent candidates from within Zanu PF were not evidence of a gradual decline in elite cohesion. Zanu PF’s political stranglehold in the country directed violence at civil society. Pent-up intolerance of political opposition draped in a dictatorship outfit replaced ethnic conflict in driving violence. From the dominant power politics analysis, a social narrative approach shows the resilience of ethnicity, nationalism, loyalty, legitimacy and unity as explanatory factors for violence. However, Zanu PF also used paramilitary organisations to maintain or regain control and the abuse of legislative and judicial powers to stay in power. The 1990 general elections took place from 28 to 30 March, with many unresolved teething problems, including persistent division and weakness in the opposition. Five parties competed in the election; ZUM, the UANC, NDU, Zanu-Ndonga and Zanu PF.

In 2000, udlakela was diverse in its trail, levels, spread and types transforming, and evolving in different ways, in different places and times, and used on different people. The resurgence of violence in 2000 was categorically a response to emboldened opposition as civil society united to mount a spirited stand against Zanu PF autocracy. In September 1999, the ZCTU led by Morgan Tsvangirai in coalition with largely urban-based civic groups collaborated and formed a new opposition party – the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). In 1999 and 2000, unprecedented nationwide political violence rocked Zimbabwe, starting during a referendum campaign for the adoption of a long overdue new constitution. The MDC defeated the government after campaigning for a ‘No’ vote in the February 2000 referendum. Held from 12 to 13 February, the result was a majority ‘no vote’. Out of a total of 1,312,738 votes cast, 697,754 were against the draft and 578,210 endorsed it. The draft constitution was rejected by 54.7 per cent against 45.3 per cent on a 26 per cent largely urban turnout. Violence in 2000 was induced by three broad issues: the referendum, land reform and the parliamentary election. These influences and the violence often coalesced but also remained distinct.

Wartime free labor under military auspices evolves in the Union-occupied lower Mississippi valley during the second half of 1864. Legislatures of Arkansas and Louisiana fail to address new labor arrangements, and plantation affairs remain under Federal military authority. Sugar planters, confronting the abolition of slavery in Louisiana, clamor for labor and racial control in planning for the 1865, whereas freedpeople and their advocates call for economic independence and criticize the Unionist government’s failure to implement racial equality. The cotton region witnesses continuing conflict over the new labor arrangements, with freedpeople pushing for alternatives to wage labor and access to land. The Davis Bend community underscores black aspirations for economic independence, while reports of the reenslavement of freedpeople along the Mississippi River illustrate the desperation of former slaveholders to preserve slavery.

As we saw in the previous chapter, demands over common resources can reveal new dynamics of the articulation/disarticulation of identities and can result in the consolidation of new ethnic boundaries. In this chapter, I focus on the consequences of identity boundary-making for physical spaces. I argue that the endemic lack of resources in contexts where recognition reforms with important redistributive components (what I have called ‘means of redistribution’) are implemented is behind the rise of perhaps the most common among the types of recognition conflict I identify in this book: social reproduction conflicts.

This is the first of two chapters to take a closer look at Sub-Saharan Africa, which is both the world’s least-industrialized and ethnically most-diverse continent. I start here with an examination of Somalia and Uganda, which are both states which have seen low levels of industrialization and an increase in ethnic fractionalization in recent decades. In Somalia the lack of formal sector job creation in the 1970s and 1980s contributed both to the collapse of the state along clan lines and a shift by which Somalia has gone from being considered one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Africa to one of the most diverse, as the salience of clan identity has risen in order to allow citizens to gain access to land and livelihoods. In Uganda a failure to create structural transformation has led to increased competition for land, leading individuals to utilize their often newly formed ethnic identities to claim ownership and title over rural land. I provide evidence from a variety of local land conflicts that revolve around ethnicity, as well as ongoing debates around both the listing of ’indigenous communities’ in Uganda’s constitution and the creation of new districts.

The estate at Yasnaya Polyana was both a blessing and a curse to Tolstoy and his wife Sofia. It became the beloved familial, historical stage where the Tolstoys proudly lived and raised their ten children, and Tolstoy wrote his work. It had belonged to his mother, whose great-grandfather Major General Prince Sergei Volkonsky had purchased it in 1763. Tolstoy inherited the property of 330 serfs in 1847, and in 1860, inherited another 300 serfs when his eldest brother died. He had sold half his land and the main house to pay gambling debts by the time he married in 1862. In the next two decades, he managed to re-establish the Tolstoy fortune, investing money earned from the novels in land nearby and in Samara province. By 1880, Tolstoy believed that property ownership was evil. His self-censure reflected his ambitions to acquire property. He had quintupled the value of his holdings to 500,000 rubles by 1891, when the land was divided among his wife and children. After his death, they gave much of Yasnaya Polyana to the peasants, as Tolstoy requested, using the sale of his works to buy out their shares. Tolstoy’s family, literature, and property were everywhere intertwined.

Research on society and environment has a rich history that is challenging to access. We define socio-environmental research as structured inquiry about the reciprocal relationships between society and environment. It has evolved from early observational expeditions to today’s data-intensive, interdisciplinary work. We assemble readings from the late 1700s to the mid-1990s to showcase this legacy and organize readings into chapters. Each chapter is introduced by a prominent scholar, who discusses the context key insights. Considered over time, readings suggest certain research themes have endured, forming lineages: a focus on populations and their resource bases, sustainable management of common-pool resources, society and land, technology, and systems. As a guide, this anthology can help new researchers gain a basic vocabulary and overview of different research traditions. Current researchers can learn different ways to conceptualize society–environment relationships, supporting interdisciplinary teams. For specialists in socio-environmental research, the readings can stimulate new questions and illuminate the historic nature of contemporary ideas and concerns.

This chapter examines the wartime population policy, the balanced distribution of population that became deliberated in the process of creating policies for “national land planning.” It analyzes the debates relating to population distribution policies as well as policy-oriented research activities mobilized for national land planning, the wartime government’s “sacred mission” to construct the new order in East Asia by establishing the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. By focusing on the population technocrat Tachi Minoru, the chapter describes how Tachi’s research reflected the political agenda of the wartime government, which primarily viewed the population as an invaluable resource to be deployed for the nation at war. It details how the research carried out with this understanding came to create the knowledge about gendered and racialized demographic subjects that were categorized around the notion of economic production and biological reproduction. The chapter also analyzes the technocrat’s research to illustrate the fragile nature of demographic knowledge produced for policymaking and concludes that the role of policy-oriented scientific investigation in wartime statecraft was by no means as stable as has been claimed.

First published in Foreign Affairs in 1938, this essay describes the racialized regimes of labor exploitation in colonial Africa, tracing the patterns of land expropriation, resource extraction and resistance that give shape to different trajectories across the continent. Du Bois identifies immanent potentialities in this landscape from the cooperative model to the resignification of leisure. An expanded version of this essay appeared in the 1939 Black Folk Then and Now.

One thoroughgoing assumption of both classical liberal and neoliberal thinking has to do with the supreme importance of property rights. Accompanying most liberal notions of property ownership is the ability to exclude all others from using your property should you wish to. This has led to a curious phenomenon – the absentee landlord. The absentee landlord owns property, controls its use, and profits from it despite not being physically present or practically using the property. In this chapter, Goel looks at how a group of holy, third-gender people in India, hijras, think about property ownership and use. Due to a century or two of colonial degradation, hijras have been stripped of many of their rights to property and its use, and occupy a marginal place in Indian society today. As a result, they maintain an elaborate system of communally maintained use-rights in the cities they live in, apportioning the ability to walk mendicant rounds and grant blessings. This chapter, more than just offering a strict dichotomous set of cases, invites the reader to think about what possession of land or space looks like when we abandon contractual exclusive ownership and instead embrace rights that come from use. The chapter thereby moves beyond the neoliberal tradition and takes the reader right to the edge of the classical liberal tradition of thought, with its emphasis on property rights as an intrinsic component of individual liberty.

One characteristic of the United States has been overlapping waves of dispossession, settlement, and dispossession again. These waves of dispossession and settlement often come with big changes in economic and political systems, and with no small amount of violence. Here, Oliver writes about historically black communities who, in the wake of slavery, established townships on Indian land in what is now the state of Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, too, “Indian Land” was in part established when white settlers forced Indians out of other parts what is now the United States and into Oklahoma. A more recent wave of dispossession has come about due to the oil-fracking boom that has swept the great plains of the United States. With this boom has come oil speculation and speculators seeking to move black communities out of their homes and off their land. Often this sort of dispossession comes in the language of the home as an investment, and the home owner as an investor seeking to make profit. This logic of marketization challenges the idea of the houseowner as a cornerstone of the community and instead implies a self-understanding as a Homo economicus seeking to maximize personal utility. Oliver shows how the communities weigh these arguments as people decide what sort of community they want to live in and what money, if any, they should make from their homes.

The control and ownership of land is one of the surest ways to generate wealth. Moreover, if you own land or treat it as property, you can accumulate it and bequeath it to whomever you like, creating large inter-generational holdings of wealth. This is often why, when revolutions happen, one of the first questions that come up is about land, its ownership, and its potential redistribution. In this chapter, Bafford looks at what happened to land ownership across a number of revolutions in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Bafford identifies how predominantly white landowners in South Africa were able to keep their wealth. They did so with the help of property-protecting neoliberal statecraft that prioritized the protection of the existing regime of property rights rather than challenging inequality of land ownership. In Zimbabwe white landowners lost many of their holdings. Still, Bafford goes on to show the way that international, neoliberal governing organizations punished Zimbabwe’s attempt at racial restorative justice with reference to the protection of property rights and the free flow of investement capital.