How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier
by Joe Studwell · 6 Dec 2025 · 393pp · 148,223 words
them because central governments struggled to govern rural areas without them. In Nigeria, central governments repeatedly sought to replace the authority of traditional leaders over land tenure, but were unable to enforce a centralised system of control. FRELIMO had a similar experience in Mozambique, and graduated from outlawing rule by tribal aristocracies
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that 87 per cent of land sales were still being handled informally, avoiding the expense of a lawyer and registration.20 Truly beneficial reform of land tenure in Africa requires the development of complementary, disinterested government and judicial institutions. Until then, the best course of action is often to live with the
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disease burden and 37–8 education and 78, 102, 103–4, 126, 245 elephant problem and 21 forced labour and 30–32, 38–9, 49 land tenure and 81–3, 85, 94–5, 98, 237–8 legacy in Africa 2, 6, 48–9, 71, 81, 126, 165, 305, 311, 312 ‘low budget
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Mahama, Alhassan 257–8 malaria 18–19, 39, 144, 181, 317, 328, 330, 402n Malawi 38, 52, 90, 235, 387n aid donors and 216 agriculture/land tenure in 237, 246, 247, 262, 265, 319, 329, 381n, 384n, 386n GDP 101, 102, 343n, 355n independence (1964) 91 manufacturing 280 Mali 24, 30, 52
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315 future growth 333 GDP 109, 111, 200, 343n, 353n government, improvement in quality of 315–16 Hausa states 27, 74 independence (1960) 74–5 land tenure 99 manufacturing 278, 280, 290, 292–3, 294, 295 military coup (1966) 75 mineral assets/mineral mining 48, 51, 54, 55, 57, 64–5, 70
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136, 162 Democratic Republic of Congo, wars in and 79, 214 Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) 92–3 independence (1980) 6, 89, 91–4 land tenure 49, 71, 85, 91–4, 97, 129 mineral assets/mineral mining 53, 322 Mugabe and 92–3 population density 22 white settlers 71, 85, 90
The Insatiable Machine
by Trevor Jackson · 15 Mar 2026 · 270pp · 104,133 words
expenditures, and were also eager to orient as much toward market production as possible to take advantage of rising prices for agricultural output. Many peasant land tenures were held for one or three lifetimes, so they could only infrequently be renegotiated.45 Instead, landlords tried to clear or enclose new land or
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claimed to have already begun improving land would often find that colonial governments were willing to recognize their seizure of it. As one historian of land tenure writes, “Improvement or betterment lies at the heart of Locke’s notion of property rights. It is linked to landhunting, squatting, and speculation; often it
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, then when that supply of workers was insufficient, underpinned the separate creation of slaves as a distinct legal category. At the same time that new land tenures were being established in England and land was being distributed in the Americas, slave codes were being written to create the new and unusual form
Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane · 28 Feb 2017 · 346pp · 90,371 words
purposes. Tenure – The legal form under which land is owned, occupied and used. Private ownership of land has risen to become the dominant form of land tenure around the world but many alternatives exist that support collective as well as individual ownership of land and resources. Wholesale money markets – Refers to the
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and use rights, continue to thrive, and remain a key subject of anthropological study and political controversy (Payne, 2004). In all this rich diversity of land tenure, one key fact stands out: the structure of landownership is not natural, but is a matter of law and custom, and hence is inherently political
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the incentives on landowners – for example, to encourage them to invest their land into publicly sanctioned development partnerships rather than face compulsory purchase. Laws governing land tenure, trading and inheritance As discussed above, much of the common and codified law of Europe, from ancient times to the present day, is devoted to
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the economy. Since the enclosures began in England in the late fifteenth century, private ownership of land has risen to become the dominant form of land tenure around the world. However, as with most historical upheavals, there have been other trends running concurrently which have drawn on entirely different economic and cultural
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of Housing Policy 9 (4): 365–89. Patten, Simon N. 1891. ‘Another View of the Ethics of Land-Tenure’. International Journal of Ethics 1 (3): 354–70. Payne, Geoffrey. 2004. ‘Introduction: Habitat International Special Issue on Land Tenure and Property Rights.’ Habitat International 28: 167–79. Pearce, Robert D., and Roger Stearn. 2000. Government
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, and Robert Vishny. 2011. ‘Fire Sales in Finance and Macroeconomics’. The Journal of Economic Perspectives 25 (1): 29–48. Sillitoe, Paul. 1999. ‘Beating the Boundaries: Land Tenure and Identity in the Papua New Guinea Highlands’. Journal of Anthropological Research 55 (3): 331–60. Simons, Henry Calvert. 1951. Economic Policy for a Free
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
by James C. Scott · 8 Feb 1999 · 607pp · 185,487 words
organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored. The organization of the natural world was no
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the reality they depicted to be remade. Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law. Much of the first chapter is intended to convey
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meet a fellow who, instead of talking arpents, toises, and pieds, refers to hectares, meters, and centimeters, rest assured, the man is a prefect."62 Land Tenure: Local Practice and Fiscal Shorthand The revenue of the early modern state came mainly from levies on commerce and land, the major sources of wealth
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procedure seems in the context of the modern state, its achievement was enormously difficult for at least two reasons. First, the actual practices of customary land tenure were frequently so varied and intricate as to defy any one-to-one equation of taxpayer and taxable property. And second, as was the case
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. An Illustration Negara mawi tata, desa ma%vi cara (The capital has its order, the village its customs). -Javanese proverb A hypothetical case of customary land tenure practices may help demonstrate how difficult it is to assimilate such practices to the barebones schema of a modern cadastral map. The patterns I will
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to respect land practices. Imagine, in other words, a written system of positive law that attempted to represent this complex skein of property relations and land tenure. The mind fairly boggles at the clauses, sub-clauses, and subsub-clauses that would be required to reduce these practices to a set of regulations
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being represented but by those state officials who aspire to a uniform, homogeneous, national administrative code. Like the "exotic" units of weights and measures, local land tenure practice is perfectly legible to all who live within it from day to day. Its details may often be contested and far from satisfactory to
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. The fiscal or administrative goal toward which all modern states aspire is to measure, codify, and simplify land tenure in much the same way as scientific forestry reconceived the forest. Accommodating the luxuriant variety of customary land tenure was simply inconceivable. The historical solution, at least for the liberal state, has typically been the
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, although the evi dence is not convincing, that common property was less productive than freehold property.73 The state's case against communal forms of land tenure, however, was based on the correct observation that it was fiscally illegible and hence fiscally less productive. Rather than trying, like the hapless Lalouette, to
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.85 What I want to emphasize here, however, is how this knowledge is gained at the expense of a rather static and myopic view of land tenure. The cadastral map is very much like a still photograph of the current in a river. It represents the parcels of land as they were
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per opening, the long-term effects on the health of the rural population lasted for more than a century. The novel state-imposed form of land tenure was far more revolutionary than a door-and-window tax. It established a whole new institutional nexus. However simple and uniform the new tenure system
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on paper. Certain land taxes and tithes have been evaded or defied to the point where they have become dead letters.97 The gulf between land tenure facts on paper and facts on the ground is probably greatest at moments of social turmoil and revolt. But even in more tranquil times, there
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will always be a shadow land-tenure system lurking beside and beneath the official account in the land-records office. We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory. All
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its use convey important social knowledge. Like the network of alleys in Bruges, the assortment of local weights and measures, and the intricacies of customary land tenure, the complexity of naming has some direct and often quite practical relations to local purposes. For an outsider, however, this byzantine complexity of names is
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naming practices is considerable. The invention of permanent, inherited patronyms was, after the administrative simplification of nature (for example, the forest) and space (for example, land tenure), the last step in establishing the necessary preconditions of modern statecraft. In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to
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transformation of names. The state had in effect blinded its own hindsight by the very success of its new scheme. With surnames, as with forests, land tenure, and legible cities, actual practice never achieved anything like the simplified and uniform perfection to which its designers had aspired. As late as 1872, an
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state was still largely a machine for extraction. It is true that state officials, particularly under absolutism, had mapped much more of their kingdoms' populations, land tenures, production, and trade than their predecessors had and that they had become increasingly efficient in pumping revenue, grain, and conscripts from the countryside. But there
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averaged about 70 acres per household.41 From the perspective of a tax official or a military procurement unit, the situation was nearly unfathomable. The land-tenure status in each village had changed dramatically. Prior landholding records, if they existed at all, were entirely unreliable as a guide to current land claims
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the consequences of a mind-bogglingly complex, delicate, and pliable set of adaptations to their diverse social and material environment.84 As in the customary land-tenure arrangements examined in chapter 1, these adaptations defy administrative codification because of their endless local variability, their elaboration, and their plasticity in the face of
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new conditions. If land tenure defies codification, then, it stands to reason that the connections structuring the entire material and social life of each particular group of peasants would remain
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obscurity all the outcomes lying outside the immediate relationship between farm inputs and yields. This means that both long-term outcomes (soil structure, water quality, land-tenure relations) and third-party effects, or what welfare economists call "externalities," receive little attention until they begin to affect production. Finally, the very strength of
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, we will not doubt the farmer's expertise in knowing his own mind and interests.99 Just as the buzzing complexity and plasticity of customary land tenure practices cannot be satisfactorily represented in the straitjacket of modern freehold property law, so the complex motives and goals of cultivators and the land they
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by Dennis Galvan, "Land Pawning as a Response to the Standardization of Tenure," chap. 4 of "The State Is Now Master of Fire: Peasant Lore, Land Tenure, and Institutional Adaptation in the Siin Region of Senegal" (Ph.D. dirs., Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 1996). 67. Ibid., p. 18
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the Mexican revolution has had the effect of depriving the state of a great deal of knowledge about agricultural patterns, house lots, or village common-land tenure in most of the twenty-eight thousand ejidos in the country. Michoacan villagers have regarded a national program to survey, register, and title every plot
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that of any written code" (p. 13). 93. For a remarkably thoughtful and thorough examination of how the colonial legal code transformed land-dispute settlement, land tenure, and social structure, see Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: "Customary" Law on Mount Kilimanjaro, 1880-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 94. The
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama · 29 Sep 2014 · 828pp · 232,188 words
by indirect rule. The British had two long-term economic policy objectives that indirect rule was meant to serve. First, they sought to convert customary land tenure into modern property rights, at the behest of both commercial agricultural interests and white settlers. Modern property rights are formal, freely alienable, and held by
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individuals or by legal entities operating as individuals. As elaborated in Volume 1, customary land tenure is a complex informal system of private property rights, sometimes mistakenly said to be communal in the sense of a Communist collective farm. Traditional customary
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more modern in the sense of being formal, contractual, and individual. Moving from a customary to a modern land tenure system was therefore much more revolutionary than the shift from feudal to modern land tenure in Europe; it involved huge changes within the authority structure of the kin groups involved. When colonial authorities sought
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Restoration, they did not reach a level that was sufficient to breed a nationwide uprising.24 Less convincing is Moore’s effort to relate rural land tenure to the rise of the militarist governments of the 1930s. He wants to draw parallels between Japan and Prussia, a country whose military was indeed
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implicated in the increasingly repressive system of agrarian land tenure from the sixteenth century on. The Prussian officer corps was recruited directly from the class of Junker landlords who in civilian life were busy repressing
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their own peasants. But in Japan, feudal land tenure was already being replaced by freer forms of tenancy and commercial agriculture by the late nineteenth century. There were large landlords who survived until the
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obstacles to modernizing change. Barrington Moore noted that the commercialization of agriculture in England under the parliamentary enclosure movement, necessary to create a modern capitalist land tenure system, required a slow-motion revolution under which peasants were forcibly driven off the lands their families had inhabited for generations. A final respect in
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, pp. 31, 38; Berry, No Condition Is Permanent, p. 32. 20. See Martin Chanock, “Paradigms, Policies and Property: A Review of the Customary Law of Land Tenure,” in Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts, eds., Law in Colonial Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991). 21. Cohen, “French Colonial Service,” p. 500; Michael Crowder, “The
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Path to Progressive Reform.” Environmental History 7(2):198–225. Banerjee, Abhijit, and Lakshmi Iyer. 2005. “History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India.” American Economic Review 95(4):1190–1213. Banfield, Edward C. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press
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system in; Article 9 and; bakuhan system in; bureaucracy in; China and; civil service in; civil society in; defeat in Pacific War; economic expansion in; land tenure in; law in; Meiji Constitution of; Meiji period in; militarism in; military in; Popular Rights Movement in; postwar economic miracle in; Russia and; Satsuma Rebellion
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Korea Kosovo Kurtz, Marcus labor: costs of; division of La Follette, Robert Laird, Macgregor Laitin, David land ownership; in Argentina; in Pakistan; in United States land tenure languages; in Aztec and Inca Empires; in China; in France; in Indonesia; in Latin America; in Tanzania LaPalombara, Joseph Latin America; Aztec Empire in; clientelism
The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
by Brett Christophers · 6 Nov 2018
. Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2018. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018029054| ISBN 9781786631589 | ISBN 9781786631602 (United Kingdom e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Public lands--Great Britain. | Land tenure--Great Britain. | Public land sales--Great Britain. Classification: LCC HD596 .C477 2018 | DDC 333.1/30941--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov
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Readman note, on ‘roseate views of the pre-enclosure past’; and it argued, inter alia, for a minimum wage for agricultural workers, further reforms of land tenure laws, and the introduction of land-value taxation.1 After World War I, Lloyd George ‘returned to “the land”’ in order, in Ian Packer’s
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Power to Unlock London’s Housing Potential’, press release, 14 July 2014, at london.gov.uk. 2 Speech to the Inaugural Public Meeting of the Land Tenure Reform Association, London, 15 May 1871, at libertyfund.org. 3 K. Cahill, Who Owns Britain (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2001), p. 27. 4 Ibid. 1 D. Massey
The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa
by Calestous Juma · 27 May 2017
foster economic transformation. The Growing Economy 31 Countries that are attracting foreign investment in agriculture are also starting to focus more seriously on reforming their land tenure systems. Recognizing customary land rights and any claims by statutory land laws is a good first step. When national governments take charge of the land
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increase the contribution of the rural sector to economic growth and to help achieve national food security. Specifically, it will increase production and productivity, improve land tenure security, modernize irrigated production systems, and mitigate the uncertainty from subsistence rain-fed agriculture, thereby increasing farmers’ incomes. The Alatona Irrigation Project will introduce innovative
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agricultural, land tenure, credit, and water management practices, as well as policy and organizational reforms aimed at realizing the Office du Niger’s potential to serve as an
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Agriculture Development Programme. See CAADP Congo, Democratic Republic of the: Academy of Engineering and, 231; East African Community (EAC) and, 35; hydroelectric power and, 124; land tenure system in, 32; seed exports to, 191 conservation: biodiversity and, 255–56, 259; farming techniques and, 132, 167; forests and, 228; soil and, 31; sustainability
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linkages in, 26; economic growth in, 22; educational videos on agriculture in, 203; education in, 91, 203; fertilizer use in, 16; horticulture in, 90–91; land tenure system in, 31–32; maize production in, 16–17; national academy of science and technology in, 230; Power Africa initiative in, 127; risk insurance in
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fish consumption in, 24; gender inequality in education in, 148; hydropower in, 125; independent power projects (IPPs) in, 126; infrastructure and, 120–21, 125–27; land tenure system in, 31; mechanization of agriculture in, 25; national 310 Index Ghana (continued) academy of science and technology in, 230; Power Africa initiative in, 127
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and, 19, 123–24, 126–27, 129, 131, 143; innovation and, xvii, xix, 84, 90, 96, 101, 219, 221, 224, 231, 237, 243, 261–63; land tenure policy and, 31–32; at local level, 106, 115; private sector partnerships with, 7, 19, 27–30, 32, 110, 113, 115–16, 132, 166, 223
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, 118–20, 123, 128–29, 132–45, 261; innovation and, 4, 7–8, 23, 26, 30, 85, 93–94, 119, 221, 228, 232, 235–40; land tenure rules and, 31; in research, 44–45, 85; returns on, 93; technology and, 54, 85, 111, 113 IPPs (independent power projects), 125–27 Ireland, 9
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use in, 16; fruit exports from, 197; gender inequality in, 149; independent power projects (IPPs) in, 126–27; infrastructure of, 120–21; innovation and, 120; land tenure system in, 31; maize crops in, 75; Ministry of Industrialization in, 57; mobile phones in, 49, 203; national academy of science and technology in, 230
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), 121 Monsanto, 7, 65, 74 Morocco, 126, 230, 257 Mozambique: aluminum smelting in, 118; breadfruit trees in, 213; CAADP and, 28; economic growth in, 22; land tenure system in, 32; management training in, 194; national academy of science and technology in, 230; policies encouraging women’s participation in science in, 151; transgenic
Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis · 1 Mar 2006 · 232pp
, India; and Alain Durand-Lasserve and Lauren Royston, "International Trends and Country Contexts," in Alain Durand-Lasserve and Lauren Royston (eds), HoldingT heir Ground: Secure Land Tenure for the Urban Poor in Developing Countries, London 2002, p. 20. 23 Mbuji-Mayi is the center of the "ultimate company state" in the Kaasai
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Latin American Left or the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kolkata had long fought for: security of tenure for informal settlers. But tiding, as land-tenure expert Geoffrey Payne points out, is a double-edged sword. "For owners it represents their formal incorporation into the official city, and the chance to
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Ibid. As the authors emphasize, "despite the importance of the topic, data on urban land-ownership are extremely rare. This contrasts sharply with research on land tenure in rural areas." (p. 184) 44 Berner, Defending a Place, p 21. 45 Baken and van der Linden, Land Delivery for Low Income Groups in
Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater · 12 Nov 2013 · 603pp · 182,826 words
on state-owned land in the 1930s, and drove the United States in the 1940s to promote democracy in Japan by forcibly destroying “the undemocratic land tenure system” and redistributing it to owner-occupiers. “We believe in the family-size farm,” President Harry S. Truman declared in 1950. “That is the basis
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property” and for the introduction of a system of “integral agrarian reform leading to the effective transformation, where required, of unjust structures and systems of land tenure and use.” This declaration not only exhibited the core values of the United States, it incorporated the sense of justice and ownership that, as Guevara
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previous centuries”: A Guide to Early Irish Law, ed. Fergus Kelly (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988), ch 1. W. E. Montgomery, The History of Land Tenure in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), 26–41, http://archive.org/stream/historyoflandten00montrich#page/ii/mode/2up. “The land shall not be sold for
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.” In Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia 1613–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 191. fuidhir, or landless workers: Montgomery, Land Tenure, 41–47. “The utmost care was taken”: J. Mill, “Tenants and Agriculture near Dublin in the Fourteenth Century”; Proceedings, Royal Society of antiquaries of Ireland
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) ed. the Editor of the Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin (New York: The Journal of Commerce and Commercial Bulletin, 1896). French-Canadian farming: in “Land Tenure, Ethnicity, and the Condition of Agricultural Income and Productivity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Quebec” by Morris Altman. Agricultural History 72, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 708
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–920. Denmark’s smaller farms and unproductive sandy soil: For the cooperative development of Danish agriculture, see “Late 19th Century Denmark in an Irish Mirror: Land Tenure, Homogeneity and the Roots of Danish Success” by Kevin H. O’Rourke. NBER Working Paper, 2005. The most tragic failure: For the failure of the
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: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951. http://mises.org/books/socialism/contents.aspx. Montgomery, W. E. The History of Land Tenure in Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889. http://archive.org/stream/historyoflandten00montrich#page/ii/mode/2up. More, Thomas. Utopia, Book I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
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, and Living Standards in China, Japan, and Europe, 1738–1925.” LSE Research online (2009). http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27871/1/WP123.pdf. Altman, Morris. “Land Tenure, Ethnicity, and the Condition of Agricultural Income and Productivity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Quebec.” Agricultural History 72, no. 4 (Autumn 1998). Anderson, Gary M. and
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Lobbying in Great Britain.” Economic History Review, New Series 10, no. 3 (1958). O’Rourle, Kevin H. “Late 19th Century Denmark in an Irish Mirror: Land Tenure, Homogeneity and the Roots of Danish Success.” NBER Working Paper (2005). Pak, Ki Hyuk. “Outcome of Land Reform in the Republic of Korea.” Journal of
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: the transforming history of land ownership / by Andro Linklater. — First Edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN 978-1-62040-290-0 1. Land tenure— History. I. Title. HD1251.L496 2013 333.309—dc23 2013011970 First U.S. Edition 2013 This electronic edition published in November 2013 Visit www.bloomsbury
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
by Gareth Stedman Jones · 24 Aug 2016 · 964pp · 296,182 words
advantages of political unity, European science, a European trained army, a free press, British-trained civil servants, the abolition of the old system of common-land tenure and a shorter passage between India and England. If the revolution depended upon the social transformation of Asia, England ‘was the unconscious tool of history
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more flexible. In England, more attention was paid to inequalities of distribution, and the political domination of the landed class. The aim of Mill’s Land Tenure Reform Association and of the Land and Labour League, both founded in 1869, was to contest this dominance.77 In France, the Saint-Simonians had
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of the analysis was to connect the emergence of commodity production in Book I with the transition from feudal or other pre-capitalist forms of land tenure to capitalist ground rent in Book III. But how could a necessary connection be established between the abstract depiction of the extended reproduction of capital
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. Their position was based not upon work, but upon conquest. Land reform, whether in the shape of the abolition of primogeniture recommended by Mill’s Land Tenure Reform Association or public ownership of the land as pursued by the Land and Labour League, had long belonged within the radical tradition. The trade
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underlay Peel’s Bank Charter Act of 1844 – he came to support the ready convertibility of paper money on demand. 77. The aim of the Land Tenure Reform Association was to abolish primogeniture and entailment. The Land and Labour League, whose aim to achieve the nationalization of the land, was closely connected
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