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.

This chapter explores the nature of possession of property and what it means in the different contexts of personal property and land. Although the law characterises property in personal property or goods and in land in distinct ways, possession provides a shared conceptual link a party in possession of land or of personal property will generally have a right to protect that property against interference by any third party (except the true owner).

Any consideration of property law must begin with the nature of property and how we should understand its conceptual underpinning.

The law is primarily a practical and pragmatic science directed to confronting and responding to practical issues and challenges in human affairs, dealings, and transactions. Many existing approaches to property law begin with an attempt to explain the conceptual contours of property and property law and to lay out its philosophical basis, proceeding to analyse these conceptual components and the law’s part in constructing the mosaic of property and its legal underpinnings. In the modern Australian context, this necessarily involves a detailed investigation and analysis of both myriad legislation and caselaw. While this strategy has stood the test of time and is reflected in the following chapters, this book seeks to position the discussion, explanation, and analysis within a context of two overarching themes. First, to explain and systematically integrate the effects and implications of technology upon property and property law. Second, to present a narrative which moves readers from property law principles to the practice of property law in all its applications.

Regimes of property, whether held by African rulers or European administrators, were not transhistorical or total. The written regime of property in Angola emerged in specific contexts, articulated with imperialism, expansion of capitalism, and consolidation of the liberal notion of individual rights at the expense of collective ones. While Portuguese agents enforced a single model of property rights, local chiefs contested this model. Colonial property regimes altered the social order and allowed women, formerly enslaved people, and immigrants, often marginalized groups, to enjoy rights and subvert the economic and social order. The violence that exiled occupants from their own land also justified kidnapping and enslavement. This violence is almost erased in the colonial archives and scholarship that traces a linear progress from slave trade to legitimate trade and imperialism. Nonetheless, violence and appropriation pervade the histories of slavery, property, rights, consumption, and claims.

For most West Central African rulers, land was central to subsistence agriculture, meeting their population needs as well as guaranteeing access to future generations. Chapter 6 traces the discussion about land ownership, examining legal changes and the centrality of paper culture for its commodification. The chapter begins by stressing the role of twentieth-century jurists and colonial officers in defending the idea that no notion of possession and individual ownership ever existed in Africa, while simultaneously creating the narrative that individual property had always existed in Europe. Despite earlier evidence that demonstrates a clear perception of occupation and jurisdiction rights among local rulers and West Central Africans, jurists, missionaries, and later, anthropologists and historians claimed that such rights did not exist, emphasizing the centrality of wealth in people, not in land, as forms of accumulation and wealth. In many ways, ethnographers, jurists, and scholars provided evidence to support colonial claims and ideologies that non-Europeans were incapable of apprehending and protecting the basic concept of ownership. This has had lasting consequences on the scholarship on wealth and accumulation in Africa. The refusal to recognize West Central African possession rights sustained colonialism and legitimated occupation and alienation of land and other resources.

Taking conflicts over new solar energy projects on the agricultural landscape in the global North as its backdrop, the chapter demonstrates how work and labour (including that performed in the North by workers from the global South) are erased both by the opponents and the proponents of such projects. The erasure is consistent with prevailing ways of knowing the human-environment nexus, shaped by an underlying political economy derivative of how international law has constructed and maintained the foundational liberal mythology that separates labour from land. Grounded in our commitment to pursuing a ‘just transition’ to decarbonisation – that is to say, a transition that attends to the distributional effects and disproportionate impacts of decarbonisation on workers and communities – we strive to reconceptualise work and labour as embodied practices of working and living on the land. Everyday socio-spatial practices structured by law implicate ordinary people in the making of landscapes and continuing relations of settler capitalism, shaping how ‘we’ live together on the land, including who belongs and who gets to decide.

This chapter shows that the seeds of a global failure to live relationally with the Earth are embedded in colonialism, which is the source of state-powered international law. State-powered international law must be decolonised, and this chapter points to ways this could be done through examining the ‘old ways’ of Aboriginal Peoples of the continent now known as Australia. Those ‘old ways’ sustained and constituted laws for thousands of years and remain our future; always was, always will be, even though colonialism has challenged Aboriginal obligations and relationships to the natural world. Aboriginal laws respected the authority of hundreds of different nations and continue to respect those old ways and authorities in the face of neoliberalism and ongoing colonialism. Colonial Australia denied our existence, yet attempted to demolish our languages and cultures and assimilate the consequences. This chapter interrogates how states could respect and acknowledge all Peoples as having an inherent right to self-determination, and as a consequence, all Peoples as having a right to collectively care for country and benefit from a relationship to land which sustains future generations.

The history of wealth accumulation and dispossession in Angola has been intertwined with the consolidation of liberal notions of progress, private property rights, land enclosure, and civilization. This is not a history of progress, but an account of dismantling – dismantle of communal rights and values that ordered societies. West Central African societies did not move progressively from one type of wealth, in people, to private property. In fact, West Central African communities valued both: territory and kinship. Wealth in people cannot exist in isolation from land control. An alternative interpretation of the past is necessary, moving away from earlier arguments that placed West Central Africans as primitive or backward and reifying colonialism and land grabbing. This is an effort to problematize recent interpretations of the Angolan past that understood territorial occupation, population removals, and dispossession as inevitable. As it is clear in local archives, West Central Africans valued land since 1600 – perhaps even earlier.