land reform

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pages: 868 words: 147,152

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell

affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, financial deregulation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, large denomination, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fragmentation, megaproject, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, purchasing power parity, rent control, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TSMC, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, working-age population

He repeatedly justified military rule on the basis that authoritarian government was the only means by which land reform could be achieved. In a speech on the first anniversary of martial law in which he talked about his promise of a ‘New Society’ (Chiang Kai-shek had promised the Chinese something similar in the 1930s with his New Life Movement), Marcos opined: ‘Land reform is the only gauge for the success or failure of the New Society … If land reform fails, there is no New Society.’ As with Chiang in China, there was very little land reform and there was no new society. The land reform that Marcos did pursue remained limited to corn and rice land, involved a high, 7-hectare retention limit, and was largely targeted at property belonging to his political enemies.61 By the time of Marcos’s fall in 1986, he had achieved less than a quarter of his own, very limited targets.

In January 1986, a month before Marcos fled, in an act of desperation the government began handing out thousands of land reform ‘Emancipation Patents’ – titles to plots of land – to farmers who had not even completed the land reform application process. Just as when the United States formed the JCRR to support land reform in Nationalist China in the winter of 1948–9, or when Washington finally backed land reform in South Vietnam under Nguyen Van Thieu in 1969, it was far, far too late. By one calculation, the cumulative achievement of land reform in the Philippines between 1900 and 1986 was the redistribution of 315,000 hectares, or about 4 per cent of the cultivated area.62 The revolution that wasn’t If Ferdy failed land reformers, his successor Cory Aquino – brought to power by ‘people power’ – did little better.

In communist-controlled areas of China in the mid and late 1940s, the success of land reform was bound up with elected village committees whose functioning was in stark contrast to the authoritarianism we associate with China today. Likewise, the representative – usually elected – land reform committees employed in Japan and Taiwan were vital to their unprecedented success.16 South Korea’s more centralised, authoritarian land reform was less effective. And in south-east Asia an absence of democratic process was a hallmark of the abject failure of land reform attempts by states in that region. Democracy and authoritarianism, in sum, have not been consistent explanatory variables of economic development in east Asia.


pages: 505 words: 133,661

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If we’re going to make better use of our land, however, we have to grapple with ownership. And to do that, England needs a programme of land reform. An agenda for English land reform It’s time for a serious political debate about land reform in England. We face a housing crisis of generational significance; a collapse in species and natural habitats; a farming sector facing huge challenges over Brexit; and spiralling inequality. Land reform is central to all of these challenges. There’s a huge amount we can learn from other countries who have undergone successful land reform programmes – not least Scotland, whose land movement has flowered in the last twenty years.

I’d argue that it is, but that land reform in England is a central part of doing so. Uncovering the extraordinary story of how England has come to be owned by so few has, at times, made my blood boil. I hope it does the same for you, too. But I also hope that it inspires you to take action to make things better. In an old, conservative country like England it can often feel like things never change. But the example of successful land reform programmes in other countries, like Scotland, should give us hope – as should our own, forgotten history of land reform movements. Get land reform right, and we can go a long way towards ending the housing crisis, restoring nature and making our society more equal.

But we can also look to England’s own history of land reform and land reform movements – a radical past that’s often forgotten, or conveniently buried. And we can look to the nascent movement for land reform that exists in England today: the housing activists, land workers, community food growers, ramblers, cyclists, environmentalists, students, homelessness charities and many others, of all political stripes, who have seen that the route to a better future lies in uniting around the common issue of land. What follows is a suggested agenda for land reform in England: a set of ten demands that, I propose, would help fix many of the problems with how land is owned, used and abused in this country.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Are there peaceful alternatives that have produced similar results? In this and the next chapter, I review a wide variety of potential candidates, most notably land reform, economic crises, democratization, and economic development. I conclude by considering counterfactual alternatives: in the absence of massive violent shocks, how would inequality have developed over the course of the twentieth century?1 ”UNTIL IT BECAME A TEMPEST UPROOTING EVERYTHING?” LAND REFORM Land reform deserves pride of place for the simple reason that for most of the past, most people lived on the land, and cultivated land generally represented the bulk of private wealth.

Local violence was a critical means of expanding the scope of land redistribution and thus wealth equalization.3 Many land reforms in history were the result of war. In the fourth chapter, I reviewed a particularly extreme case: land reform in Japan under American occupation that entailed effectively uncompensated confiscation and a wholesale restructuring of landownership across the country. This was a novel phenomenon of the post–World War II era: up to that point, foreign occupiers had never promoted a redistributive agenda. Soviet rule in Central Europe was the principal manifestation of equalization sponsored by conquering forces. Historically, war had provided an impetus for land reform in other ways.

A failed communist uprising in Sri Lanka in 1971 that is thought to have cost thousands of lives prompted land reforms the very next year, providing for the expropriation of private, and later also corporate, land in excess of a given ceiling. Prompted once again by violence, this intervention represented a radical departure from the failure of all previous governments since independence to tackle land inequality.12 All these examples consistently point to the paramount importance of violence, whether applied or latent, in bringing about meaningful land reform. Yet results varied greatly. Indeed, land reform has a poor track record in alleviating inequality.


pages: 603 words: 182,826

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

“the democratization of the villages”: Dore’s comments on change in social attitudes after land reform are in Land Reform in Japan by R. P. Dore (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), “end of hallowed hierarchy” (ibid., 161); “sense of equality” (ibid., 218); the number of peasants involved (ibid., 149). Wider economic impact, see “Agricultural Land Reform in Postwar Japan” by Toshihiko Kawagoe. Policy Research Working Paper 2111; World Bank Development Research Group, 1999. its role was essential: For the role of land reform in Taiwan’s economic success, see “Agriculture as the Foundation for Development: the Taiwanese Story” by Tsu-tan and Shun-yi Shei, in Taiwan’s Development Experience: lessons on the roles of government and market, eds.

its role was essential: For the role of land reform in Taiwan’s economic success, see “Agriculture as the Foundation for Development: the Taiwanese Story” by Tsu-tan and Shun-yi Shei, in Taiwan’s Development Experience: lessons on the roles of government and market, eds. Erik Thorbecke and Henry Wan (Boston: Kluwer, 1999); for the increase in productivity, see “Economic Consequences of Land Reform in Taiwan” by Anthony Y. C. Koo. Asian Survey 6, no. 3 (March 1966): 150–157. “Negotatiating with a tiger”: Quoted Ladejinsky, Agrarian Reform, 101. his third success: Land reform in South Korea. “Outcome of Land Reform in the Republic of Korea” by Ki Hyuk Pak. Journal of Farm Economics 38, no. 4 (Nov. 1956), 1015–1023. a direct comparison with North Korea: The differences between South Korea’s development path and those of Japan and Taiwan are explored in “Contesting Models of East Asian Development and Financial Liberalization: A Case Study of South Korea” by Amiya Kumar Bagchi.

In South Vietnam, Wolf Ladejinsky discovered for the first time the difficulty of putting into practice a policy of land redistribution without the backing of draconian powers to enforce it. The mandate from the State Department to introduce land reform in South Vietnam required him to work through the existing political system run by President Ngo Dinh Diem, whose main source of support came from country’s great landholding families. Ladejinsky’s new role reflected the sea change that was beginning to affect Cold War attitudes within Washington. In 1950, Dean Acheson, as secretary of state, had explicitly committed the United States to a policy of supporting “world-wide land reform” as the best way of “strengthening the system of free enterprise by diffusion of private property and reinforcing the economic foundation of the State.”


The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, business climate, colonial rule, death from overwork, declining real wages, deliberate practice, disinformation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Gini coefficient, guns versus butter model, income inequality, income per capita, land bank, land reform, land tenure, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, new economy, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, systematic bias, union organizing

Bernard Fall was taken in by Chi, and Frances FitzGerald in her influential Fire in the Lake followed Fall in giving a “conservative estimate” that “some fifty thousand people of all economic stations were killed” in the course of the land reform.167 Because of their reputations as opponents of the war, Fall and FitzGerald played an especially important role in the perpetration of a myth that still flourishes in its third decade of life.168 On the basis of an analysis of official figures and credible documents, plus an estimate made by the Diem government itself in 1959, Porter concluded that a realistic range of executions taking place during the land reform would be between 800 and 2500.169 The North Vietnamese land reform has been subjected to a more recent and exhaustive study by Edwin E.

By 1973 foreign interests controlled 59% of the capital invested in forestry, 96% in mining, 35% in industry, 47% in hotels and tourism, and 33% in agriculture and fisheries.26 The lifting of restrictions on imports and encouragement of foreign investment also led to substantial denationalization in sectors traditionally dominated by local enterprise—batik, textiles, beverages, foodstuffs, and cigarettes—a process hastened by the lack of capital access of local entrepreneurs in a system of privileged credit and restrictive credit policies.27 New agricultural technologies, the monopolization of rural credit by large individual and corporate farmers, and the rise in price of agricultural land also resulted in massive dispossession of peasants and a greater redundancy of agricultural laborers, a fall in agricultural wage rates, widespread hunger, and a widening gap between village rich and poor. Anderson notes that ...in the wake of the destruction of the PKI, the modest land-reform and crop-sharing legislation of the Sukarno years had become a dead letter. Much of the land redistributed in the early 1960s had reverted to its earlier owners by the early 1970s. Although the law provided for 50-50 shares in the crop between tenant and landlord, in many areas the actual ratio ran as high as 70-30 or even 80-20 in the landlords’ favor. It was only too easy to brand any attempts to enforce the land-reform and sharecropping statutes as “communist”. With the memory of the massacres of 1965-66—which took place largely in the villages—still only too vivid, few poor farmers dared to try to organize to defend their legal rights.28 Foreign capital has had to pay a steep price for the privilege of entry and in “protection money” demanded by the generals.

We have written on the subject extensively elsewhere, as have many others.5 5.1 Constructive Bloodbaths in Vietnam 5.1.1 French and Diemist Bloodbaths Although the only pre-1965 bloodbath recognized in official doctrine is that which occurred in North Vietnam during its land reform of the mid-50s, there were others. In 1946, without warning, the French bombarded Haiphong, killing an estimated 6000 civilians,6 perhaps more than the number of victims of the well publicized North Vietnamese land reform episode (see section 5.2.2). But as part of the French recolonization effort, and with Vietnam of little interest to the American leadership, this bloodbath was ignored and has not been mentioned by U.S. official or non-official propagandists in their historical reconstructions of terror in Indochina.


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

In doing so it put the politics of land and landownership exactly where the Lords, then Britain’s leading landowners, did not want it: in the political spotlight. This was not the first time that the ‘land question’ had featured prominently in British political debate. A groundswell of agitation for agrarian land reform had accumulated, notably, in the 1840s. This agitation was spearheaded by the Chartist movement and one of its leaders, Feargus O’Connor, whose (failed) Land Plan envisioned the provision of smallholdings for the working classes.1 In the same period, land reform was also promoted by the more establishment-friendly Anti-Corn Law League, and especially one of its founders, Richard Cobden.2 But this agitation, too, ultimately dissipated in the face of staunch government resistance.

First, they argued that landlordism in the countryside, underpinned by centuries of enclosure, had ‘driven people off the land and into overcrowded and unsanitary slums’.1 Second, they spied growing signs of landlordism in the city itself, and saw a progressive land-focused politics of a Polanyian ilk as the answer to urban social problems, just as it was their preferred solution to rural social problems. So, while the Liberals’ land-reform proposals may have originated in the countryside, they took on a distinctive urban hue as, writes Packer, radicals came to see ‘the land’ as the solution for subjects as disparate as the crisis in local government finance, unemployment and housing shortages. What these topics had in common was a conviction in the Liberal Party that landlords must be responsible for many of the ills of urban society, just as they were for the difficulties of rural England.2 But if, as Peter Weiler says, early-twentieth-century land reform in Britain traditionally ‘has been seen as essentially a Liberal policy’ – and it has – Labour was definitely not indifferent; and the more urban the issue, the more of a distinctively Labour issue it often became.3 (The Tories, as the landowners’ party then and now, were invariably on the other side.)

What these topics had in common was a conviction in the Liberal Party that landlords must be responsible for many of the ills of urban society, just as they were for the difficulties of rural England.2 But if, as Peter Weiler says, early-twentieth-century land reform in Britain traditionally ‘has been seen as essentially a Liberal policy’ – and it has – Labour was definitely not indifferent; and the more urban the issue, the more of a distinctively Labour issue it often became.3 (The Tories, as the landowners’ party then and now, were invariably on the other side.) From 1918 onwards, the Labour Party was publicly committed to land reform, and the reforms it championed were often far more radical than those advocated by the Liberals. The most radical proposal of all was land nationalization, whereby the state would not just acquire some land, but would acquire and own all land (see Chapter 1). In power, Labour leaders never actually made a formal attempt to nationalize the land.4 Labour was far from unified on the philosophy, still less the practicalities, of land reform, and the interwar period featured marked tension between those in the party in favour of nationalization and those preferring a more moderate fiscal solution – namely, land value taxation – à la Lloyd George.5 Nevertheless, Labour election manifestos contained the wording, ‘Labour believes in land nationalisation’, or words to that effect, until as late as 1945.1 It was in the context of an increasingly high-profile urban-land politics in the early twentieth century, then, that the state set about building a stock of urban public land as a complement to its growing stock of rural public land.


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Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum

active measures, affirmative action, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, centre right, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, language of flowers, means of production, New Urbanism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Slavoj Žižek, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, work culture

Even as a theoretical idea, land reform had never been as popular in Poland as elsewhere. A few attempts at land reform in the 1920s and 1930s had foundered in part because the larger estates were generally well managed, and many reformers thought that small farms were less productive.5 Most of the country’s very largest estates had in any case been in eastern Poland, which was now part of the Soviet Union. Knowing this, the Polish communists proceeded cautiously, and small and medium-size parcels of land were at first exempt. Instead, the 1944 decree on land reform called for the immediate confiscation of the land of “citizens of the Reich who are not of Polish nationality” as well as “Polish citizens claiming German nationality” (Volksdeutsche) and “traitors” (a conveniently vague designation), as well as all farms larger than 100 hectares.6 In total, some 10,000 estates were confiscated, and a further 13,000 estates were reduced in size.7 About 20 percent of all agricultural land was affected.

Populist land reformers had been thick on the ground in interwar Hungary, although they usually opposed Soviet-style collectivization and called for the creation of private cooperatives to replace the vast aristocratic estates.9 After the war, most Hungarian politicians had reached an uneasy consensus about the necessity of land reform, but they had come to no agreement about scale or timing. Both issues were resolved for them by the Soviet occupiers, who forced the provisional government to carry out land reform immediately, in the spring of 1945, on the grounds that the redistribution of property would encourage any Hungarian peasants still fighting against the Red Army to drop their arms and come home. Soviet authorities also made a fast decision about the scale of the reform, which was very wide-ranging and very harsh. The decree on land reform in March 1945 expropriated all estates—land, livestock, and machinery—larger than 570 hectares, along with all estates belonging to “Germans, traitors and collaborationists.”

There were three: Do you support the abolition of the senate [a prewar institution without much of a function]? Do you support land reform and nationalization of large industry while preserving private property? Do you wish to keep Poland’s new territories and its new western border? The correct answer to all of these questions was yes. Thus did the communist electoral campaign have a simple slogan: “Three Times Yes!” Mikołajczyk took up the challenge and instructed his followers to vote yes on the second two questions. As Berman recognized, it was hard for him to argue against the western territories, and both nationalization and land reform were then popular, especially since the question included the contradictory phrase “while preserving private property.”27 But Mikołajczyk did call upon his followers to vote “Once No” on the meaningless question about the senate.


The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, business climate, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, feminist movement, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, land reform, land tenure, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, War on Poverty, zero-sum game, éminence grise

“The Army is in control, according to Gómez, and the US is giving military aid to a ‘killer government.’ ” Gómez, who comes from a landowning family and is quite critical of the civilians who resigned from the junta in January 1980 after a major outbreak of state terror, has had various things to say, in interviews and press conferences, about the land reform program for which he was a top adviser. He states that while the land reform program has seized large amounts of land from wealthy families, it “has distributed plots only to a relatively few peasants.” The greatest success of the Salvadoran institute in charge of land reform (ISTA), of which he was a deputy, was in investigating the military: “We found huge amounts of corruption.” “We were finding that ISTA was buying land already in government hands.

He also observes, with reason, that what is happening now in El Salvador is Matanza, Part II, a replay of the vast slaughter of peasants in 1932 when privilege had once before been seriously threatened by the poor, that time without our assistance, hence without the need to invoke the “Soviet drive for world domination.” Something else that we are supposed to believe is that the land reform is marching from strength to strength in accordance with the plans of the “reformist junta,” undermining the appeal of the guerrillas, as reported by Edward Schumacher in the Times while the army was massacring fleeing peasants at the Lempa River (see above, p. 342). One way to assess the success of the land reform would be to ask the opinion of the director of the agrarian reform program, José Rodolfo Viera. That possibility is excluded, however, because he was assassinated by right-wing elements on January 4, 1981.

A subsequent co-authored article expands on this interpretation of the land reform. Gómez and Cameron believe that “Phase I of the program, which breaks up the country’s largest estates, has worked” and that Phase III, the “Land to the Tiller plan” is supported by the peasants and “has the potential to improve dramatically the lives of those receiving the land where they had previously worked as sharecroppers” (Phase II, which was to break up middle-sized farm holdings, including the bulk of the coffee plantations, will not be enacted, it is generally assumed). The land reform, they believe, has broken the power of the traditional oligarchy, but is replacing it by a new military oligarchy.


pages: 299 words: 87,059

The Burning Land by George Alagiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, fear of failure, gentrification, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, pre–internet, urban decay, white flight, éminence grise

I was just … we were just wondering if you’d like to come in and talk to the High Commissioner about your concerns.’ ‘No, I wouldn’t like to come in.’ ‘It’s just that Lesedi Motlantshe’s death has shocked us all and we, the government, we’re obviously as keen as anybody to find the culprit and you seemed to suggest there was a link with the government’s land-reform programme.’ ‘Is that what it’s called?’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Selling land to foreigners, that’s land reform, is it?’ ‘Getting back to your interview. We were just wondering whether you had any thoughts on who might be responsible for Lesedi Motlantshe’s murder.’ ‘I have plenty of thoughts, my friend, but I’ll keep them to myself. As you know, we’re a neutral organisation.’

Kagiso waved his hand towards the church. ‘Anybody.’ ‘But you? Hang on, let me get this straight. From what Maude said you work for a charity, right?’ ‘Right.’ ‘I looked it up, Soil of Africa. It campaigns for land reform.’ ‘Right,’ he replied abruptly. ‘Christ! Kagiso! I’m not reading out a checklist.’ ‘What do you want to know? You’ve seen the website. We campaign for land reform, not the kind that people like Willemse want. We oppose foreign ownership, we oppose our own corporations squeezing out the people who actually live on the land, and we find lawyers to defend people forced off what they thought was their land.

I think the business press are here in force, though – that’s the woman from the FT by the aisle in the front row. There’s bound to be questions about land reform so just stick to the bullet points we discussed earlier.’ She handed him a sheaf of papers. ‘That’s a reporter from the Today programme. You spoke to them a few days ago so he’s bound to ask you how you could have known days ago that the murder was linked to agitation over land reform.’ Was that just six days earlier? It felt like a lifetime to Anton. He didn’t know whether to stay sitting or stand up. There was a lectern next to the table.


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How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature by George Monbiot

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, bank run, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Attenborough, dematerialisation, demographic transition, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, first-past-the-post, full employment, Gini coefficient, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Leo Hollis, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, peak oil, place-making, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, urban sprawl, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, World Values Survey

Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today. But he is right in theory. Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of further studies.2 There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare.

The Child Inside 1Jay Griffiths, 2013, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape, Penguin Books, London. 2Stephen Moss, 2012, Natural Childhood, nationaltrust.org.uk. 3Department for Communities and Local Government, 27 March 2012, National Planning Policy Framework, gov.uk. 4Communities and Local Government Committee, 9 December 2014, Fourth Report, parliament.uk. 5Please see the 1997 report Child’s Play: Facilitating Play on Housing Estates by the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for an excellent summary of what child-centred design might involve, at jrf.org.uk. 6Scottish Government, December 2014, A Consultation on the Future of Land Reform in Scotland: Annex A, gov.scot; Land Reform Review Group, 2014, ‘The Land of Scotland and the Common Good’, scotland.gov.uk. 7Department for Communities and Local Government, 8 May 2015, 2010 to 2015 Government Policy: Localism, gov.scot. 8See Stuart Gulliver and Steven Tolson, 2013, Delivering Great Places to Live: 10 Propositions Aimed at Transforming Placemaking in Scotland, University of Glasgow, RICS, lanscapeinstitute.org. 9.

., 3 July 2004, ‘Tory Summer Party Drew Super-Rich Supporters with Total Wealth of £11bn’, theguardian.com. 15For more on this, see Ramsay, 42 Reasons to Support Scottish Independence. 49. Highland Spring 1James Hunter et al., July 2013, 432:50: Towards a Comprehensive Land Reform Agenda for Scotland, House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee, parliament.uk. 2Simon Johnson, 30 November 2014, ‘“Future bleak” for Grouse Shooting and Deer Stalking’, telegraph.co.uk. 3Andy Wightman, 26 November 2014, ‘Land Reform; The Wait Is Over’ andywightman.com. 4Defra has tried to pass this off as payments for ‘moorland farmers’, but all owners of grazed or managed moorlands, of which grouse moors are a major component, are eligible: see ‘CAP Boost for Moorland’, 25 April 2014, gov.uk. 5Rajeev Syal, 22 April 2014, ‘David Cameron Blasted over Shotgun Licence Fees Veto’, theguardian.com. 6This assumes that a house in Blackburn valued at £69,000 in 1991 would cost around £200,000 today; see Blackburn with Daren Council, ‘Council Tax Charges for 2015–16’, blackburn.gov.uk; see also Ian Jack, 29 March 2014, ‘Why Do We Pay More Tax than Oligarch in Knightsbridge Palaces?’


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Instead, in 1954, in one of the more notorious cold war episodes, the CIA sponsored a coup to get rid of Arbenz. And, no doubt coincidentally, to stifle land reforms. One of the coup’s chief architects was Howard Hunt, later famous for his involvement in both the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. There followed four decades of civil war, during which Guatemala nurtured state terror, right-wing death squads, and what amounted to genocide against Mayan indigenous groups. A U.S.-brokered peace finally broke out in 1996. The peace accords promised land reforms. But the entrenched power of the major landowners has ensured that the reforms have never happened.

Fearing U.S. bankers wanted to force Honduras to tax his business to pay off national debts, he hired mercenaries to carry out a coup that put his man, Manuel Bonilla, in charge—and secured yet more land for his company. In 1930, following Keith’s death, Zemurray’s empire and Keith’s United Fruit merged. The years that followed were the glory days of monopoly and profit. But, after the Second World War, rumblings of discontent and demands for land reform grew across Uncle Sam’s backyard. In Guatemala, a reformist president, Jacobo Arbenz decided to take on the landed elite, including United Fruit. His reforms began by expropriating 150,000 acres of unused land that the company held along the Atlantic coast. Zemurray was having none of it. United Fruit lobbied against Arbenz, particularly in the United States, where it branded him a Communist fifth columnist.

Poor farmers are often forced to become seasonal laborers on the plantations, or cross the border into Mexico in the hope of making it into United States. Guatemala is among the world’s leading exporters of sugar and coffee—and, of course, bananas. U.S. companies like Dole, Del Monte, and United Fruit (now renamed Chiquita) are still there. Agribusiness and its representatives in parliament continue to rebuff land reforms. But there are new land grabbers, too. Drug traffickers, made rich by the huge fortunes to be gained from selling their products to North America and Europe, have moved in from Mexico and elsewhere. The traffickers have bought huge areas of lowland cattle ranches, both as a convenient way of laundering their profits and as a means of hiding the airstrips where cocaine going north and east can be switched from one small plane to another.


pages: 393 words: 115,178

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capitalist realism, centre right, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, land reform, market fundamentalism, megacity, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, structural adjustment programs, union organizing

This latter, I think, is the danger we have most to fear and to guard against.41 The question of land reform was an exemplary and recurring case of “Do as I say, not as I do.” When General MacArthur was running Japan immediately after World War II, he pushed through an ambitious land reform program, and US authorities oversaw redistribution in South Korea in these years as well. In strategic, US-controlled nations, they saw the necessity of breaking up feudal land control in order to build dynamic capitalist economies. But when carried out by leftists or perceived geopolitical rivals—or when threatening US economic interests—land reform was more often than not treated as communist infiltration or dangerous radicalism.

But Guatemala voted against the Soviet Union’s actions at the UN, and the new president made it clear in his inaugural speech that his goal was to “convert Guatemala with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state.”26 This was no small task. When his government passed a 1952 land reform, this effort ran up against very powerful interests. The government began to buy back large, unused land holdings and distribute them to indigenous people and peasants. Processes of these kind were seen by economists around the world as not only a way of benefiting regular people, but of putting the whole country to productive use and unleashing the forces of market enterprise.

He read The People’s Daily, or Harian Rakyat to him, and he started an extracurricular study group under a young member of the PKI, which was engaged in constant outreach in his town. The most important of the PKI programs in his region was carried out by the Indonesian Farmers Alliance (BTI), which sought to enforce peasants’ rights within the existing legal framework and push for land reform. BTI members told Sakono and his family that “the land belongs to those who work it, and it can’t be taken away,” and even more importantly, they surveyed and recorded holdings, made sure laws were enforced, and helped improve agricultural efficiency. Twice a week, Sakono and two of his friends got together for three hours with a man named Sutrisno, a tall, happy-go-lucky party member with brown curly hair, to study basic politics in the Marxist tradition.


pages: 486 words: 139,713

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

Of all the SNP’s various revolutionary plans for Scotland, the one that in the view of the party chiefs would most obviously allow the country to become more equitable was always the plan for fundamental land reform. Not the near-beer reform the traditional political parties had espoused—but full-blown radical reform, which would really shake things up. Now, with the SNP firmly in charge and with a comfortable majority in Parliament, a plan for real change could get under way. “Scotland’s land is a valuable asset,” the newly elected SNP member for Argyll remarked, “and an asset which should benefit the many. The party is committed to empowering communities through land reform, enabling them to determine their own futures.” A million acres would be in community hands by 2020, pledged one minister.

., 23–24 Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 385 San Francisco Marina District, 106 Savage, James, 378, 379–80, 381 Scandinavia, 54, 58, 166, 222, 366 land wandering (allemansträtten), 221–22, 223 Schaghticoke people, 17–18, 27 Schellenberg, Keith, 354–56 Scotland acres owned by landed gentry, 159 Act of Union (1707), 345 border with England, 76 the clearances, 171–72, 181–93, 349n cloudberries (averin) in, 224 crofters of, 183, 185, 186, 187, 187, 189, 190, 349n, 351–52, 417, 418 emigration to Canada, 191–92, 191n the Hebrides and land rights restoration, 343–61, 360 Highlands, 183, 189, 345, 349n lack of trespass in, 221, 223 laird, 344, 344n Land Reform Act of 2016, 346, 348 land reform and land ownership in, 223–24, 345–46, 348–61, 353, 360 land trusts in, 392, 393 lochs and lakes of, 224, 224n Outdoor Access Code, 224 raising of sheep, 183–84, 186, 189 Scots-only referendum (1997), 223 Scottish Parliament (1997), 345 statue, “the Mannie” (Duke of Sutherland), 181, 182, 183 Sutherland county, 187–88 unequal ownership of its land, 345 Scotsman newspaper, 347 Scottish Land Fund, 349n, 360 Scottish National Party, 346–47, 349 Scott-Keltie, Sir John, 65 Sealth, Suquamish Chief, 403–6, 404 speech of, 405–6 Second Treatise on Civil Government (Locke), 101 Selkirk, Earl of, 192 Sellar, Patrick, 184, 185 Seminole people, 138, 145, 146, 148 7:84 Theatre Company, 345 Shackleton, Ernest, 99 Shakespeare, William, 168 Shawnee people, 136n Sheindlin, Judy, 197n Shoshone people, 261 Shreve, Henry, 147n Sierra Club, 377 Silverthorne, Alice, Countess de Janzé, 363, 372 Sioux people, 138, 407 Battle of Little Bighorn, 143 Battle of Wounded Knee, 143 best-known chief, 143 as horsemen, 142–43 loss of landholdings, 142–45, 144n names of treaty signers, 144n railroad land grants and, 143 reservation today, 144–45 Sitting Bull, Sioux Chief, 143 Skye, Hebrides islands, Scotland, 93, 94, 358 Glendale crofters rebellion, 351–52 slavery, 131n, 132, 147n, 330, 408 Smith, John, 130–31 soil Charlton and Chatfield types, 13 Ukraine’s chernozem soils, 300 of Winchester’s land, 12–13 “Song of the Cities, The” (Kipling), 323 South Africa apartheid in, 119 British rule ends, 366 land redistribution program, 371, 372 Native Land Act of 1913, 371 white land ownership in, 371 South America, 54, 233, 242, 387, 400 South Dakota, 138, 138–39, 142–45, 144n South Georgia island, 99 making a map of, 99–100 Spain colonial Africa and, 365–66 enslavement of Native Americans made illegal, 132 explorers and colonizers of North and South America, 125–27, 138 Philippines and, 127 Ponce de León and, 125–26 Spain, William, 334 Speke, John, 364 Springer, William, 150n Squantz, Schaghticoke Chief, 17–18, 27 Stalin, Joseph “the law of five ears of wheat,” 298 Ukrainian starvation and, 286–87, 289–90, 294, 297–98, 300 Standing Bear, Ponca Chief, v address, 1879 trial in Nebraska, 123 Stanley, Henry, 364 Statesman’s Yearbook, 65, 65n stewardship Biblical references, 283 enclosure and, 172–73, 177–78, 180 indigenous peoples, wisdom and practices of, 235–45, 241 land conservation trusts and, 386–90 Malone as landowner and, 208 parks, recreation, and plutonium, 247–61, 250, 252, 254, 257 sustainable management and, 202 tragedies of improvement, 171–93 trespass laws vs. roaming rights, 215–24 Turner and, 204–6 wilding or rewilding projects, 225–34 world’s largest landowners and, 195–216 Stimson family, 201 Stone Age, 40, 42 Struve, Friedrich Wilhelm Georg von, 54–59, 55n, 60 Pulkovo Observatory and, 59 Struve Geodetic Arc, Latvia, 51–55, 55, 60 Sturgeon, Nicola, 346–47, 349 suburbs, 242, 248, 258, 265, 319, 395 Surtsey island, 103–4, 104n surveying, surveyors American Public Land Survey System, 152 British land ownership, Domesday Book survey of 1085, 162–64 Canadian-U.S. border and, 87–88 delineation and demarcation of property and, 35, 48 East Liverpool, Ohio, and surveying of western America, 152 map of South Georgia and, 99–100 marker points, Struve Geodetic Arc, 51–53 size of the Earth, determining, 51–60, 64 Struve and, 56–58 survey map (1850), 29, 29–30 theodolite for, 48, 56, 57, 64, 96, 422 triangulation and, 56, 57–58, 96 of the Unassigned Lands, 152 United Kingdom Ordnance Survey, 94–97 U.S. grid system, 152 Sutherland, Duke of, 182–83 Sutherland Leveson-Gower, Lady Harriet, 183, 183n, 185, 190 Sutherland Leveson-Gower, Lord George Granville, 182, 182–85 Dunrobin Castle, 183, 185, 187, 189 Swift, Jonathan, 93 Syrtsov, Sergey, 291, 292, 293 Taconic Orogeny, 23 terra nullius, 200 Texas biggest landowners in, 201 Kroenke’s Waggoner Ranch and evictions, 209–10 Spanish territory of, 138 trespass law and, 216–17 Wilks brothers and, 210–11, 211 Thompson, David, 90, 90n, 91 Thompson, E.

Accordingly, since 1999 Scotland now has had its own 129-member Parliament sitting in Edinburgh, and although in a further referendum in 2014 its voters opted to remain in the United Kingdom, the country’s nationalist leanings have steadily intensified, accompanied by a fiery determination to undertake changes and reforms that remain unpalatable south of the border. Land reform is one such, and a cascade of legislation formulated in this brand-new assembly, led since 2011 by a nationalist party, has changed matters drastically. The crucial component was an act passed early on, in 2003, that did three things—two of which related to exactly who may buy land in Scotland, and altered forever the curious reality that half of the country’s land is owned by a mere three hundred wealthy or land-wealthy families: a curiosity that belongs later in this account.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But the idea goes back much further in history than that. Land Reform In centuries past, when agriculture constituted the bulk of national product, policies to disperse ownership of capital were concentrated on land. Land reforms that encouraged (or forced) landlords to give up their holdings and that distributed farmland took their impetus from the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, which transferred ownership of land from the ancien régime to individual family farms.4 Following this example, there were numerous land reforms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Albania, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.

Land reforms that encouraged (or forced) landlords to give up their holdings and that distributed farmland took their impetus from the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, which transferred ownership of land from the ancien régime to individual family farms.4 Following this example, there were numerous land reforms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Albania, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. These land reforms, while sometimes imposed harshly, did usually represent real social progress, and they helped economic growth. For example, the South Korean postwar economic growth miracle has been attributed to that country’s land reform and the resulting lessening of income inequality after the Japanese occupiers were expelled with the end of World War II. The South Korean Agricultural Land Reform Amendment Act (ALRAA) of 1950 speci ed that anyone could own agricultural land but only if he or she actually farmed it, set at three hectares the maximum amount of agricultural land that any one individual could own, and prohibited tenancy arrangements and landrenting.

The end result was that wealth was extracted from the South Korean landlords (in a more peaceful way than in China or North Korea after the communist revolutions there) to lower inequality, e ect a modernization of Korean society, and launch that country’s economic miracle.5 The United States has a long and unusual history of land reform since it had available vast undeveloped public lands. Andrew Johnson, Horace Greeley, and others argued that ownership of one’s own farm was healthy for democracy. Their e orts led to the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which divided up public lands and sold small farms to individual families.


pages: 193 words: 46,052

Modern China: A Very Short Introduction by Rana Mitter

banking crisis, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, urban planning

Yan’an was not easy to get to, its isolation being an advantage in protecting the area from the Nationalists and the Japanese. Mao took advantage of this, using the period to implement a variety of policies that would eventually influence his rule over China. These included attempts to create a self-sufficient economy, tax and land reforms to relieve the poverty of the rural population, and fuller representation for the local population in government. At the same time, Mao reshaped the party in his own image. The Party was purified through repeated ‘Rectification’ (zhengfeng) campaigns, which sought to impose an ideological purity on party members based in Mao’s own thought, rather than encouraging dissent.

Many of the officials installed in the restored Nationalist government were corrupt and inefficient. Within months, the goodwill of victory was being squandered. Was the Communist victory a military one or a social one? The two aspects are not easily separated. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had little chance to implement serious land reform before 1949 in most areas of China: during the Civil War, it simply did not have that level of control over the population. Without the brilliant military tactics of Lin Biao and the other PLA (People’s Liberation Army) generals, social reform on its own would not have been enough to bring the CCP victory.

Certainly, the years of war and the failure of the Nationalists genuinely to reform social relations in rural China meant that there was a widespread constituency in favour of violent change, driven by a conviction that previous attempts to change the structure of rural society had failed. The initial period of ‘land reform’ in China in 1949–50 saw some 40 per cent of the land redistributed, and some 60 per cent of the population benefiting from the change. Perhaps a million people who were condemned as ‘landlords’ were persecuted and killed (see Figure 6). Yet this violence was not random. Official campaigns were instigated that oversaw and encouraged terror.


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Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer by Eoin Ó Broin

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, financial deregulation, Future Shock, global macro, housing crisis, Housing First, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, low interest rates, mortgage debt, negative equity, open economy, passive investing, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, the built environment

Concerned by the rising levels of political and social agitation, the British Government eventually responded with a series of land reforms which over the next decades redistributed huge tracts of rural Ireland from landlords to tenant farmers. The Kilmainham Treaty settlement between Parnell and Gladstone may have demobilised the movement and angered the radicals, Davitt included, but its outcome was to prove as important to the development of Irish society in the twentieth century as many of the better known historical events. Land Reform and Rural Housing While the 1870 Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act sought to quell the rising tide of rural protest, its measures were weak and outpaced by events.

Back-cover photo of the author by Mark Nixon, www.marknixon.com. All royalties from this book will be donated to Inner City Helping Homeless. Contents Acknowledgements Deficiencies and Terminology Preface Overture Inadequate Language Real People A Dysfunctional System MOVEMENT ONE The State Gets Involved Modern Housing Land Reform and Rural Housing Urban Housing Free State – The First Decade New Government, Similar Policy A Reforming Coalition Social Housing’s High Point Conclusion MOVEMENT TWO The State Walks Away Recession and Retrenchment Reduction and Residualisation The End of Asset-Based Welfare Letting Private Finance In A New Consensus House Prices Explode Ignoring Good Advice The Housing Bubble Bursts Social Housing Strategy 2020 The Dáil Housing and Homeless Committee New Minister, New Department, New Plan Minister Coveney’s Record – July 2016 to June 2017 Minister Murphy’s Record – June 2017 to December 2018 Conclusion MOVEMENT THREE The Return of the State?

Padraic Kenna notes that prior to the enactment of this raft of legislation ‘13,000 landlords owned and controlled the whole rural area of Ireland’ while by 1920 ‘316,000 holdings were purchased by tenants on some 11.5 million acres … Some 750,000 acres were also distributed to 35,000 allottees, and 10,000 holdings were created from intermixed or rundale lands, mainly through the Congested Districts Board.’5 Alongside land reform, political pressure from the Land League and Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster forced the Government to introduce a series of Labourers Acts in 1883, 1885, 1891 and 1896. These provided loans for the provision of rural cottages for farmers. There were 16,000 such cottages constructed by 1900 with a total of 36,000 provided for by 1914.


pages: 851 words: 247,711

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War by Norman Stone

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, central bank independence, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labour mobility, land reform, long peace, low interest rates, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Money creation, new economy, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, V2 rocket, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, éminence grise

It was a cunningly played game, and had lessons for the men and women who emerged from the Party schools to take over central Europe. That sophistication was not needed in the Balkans, where there was not much between lord and peasant. There, the choreography was simple, brutal, and short: terrorize any opposition, offer land reform and grant property to new Party members. They were easy enough to recruit: disgruntled peasants (the village bad-hats) and the local minorities, including gypsies. In Romania some of the Hungarian minority were mobilized, and there were always Jews, though not of course the religious Jews, who suffered as much persecution as did other religious.

Almost as soon as they occupied the city, the Russians had flown in old German Communists from Moscow, with an idea of controlling their zone through apparently democratic methods. To start with, the Communists announced that they would co-operate with other anti-Fascist parties and not insist on a full-scale Communist programme. They would, for instance, have a land reform, but one designed to break up the estates of the ‘reactionaries’ and grant land to small farmers (who were expected, as in Poland or the Czech lands, then to support the Communists). But elections did not go their way - hardly surprisingly, since at the time the Red Army had acquired a terrible reputation for looting and raping, and a quarter of the industrial installations of the zone were being dismantled.

Crammed into the ghetto area, there survived still about 250,000 Jews, whose lives had been spared because there were considerable limits to the anti-semitism of Hungary; but there was bitterness and privation all around. The Soviet authorities had promoted a sort of last-moment National Front and anti-Nazi coalition, and then set about recruiting Communists in a country that did not, by nature, produce very many. However, land reform was a serious cause in a country still dominated by great (and quite efficient) estates; there was at least a peasant radical movement, and, given the large and sometimes foreign-owned factories in Pest, there was at least the beginning of a labour movement. To begin with, Stalin had not quite known how to handle Hungary, and allowed a free election in November 1945 - calculating no doubt at first, as with East Germany, that the triumph of the Red Army would cause Communism to become popular.


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Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

The shah’s plans to introduce a Soviet-style “Literacy Corps” also instilled anxiety in the clerics, who wondered whether this was a covert secularization measure designed to undercut the traditionally dominant role of religious scholars as village teachers.11 In reaction to the storm of protest, the prime minister ultimately rescinded the local councils law—at least for the time being. But land reform went ahead. In January 1963 the shah put land reform and five other measures on the ballot in a nationwide referendum. Though the 99.9 percent “yes” vote was clearly fraudulent, the clergy did not dare to issue religious rulings against the land reform, recognizing its popularity. The shah deepened the insult by referring to the clerics as the “black reaction.”12 In March 1963 Khomeini fired back with sermons accusing the government of plotting to destroy the religious classes in the interest of nefarious foreign interests.

In some cases the do-gooders then returned with escorts of government troops, and literacy classes then proceeded at bayonet point. The land-reform program similarly ignored the complex skeins of social relations that bound Afghans together in the countryside in a million site-specific ways. Given its extreme topography, hybrid civilizations, and ethnic and social pluralism, Afghanistan has never been a country about which useful generalizations can be made. But this is precisely what the land reform of 1978 entailed. It attempted to impose a one-size-fits-all template on a messy array of situations. It is true that Afghan landlords acted as exploiters—but they were also important organizational centers of society who played religious or social roles as well as economic ones.

The White Revolution represented the other major component of the shah’s response to the communist challenge. Having crushed their organization, he would now selectively steal their ideas. On paper, at least, the shah’s program sounded as though it had been lifted from a Marxist-Leninist manifesto: sweeping land reform, state-sponsored literacy campaigns, nationalization of forests, the awarding of company shares to the workers. In practice, of course, many of these positive-sounding measures were undermined by corruption, nepotism, and bad planning—in other words, by the very nature of the regime they were supposed to be changing for the better.


Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Daron Acemoğlu, James A. Robinson

Andrei Shleifer, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, declining real wages, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, minimum wage unemployment, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, rent-seeking, seminal paper, strikebreaker, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, William of Occam, women in the workforce

When land is taken from big landowners and redistributed to agrarian workers, the loss of efficiency may not be significant and, in fact, according to some estimates, there might even be a gain in efficiency because many of the big farms are owned by 304 Economic Structure and Democracy major landowners who farm more land than is efficient (Binswanger, Deininger, and Feder 1995 discuss evidence that land reforms may have efficiency gains; Besley and Burgess 2000 show that land reforms in India have had little adverse effect on aggregate economic performance). This suggests that land reform is often an attractive policy tool for democracies to achieve their fiscal objectives without creating major distortions. Naturally, this implies a greater burden of democracy on landowners than on capital owners.

At their first meeting in May 1906, members of the Duma put forward a series of demands, including the release of political prisoners, trade-union rights, and land reform. Nicholas II rejected all these proposals and dissolved the Duma in July 1906. In April 1906, Nicholas II had forced Witte to resign and replaced him with the more conservative Peter Stolypin. Stolypin attempted to provide a balance between the introduction of much needed social reforms, such as land reform, and the suppression of the radicals. Elections for the Second Duma took place in 1907. Stolypin made changes to the electoral law and used his powers to exclude large numbers from voting.

However, we have been obliged to stick to it because our entire political action among the peasants is based upon the right of each to individual property. We would have risked losing their support had we stopped breaking up landholdings. (p. 241) The fact that one goal of the revolution was radical land reform and that land could be redistributed to those who took part and withheld from those who did not allowed the Viet Minh to use the strategy of exclusion to encourage people to take part in collective action. Part of the strategy of the Viet Minh for solving the collective-action problem was also to exploit existing social networks and community institutions: “The Communists were forming small self-help fraternal organizations, one-fourth of whose members had been political prisoners.


From Peoples into Nations by John Connelly

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, oil shock, old-boy network, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, Transnistria, union organizing, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

Piast, under former Austrian Reichsrat deputy Wincenty Witos, became a center-right machine party that brokered most of the coalitions of the six years of Polish parliamentary rule. Because of the many Ukrainians in its home base of Galicia, the party did not support land reform that might weaken the “Polish element.” Wyzwolenie by contrast favored radical land reform and sympathized with the interests of ethnic minorities. Until the Polish economic situation became dire in the 1930s, the two peasant parties did not cooperate. These divisions among Poles, aggravated by ethnic complexity, resulted in political chaos.

One thousand had a quarter of all land, and the Catholic Church had 500,000 hectares. 58. Hoensch, History, 169–170; N. G. Papp, “The Political Context of the Hungarian Land Reform of 1945: A Reassessment,” Historian 46:3 (May 1984), 385–387, 395. 59. Kenez, Hungary, 107. 60. Papp, “Political Context,” 392. Retroactive to January 1, 1946. That is, there could be no appeals on lands distributed before that date. 61. Kenez, Hungary, 112; Papp, “Political Context,” 388. 62. Papp, “Political Context,” 388–389. 63. In the fall of 1945, the Smallholders campaigned against abuses of land reform, especially by Communist-dominated land-distribution committees. Papp, “Political Context,” 391. 64.

For example, liberal politicians claimed that they had to stem a flood of Jewish immigration to avoid becoming “helots” in their own land, tied to Jewish creditors.73 Yet in fact, liberals owned little agricultural land and were not dependent on loans. Had the elite really wanted to strengthen Romania as a society, the simplest path would have been land reform, making mostly landless peasants into farmers with an interest in profit and productivity. But it was easier to ascribe Romania’s socioeconomic backwardness to the supposedly harmful Jewish middlemen—tax collectors, merchants, money-changers—positions projected as exploitative, not productive, and allegedly proving that Jews could only “live from the fruits of labor of other peoples.”


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Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Mentally surveying the North American continent, and familiar with the farming capabilities of the average eighteenth-century family, Jefferson expected that the United States would have little to worry about in this regard for thousands of generations.69 Jefferson even drafted legislation to grant each Virginia resident 75 acres of free land upon marriage.70 The working-class land reformers described in Chapter 2 quoted Jefferson avidly; they loved his notion of “the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”71 But ironically, Jefferson’s agrarianism did not really imply equality.

A “free homestead” is perfectly consistent with the Jeffersonian vision of small independent producers, but it requires (obviously unjust) redistribution from Native Americans who own the land to landless workers, and a massive government “welfare” program to implement.67 James Huston has divided antebellum American political economists into “free traders,” who thought abundant free land could create equal opportunity without government intervention, and protectionists, who called for government intervention like protective tariffs. The movement to obtain free land for actual settlers sits uncomfortably in the space in between. The land reformers called for large-scale government intervention in order to distribute the land. Then, the land would provide enough independence so that homesteaders could resist government control.68 The long history of squatting in the American West also shows that individuals eagerly asserted claims to resources.

RECONSTRUCTION The new inequality of the late nineteenth century converged on the United States from several different directions, one of which was the handling of the postwar southern economy. The Civil War left approximately 4 million enslaved African Americans nominally free but able to make very few social or economic choices. As the American land reformers had predicted, freed African Americans equated independence with landownership, and during the Civil War, the Union experimented with redistributing Confederate land to freed slaves. Radical Republicans in Congress proposed a program of dividing confiscated Confederate lands from 70,000 rebel leaders into small farms.


Killing Hope: Us Military and Cia Interventions Since World War 2 by William Blum

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, kremlinology, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, trickle-down economics, union organizing

To some extent, these people may have been retained in office because they were the most experienced at keeping the country running. Another reason has been suggested: to prevent the Korean People's Republic from assuming a measure of power.25 And while the North soon implemented widespread and effective land reform and at least formal equality for women, the Rhee regime remained hostile to these ideals. Two years later, it enacted a land reform measure, but this applied only to former Japanese property. A 1949 law to covet other holdings was not enforced at all, and the abuse of land tenants continued in both old and new forms.26 Public resentment against the US/Rhee administration was aroused because of these policies as well as because of the suppression of the KPR and some very questionable elections.

In addition, there were Communists employed in the bureaucracy, particularly in the administration of land reform.14 Lacking anything of substance they could accuse the Guatemalan left of, Washington officials were reduced to condemnation by semantics. Thus, communists, unlike normal human beings, did not take jobs in the government—they "infiltrated" the government. Communists did not support a particular program—they "exploited" it. Communists did not back Arbenz—they "used" him. Moreover, communists "controlled" the labor movement and land reform—but what type of person is it who devotes himself in an under-developed country to furthering the welfare of workers and peasants?

Amongst American policy makers, there were those who came to the routine conclusion that the Huks were thus no more than a tool of the International Communist Conspiracy, to be opposed as all such groups were to be opposed. Others in Washington and Manila, whose reflexes were less knee-jerk, but mote cynical, recognized that the Huk movement, if its growing influence was not checked, would lead to sweeping reforms of Philippine society. The centerpiece of the Huk political program was land reform, a crying need in this largely agricultural society. (On occasion, US officials would pay lip-service to the concept, but during SO years of American occupation, nothing of the sort had been carried out.) The other side of the Huk coin was industrialization, which the United States had long thwarted in order to provide American industries with a veritable playground in the Philippines.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

East Asia was busy doing something similar, using infant industry subsidies to build strong businesses in a protected economy, grooming them to the point where they were capable of competing and succeeding against their Western counterparts. All of these strategies relied on relatively high trade tariffs on foreign goods, restrictions on foreign capital flows and limits on foreign ownership of national assets. Land reform was often a central part of the package. And in many cases, governments sought to nationalise natural resources and key industries in order to ensure that their citizens benefited from them as much as possible. These developmentalist policies mimicked the very same measures that the United States and Europe used to such good effect during their own periods of economic consolidation.14 And they worked equally well in the global South, delivering high per capita income growth rates of 3.2 per cent during the 1960s and 1970s – double or triple what the West achieved during the Industrial Revolution, and more than six times the growth rate under colonial rule.15 It was a postcolonial miracle.

Three years later, they formed the G77 to advance their interests and vision at the United Nations, and founded the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which would develop the principles for a fairer global economy. The South was rising, and leading the way to a better world for the planet’s majority. * One might think that Europe and the United States would be thrilled to watch this success unfold; after all, the new policies that global South countries were rolling out – tariffs, nationalisation, land reform, capital controls – were bringing about real development, and Western governments, in the spirit of Truman, claimed to be in favour of development. But they were not amused. Western states had become accustomed to having easy access to cheap labour, raw materials and consumer markets in global South countries, and the rise of developmentalism was beginning to restrict this access.

After his six-year term, which was marked by unprecedented political freedom and stability, Arévalo stepped down to allow for new elections, which brought one of his ministers, Jacobo Árbenz, to power. Árbenz – known for his Swiss ancestry and nicknamed the Big Blonde – continued the progressive policies of his predecessor, adding a new land reform programme called the Agrarian Reform Act. At the time, fewer than 3 per cent of Guatemalans owned 70 per cent of the land. Árbenz’s plan was to nationalise large tracts of unused private land and redistribute it to landless peasants who had been victims of debt slavery during the Ubico years, to allow them to farm their way out of starvation.


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Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Ford Model T, four colour theorem, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, informal economy, kremlinology, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Potemkin village, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, stakhanovite, two and twenty, UNCLOS, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

According to an official biography, “none of the poets and composers assembled there had thought of this until he pointed it out.”56 At celebrations staged all across the country, Kim received direct, personal credit and thanks for the land reform.57 A letter supposedly written by villagers in North Hamgyong Province praised him for liberating the country from the Japanese and then, without even stopping to rest, solving the country’s land problems. “Give us whatever are your orders without hesitation,” the villagers said. “We will never fail to achieve what you order us to do.” Stories the regime disseminated included one about a visit to a village, at the time of land reform, when Kim peeled hot, boiled potatoes and offered one to an old man. “Old Pak Jang-ban, given the first potato, held it in his hands, sobbing, and bo-wed his white-haired head deeply.

“There is evidence that people in the North genuinely feared that they might be hit” with atomic weapons, they write—and “anyone who has seen pictures of the North as it was in the winter of 1950–51 and the destruction of Hungnam (or Inchon), with temperatures falling to minus forty degrees centigrade, with food stocks burned, animals slaughtered and entire villages razed to the ground, might reconsider why people moved.”84 Halliday and Cumings also say that no “important” Workers’ Party officials defected to the South.85 The South had already passed the legislation for a land reform of its own before the invasion. Redistribution, limiting any family to three chongbo or about 7.5 acres, was supposed to take place after the 1950 autumn rice harvest. Once he regained control of the South, Rhee sought to postpone the reform, but he ended up carrying it out. Halliday and Cumings believe that the Northern occupiers’ brief land-reform effort, whatever its shortcomings, had been enough of a success to pressure the Rhee regime into going ahead despite the objections of the landlord class.86 Still, one key to the intensity of Southern anti-communism in succeeding years no doubt is the fact that Southerners with obvious leanings toward the North had either gone north or died.

“As far as I know, people at that time weren’t that greedy” But his father’s formerly well-to-do neighbors nonetheless considered him a traitor. Cumings reports (Origins II, p. 717), “On the day American forces moved into [Pyongyang], Rhee announnced the abrogation of the northern land reform, prompting the CIA to comment that this ‘reflects political pressure by the landlord class to nullify … land reform in order to maintain their traditional controlling position in Korean political and economic life.’ Pyongyang’s new mayor chose United Nations Day to announce that land would be returned to its rightful owners.’” 44. Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, pp. 159–163. 45.


Turning the Tide by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, disinformation, failed state, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, land reform, launch on warning, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

As he left the presidency, Arévalo, recalling his belief in the noble words of President Roosevelt, commented sadly that “Roosevelt lost the war. The real winner was Hitler.”178 The US soon moved to prove the accuracy of these words. Arévalo’s successor, Jacobo Arbenz, attempted to carry Arévalo’s reforms forward, including a successful land reform that led to a rise in exports and a favorable balance of payments by 1954. The land reform not only increased productivity, but “also provided campesinos with their own food, even cash from sales, while involving them in the political system for the first time in 400 years.” But this was not to be. Arbenz attempted to expropriate unused lands held by the United Fruit Company and to hand them over to landless peasants, offering compensation based on the company’s fraudulent tax valuation.

Martínez maintained his rule until1944 with bloody repression and corruption while openly siding with European and Japanese fascism through the 1930s—and, in limited ways, introducing some social reforms in the style of his fascist models. Thus a government housing program constructed 3000 houses from 1932 to 1942 while the population of San Salvador alone increased by 80,000, and 0.25% of the population received land (including squatters, required to pay for the land on which they lived or be expelled) in a land reform program. There was little support for the 1944 coup attempt by labor, the peasantry or the urban poor, who had been traumatized by the Matanza.2 All of this was during the peak years of the Good Neighbor policy, which was to replace the earlier rampant US military interventionism. Its exalted rhetoric concealed something rather different.

“José Napoleón Duarte, however, joined the junta and, in December 1980, became its president—exercising little influence but providing the armed forces, which were slaughtering Salvadoran civilians by the tens of thousands in 1980 and 1981, with an effective public relations spokesman,” the role he has continued to play since, to mounting applause in the US as the slaughter seemed to be achieving some results.40 By early 1980, the stage was set for outright war against the population. The Archbishop was assassinated in March; the war against the peasantry began in full force in May with major massacres, under the guise of “land reform”; the university was destroyed in June; the leadership of the political opposition was murdered in November; the independent media were terrorized and eliminated; and in general the popular organizations were crushed with large-scale killings and torture (accompanied by the silence of the US press).


pages: 375 words: 105,586

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

But in between these two eras of disaster capitalism came 30 years of strong postwar economic growth, rising working-class prosperity and the ‘developmentalist’ period in the postcolonial countries where an alliance of national industrial development, government welfare policies and pro-peasant land reform seemed to nurture the prospect of a capitalist catch-up in the poorer countries and rising prosperity for all. These high hopes ended in the 1970s. Oil crisis and stagflation were the pretext for fiscal deregulation that tipped the balance away from the interests of citizens and workers within countries towards the interests of capital globally.119 This prompted a crisis of public debt in the poor countries and later private debt in the rich countries, shaping a towering edifice of debt that can be happily deferred or sold in the world’s symbolic economy for just so long as enough people remain confident in that symbolic economy, but that its non-symbolic ecology will ultimately have to pay.

If political institutions and scientific research were devoted to actively supporting it, there’s a good chance it could produce higher returns acre for acre than existing forms of capitalist farming (in fact, as we’ll see in Part II, sometimes it already does), while producing copious low-carbon, labour-intensive employment of the kind that green new dealers and ecological economists argue is necessary for sustainable prosperity. Pro-peasant land reform has successfully tackled hunger and poverty before, and there’s a good chance it can do so again in the future.164 It’s in this rather generic sense of recapturing the garden that I use terms such as ‘peasant’, ‘small-scale farmer’, ‘homesteader’, ‘self-reliant farmer’ and the like fairly interchangeably in this book without too many apologies about upsetting hair-splitting academic categories, and perhaps indeed with the somewhat mischievous intent of endorsing a small farm or peasant essentialism in the very particular sense described above.

And their numbers are likely to increase. PART II Small Farm Ecology If all the land in England was divided up quite fair There would be work for everyone to earn an honest share Well some have thousand-acre farms which they have got somehow But I’ll be satisfied to get three acres and a cow. 19TH-CENTURY ENGLISH LAND REFORM SONG1 CHAPTER FOUR The Farm as Ecosystem The ten crises I described in Part I comprise a deep set of challenges to the present global order. Agriculture is at the heart of many of them, a major force driving the environment beyond planetary boundaries.2 Historically, most parts of the world have developed agricultures that were less drastically compromising of ecological integrity.


pages: 846 words: 250,145

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

As they solidified their governments, the Korean regimes made preparations for confronting each other. In the north, the Communists under Soviet guidance restored much of the industrial capacity that the Japanese has concentrated there. They also carried out a land reform plan that took land away from landlords, most of whom had worked closely with the Japanese, and put it in the hands of those who farmed it. The land reform secured support for the regime among peasants, and improved food supplies across North Korea. But it also contributed, with other Communist political campaigns, to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to the south.

“I was delighted,” Miłosz wrote, “to see the semi-feudal structure of Poland finally smashed, the universities opened to young workers and peasants, agrarian reform undertaken and the country finally set on the road to industrialization.”15 Meanwhile the Communists’ attempts at securing their control of the Polish state and Polish society continued. In mid-1946 they managed, by hook and by crook, to get a majority in a referendum supporting land reform and nationalization of basic industries. During that year the Communists gradually, with Soviet assistance, outmaneuvered their Left-wing coalition partners and marginalized them. A few brave politicians—such as Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the leader of the centrist Polish People’s Party—attempted to hold them back, and the Polish Catholic Church complained about the country being ruled by atheistic Communists.

Stalin’s view of Hungary was colored by the sad fate of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 and by what he saw as the strength of the political Right. He instructed the Hungarian Communist leaders who returned from Moscow in order to reestablish their party in Budapest to be careful. Do “not be sparing with words, [but] do not scare anyone,” the Boss admonished. “Once you gain strength you may move on.”17 The land reform policies of the coalition government that took over running the country after the German capitulation did prove popular, and the Communists thought they could take much of the credit. They bragged about their influence to Stalin. The Soviet leader, however distrustful he was of the Hungarian party’s predominantly Jewish leadership, allowed elections to go ahead in Hungary in the fall of 1945, on the assumption that the Communists would do well.


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Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bretton Woods, corporate governance, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, ghettoisation, Howard Zinn, informal economy, land bank, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, RAND corporation, reserve currency, special economic zone, spectrum auction, stem cell, The Chicago School, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

After twenty years of “growth,” 60 percent of India’s workforce is self-employed, and 90 percent of India’s labor force works in the unorganized sector.11 Post-Independence, right up to the 1980s, people’s movements, ranging from the Naxalites to Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti, were fighting for land reforms, for the redistribution of land from feudal landlords to landless peasants. Today any talk of redistribution of land or wealth would be considered not just undemocratic but lunatic. Even the most militant movements have been reduced to a fight to hold on to what little land people still have. The millions of landless people, the majority of them Dalits and Adivasis, driven from their villages, living in slums and shanty colonies in small towns and megacities, do not figure even in the radical discourse.

When Nelson Mandela took over as South Africa’s first Black president, he was canonized as a living saint, not just because he is a freedom fighter who spent twenty-seven years in prison but also because he deferred completely to the Washington Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANC’s agenda. South Africa’s great “peaceful transition,” so praised and lauded, meant no land reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalization of South Africa’s mines. Instead there was privatization and structural adjustment. Mandela gave South Africa’s highest civilian award—the Order of Good Hope—to his old friend and supporter General Suharto, the killer of communists in Indonesia. Today in South Africa, a clutch of Mercedes-driving former radicals and trade unionists rule the country.

Sakthivel and Pinaki Joddar, “Unorganised Sector Workforce in India: Trends, Patterns and Social Security Coverage,” Economic and Political Weekly, May 27, 2006, 2107–14. 12. “India Approves Increase in Royalties on Mineral Mining,” Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/ SB125006823591525437.html. 13. From a 2009 Ministry of Rural Development report titled “State Agrarian Relations and Unfinished Task of Land Reforms,” commissioned by the Government of India: “The new approach came about with the Salwa Judum. . . . [Its] first financiers . . were Tata and the Essar. . . . 640 villages as per official statistics were laid bare, burnt to the ground and emptied with the force of the gun and the blessings of the state. 350,000 tribals, half the total population of Dantewada district are displaced, their womenfolk raped, their daughters killed, and their youth maimed.


The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947 by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, long peace, South China Sea

Unity rested on deals with opportunistic warlords and regional leaders, and was held together with corruption, cajoling, and violence. Control required playing faction against faction, maintaining constant suspicion, and frequently privileging loyalty over effectiveness. Supposed commitments to measures such as land reform—the foremost demand of the rural masses—were blocked by reactionary supporters. But whatever the unstable and unsavory alliances, whatever Chiang’s autocratic tendencies, the achievements were real. “After a long waiting and desperate search,” admitted a former opponent, “we, to our great joy, have at long last found our Leader.”

Chiang sidelined effective generals or governors who grew too strong, and protected venal or incompetent ones. He made deals with warlords. He tolerated conspicuous corruption, though few observers thought him personally corrupt—his love of power, one said, did not extend to its trappings. He ignored abuses by supportive landlords, despite recognizing the need for land reform as “the most fundamental problem of China.” He prized loyalty, trusted few, stayed always suspicious. Before World War II, an envoy from Nazi Germany had registered Chiang’s interest in “how our party leadership succeeds to maintain such strict discipline among its followers and takes harsh measures against dissidents or opponents.”

“I sent you a letter on the Pinehurst proposition,” Eisenhower’s note read. “Courier was more than pleased to have my report.” As Marshall thought about his future, Mao was initiating a new step on the way to his revolution. A directive went to Communist cadres: they were to adopt a more aggressive approach to land reform in areas they controlled. Until now, the tactically agile Mao had focused on reducing rural rent and debt. (While rural China was technically not “feudal,” the term often used to describe it, most farmers spent their lives struggling to get by, cruelly beholden to landlords, lenders, and tax collectors.)


pages: 371 words: 98,534

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

This does not bode well for the future of SOE reform, and suggests that they will become bigger and more focused on political strategy than on commercial efficiency. Land and Hukou Rural land reform has been an ongoing feature of Chinese economic development going back to Mao but its significance continues to rise in a country where urbanisation is growing quickly. Although the rural population amounts to just 44 per cent of the total, compared with 64 per cent in 2000, and 82 per cent in 1978, over 600 million people are still classified as comprising the rural population. Their significance in Chinese society and in the economy remains considerable. Land reform is not only about efficiency in the countryside on farms and in rural enterprises, but is an essential component of China’s urbanisation strategy.

Less than two years after the third plenum, China launched Made in China 2025, an industrial policy strategy that sets the country on a path to speed up and realise major changes in modern and advanced manufacturing with a strong emphasis on Chinese prowess and origination.11 We will look at Chinese industrial policy a little more in Chapter 7 when considering options to avoid the middle-income trap. The goal of financial liberalisation has been pursued by and large, though with some setbacks since 2015. Yet in other areas, reform progress has been disappointing, or actually gone into reverse. These include SOE reform, land reform, hukou reform, social security reform and a slew of proposals to change policies affecting investment, competition and the central–local government division of fiscal responsibilities and new forms of raising revenue. Water scarcity, which is increasingly pressing, is hardly aired as a matter of urgency.

Land reform is not only about efficiency in the countryside on farms and in rural enterprises, but is an essential component of China’s urbanisation strategy. In recent years, land reform and urbanisation strategies have been rolled out slowly and in pilot form. The cities of Chengdu and Chongqing were selected several years ago, for example, and have generally won favourable plaudits from the Chinese government and the World Bank for more efficient land use, enterprise start-ups, and controlled sales of land-usage by farmers.22 Yet, the widening out of these pilot projects has not been extensive or purposeful. Part of the problem is that everyone wants cheap land over which the government has monopoly ownership: property developers, industries including SOEs, and local and provincial governments, which rely on land sales for about a third of their annual revenues.


Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity by Paul Ely Beckerman, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

Declining government revenue made it impossible for him to make good on his electoral promises, however, and he was forced to resign just over halfway through his term. Soon afterwards the military took power themselves, announcing that this time they intended to retain power long enough to carry out modernizing reforms. In 1964 this government enacted a land reform that significantly changed land tenancy in the Sierra, although it preserved commercial holdings in the Costa. Persisting low commodity-export prices, however, made it no less difficult for the military government to manage the economy and the fiscal accounts effectively. Unable to agree on a policy program to confront the economic malaise, and increasingly unpopular because of political repression, the military decided to step down in 1966.

Gender patterns of land ownership in Ecuador vary by region, with land ownership being much more egalitarian in the Sierra than in the Costa (see table 5.6). In the case of the former, despite an initial male bias in land distribution, evidence suggests that traditional forms of equal male and female inheritance—especially among the indigenous Quichuaspeaking population—have begun to equalize ownership of land-reform properties, which are now being passed on to a second generation (Doss 1996).34 A detailed study of Cantón Salcedo in the northern Sierra found that women were as likely as men to own land, either via inheritance or purchase. Moreover, men’s and women’s parcels were roughly equal in size (about two hectares on average) and deeds of purchase were generally jointly registered in the names of both husband and wife (Doss 1996).

Historically, coastal agriculture was dominated by cacao until the 1920s, after which rice, sugar, and bananas became important crops. Land rental (precarismo) and a relatively mobile, temporary agricultural labor force, with little direct female participation in crop production, characterized the region prior to agrarian reform. Land-reform legislation affecting the Costa was not enacted until 1973, and it took a different form than in the Sierra (Phillips 1987). Much larger properties (up to 2,500 hectares plus 1,000 hectares of pasture) were allowed to remain intact, and the emphasis was on formation of cooperatives as opposed to individual parcelization.


pages: 934 words: 135,736

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990 by Mary Fulbrook

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, centre right, classic study, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, land reform, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, Sinatra Doctrine, union organizing, unorthodox policies

As Grosser has pointed out, this transformed Berlin overnight from being perceived as a bastion of Nazism and Prussian militarism to being the symbolic last outpost of freedom and democracy in the western sense, to be protected at all costs. 22 The end of the airlift which amounted to 277,000 flights came when the political division of Germany was effectively accomplished, as will be seen below. It is notable that, in contrast to the Soviet zone, there were no radical transformations in economic structure in the western zones of occupation. In the case of land reform, the argument could be made that there were in any event few large estates to be divided in the west. The Soviets had in their zone the main areas of the Junker estates. Nevertheless, what land reform there might have been in the west was deflected, partly by the representations of interested German land-owners, partly because of lack of clarity and forcefulness in Allied policy-making in this area.

In no zone did denazification present a simple, clear, consistent story. In the Soviet zone, given the primarily structural and socio-economic interpretation of Nazism which prevailed, major efforts were devoted to the radical transformation of social and economic organization. Apart from the land reform which served to abolish the Junker class, the resources of certain Nazi industrialists were expropriated, and there were reforms of industry and finance which had not merely reparations as their aim. The Soviets were concerned also to oust individual Nazis from important positions. They carried out purges not only in the political and administrative spheres, but also in the teaching profession and the judiciary.

There are many possible relevant aspects, including such topics as the importance of regionalism; here, we shall consider only two: class and religion. There was a radical divergence in the class structure of the two Germanies in a variety of respects, as we have seen above. In relation to East German political culture, of key importance was the early abolition of the old Prussian Junker class, with the Soviet land reform of 1945, and of capitalist industrialists and financiers. While differences of status and privilege were still noticeable in East Germany-based usually on political criteria one consequence of a general levelling of class structure was the development of what has been classified as a predominantly petty bourgeois (kleinbürgerlich) class culture.


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The proposal died because of opposition by large landowners. Wang Mang, the court official who usurped the throne from the Liu family and brought the Former Han to a close, also tried to implement land reform by nationalizing large estates. But he too faced tremendous opposition and eventually exhausted himself dealing with a peasant uprising known as Red Eyebrows (for the color they painted their brows).9 The failure of Wang Mang’s land reform enabled the patrimonial aristocracy to extend its holdings and consolidate its power when the Later Han was restored. Owners of large estates succeeded in controlling hundreds or thousands of retainers, tenants, and kinsmen; they often commanded private armies as well.

One state in particular, the kingdom of Qin, embarked on a remarkable modernizing project whose direct target was the kinship-based, patrimonial social order of the early Zhou. It democratized the army by bypassing the warrior aristocrats and directly conscripting masses of peasants, it engaged in large-scale land reform by dispossessing patrimonial landowners and giving land directly to peasant families, and it promoted social mobility by undermining the power and prestige of the hereditary nobility. As “democratic” as these reforms sound, their only purpose was to increase the power of the Qin state and thus create a remorseless dictatorship.

Every one of the institutional innovations undertaken in China during the Eastern Zhou can be linked directly to the requirements of war. The expansion of military service to the general male population, the rise of first a military and then a civilian permanent bureaucracy, the decline of patrimonial officeholders and their replacement by newcomers chosen on the basis of merit, population registration, land reform and the reshuffling of property rights away from patrimonial elites, the growth of better communications and infrastructure, the imposition of a new, impersonal hierarchy of administrative offices, and uniform weights and measures all had their origins in military requirements. While war was not the only engine of state formation in China, it certainly was the major force behind the growth of the first modern states in China.


pages: 230 words: 62,294

The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop by Gregory Dicum, Nina Luttinger

biodiversity loss, California gold rush, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, do well by doing good, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, European colonialism, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, open economy, price stability, Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

All the grand notions of “fair wages, higher living standards, and better working conditions” are nothing more than words when black workers on Portuguese-owned plantations in Angola work with guns at their backs. None of these words will be realized until there is massive land reform throughout the producing countries, but the United States, the most influential importing Member of the ICO, has done its utmost in the past to prevent any such land reform from taking place in Latin America. The large landowners of Africa and Latin America who try to block land reform programmes irrespective of their radical or mildly reformist nature are precisely the owners of the large coffee plantations.11 If the ICA served to prolong the golden moment when huge producers and huge roasters stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the warm glow of virtuous anticommunist prosperity, by the 1980s this ossified arrangement was showing new strains as the world order fundamentally changed around it.

In those countries that endured colonialism, traditional indigenous land-tenure systems were supplanted by top-down structures that gave land rights to the government or to rich, often absentee—and often foreign—landlords. This state of affairs means that small farmers must pay for the use of their own land or be shut out from working their land entirely and serving instead as laborers for others. Land reform has been a recurrent goal of development and workers’ groups throughout the tropics, but the vested interests in these nations are unafraid to enforce their primacy by physically repressive means. Indeed, land inequity has been at the heart of many of the world’s modern conflicts. In one of the most egregious of many such coffee-related conflicts, during the 1932 uprising in El Salvador—a time when 90 percent of the nation’s economy rested on coffee—exploited laborers rose up against the coffee barons and their military henchmen, only to be brutally suppressed.


pages: 243 words: 70,257

In Patagonia: by Bruce Chatwin

British Empire, Ford Model T, Haight Ashbury, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong

He nipped back into the cab and the dog crouched, hatefully baring its gums. ‘My neighbours are Italian,’ Bill said. ‘The Its have got the whole region buttoned up. All came from one village in the Marches forty years back. All ardent Peronistas and not to be trusted. They have a simple philosophy: breed like flies, bellyache about land reform later. They all started off with good-sized lots, but they go on splitting them up. You see that house building over there?’ The track had risen sharply and the whole country was spread out behind, a basin of fields ringed by rocky hills and lit by flashing shafts of sunlight. All the farmhouses were set in clumps of poplars, except the new one, a plain block of white, bare of trees.

Sonny Urquhart was a hard stringy man with blond hair swept back and parted in the centre. He had moles on his face and a big Adam’s apple. The back of his neck was criss-crossed with lines from working hatless in the sun. His eyes were watery blue, and rather bloodshot. He finished his business with Bill about the bull. And Bill talked about farm prices and land reform and Sonny shook or nodded his head. He sat on a firestool and sipped his whisky. Of Scotland he preserved a certain pride of blood and a dim memory of kilts and pipes, but those were the festivities of another generation. His aunt and uncle had come down from Buenos Aires to look after him. The aunt was pleased we had come.

It was one hundred years since Don Jose Menendez set foot in Punta Arenas and a well-heeled party of his descendants had come south to unveil his memorial. The women wore black dresses, pearls, furs and patent shoes. The men had the drawn look that comes of protecting an over-extended acreage. Their Chilean lands had vanished in land reform. As yet they clung to their Argentine latifundias, but the good old days of English managers and docile peons were gone. Don Jose’s bronze head was bald as a bomb. The bust had once adorned the family’s estancia at San Gregorio, but under the Allende regime the peons shoved it in an outhouse. Its reconsecration on the plaza symbolized the return of free enterprise, but the family were unlikely to get anything back.


pages: 403 words: 132,736

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

The disparity between the Indian policy elite’s dreams for tomorrow and what most Indians needed at the time was stark. To be fair, Nehru had tried land reform and to some extent succeeded in getting rid of the most feudal end of the spectrum. The notorious zamindari system that had been set up by the British in most of northern India, under which large landholders, the zamindars, were responsible for collecting taxes for the British from a penurious peasantry, had virtually been abolished by the end of the 1950s. But in most parts of India, Nehru’s land reforms were either watered down or sabotaged altogether by the local Congress Party elites, who, to Nehru’s growing frustration, were drawn disproportionately from the ranks of upper-caste landowners and notables.

Nehru’s Edwardian stamp is also visible in the continued cult of the omnipresent state, which he shared with many left-wing upper-class Englishmen of that era—notably the Fabians, who believed that socialism could be implemented peacefully through the state by a qualified class of “Platonic” technocrats. That Nehru was more influenced by the Fabians than by the Russian Bolsheviks, Indians can be thankful. But traces of Nehru’s economic model, in which the state would lead the country’s drive to industrialize at the expense of both consumption, which he saw as frivolous, and effective land reform, which he felt unable fully to accomplish in a democracy, are still visible in spite of the decision in 1991 to begin dismantling his notorious “License Raj” of extensive state regulation of the economy. There are still strong echoes today of the distaste Nehru felt for private business and the pursuit of moneymaking, although they have grown fainter since 1991.

Average life expectancy was just thirty-two years, an extraordinary but credible figure that gives a fair picture of the abysmal quality of life for most of India’s villagers. Common descriptions at the time talked of emaciated peasants with visible rib cages, “coolies” half bent from a (short) lifetime of manual labor, and children with potbellies from protein deficiency. India at independence was a country desperately in need of rural land reform and measures that would drastically boost crop yields so it could feed its people and build a launch pad for future growth. What it got instead was public steel plants and aluminum smelters, which not only were, for the most part, heavily loss-making but also ate up India’s precious foreign exchange resources.


Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, business climate, colonial rule, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, land reform, managed futures, microcredit, open economy, operational security, rolling blackouts, Seymour Hersh, unemployed young men

Governments unaccustomed to solicitous concerns for distant “little people” found themselves barraged with proposals for land reform and other benefits for peasants. By the 1950s, governments were trying to reverse long-held habits and were seeking international help from the Ford Foundation and others to improve the lives of their villagers. During the 1950s, the Ford Foundation attempted to engage broadly with several of the ambitions for rural development of Near Eastern governments, including land reforms. Ford was substantially involved in efforts by the Iranian government at rural development from 1953, which lasted in varying forms until the foundation left Iran in 1964.

Whatever the declared mistrust of nation-building and the common pessimism that we do not know how to do it, we find our government committed to formidable ventures in it. An example of this tendency can be seen in as sober a body as a study group from the Council on Foreign Relations, which has recently espoused the radicalism of land reform in the Andes.18 This vocation to universal progress, if one may so describe it, is not new. I have been reminded by the new Library of America collection of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poetry that the hopeful, egalitarian vision that drove us after World War II was alive in this country in 1866, when he published his Snowbound.

The resignation of the prime minister’s cabinet in protesting the freeing of leftist political dissidents exemplifies such a disappointment. Labor unrest following the American “reverse course” on labor policy is a similar example from the polar • 79 • • Minxin Pei, Samia Amin, and Seth Garz opposite constituency. Land reform, military purges, industrial decentralization, and other reform efforts marginalized some groups, and the gloss with which history paints such reforms should not misconstrue the reality that the Japanese political process was highly contentious. For all the effort expended by SCAP in choreographing Japan’s revolution from above, economic instability threatened to undercut social and political achievements.


pages: 363 words: 107,817

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed by Andrew Jackson (economist), Ben Dyson (economist)

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, David Graeber, debt deflation, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, land bank, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technological determinism, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies

This was exacerbated in 2001 when the government defaulted on the servicing of its loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In response, the IMF refused to make any concessions (such as refinancing or loan forgiveness) to punish the government for its policies, most significantly the land reform measures. With reduced food production due to the land reforms, the government had to buy food from abroad to try to prevent mass starvation. But, because of the default on the IMF loan, Zimbabwe’s creditworthiness was effectively ruined, making it impossible to get loans elsewhere. As a result, the Zimbabwe government started to issue its own national currency and used the money to buy U.S. dollars on the foreign-exchange market.

Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, and other members of the leading party ZANU-PF, have been eager to blame the continuous years of drought and the targeted sanctions of Western countries as the main reasons for the economic decay. Yet these claims are easily refuted - sanctions on top government officials only came into effect in 2002. Empirical research questions the claim that drought is to blame: “The historically close relationship between rainfall and GDP growth ended in 2000 – the first years after the land reforms.” (Coltart, 2008, p. 10) So what were the real reasons for Zimbabwe’s decline? In the mid 90s, about 4,500 white families owned most of the commercial farms, employing 350,000 black workers and often providing financial support for local infrastructure, hospitals and schools. Simultaneously about 8,500 black farmers ran small-scale commercial farms that were able to access credit from Zimbabwean banks and vitally contributed to the agricultural production (Richardson, 2005).

As Richardson (2005) states: “In early 2000, Mugabe was handed a confidential memo from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, the country’s central bank. The memo predicted that going forward with farmland seizures would result in a pullout of foreign investment, defaults on farm bank loans, and a massive decline in agricultural production.” 4. Although there is no reliable data displaying the financial costs of land reform, economists have estimated the aggregated agricultural industry’s output falling from 4.3 million tons in 2000 (worth, at today’s prices US$3.35 billion) to just 1.4 million tons in 2009 (worth some US$1 billion), a decline of more than two thirds in overall volume and value. Smallholder farmers’ production suffered similar losses, with output decreasing some 73 percent in the same period. 5.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

(Another response was launched a month after Kennedy’s speech, in the Bay of Pigs, Cuba.) The Alliance argued that land reform would transform Latin America. As Kennedy put it, the Alliance planned “to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela.” Unsurprisingly, tierra (land) was on the minds of a lot of newly politically enfranchised inquilinos. This, plus the fact it was now promoted by the U.S., put land reform on the policy agenda in 1964. In 1967 Frei launched an agrarian reform program aimed at redistributing land and expropriating all farms that were over the equivalent of 80 hectares in the Maipo Valley.

(This meant that farms could be larger in places where land was of lower quality.) In anticipation of the land reform, some 200 rural unions, which were then illegal, had organized. They were legalized by the same piece of legislation. By 1970 there were close to 500 such unions. There was a surge in labor strikes, which went from 88,000 in 1960 to 275,000 in the year 1969. Illustrating once again the Red Queen in action, in response to this societal mobilization Frei didn’t just initiate land reform; he also increased the state’s capacity. In particular, Frei attempted to reduce the ability of politicians to use clientelistic policies to buy support without doing much for the population they were supposed to serve.

But banning debt peonage wasn’t enough when people were economically subservient to the elite. Greater liberty was necessary to make Athenians more active citizens so that they could get even more liberty. To this end, Solon sought to improve their access to economic opportunities. He implemented a land reform by uprooting the boundary markers of fields. These markers recorded the obligation of the tenants farming the land to pay a sixth of their produce. By eliminating them Solon in effect freed the tenants from the landowners, giving them the land they owned, and turning Attica, the region surrounding Athens, into a land of small farmers.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

But no one came as close as Trotsky to accurately guessing what would happen next. Grasping the implications of 1905, Trotsky refined a novel theory of “permanent revolution.” Marxists had traditionally thought that revolution would occur in stages. The first would be “bourgeois-democratic,” paving the way for peasant land reform and further urban industrialization, and creating a capitalist republic with freedom of speech and assembly. The new situation would allow social democrats to patiently organize for a second, socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks agreed on theory but argued over the role liberal capitalists would play.

On March 1, the day of the tsar’s flight, soviet and liberal leaders came to an agreement for the creation of a new Provisional Government that would implement a wide range of reforms. Russia would have full civil liberties, with political prisoners released and the police and state apparatus transformed. Important questions about the war, land reform, and elections remained unresolved, but the February Revolution was among the most sweeping the world had ever seen. Yet tensions quickly appeared. Sovereign authority could now be claimed by the worker and soldier soviets and by the Provisional Government. Moderate socialists struggled to bridge the gap, believing they had to keep the bourgeoisie within the February consensus.

Even Martov denounced the Bolshevik “coup d’état,” though he also put forth a resolution calling for an interim all-Soviet government and plans for a constituent assembly. Many Bolsheviks supported the motion, and it carried unanimously. Martov’s plan would have created the broad socialist government that many had sought in September—only now, in a more radical moment, it would be pressured into ending the war and bringing about land reform. But as in September, the Right SRs and the majority of Mensheviks refused to go along. They walked out of the Congress, ceding the revolution’s future to the Bolsheviks. Martov still wanted a compromise and tried to start negotiations for the creation of a coalition socialist government. But just two hours later, with the moderates no longer in the hall, the Bolshevik mood hardened.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Furthermore, the 1944 revolution had aroused “a strong national movement to free Guatemala from the military dictatorship, social backwardness, and ‘economic colonialism’ which had been the pattern of the past,” and “inspired the loyalty and conformed to the self-interest of most politically conscious Guatemalans.” Things became still worse after a successful land reform began to threaten “stability” in neighboring countries where suffering people did not fail to take notice. In short, the situation was pretty awful. So the CIA carried out a successful coup. Guatemala was turned into the slaughterhouse it remains today, with regular US intervention whenever things threaten to get out of line.

Madison feared that a growing part of the population, suffering from the serious inequities of the society, would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of [life’s] blessings.” If they had democratic power, there’d be a danger they’d do something more than sigh. He discussed this quite explicitly at the Constitutional Convention, expressing his concern that the poor majority would use its power to bring about what we would now call land reform. So he designed a system that made sure democracy couldn’t function. He placed power in the hands of the “more capable set of men,” those who hold “the wealth of the nation.” Other citizens were to be marginalized and factionalized in various ways, which have taken a variety of forms over the years: fractured political constituencies, barriers against unified working-class action and cooperation, exploitation of ethnic and racial conflicts, etc.

It was strikingly obvious that caste and tribal distinctions (tribal are usually worse) have been pretty much overcome. The governing committee was half women, one of them tribal. The guy who was more or less in charge of the committee was a peasant who had a little piece of land. Some of the people who spoke up were landless laborers who’d been given small plots. They had an extensive land reform program and the literacy level has gone up. We went to a school that had a library of maybe thirty books, of which they were very proud. Simple tube wells have been designed (with government support) that can be sunk by a group of families. Women, who’ve been trained to install and maintain them, seemed to be in charge.


Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

[If self-sufficiency is reached], the market price of the commodity will drop considerably in the Philippines. This means that only the most efficient farming units will lie with the large, mechanized, tenantless, agro-business farms. This technological fact, coupled with a loophole in the Land Reform Code that allows a landlord to throw his tenants off the land and retain it himself if he farms the area, might destroy whatever attempts are made at land reform in the Philippines. . . . [President Marcos] is very much aware of a little-publicized report issued in 1965, which clearly proves the feudal, and therefore explosive, nature of Philippine rural society. The report reveals that only eighteen years ago, less than half of 1 percent of the population owned 42 percent of the agricultural land.

In 1903, the tenancy rate for the entire country was 18 percent excluding farm laborers. By 1948 this figure had climbed to 37 percent. In 1961, it was over 50 percent. There is no evidence that this trend has at all changed in the last eight years. It may even be outpacing the minuscule efforts at land reform. . . . Will the Congress in Manila, composed of the very same rural banking elite, ever vote the necessary funds to finance the Agricultural Credit Administration, the Land Bank and Cooperatives?44 The report may have gone on to indicate that this situation is, largely, a consequence of American colonial policy, and it also might have ventured a prediction as to the fate of those driven off the land under “rationalization” in a country that has been described as an American vegetable garden.


pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

The causes of the revolution had much more to do with the wealth and poverty created by the oil- and land-reform-based economic transformations that were put into place, who that wealth flowed to, who the poverty was inflicted upon, and the obstacles to successful economic development that followed from those stresses. In 1973, world oil prices tripled, and with the revenue from the bonanza, Reza Shah hoped to turn Iran into an industrial country in one generation. This meant, first, land reform: distributing land to turn tenants and sharecroppers into independent farmers, and compensating landlords with government oil revenues.

In succession after 1791, France experienced the terrorist dictatorship of the Jacobins; the corrupt and gerrymandered five-man Directory; a dictatorship under Napoleon Bonaparte as “first consul”; a monarchy until 1848; a First Republic; a Second Republic; a shadow of an empire under Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew Louis Napoleon; a socialist commune (in Paris at least); a Third Republic, which suppressed the commune and elevated a royalist to president; and, peaking in 1889, the efforts of an aspirant dictator and ex-minister of war, Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger, with his promise of Revanche, Révision, Restauration (revenge on Germany, revision of the constitution, and restoration of the monarchy).30 And yet land reform stuck. Dreams of past and hopes of future military glory stuck. And for those on the left of politics, the dream of a transformational, piratical political revolution—the urban people marching in arms (or not in arms) to overthrow corruption and establish justice, liberty, and utopia—stuck as well.

He then received at least the temporary blessing of the Ottoman sultan, Selim III the Reformer (who shortly thereafter was deposed, imprisoned, and murdered by his own janissary guardsmen). Muhammed Ali looked northwest at Europe and east to India. He ruled a prosperous kingdom—but he saw that Europeans might do to his or his children’s kingdom what they had done to India. So Muhammed Ali strove to make Egypt great, introducing new crops, land reform, a modern military, a focus on exporting cotton, and the construction of state-owned textile factories to jump-start Egyptian industry. He understood that unless he could keep the machines working, his great-grandchildren would become the puppets of French bankers and British proconsuls. But the machines could not be kept working.


pages: 419 words: 125,977

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang

anti-communist, Deng Xiaoping, estate planning, fake news, financial independence, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of writing, job-hopping, land reform, Mason jar, mass immigration, new economy, PalmPilot, Pearl River Delta, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, vertical integration

In the next room, a title stretched across one wall: “A Vision Made Real: From Agricultural County to IT City.” A light board showed photos of the Communist Party meeting at which Deng Xiaoping set forth his program for economic reform and opening to the West. That was in 1978. From one room to the next, the exhibit had jumped thirty years, skipping over the founding of Communist China, the land reform and the execution of counterrevolutionaries, the attacks against “class enemies” and the establishment of the communes, the Great Leap Forward and the famine that killed at least twenty million people, and the decade of the Cultural Revolution. I had exited History and entered Economy, and now the exhibit came to life.

City residents came to refer to the tomb as wuming bei: the stele with no name. * * * The Communist revolution swept into Liutai in the summer of 1946. Party organizers fanned out to villages across Manchuria, evaluating every family’s “class status” and confiscating land and livestock from rich households to distribute to the poorest ones. A second wave of land reform, the “Dig Out the Cellars” movement in the fall of 1947, sought to root out additional property that families had hidden away. Party activists taught villagers to denounce landowners in public meetings that were known as “struggle sessions”; their chosen targets were cursed, humiliated, and beaten.

The coming of the revolution to rural villages like Liutai set the pattern for the mass movements of the Communist era. Political campaigns would come in waves, each one more extreme than the last; acts of violence were applauded as proof of revolutionary purity. History does not say much about the 1940s land reform and the lives it ruined, perhaps because later movements played out in the cities and claimed more prominent victims. And historians have not paid attention to people like my great-uncle, who was forced to flee his home and live out his days as a guest in someone else’s house. His wife fared worse.


pages: 413 words: 128,093

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

The short version of this long and complex struggle is that while the founders of the Nehruvian state permitted and sometimes encouraged gradual change in the countryside—and in a few regions threw out upper-caste landlords to replace them with middle-caste peasant farmers—by and large they promised much more land reform than they actually delivered. In places like Maharashtra and Gujarat, middle castes prevailed, sometimes on their own and sometimes with help from the state. But in the northern heartland, as the land reform specialist Arvind Das put it to me one afternoon in New Delhi during a helpful tutorial, “a lot of legislation was enacted and very little was implemented.” In part this was because when the government passed reform laws, it provided long waiting periods before the laws took effect.

The variously nationalist, leftist, and Gandhian rhetoric of South Asia’s several independence movements suggested that the colonial structure would be torn down and replaced with an egalitarian model. Attempts of this sort were indeed made after independence and some of them succeeded, but in such crucial areas as land reform, higher education, caste, and access to English—the language of power—not enough changed, compared with what was promised. In India, this was in part because of the evolutionary, tolerant, democratic character of the Nehruvian ideal, which rejected purges. It was also because the indigenous elites used for centuries by the British had the wisdom to switch sides during the independence struggle and then claimed the mantle of victory when independence arrived.

Singh to initiate for these other backward classes a new, sweeping affirmative action plan in public employment that sparked the caste riots of 1990, including the upper-caste self-immolations that brought the fire-extinguisher salesman to my door. For decades now, South Asian politicians and activists have been attempting sporadically to untie the hierarchical binds of history, religion, and culture through land reform legislation, speeches, symbolic acts, marches, electoral campaigns, industrialization plans, welfare programs, and government hiring schemes. Many of these efforts reflect the noblest aspirations of the Nehruvian state: social mobility and an end to caste distinctions through universal education, full employment, widespread health care, and a benevolent, leveling bureaucracy.


On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, feminist movement, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, land reform, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, union organizing

The early successes of the Sandinistas quite rightly caused fear, indeed virtual hysteria among U.S. elites, as we see from the fact that the government can declare a “national emergency” in the face of this grave threat to the existence of the United States without evoking ridicule, indeed, with the expressed support of respectable opinion. If peasants starving to death in Honduras can look across the borders and see health clinics, land reform, literacy programs, improvement in subsistence agriculture and the like in a country no better endowed than their own, the rot may spread; and it may spread still farther, perhaps even to the United States, where the many people suffering from malnutrition or the homeless in the streets in the world’s richest country may begin to ask some questions.

President Carter therefore sent the military aid with a message to Congress saying that it was intended “to strengthen the army’s key role in reforms”—a phrase that would have made Orwell gasp. The consequences were exactly as the Archbishop had predicted. In March, Archbishop Romero was assassinated, as the death squads went into action. A State of Siege was instituted, renewed monthly since, and in May the war against the peasantry was launched in full force under the guise of land reform. Peasants were the main victims of the Carter-Duarte war in 1980—not surprisingly, since “the masses were with the guerrillas” when this exercise began, Duarte later conceded. The first major atrocity was the Río Sumpul massacre, when 600 fleeing peasants were slaughtered in a joint operation of the Salvadoran and Honduran armies.

As for the first point, apart from an oblique reference by Abraham Brumberg (former director of the State Department journal Problems of Communism, who has given nuanced and, in my view, quite plausible assessments of the Sandinista government elsewhere), there is only one phrase referring to the Sandinista programs in the areas of health, literacy, land reform and development: by Tad Sculz (NYT, March 16), in the course of a denunciation of the “generally appalling leadership” in this “repressive society” and “its failures.” These programs are crucial to understanding the U.S. attack against Nicaragua, as we have seen; correspondingly, no mention of the basic reasons for the U.S. war was permitted in these opinion columns.


pages: 565 words: 160,402

A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley

currency manipulation / currency intervention, defense in depth, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, land reform, operational security, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea

Admitting that the summer and fall offensives of 1968 “did not achieve the military and political goals which they were assigned,” the Communist historians nevertheless concluded that they had paid off in another realm because “they rained new blows on the already shaky will of the American imperialists.”42 The top Americans recognized President Thieu’s importance to all of this, Abrams observing that “he knows more about pacification than any other Vietnamese” and Colby calling him “the number one pacification officer.” On a number of occasions Thieu invited Ambassador Bunker to go along on visits to the countryside, where Bunker heard him emphasize restoring local government, holding village and hamlet elections, training local government officials, and land reform. At Vung Tau 1,400 village chiefs, representing about three-quarters of all the villages in South Vietnam, went through training during the first nine months of 1969. President Thieu visited every one of those classes, giving the village chiefs the incomparable cachet of being able to go back home and speak about “what President Thieu said to me—.”

“For the first time in the war,” said the briefer, “the enemy’s traditional bases of power are being directly challenged—his political organization and his control of the population. While this task has only just begun, it appears that the outcome of the war will be decided here. Presently, at least, both sides are finally fighting the same war.” LAND REFORM WAS an extremely important part of the government’s appeal to the people. During 1969 it distributed more land to the peasantry than in the previous seven years combined, and that was just the start of it. In March 1970 President Thieu introduced a far-reaching “Land to the Tiller” program involving some one million acres, a third of all the land currently under cultivation.

Bunker attributed that to the cumulative effect of a lot of things, the complex of actions and programs they had brought together under the rubric of “one war.” He cited improvements in South Vietnamese military capability, a more effective civil administration and establishment of the constitutional process, land reform, increases in agricultural production. Over time, then, “one could see noticeable changes in the countryside, the economic condition of the people, of their ability to buy sophisticated equipment for their farms, tractors, increased modes of transportation, in so many different ways. This nation-building process was evident.”11 And Bunker acknowledged the beneficial effects of a harmonious team approach on the American side.


pages: 891 words: 253,901

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, independent contractor, information retrieval, Internet Archive, land reform, means of production, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ted Sorensen

He consulted with Maria’s brother, Tonio, who was an agricultural expert, with a progressive Mexican economist, and with young leaders of the Guatemalan Communist Party whom he had come to respect as some of the most dedicated and intelligent agents of change in the country. Together, they formulated a plan for sweeping land reform and social progress in Guatemala. After her husband’s presidential victory, Maria Arbenz came under fire from his enemies as an evil influence over the newly elected Guatemalan president—a beguiling, Communist-leaning sorceress. But Arbenz ignored the poisonous political chatter and allowed his well-informed wife to participate in cabinet meetings. She soon established herself as one of his top advisers. The land reform bill that the new president hammered out and then ushered through the legislature two years later was relatively moderate—Arbenz’s government only expropriated acreage from United Fruit’s huge holdings that was not under cultivation, and it offered the multinational corporation fair compensation for the seized land.

But Dulles’s interest in Guatemalan artifacts did not extend to the people who had produced them. United Fruit’s cries of alarm about Arbenz’s land reform soon produced the same results that Anglo-Iranian Oil’s protestations did in Iran. The Eisenhower-Dulles administration moved swiftly to isolate Guatemala, labeling it a Soviet “beachhead” in the hemisphere. The Arbenz government, Foster charged, was imposing a “Communist-type reign of terror” on the Guatemalan people. Ambassador John Peurifoy, the Dulles brothers’ handpicked man in Guatemala, tried to bribe Arbenz to fall in line, offering him $2 million to abort his land reforms. When that tried-and-true tactic of winning over Latin dictators did not succeed, Arbenz was physically threatened.

What had Jacobo Arbenz done to deserve such a heartbreaking journey through life—a tale of grief and lament out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel? Simply put, he had tried to uplift his people. In doing so, he defied the gods of his country, the almighty United Fruit Company and its powerful friends in Washington, as well as Guatemala’s medieval land barons. In June 1952, Arbenz pushed a sweeping land reform bill through his nation’s legislature aimed at redistributing the heavily rural country’s farm acreage, 70 percent of which was in the hands of 2 percent of the landowners. Among the properties expropriated under the new law and handed over to poor farmers were some of the vast estates of United Fruit.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

First, Ladejinsky was forced to leave Japan when the Republican secretary of agriculture deemed his Russian origins a security risk. Then, two years later, when he was working on land reform in South Vietnam, the State Department dismissed him for a technical conflict of interest, as he had bought stock in a Taiwanese company that had a contract with the U.S. government. Logue was convinced that Ladejinsky was being politically targeted and was outraged. As he wrote to another associate from his India days, “Wolf is the leading democratic expert in the world on land reform. There is a certain irony in the fact that his resignation was forced because he was the only American publicly known to have invested a private dollar in private enterprise in Chiang Kai-Shek’s Formosa.”

“Time of Trial for Wolf Ladejinsky, Land Reform Expert Ousted from Job,” NHR, December 31, 1954; Wolf Ladejinsky to Logue, January 14, 1955; Logue to Ladejinsky, February 6, 1956; Ladejinsky to Logue, February 15, 1956; and Logue to Ladejinsky, March 20, 1956, EJL, Series 4, Box 27, Folder 69; Logue to Ensminger, March 20, 1956, EJL, Series 4, Box 25, Folder 43; Logue to Paul Appleby, March 20, 1956, and Appleby to Logue, March 22, 1956, EJL, Series 4, Box 23, Folder 2; Logue to Chester Bowles, March 27, 1956, EJL, Series 4, Box 23, Folder 12. On Wolf Ladejinsky and his land reform work, see Bowles, Ambassador’s Report, 181, 185, 374; Wolf Isaac Ladejinsky and Louis J.

As he warned his Republican successor as ambassador, George Allen, “Any effort by the Administration or Congress to tie political strings to Indian Aid or to force us to go out to ‘claim credit’ which really belongs to the Indians, will be disastrous.” Bowles was right to worry. For many reasons—including the Indian government’s reticence to enforce true land reform and wrest control from the landholding rural elites, and Point Four’s failure to adequately engage ordinary Indians in decision-making—community development was never as popular among villagers as Bowles had hoped.52 This Indian experience would stay with Logue for many years. By 1955, when he was working in New Haven, Point Four would provide a model for the kind of integrated physical and social reconstruction he was promoting at home.


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

The workers have nothing to eat and are shot like dogs by murderous guards while on strike. . . . Public school teachers are . . . selling their bras to earn enough to eat. . . . It is an order dedicated to the International Monetary Fund, the foreign banks, the oil companies . . . thug-hiring employers, and land-reform-busting landlords.”7 Deep frustration drove thousands into armed insurgencies. Still, the idea of “protracted people’s warfare” did not appeal to everyone, says Josua Mata. The idea of picking up a gun, he still feels, “was attractive only to the young and stupid,” because any attempt at armed struggle would bring terrible retribution and “guns never bring anything positive.”

PART IV NO RICE WITHOUT FREEDOM, NO FREEDOM WITHOUT RICE The Global Uprising of Peasants and Farmworkers CHAPTER 30 “NO LAND NO LIFE” Uprisings of the “Landless,” 2017 CHRISTMAS 2016, MINDANAO, PHILIPPINES. Armed men lounged at the entrance to a banana plantation. Nearby, a sign read “Intruders Will Be Shot. Survivors Will Be Shot Again.” Inside the gates, displaced farmers were seven months into an occupation demanding the return of lands that had once been theirs. Philippine land reform officials had ruled for the farmers. But Lapanday Foods, which ships twenty million crates of bananas annually, refused to comply. On Mindanao, home to the largest rubber, banana, and pineapple plantations in the Philippines, disputes are often solved with bullets. Lapanday guards had already shot and wounded ten occupiers.

Led by the Asian Peasants’ Coalition and Pesticide Action Network–Asia Pacific (PAN AP), transnational farm and fishing networks mobilized to retain or regain land and water rights. “Smallholders,” unwilling to wait any longer for their governments to fulfill promises of “agrarian reform,” called for “land reform by the people.” Sarawak in Malaysia held rituals cleansing their farmlands of “foreign money power.” Sri Lankan fishermen rallied on boats to demand their rights to ancestral waters. Many of the protesters were women because women grow 80 percent of the food in Asia and Africa. Any attempt to fight world hunger must begin with women, they say.


pages: 454 words: 107,163

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

But massively unequal land ownership—a residue of the colonial land system set up by the Portuguese crown—concentrated national wealth in impractically large, idle estates, some the size of small European countries, resulting in almost ritualized conflicts between peasants and Brazil’s powerful landlords. Government leaders who attempted meaningful land reform faced the wrath of landowners, who, through corruption and other forms of political influence, had long been a part of the state itself. Development of the Amazon seemed to offer an alternative to the impossible conflicts facing the nation, and Brazil’s generals jumped at the prospect, believing that in doing so they would entice foreign investment, earn foreign capital, grow the economy, and obviate the need for land reform all at the same time. In 1966, Brazil’s dictator president, General Castello Branco, announced that “Amazonian occupation will proceed as though we are waging a strategically conducted war,” branding the colonization efforts as a national project of unification—a march toward ordem e progresso.15 The effort included massive tax breaks for investors, huge development projects such as the paving of the Belém to Brasília highway and the construction of massive new dams, and an Amazonian version of the Homestead Act to encourage the colonization of the Amazon by settlers.

“I’m worried about it because there are thousands of people living here who depend on the forest—and their lives are in danger every day.”33 The successor to Mendes as the head of the rubber tappers union, Osmarino Amâcio Rodrigues, so feared that environmentalism was distracting attention away from the need for land reform that he denounced “empty environmentalism” in a provocative 1990 essay titled “The Second Assassination of Chico Mendes.”34 In contrast to conservationists who define the challenge as “protecting nature,” Veja magazine reporter Coutinho, like Mendes before him, insists that the key to protecting the Amazon is achieving a high enough level of prosperity so that Brazilians can care for their forest.

Once we abandon the belief that there exists a nature or a market separate from humans, we can start to think about creating natures and markets to serve the kind of world we want and the kind of species we want to become. 8. Today, the effort to save the Amazon is being undermined by the quasi-religious adherence to both nature and the market. In imagining that they are trying to protect nature from humankind, conservationists define virtually all of the key drivers of deforestation—Brazil’s debt, its lack of land reform, and its need for economic growth—out of their politics. Imagine that in 1964 Brazil’s democratic government had been invaded by a foreign government that then ruled as a military dictatorship for the next quarter century. Seeking to quell internal dissent, the illegal government borrowed billions of dollars from foreign banks and governments to destroy one of Brazil’s national treasures, the Amazon forest.


pages: 564 words: 153,720

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

business climate, business cycle, commoditize, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, land reform, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open economy, out of africa, profit motive, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, The Great Good Place, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, vertical integration, women in the workforce

The United Fruit Company was the hardest-hit foreign corporation, since much of its potential banana land lay fallow.85 Its land also had been undervalued to avoid taxation, so that the company was forced to sell land far below its fair market value. In 1954 land-hungry peasants began to occupy coffee plantations illegally, with some Guatemalan Communists encouraging them. “The land reform program has practically been taken over by communist agitators who exhort peasants to ‘invade’ private property,” the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal reported. “Owners have no recourse and objections only bring threats of fines and imprisonment on the grounds that they are ‘hindering the land reform program.’” The writer concluded that “if the present trend continues, the days of large privately owned and operated coffee Fincas are numbered.” As a private lawyer, the new Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had represented the United Fruit Company.

In Kenya, native laborers first sabotaged crop harvests, but in 1952 many coffee workers joined other disenchanted Africans in what came to be called the Mau Mau Rebellion, which resulted in government suppression. By the end of 1954, detention camps and prisons held 150,000 people. At the same time, however, the British instituted land reforms and opened more coffee cultivation to African producers. By 1954 some 15,000 Kenyan natives grew coffee on tiny plots, totaling only 5,000 acres. Over the next few years Africans would come to dominate the Kenyan industry, producing some of the finest arabica beans in the world. Other African countries also produced limited amounts of arabica, but the largest source remained Ethiopia, coffee’s original home.

Fearful that all of Central America would fall to Communist influence (as had Nicaragua), the United States supported the repressive governments of El Salvador and Guatemala with helicopters and anti-insurgency training while trying to nudge them toward mild reforms. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) dumped money into ameliorative social programs while Congress authorized millions in military aid. In 1980, under pressure from the Carter administration, a much-trumpeted land reform law was passed in El Salvador, but it barely touched the coffee oligarchy. At the same time, the reforms served as a cover for greater repression by the troops supposedly sent to enforce land division. On March 23, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero delivered a powerful sermon. “We should like the government to take seriously the fact that reforms dyed by so much blood are worth nothing,” he preached.


Lonely Planet Scotland's Highlands & Islands by Lonely Planet

carbon footprint, country house hotel, demand response, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, rewilding

Other useful resources: Mountaineering Council of Scotland (www.mountaineering.scot) Ordnance Survey (www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk) Ramblers’ Association Scotland (www.ramblers.org.uk/scotland) Scottish Mountaineering Club (www.smc.org.uk) THE RIGHT TO ROAM There is a tradition of relatively free access to open country in Scotland, a tradition that was enshrined in law in the 2003 Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, popularly known as ‘the right to roam’. The Scottish Outdoor Access Code (www.outdooraccess-scotland.scot) states that everyone has the right to be on most land and inland waters, providing they act responsibly. You should avoid areas where you might disrupt or disturb wildlife, lambing (generally mid-April to the end of May), grouse shooting (from 12 August to the third week in October) or deer stalking (1 July to 15 February, but the peak period is August to October).

It was always precarious, as rights were granted on a year-by-year basis, so at any moment a crofter could lose not only the farm but also the house they’d built on it. The late 19th-century economic depression meant many couldn’t pay their rent. This time, however, they resisted expulsion, instead forming the Highland Land Reform Association and their own political party. Their resistance led the government to accede to several demands, including security of tenure, fair rents and eventually the supply of land for new crofts. Crofters now have the right to purchase their farmland and 2004 laws finally abolished the feudal system, which created so much misery.

Raising salmon for food took off in Scotland in the 1970s, and by 2017 the number of marine farms had risen to more than 250, producing around 170,000 tonnes of salmon. The industry sustains around 2000 jobs and accounts for £600 million in export income. However, salmon farming has its downside. A report published in 2018 by the Scottish Parliament’s Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee (Report on the Environmental Impacts of Salmon Farming) claimed that fish farms have had a negative impact on the environment – uneaten fish food, waste products, pesticides and chemical treatments end up in the surrounding waters, causing an artificial ‘desert’ on the sea bed. In addition, salmon farms act as a breeding ground and ‘sink’ for sea lice, naturally occurring parasites that then infect and kill wild salmon and sea trout.


From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, classic study, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, plutocrats, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, young professional

At a time when the ideals of democracy and republicanism inspired masses as well as intellectuals in most postcolonial countries, Iran under the shah seemed to be actively working to depoliticize its citizenry. In lieu of a nation-building ideology, the Pahlavi regime offered a mix of Persian chauvinism, the cult of the shah, and a tarted-up version of Iran’s pre-Islamic history. But it attracted neither the traditionalist masses nor the expanding middle class. The grandiose schemes of land reform, industrialization and urbanization the shah imposed on his largely peasant population led to an ever-deeper discontent. The attempt to push Iran into the twentieth century created a small middle class, but it also uprooted millions of people from their traditional rural homes and exposed them to the degradations of urban life.

He even allied himself with the Communists to achieve this. By 1924, Sun had also become aware that his political programme must meet the economic challenge of China – the agrarian crisis in particular. But he died too early, and his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, though a self-styled military tactician, had little interest in land reform. Allied with landlords, urban financiers and businessmen, he failed to keep up Sun’s radical initiative, which passed to Mao Zedong and the Communists. ‘Whoever wins the support of the peasants,’ Mao said, ‘will win China; whoever solves the land question will win the peasants.’73 And so it happened.

China today is colonial in the enemy-occupied areas and basically semi-colonial in the non-occupied areas, and it is predominantly feudal in both … It is precisely against these predominant political, economic, and cultural forms that our revolution is directed.74 The Japanese invasion helped Mao’s cause as much as the corruption and brutality of the Nationalists; the Communists tapped directly into the anti-imperialism of the Chinese masses, and appeared the natural leaders of the Chinese resistance even when their actual military contribution to Japan’s defeat was minor. Class struggle was another of their preferred catalysts for the reorganization of Chinese society. They pursued, often brutally, land reform and other class-based social and economic policies, even as they fought a civil war with the Nationalists after 1945. Moreover, the same organizational skills helped the CCP to rebuild a political and administrative system remarkably quickly after their victory in 1949 (which forced the Nationalists to retreat to Taiwan), and to lead their young nation-state into a major war with the United States in Korea in 1951.


After the Cataclysm by Noam Chomsky

8-hour work day, anti-communist, British Empire, death from overwork, disinformation, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, land reform, mass immigration, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

Very soon, U.S. scholars took their own initiatives, as when a group of historians engaged in what one called “historical engineering, explaining the issues of the war that we might the better win it,” produced such material as The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, a series of forged documents (as was suspected in Europe at the time) purporting to show that the Germans had materially assisted the Bolsheviks in coming to power and that Bolshevik leaders were paid agents of the German general staff.8 As intelligence services have become more sophisticated—or at least, better funded—they have learned to play upon the willingness of the more thoughtful members of the community to believe the worst about official enemies of the state to which they are devoted. One technique is to arrange for “scholarly studies,” such as the book by Hoang Van Chi which had such remarkable success in establishing the mythology concerning the bloodbaths during the North Vietnamese land reform.9 Another device is to plant stories in the foreign press, to be picked up by “witting” (or perhaps, witless) journalists and others. The CIA recognized long ago that foreign correspondents are particularly susceptible to such deception since they so often tend to rely on local contacts for their “insights.”

He does not remark that since his evidence derives primarily “from the in-depth interviewing of selected refugees,” it will obviously be negative; those who might approve of these programs are excluded from his sample. But ignoring this trivial point, Quinn states that “the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the peasantry was opposed to almost all of the [Khmer Rouge] programs.” Quinn discusses programs which included land reform, establishment of cooperatives, ensuring “that all citizens have roughly the same degree of wealth,” obliterating class lines by confiscating property from the wealthy and compelling university students to plant and harvest rice, distributing excess crops “to feed other groups whose harvest was insufficient,” etc.

The major newsweeklies did not want to miss the opportunity to offer their readers visual evidence of Khmer Rouge tyranny, and could not be deterred merely because the evidence was faked—repeated exposure has rarely dimmed the lustre of other familiar propaganda tales, such as the North Vietnamese land reform bloodbath of the 1950s, discussed in Volume I. On November 21, 1977, Time magazine ran the photo of the bound man. While the Washington Post had withheld judgment on whether the victim was killed in the staged photo, doubts had now been eliminated and Time assured the reader that he was executed.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

Since her election, efforts to implement a serious land reform program have foundered on the opposition of a legislature largely controlled by the very people who would be its targets. Democracy in this instance is constrained in bringing about the kind of egalitarian social order that would be necessary either as the ground for capitalist growth or for the long-term stability of democracy itself.26 In such circumstances, dictatorship could potentially be much more functional in bringing about a modern society, as it was when dictatorial power was used to bring about land reform during the American occupation of Japan.

The same was said to be true for the Cubans and Nicaraguans, who had been victimized by American imperialism, and for the Vietnamese, for whom communism was regarded as a virtual national tradition. Many on the Left shared the view that a radical socialist regime in the Third World could legitimate itself, even in the absence of free elections and open discussion, by engaging in land reform, providing free health care, and raising literacy levels. Given these views, it is not surprising that there were few people on the Left who predicted revolutionary instability in the Soviet bloc or in China. Indeed, the belief in the legitimacy and permanence of communism took on a number of bizarre forms in the waning days of the Cold War.

A similar kind of reform effort was undertaken by the left-wing military officers who ruled Peru between 1968 and 1980. Before the military takeover, 50 percent of Peru’s land was held by seven hundred hacienda owners who also controlled much of Peruvian politics. The military enacted the most sweeping land reform in Latin America after Cuba’s, replacing the old agrarian obligarchs with a new, more modern elite of industrialists and technobureaucats, and facilitating the dramatic growth of a middle class through improvements in education.27 This dictatorial interlude saddled Peru with an even larger and more inefficient state sector,28 but it did eliminate some of the most glaring social inequalities and thereby improved somewhat the long-term prospects for the emergence of an economically modern sector after the military returned to their barracks in 1980.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

They have accompanied the movement for human rights and democratic reforms in the postcolonial era and are now a major force in the political and cultural life of countries throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Today there are more than 35,000 voluntary organizations in the developing nations.I3 Third-world NGOs are involved in rural development and land reform, food relief, preventive health care and family planning, early-childhood-education and literacy campaigns, economic development, housing, and political advocacy, and are often the only voice of the people in countries where the governments are weak and corrupt and the market economy small or nonexistent.

Parent associations have mushroomed throughout Latin America over the past decade, helping parents establish childcare centers, community vegetable gardens, and producer cooperatives. In countries where small landowning elites still own and control much of the countryside, peasant associations and unions have been formed to press for land reforms. The Mexican National Union of Autonomous Regional Peasant Organizations and the Movement of Landless Rural Workers in Brazil are among the best-known and most visible groupS.28 Africa too is experiencing a rapid growth in third-sector activity. There are more than 4,000 NCOs currently operating on the African continent, and many observers regard them as "the most significant driving force behind development" in that part of the world. 29 In Uganda, 250 local NCOs provide emergency assistance and healthcare programs to the poor.

The loss of international agricultural-commodity markets could plunge the Southern Hemisphere nations into an economic tailspin and force an international banking crisis of unprecedented proportions. Civilization would likely descend into a long-term decline that could last for centuries. For that reason alone, Southern Hemisphere NGOs are going to feel increasing pressure to resist the biotechnology revolution in agriculture while at the same time working for land reform and more ecologically sustainable approaches to farming their land. Dr. Vandana Shiva, Director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and National Resource Policy, in India, worries that in her own country, upwards of 95 percent of the farm population could be displaced in the coming century by the biotechnology revolution in agriculture.


pages: 262 words: 73,439

Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge) by Penny Harvey, Hannah Knox

BRICs, centre right, classic study, dematerialisation, informal economy, Kickstarter, land reform, new economy, the built environment, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, urban renewal

Integration and Difference 57 A former army officer told us that the colonizers had been responsible for stealing over two thousand square miles from the generals who had first claimed the land, but that there was nothing the generals could really do about it. Ownership is weak when land is unoccupied, and along the Iquitos-Nauta road occupation appeared to trump the threat of force when it came to winning land rights. Against a background of national land reform, which was under way at the time, it is perhaps unsurprising that the associations found it relatively easy to displace the generals as individual landowners. Moreover, the 1970s and 1980s had seen an increase in labor organization in Iquitos. By the time the road was being colonized, many of the unions were powerful voices in the region, having brought a much greater sense of community activism and local rights to the roadside dwellers (Rodriguez 1991).

Helicopters scanned the forest for images of these people in what appeared as a response to the contradictory compulsions to prove that they existed, to demonstrate the threat the road posed to them, and to stimulate calls for their protection or integration, or both. 2. See Lopez Parodi 1991. 3. This was particularly striking as it was taking place as the same time as a broader process of land reform that dismantled the hacienda system of land ownership in the Andes, redistributing the land from the hacienda owners to communities (Seligman 1995). 4. Anon. 1989. 5. At the same time, from the perspective of many people living in Iquitos and Nauta, the road still stands as a place that is characterized by its lack of sociality.

., 6 land distribution, inequalities in, 208n14 land expropriation, 170–71, 174–75, 178 land ownership: authoritarian control of, 32–33; and hacienda system, 209n3; and Interoceanic Highway, 38, 65–66, 156; investments of, 35; and Iquitos-Nauta road, 55–57, 60, 74, 75, 138, 141; and labor conscription, 28; and road-building projects, 32–33 land reform, 57, 209n3 landscape: sentient landscape, 53, 79, 127. See also Earth forces Larkin, Brian, 206n8 Latour, Bruno, 94, 97, 98, 198–99, 206n4, 210n4 Lave, Jean, 82, 211n15 Lazar, S., 212n8 Leguía, Augusto, 28, 29, 42 Leite-Ribeiro, Raul Fernando, 38, 39 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1, 2, 6, 107, 108, 197, 198, 206n3, 207n18 Li, Fabiana, 213n5 Lima, Peru, 24, 208n4 Llosa, Elena, 38, 39 logging industries: and Interoceanic Highway, 3, 23, 26, 31, 63, 64, 65, 156, 158, 171; and Iquitos-Nauta road, 43, 47, 49, 138, 140 Madre De Dios River, barges crossing, 37 malarial mosquitos, 48, 49, 58 Maldonado, Faustino, 26 Manu National Park, 31, 109 Marcapata, Peru, 32, 38, 72 235 marginality, 39, 50, 61, 114 material environments, instability of, 17, 79, 89, 94, 101–2, 103, 122, 187, 199, 210n1 material forms, 4, 11, 16 material practices: and health and safety measures, 121; and knowledge practices, 8; and numbers, 210–11n13; and open-ended nature of infrastructural forms, 6–7, 13, 135; political nature of, 10, 14.


pages: 287 words: 95,152

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

You inevitably ask yourself whether the Belt and Road initiative might not be a concept far ahead of what social and political reality can deliver. A kind of utopianism, in this sense. Across the border, in Kazakhstan, the issue has similar undertones. When I visited in 2016 the government was bracing itself against growing popular protests about a recent land reform bill. While the Western media spoke of dissatisfaction with the lack of civil and political rights, it was clear to anyone familiar with the protests that the root of the unrest lay elsewhere, namely, in the widespread fear that allowing foreign companies to own land in Kazakhstan would be tantamount to granting future control over the country to China.

Fears of growing Chinese migration to Kazakhstan are pervasive among the public, with much-exaggerated numbers swirling about, and the wage gap between local workers and Chinese migrants – especially in the oil industry – continues to provoke resentment and even open conflict and unrest. Negative stereotypes of the Chinese, as well as Sinophobia, are easily found in Kazakh newspapers.10 It was revealing that President Nazarbayev, who enjoys an almost limitless form of personal rule, was forced by the protests to place a moratorium on land reform. As a historically nomadic people, Kazakhs retain an intimate, personal relationship with what they regard as their land. Leonid Brezhnev recalled in a little booklet how during his wartime years Kazakh soldiers and officers would sing mournfully, not about the wives or girlfriends left behind but about the steppe at home, so different from the Ukrainian one.

Here Mao was only building on the earlier May Fourth Movement, with its rejection of traditional Confucian values in favour of a modern, scientific culture. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao urged the Chinese people to ‘smash the four olds’: old customs, old culture, old ideas and old habits. As the revolution moved from the cities to the countryside, land reform eliminated the private holdings of lineage property. Ancestral halls and structures of lineage worship were converted to schools or other public places. Temples were razed or converted into the symbols of a modern state: schools, hospitals, military barracks and local administration buildings. This is still a rather visible feature of the landscape in a city like Beijing, but also in the countryside.


pages: 293 words: 89,712

After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine by Antony Loewenstein, Ahmed Moor

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, drone strike, facts on the ground, gentrification, ghettoisation, land reform, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, one-state solution, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, young professional

Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with Adalah, explained of the land reform: “Only Israeli citizens and anyone who can come to Israel under the Law of Return – that is, any Jew – can buy the lands on offer, so no ‘foreigner’ will be eligible.”37 There was also a safeguard ensuring that Palestinian citizens continued to be barred from these rural communities: the admissions committees. These committees, which had been used to block the Zbeidats from Rakefet, would continue to oversee property transactions. Just as the Likud’s privatisation of the economy had simply moved control from one group of Israeli Jews to another, Netanyahu’s land reform would simply refashion the exclusion and discrimination imposed on Palestinian citizens.

But Israel’s “national lands” were a far more contentious choice for privatisation than the economy, especially among traditional Labour Zionist groups. With a strong Right-wing majority government behind him, Netanyahu finally took on the issue at the end of the 2000s. He announced a programme of what was termed “land reform” to allow Israeli Jews, almost all of whom were living in homes and on land on the basis of a long-term lease from the ILA, to buy their properties outright. The sell-off was expected to appeal most strongly to middle-class Jews living in the hundreds of rural community associations. One of the Right’s motives in pushing the measure through was to win over to the Likud party Israeli homeowners in these rural communities who had traditionally identified with Labour Zionism.34 The area of land in question was not especially large: some 800,000 hectares, or about 4 percent of Israel’s territory.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

A former Spanish colony, Mexico, was the site of one such compromise among workers, capitalists, and the state. The 1910 Mexican Revolution began as an affair of the middle class but soon began to exceed it, with workers and peasants making militant demands. In 1934, Lázaro Cárdenas was elected Mexico’s president on a platform to meet those demands: he instituted wide-ranging land reform, redistributing 47 percent of all cultivatable land48—and began to nationalize the assets of the oil industry, including the refineries of the Standard Oil Company. Control over cheap energy was a central part of the project of Mexican corporatism. For the Standard Oil Company’s founding family, the Rockefellers, this was nothing short of an outrage.

Food prices declined 3 percent a year between 1952 and 1972, three times faster than the already steep decline in commodity prices across the twentieth century.57 Real prices for rice, maize, and wheat declined yet further from 1976 to 2002.58 Perhaps the greatest success was the effective quieting of peasant demands for land reform and urban demands for political change. Yet the long Green Revolution’s prodigious output achievements did not reduce hunger. If China—where the agricultural revolution was decidedly redder but no less productive for it—is removed from the analysis, the ranks of the hungry swelled by more than 11 percent over the course of the Green Revolution.59 And while reporters are happy to celebrate the fact that “India’s wheat production doubled” from 1965 to 197260 and rose steadily throughout the 1970s, the amount that Indians actually ate hardly improved over the same period.

Reparation is neither so easy nor ever final. Consider the case of Guatemala. Diane Nelson’s helpfully titled Reckoning charts the attempt to compass and account for the long war sparked by the United Fruit Company’s reign over cheap bananas in Guatemala and the company’s response to a crisis of land reform that precipitated a CIA coup. Nelson follows the long-fought demands for accountability and reparations, which finally resulted in the payment of a debt for war crimes that became, in part, a fund for planting trees. Of one of her informants, she reports, “In Joyabaj, Doña Miguela’s husband has received some money but hasn’t planted anything.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The lay of the land “When you talk about building highways, canals and rail in a country like India,” Vinayak Chatterjee says, “you come up against a big constraint—land.” Vinayak heads the consultancy Feedback Ventures Ltd and has years of experience working with the government and private sector on infrastructure issues. Land has been an especially charged concern in our politics. The 1950s and 1960s land reforms had failed across most of the country with the exception of Kerala and West Bengal. The landowning zamindars were politically powerful, and in most states the loopholes in the legislation had made the reforms largely impotent. At the same time, rent control policies imposed massive restrictions on urban land, taking it off the market.

And through their early years such movements were often thwarted and repressed—the 1950s and 1960s were the dark ages for Indian secular rule as across states political parties shunted backward castes to the margins and limited their political power. In Bihar the state Congress took great pains in 1963 to prevent a minister of the Kurmi caste from becoming the chief minister. 8ci In Uttar Pradesh, the Congress MLA Sampurnanand stated that “opening the doors to the backward castes . . . will blow up the whole social structure.”9 And when land reforms took place in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, violence surged against Dalits and backward castes who were allotted land—a trend that continued well into the 1980s and 1990s in north India. The rapid rise of such caste alliances deeply angered leaders such as Ambedkar, who felt that the government was making a mockery of political rights.

Land has never been an easy issue in India—it has been a source of much chest-thumping and of pitched, agitated battles. The crisis of land rights and the abuse many landless workers suffered under the zamindars nearly derailed efforts by Indian leaders preindependence to unite rural communities under the freedom movement. Postindependence, land politics became even more complicated, especially the failed land reform and redistribution efforts of the 1950s and 1960s. Today the politics of land in India still has a deeply adversarial texture—it is seen primarily as a battle between the powerful and the powerless. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the zamindars on top, but lately it is companies eager to establish special economic zones (SEZs) in partnership with state governments that are seen as new, autocratic overlords.


pages: 607 words: 185,487

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the great "centralizer" of absolutism, proposed to conduct a national cadastral survey of France, but he was thwarted in 1679 by the combined opposition of the aristocracy and clergy. After the Revolution more than a century later, the radical Francois-Noel Babeuf, in his "Projet de cadastre perpetuel," dreamed of a perfectly egalitarian land reform in which everyone would get an equal parcel.95 He too was thwarted. We must keep in mind not only the capacity of state simplifications to transform the world but also the capacity of the society to modify, subvert, block, and even overturn the categories imposed upon it. Here it is useful to distinguish what might be called facts on paper from facts on the ground.

The only revolutionary party with any rural following was the Social Revolutionaries, whose populist roots tended to make them unsympathetic to Lenin's authoritarian outlook. The effects of the revolutionary process itself had rendered rural society more opaque and hence more difficult to tax. There had already been a sweeping seizure of land, dignified, retrospectively, by the inappropriate term "land reform." In fact, after the collapse of the offensive into Austria during the war and the subsequent mass desertions, much of the land of the gentry and church, as well as "crown land;' had been absorbed by the peasantry. Rich peasants cultivating independent farmsteads (the "separators" of the Stolypin reforms) were typically forced back into the village allotments, and rural society was in effect radically compressed.

Then, too, a capital city administrator could not help but prefer to supervise and tax large productive units and not have to deal with separate farmers.... The collective had a dual appeal to authentic agrarian reformers. They represented a social ideal for rhetorical purposes, and at the same time they seemed to simplify the technical problems of land reform and state control.47 In the turmoil of 1917-21, not many such agrarian experiments were possible, and those that were attempted generally failed badly. They were, however, a straw in the wind for the full collectivization campaign a decade later. Unable to remake the rural landscape, the Bolsheviks turned to the same methods of forced tribute under martial law that had been used by their czarist predecessors during the war.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The 1950s and ’60s, in particular, were years of strong economic growth that saw Mexico once again begin to close the gap between itself and the United States. But the fundamental problem of inequality and class had not been solved. The PRI did have some significant accomplishments to its credit: it undertook a major land reform in the 1930s that broke up Mexico’s large haciendas, and just as important, it created a strong sense of national identity by continuing the revolution’s revival of pre-Columbian symbols. But it achieved stability through the clientelistic distribution of state resources to favored political groups, which limited competition and prevented Mexico from developing a strongly competitive private sector.

The old landowning oligarchy could feel its influence slipping away, but no one in the new political constellation that emerged by the 1920s was fundamentally challenging its position. Indeed, one social fact that distinguished Argentina from Peru and Mexico was that it had no impoverished peasantry that could organize to demand radical land reform. Whereas the Costa Rican elite made good political choices in 1948, the Argentine elite made some very bad ones, beginning with the military coup that took place in September 1930 that brought down Yrigoyen’s radical party government. The coup was the result of collaboration between the old landowning oligarchy and the military.

American administrators left land distribution up to the Philippine court system rather than to an executive agency, since that was the way it was done in the United States. They failed to recognize that in the Philippines, in contrast to America, widespread illiteracy meant that legal proceedings would be dominated by educated elites, who then succeeded in grabbing large estates despite the Americans’ explicit desire to promote land reform. By exporting the nineteenth-century U.S. model of a government of “courts and parties” to the Philippines, the United States permitted the growth of a landed oligarchy that continues to dominate that country.9 We should thus be wary of foreigners bearing gifts of institutions. Foreigners seldom have enough local knowledge to understand how to construct durable states.


Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

He called for land reform; low-rent housing; modest nationalization of business; foreign investment provided it was not excessively exploitative of the country and other policies making up the program of any liberal Third World leader serious about social change. He was likewise serious about the thing called civil liberties: communists, or those labeled as such, were not to be persecuted unless they actually violated the law. A number of American officials and congressmen expressed their discomfort with Bosch's plans, as well as his stance of independence from the United States. Land reform and nationaliza-tion are always touchy issues in Washington, the stuff that "creep-ing socialism" is made of.

Later, when questioned about this by the Pike Committee, Kissinger responded: "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."27 Portugal, 1974-76 A bloodless military coup in 1974 brought down the US-supported 48-year fascist regime that was the world's only remaining colonial power. This was followed by a program centered on nationalization of major industries, workers' control, a minimum wage, land reform and other progressive measures. Washington and multinational officials who were on the board of directors of the planet were concerned. Destabilization became the order of the day: covert actions; attacks in the US press; subverting trade unions; subsidizing opposition media; economic sabotage through international credit and commerce; heavy financing of selected candidates in elections; a US cut-off of Portugal from certain military and nuclear information commonly available to NATO members; NATO naval and air exercises off the Portuguese coast, with 19 NATO warships moored in Lisbon's harbor, regarded by most Portuguese as an attempt to intimidate the provisional government.28 The Portuguese revolution was doomed.


Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, clean water, David Brooks, disinformation, failed state, Farzad Bazoft, guns versus butter model, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing

Greenberger, “Peril to Democracy,” WSJ, Sept. 14, 1987, warning that the corruption under Duarte, more “rampant” even than under his predecessors, is “threatening one of President Reagan’s few foreign-policy successes,” namely “foster[ing] democracy in this tiny Central American nation.” See p. 89. 22. Lindsey Gruson, NYT, Sept. 28, 1987. On early criticisms of the land reform by Oxfam, Salvadoran land reform specialist Leonel Gómez, and others, and sources, see Towards a New Cold War, 43ff.; reprinted in Peck, Chomsky Reader. 23. CSM, Sept. 15, 1987. The Mexican Press reports that the union leader was kidnapped “by five elements of a security body.” On the same day, the government announced the arrest of 12 union leaders.

The ranching country of central Nicaragua was a “traditional recruiting ground for the brutal National Guard that sustained the dictatorship” of Somoza, and with its moderately well-to-do private farmers, is the main center of contra support today.23 Jorge Castañeda writes that the neglect of the Sandinistas for the “poor and backward peasantry of the northern reaches” in the first years after the fall of Somoza “when linked with ties the Somoza National Guard had in remote, poverty-stricken areas— traditional recruiting grounds for most Latin American armies—made this sector of the population ideal for contra enrollment” before it was “neutralized” by land reform and resettlement from areas of conflict, thus reducing the “meager popular support” for the contras in scattered and generally remote regions.24 It comes as no surprise that “among the contras membership in the National Guard appears to hold little or no stigma,” or that many joined the contras “because they were either members of the National Guard or had relatives who were,” while others describe their service in the U.S.


pages: 348 words: 98,757

The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross

business intelligence, call centre, Dr. Strangelove, false flag, illegal immigration, index card, inflation targeting, land reform, multilevel marketing, profit motive, Project for a New American Century, seigniorage

"Lots of radical ministries jockeying for preeminence, a permanent emergency in foreign affairs, a big war effort. Central planning, maybe, lots of nationalization. They're going to have to industrialize properly if they're going to dig their way out of this mess. War spending is always a good way to boost an economy. And land reform, let's not forget the land reform—they'll probably expropriate the big slave plantations in South America, the duchies of the Midwest." "My—Miriam, you can't sleep here: The bedding's mildewed." "Wha—oh? Shit. There should be spare sheets in the laundry—" Miriam wound down. "Oh. No servants." "I could hire bodies easily enough, if you think it necessary?"

We're not going to breathe a word of this to anyone, including the rest of the commission. Not the Peace and Justice puritans—they'll just find a way to use your world-travelers as a stick to stir up trouble. Not the Radicals: I've no idea what they'd do, but it'd probably be as stupid as those land-reform proposals they keep coming up with. And Foreign Affairs: If the Bourbon gets so much as a whisper that they exist, he can make them an offer that would bankrupt our coffers to match. No. This needs to be kept secret, so secret that nobody gets a whiff of their existence. And you're just the man to see that it happens, aren't you?


pages: 171 words: 53,428

On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, crowdsourcing, feminist movement, land reform, means of production, Occupy movement, post-industrial society, profit motive, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

The choice of words indicates a reluctance on Jackson’s part to recognize the reality of the revolutionary situation, despite his account of the breakdown of Republican authority. The statement that the workers “abused their sudden authority” by carrying out collectivization rests on a moral judgment that recalls that of Ithiel Pool, when he characterizes land reform in Vietnam as a matter of “despoiling one’s neighbors,” or of Franz Borkenau, when he speaks of expropriation in the Soviet Union as “robbery,” demonstrating “a streak of moral indifference.” Within a few months, Jackson informs us, “the revolutionary tide began to ebb in Catalonia” after “accumulating food and supply problems, and the experience of administering villages, frontier posts, and public utilities, had rapidly shown the anarchists the unsuspected complexity of modern society” (pp. 313–14).

Bernstein, “Leadership and Mass Mobilisation in the Soviet and Chinese Collectivization Campaigns of 1929–30 and 1955–56: A Comparison,” China Quarterly, no. 31 (July–September 1967), pp. 1–47, for some interesting and suggestive comments and analysis. The scale of the Chinese Revolution is so great and reports in depth are so fragmentary that it would no doubt be foolhardy to attempt a general evaluation. Still, all the reports I have been able to study suggest that insofar as real successes were achieved in the several stages of land reform, mutual aid, collectivization, and formation of communes, they were traceable in large part to the complex interaction of the Communist party cadres and the gradually evolving peasant associations, a relation which seems to stray far from the Leninist model of organization. This is particularly evident in William Hinton’s magnificent study Fanshen (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), which is unparalleled, to my knowledge, as an analysis of a moment of profound revolutionary change.


pages: 669 words: 150,886

Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power by Patrick Major

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, disinformation, Easter island, falling living standards, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-materialism, Prenzlauer Berg, refrigerator car, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine

See also Harrison, ‘Berlin Crisis’, 211. ¹⁴³ Leuschner, ‘Ergebnis der Beratungen über die ökonomischen Fragen’, 17 June 1959, SAPMO-BArch, DY30/JIV2/202/29. ¹⁴⁴ Staritz, Geschichte der DDR, 190. ¹⁴⁵ SED-ZK (LPO), ‘Bericht über die politische Lage . . . ’, 17 Mar. 1960, SAPMO-BArch, DY30/IV2/5/292, fos. 122–9. 50 Behind the Berlin Wall than join. The northern regions were collectivized first, perhaps because there were fewer traditional smallholdings at stake, although it is clear that many ‘new farmers’, beneficiaries of 1945’s land reform, also feared returning to the status of estate workers. Soon after the announcement of full collectivization on 14 April 1960, farmers were complaining about being tricked by broken promises. A significant minority of LPG members unilaterally resigned from collectives. A year after collectivization 17,000 ‘individual farmers’ were still counted—tiny compared with the half million new collective farmers—but still a thorn in the authorities’ side.¹⁴⁶ ‘Fire brigades’ of party officials roved the countryside for recantations.

(eds), Lebensläufe: hüben und drüben (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1993), 321. ¹¹ Jan Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–90 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). ¹² MfS-ZAIG, ‘Bericht über die Entwicklung der Republikflucht im Zeitraum 1.4.61–13.8.61 . . . ’, 3 Oct. 1961, BStU-ZA, ZAIG 412, fo. 72. ¹³ Alexander von Plato and Wolfgang Meinicke, Alte Heimat—neue Zeit: Flüchtlinge, Umgesiedelte, Vertriebene in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone und in der DDR (Berlin: Verlags-Anstalt Union, 1991), 56–65. ¹⁴ BAK, B136/2719, fo. 181; B136/2720, fo. 25. ¹⁵ HVDVP, ‘Republikfluchten . . .’, 2 Nov. 1957, BAB, DO-1/11/964, fos. 193–201. Crossing the Line 59 Germany.’¹⁶ There was even some solidarity among expellee communities. On 13 February 1960 five farming families, originally from Latvia, then transplanted to the Ukraine by Nazi resettlement before enjoying the land reform in 1945, fled en masse from the commune of Niemberg in Halle.¹⁷ This was their third move in twenty years—just some of the wandering souls of the early GDR. Among East Germans themselves rootedness varied by region, as Figure 2 clearly demonstrates. Initially there was greater uniformity, with border regions slightly more susceptible.

Whereas Magdeburg, Frankfurt, and Prenzlau in the north had been devastated, Leipzig and Karl-Marx-Stadt were only moderately damaged, and Thuringia almost unscathed. Saxony was an industrialized region and remained so, attracting an internal migration. In the north, on the other hand, there had been much greater dislocation of social networks under the land reform, ending centuries of Junker patronage.¹⁸ Here a long-established ‘flight from the land’ continued, as young country-dwellers sought work in the towns. In the rural areas of the south, on the other hand, smallholding, including workers’ cottage gardens, provided a stronger incentive to stay. Moreover, Cottbus and Dresden contained the homelands of the slavic Sorb minorities in the Ober- and Niederlausitz and witnessed consistently low losses.


pages: 517 words: 147,591

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, Jacob N. Shapiro, Vestal Mcintyre

basic income, call centre, centre right, classic study, clean water, confounding variable, crowdsourcing, data science, demand response, drone strike, experimental economics, failed state, George Akerlof, Google Earth, guns versus butter model, HESCO bastion, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, Internet of things, iterative process, land reform, mandatory minimum, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, natural language processing, operational security, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, statistical model, the scientific method, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

A clear example is service provision by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan under the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP). These development funds, which were spent on projects chosen by battalions and brigades, were disproportionately allocated to communities with the highest predicted levels of violence rather than those with the largest population or the greatest economic need.12 Land reform in Colombia provides another example, as documented by Mike Albertus and Oliver Kaplan: the government implemented it disproportionately in areas where violence posed the greatest risk to elites.13 Rebels also provide services. William Hinton, in 1966, documented land redistribution and other service provision by Maoist rebels in China in his book Fanshen.14 More recent research has repeatedly replicated that finding, showing multiple instances of service provision by various rebel groups.

In reality, careful analysis by ESOC member Steve Biddle along with his students Ryan Baker and Julia Macdonald reveals a more complex sequence: while military assistance was critical in preventing the collapse of the Salvadoran regime in the early 1980s, the United States subsequently failed to convince the local government to adopt a set of reforms that could have led to settlement, including making governance inclusive, professionalizing the military, and implementing land reform and other economic modernizations. The local regime chose to instead use the military as a repressive tool to maintain a grip on political power. The conflict remained a festering stalemate until 1992. Fortunately, the FMLN insurgency (a coalition of left-wing guerrilla groups) was weakened by an external factor—loss of Nicaraguan support.

When the enemy is embedded in the community rather than grouped behind a border or front line, it is essential to get information from citizens. We’ve seen the success that opening information channels can bring: in Indonesia, police used information from deradicalized former rebels to shut down the most violent splinter groups of Jemaah Islamiyah; in Colombia, land reforms led to both greater satisfaction among rural citizens with government and less violence, almost certainly by opening up information channels; and in Iraq, an ESOC study presented the first quantitative links between the number of tips received and short-term reductions in insurgent violence. Getting more information might not be so hard.


pages: 1,433 words: 315,911

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, War on Poverty

For seven years, he and his staff proposed American-style changes in everything from policing to public administration to the installation of traffic lights in Saigon. Diem listened to them all, accepted almost $2 billion in aid between 1955 and 1960, and again and again went his own way. Americans urged him to make sweeping land reforms; he expropriated vast tracts of land from wealthy French and Vietnamese landlords but then failed to redistribute most of them among the landless. They suggested he encourage democracy on the local level; instead, he replaced elected village chiefs and village councils with outsiders, hand-picked by bureaucrats loyal to him.

Years of fighting had taken a serious toll on North Vietnam. The French had deliberately destroyed a network of dikes. Rice production had plummeted. Railroads no longer ran. Vast areas had been abandoned by farmers who had fled to the cities for safety during the fighting. The communists now imposed land reforms modeled on those imposed by Mao Zedong in China with a ruthlessness that left as many as fifteen thousand people dead, including not only landlords and their allies but many peasants who had fought in the ranks of the Viet Minh. Hanoi’s policies were so harsh and uncompromising that one province was driven to open rebellion and had to be brought to heel.

It also afforded the Chinese advisers the chance to press their Vietnamese counterparts to demonstrate their commitment to Marxist-Leninist ideology. In 1951, the Indochinese Communist Party, which had been operating in secret, reemerged under a new and more doctrinaire-sounding name: the Vietnam Worker’s Party. The party also stepped up its plans for socialist-style mass mobilization, including a military draft and a land reform campaign. The 1949–50 period was also a turning point for Diem. Following his release by Ho in 1946, Diem spent three mostly fruitless years trying to build a coalition of noncommunist nationalists. Then, in 1949, he confronted a major new political development: the establishment of a new anticommunist Vietnamese state, known as the Associated State of Vietnam (ASVN).


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

A calico printer turned politician, Cobden had risen from a clerk in a City of London warehouse to the smoggy heights of Manchester’s cottonopolis: in 1836, five years after moving from commission to factory production, his firm had £150,000 in turnover, with profits of £23,000, a hint of the sums to be made from textiles in flush times.6 John Bright was the other outspoken leader of the League, born, unlike Cobden, to a prosperous family of Quaker cotton spinners in the town of Rochdale in Lancashire. Both were eloquent and tireless proponents of free trade, though in each case – untypically – their radicalism reached past the Corn Laws, to electoral and land reform, an end to primogeniture, and religious disestablishment. ‘The colonies, army, navy and church are, with the Corn Laws, merely accessories to aristocratic government’, wrote Cobden in 1836. ‘John Bull has his work cut out for the next fifty years to purge his house of those impurities!’7 Long before victory over the Corn Laws was in sight, however, Cobden and Bright met James Wilson, a Scottish hat manufacturer and author, whose powerful vision of a free trade world, first set out in 1839, gave their campaign its winning argument.

He got the job, which paid £150 a year, through Bagehot’s old friend and co-editor, Richard Hutton, for whom Asquith also wrote at the Spectator. Before crossing the Strand to the Economist offices, Asquith would wax on classical themes – ‘The Art of Tacitus’, say, or ‘The Age of Demosthenes’ – as well as on contemporary topics like fair trade, land reform and Ireland.86 At the Economist he set down his ideas on the future of liberalism, at this stage under the heading of ‘New Radicalism’, intended to head off the very schism that precipitated his own exit from both the Spectator and the Economist in 1885. A Liberalism fit for the times would, Asquith argued, take on board some progressive social demands without endangering international free trade, while banishing any concerted opposition to interventions overseas, which was as unrealistic as it was unpopular.

The paper advocated pitiless repression of ‘Mau Mau terrorists’ and guerrilla fighters, and the imprisonment of ‘extremist’ leaders like Jomo Kenyatta, and swallowed the government’s line on the notorious detention camps it had set up in the colony – that these had ‘rehabilitated’ nearly 80,000 Mau Mau supporters.101 Of course, constitutional and land reforms were also needed to address local grievances, the paper conceded, as it covered the ‘Kenyan emergency’ for the next eight years, aware that the model of City-led colonial development depended partly on what happened there.102 Growth in Kenya – a brisk 3 per cent on average from 1948 to 1960 – might neutralize racial discontent, which the paper saw as a by-product of population growth among the native Africans.103 The vision uniting these assessments of empire belonged to Ward, who reframed editorial coverage of it to fit the Cold War.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Tax revenues from the new landowners went into the purchase of fertilizer, equipment, and farmer education programs in a mutually enhancing spiral upward.38 As in England in the seventeenth century, agricultural improvement required fewer workers, releasing men and women for other occupations, like manufacturing. The more egalitarian distribution of wealth created by land reform made rural radicalism less likely while it undercut opposition to modernizing reforms that entrenched landed elites usually mount. Less tangibly, the relative income equality in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong consolidated the support from a prospering working class. One can only wonder what would have happened to the economies of Argentina and Mexico if they had undertaken similar land reforms. More important, the Korean War of 1950–1953 had introduced a big spender into the Pacific basin trade universe.

The country was demilitarized; jails were cleared of dissident liberals, socialists, and Communists; and political parties and labor unions encouraged to participate in the hoped-for establishment of a postwar democracy. When the Japanese were slow to produce a constitution, General MacArthur’s staff did it for them, investing power in a legislature like that of Great Britain and giving women equal political rights with men. Land reform placed more than two million acres in the hands of nearly five million tenant farmers. The rural economy began to blossom. Turning their attention to the manufacturing sector, the occupiers became intent on breaking up the giant holding companies of the prewar period.9 World politics then intervened.

The idea that peripheral countries could enter the world market on advantageous terms looked almost dead, until nations in East Asia showed how it could be done. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea proved dependency theory wrong. Their economies managed their own takeoffs into self-sustained growth, doing in thirty years what it had taken Japan a hundred to do. Successful development in Taiwan and South Korea started with land reform, a step strongly backed by the United States, which exercised a powerful influence on the leaders of Korea and Taiwan through its aid programs. Just moving landownership from the hands of a leisured elite to those of the working farmers had many profound and lasting consequences. Crop yields went up, lowering food prices and giving everyone more purchasing power.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Thicknesse, ‘National Grid and SSE Shift to Overseas Ownership to Counter Labour Nationalisation Plans’, 24 November 2019, at cityam.com. 84. G. Monbiot, ‘After Urging Land Reform I Now Know the Brute Power of Our Billionaire Press’, Guardian, 3 July 2019. 85. Financial Times, ‘Labour’s Manifesto Adds Up to a Recipe for Decline’, 21 November 2019. 86. R. Partington and G. Wearden, ‘UK’s biggest firms gain more than £30bn in value after Tory win’, Guardian, 13 December 2019. 87. Bregman, ‘No, Wealth Isn’t Created at the Top’. 88. W. Davies, ‘Bloody Furious’, 20 February 2020, at lrb.co.uk. 89. Ibid. 90. Davies, ‘England’s Rentier Alliance’. 91. Monbiot, ‘After Urging Land Reform I Now Know the Brute Power of Our Billionaire Press’. 92.

Two of the country’s leading infrastructure rentiers, for example, on learning of Labour’s renationalization plans, summarily shifted ownership of their UK operations overseas ‘to defend themselves against Labour’s policies’.83 The reaction to the Labour-commissioned ‘Land for the Many’ report – published in mid 2019, and containing proposals for progressive land reform – was sufficiently fierce to lead a clearly shaken Monbiot, one of its co-authors, to write an article reflecting on the readiness of the UK’s ‘billionaire press’ to go into battle on behalf of the ‘ultra-rich’ and ‘oligarchic power’.84 Meanwhile, the Financial Times – which in many respects has given Corbyn a fairer hearing than the UK’s nominally left newspapers, such as the Guardian, during his time as Labour leader – had clearly had enough when it saw the contents of the party’s 2019 general election manifesto: ‘punitive tax increases, sweeping nationalisation, and the end of Thatcher-era union reforms’.

Hyman, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (New York: Viking, 2018), Chapter 13. 58. A. Chakrabortty, ‘How a Small Town Reclaimed Its Grid’. 59. A. Chakrabortty, ‘The Town that Refused to Let Austerity Kill Its Buses’, Guardian, 6 June 2018. 60. D. Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 360. 61. Land Reform Review Group, The Land of Scotland and the Common Good (Edinburgh: Scottish Government, 2014), p. 87. 62. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 115–16. 63. D. Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2014), pp. 139–40. 64. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 395. 65.


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1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, feminist movement, global village, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, land reform, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea

By the end of 1914 the combined forces of the revolutionary armies of Carranza and Pancho Villa and Zapata had secured control of Mexico and defeated the federal army that Porfirio Díaz had left behind. Zapata and Villa moved their armies into the capital as a new revolutionary government was formed. Carranza declared himself president and reluctantly and under great pressure adopted Zapata’s land reform program, though he did little to put it into action. Álvaro Obregón, who, like most leading figures of the period, held the title of general, was a schoolteacher from the northern state of Sonora who had started out with a guerrilla army but had learned the modern warfare of machine guns and trenches.

His men were cut down by the machine guns and cut up by the barbed wire. Obregón himself had an arm blown off, and the partial limb in a pickling jar became the emblem of Obregón’s Red Battalions, which was later fashioned into the Revolutionary Army of Mexico, supposedly an “Army of the People” that embodied the ideals of the revolution. Zapata stuck to his land reform goals. Such stubborn local chieftains could usually be bought off. But Zapata would not take money or accept compromise. His organization was infiltrated by an army double agent who was allowed to carry out several sneak attacks, killing large numbers of soldiers, to prove his authenticity to Zapata.

During World War II, in an attempt to appear more stable and democratic, the PNR changed its name to that uniquely Mexican paradox, the Institutional Revolution Party. That is what Mexico had become, not a democracy but an institutional revolution—the Revolution that feared revolution. The PRI bought out or killed agrarian leaders, all the while paying verbal homage to Zapata and carrying out as little land reform as possible. It bought out the labor unions until they became part of the PRI. It bought out the press, one newspaper at a time, until it completely controlled them. The PRI was not violent. It tried to co-opt. Only in those rare situations where that did not work would it resort to killing. In 1964 the PRI chose the former minister of the interior, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, as the next president.


Insight Guides South America (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Airbnb, anti-communist, Atahualpa, bike sharing, call centre, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, digital nomad, Easter island, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, invention of writing, Kickstarter, land reform, urban planning, urban renewal

In 1648, an obraje in Peguche had to be closed, because the number of suicides among workers had grown to alarming proportions. The Otavaleños were forced to learn Spanish to facilitate their conversion to Christianity, although their Catholicism today incorporates a number of ancestral beliefs. Land reforms enacted in Ecuador in 1964 abolished the wasipungo system, based on enforced Indigenous labor. The first store selling woven products opened in Otavalo in 1966, and within a dozen years, there were 75 such stores. Weaving has now decentralized and become a cottage industry. Over the years, the ingenuity of the Otavalo weavers has brought them worldwide fame.

But the miners began an armed revolt and, after heavy fighting, defeated the military. Paz Estenssoro returned to La Paz and the MNR began to put its reforms into action. In the following years Bolivia saw the nationalization of tin mines, the granting of votes to Native peoples, and extensive land reform. Unfortunately, the mines were still dependent on foreign capital, and the land given to Indigenous peoples was in plots too small to be productive. The economy began to slide and the MNR was ousted in another military coup. EVO MORALES Bolivia’s former president, Evo Morales, was not, as many believe, the first Indigenous president in South America.

He established a corporate state loosely modeled on Mussolini’s Italian-style Fascism, but he lost support after the fall first of Mussolini, then of Hitler. Vargas resigned in 1945, but returned to office in 1951, before committing suicide three years later. Eighteen years of constitutional rule and steady economic growth followed, up until the early 1960s. With the number of landless peasants increasing dramatically, land reform became an explosive political issue. The military responded to the growing unrest by seizing power in April 1964. Birth of the “Brazilian miracle” The military’s crackdown on leftists (many of whom were tortured and killed) together with generous fiscal incentives, combined to attract a flood of foreign investment.


pages: 366 words: 117,875

Arrival City by Doug Saunders

agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, call centre, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, foreign exchange controls, gentrification, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Kibera, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Pearl River Delta, pensions crisis, place-making, price mechanism, rent control, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, working-age population

Iranians were overwhelmingly villagers, and most of those villagers were peasant farmers, who grew by hand for their own consumption and paid feudal-style fees to owners who often lived elsewhere. The agricultural reform, which affected the majority of the population, seemed a simple matter: Redistribute the land, and let agriculture become an industry. By 1971, when the land reforms were complete, it should have been apparent that the goal wasn’t being realized. About half of the best land, much of it owned by government employees or military officers, was neither redistributed to peasants nor mechanized into productive farms; the owners bribed officials to have their estates classified as industrial farms, even if they weren’t, or they simply stole the subsidies, or they “divided” out the most unfertile pieces of land and handed them to peasants.

It has meant that the arrival city is sometimes treated with respect, since the slum-based Shiv Sena has granted land ownership, sewage, and water supplies, and municipal services, such as schools, clinics, and parks, to deserving (Hindu) slums, in ways that sometimes follow the best practices of urban land reform and turn the self-built settlements into truly thriving neighbourhoods. It has also meant that the worst sort of practices—bulldozer slum clearance, high-rise replacement of upwardly mobile arrival cities, complete neglect of the most basic sanitary and health needs, and criminal-gang control of services—have continued, and have even been amplified, in slums that are not part of that privileged group.

A revised and expanded version appears in Gardner and Ahmed, “Degrees of Separation: Informal Social Protection, Relatedness and Migration in Biswanath, Bangladesh,” Journal of Development Studies 45, no. 1 (2009). 17 Deboarah Fahy Bryceson, “Deagrarianization and Rural Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Sectoral Perspective,” World Development 24, no. 1 (1996); Vali Jamal and John Weeks, “The Vanishing Rural–Urban Gap in Sub-Saharan Africa,” International Labour Review 127, no. 3 (1988). 18 See, for example, Robert Fishman, “Global Suburbs,” in First Biennial Conference of the Urban History Association (Pittsburgh: 2002); Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Chinese Town’s Main Export: Its Young Men,” The New York Times, June 26, 2000. 19 Roger Ballard, “A Case of Capital Rich Under-Development: The Paradoxical Consequences of Successful Transnational Entrepreneurship from Mirpur,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 37, no. 49–81 (2003): 41. 20 The most comprehensive exploration of the farm-size issue is found in Michael Lipton, Land Reform in Developing Countries: Property Rights and Property Wrongs (Abington: Routledge, 2009), 65–120. 5 THE FIRST GREAT MIGRATION 1 Jeanne Bouvier, Mes Memoires, ed. Daniel Armogathe (Paris: Editions de la Découverte, 1983), English translation from Mark Traugott, ed., The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 367–81. 2 Tilly, “Migration in Modern European History,” 58. 3 William H.


Rethinking Camelot by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Howard Zinn, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan

“Behind the façade of a constitutional regime,” he observes, “we have a militarized society under the state of siege provided” by the 1886 Constitution, which grants a wide range of rights, but with no relation to reality. “In this context poverty and insufficient land reform have made Colombia one of the most tragic countries of Latin America.” Land reform, which “has practically been a myth,” was legislated in 1961, but “has yet to be implemented, as it is opposed by landowners, who have had the power to stop it.” The result of the prevailing misery has been violence, including La Violencia of the 1940s and 1950s, which took hundreds of thousands of lives.


pages: 376 words: 121,254

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World by Thomas Feiling

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Caribbean Basin Initiative, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, drug harm reduction, gentrification, illegal immigration, informal economy, inventory management, Kickstarter, land reform, Lao Tzu, mandatory minimum, moral panic, offshore financial centre, RAND corporation, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, trade route, upwardly mobile, yellow journalism

In departments like Antioquia, Córdoba and Sucre, which are blessed with fertile flood plains by the rivers that run off the Andes, a huge amount of land is given over to cattle ranches. These benefit big landowners but supply little in the way of food or employment. This system of often unproductive latifundios (estates) has long proved resistant to change. Efforts towards a land reform programme were made in the 1960s, but all they achieved were some big irrigation projects in the north, and some resettlement programmes to areas that are today controlled by FARC guerrillas. The owners of the latifundios are increasingly likely to be paramilitary bosses, wealthy drugs traffickers, or both.24 ‘The European Union says that there should be investment instead of fumigation, which is a good idea, but they’ve done nothing,’ Caquetá Congressman Luis Almario Rojas told me.

Uribe Velez says that if Colombia didn’t have drugs, it wouldn’t have terrorists and has reaffirmed his commitment to fighting the Americans’ war on drugs.83 There is certainly a war on coca growers, the FARC and the drugs mules. But this is far from being a war on drugs. If the Colombian government was serious about tackling the cocaine trade, the Ministry of Agriculture would tackle the land reform issue, instead of chasing Colombian coca farmers around the country in fumigation planes. When the coca fields are sprayed, cultivation just moves on. Of course the coca fields finance the guerrillas, but Colombia had trafficking routes and mafiosi long before it had coca fields. The cocaine traffickers are unaffected by the fumigation programme.

Judge Carlos Gaviria went on to become the leader of Colombia’s main opposition party. He has since been cited as saying that the United States is the principal obstruction to the international community committing itself to the legalization of drugs.19 While there is no reason to think that the legalization of cocaine would benefit the poor, usher in land reform, challenge the extreme concentrations of money and political power in Colombia, or end its fratricidal conflict, it would certainly make it easier for the state to regulate supplies, enforce contractual obligations, and decide where the coca fields should be. Thousands of poor farmers would have legal work, and pristine jungle could remain pristine.


pages: 366 words: 124,895

Imperium by Robert Harris

land reform

First, they aimed to seize control of the state by sweeping the board in the general elections, securing not only both consulships but also all ten tribunates, and a couple of praetorships besides; the bribery agents reported that the thing was more or less a fait accompli, with Cicero’s support slipping daily. The second stage called for the introduction by the tribunes of a great land reform bill in December, which would demand the breaking up of the big publicly owned estates, in particular the fertile plains of Campania, and their immediate redistribution as farms to five thousand of the urban plebs. The third step involved the election in March of ten commissioners, headed by Crassus and Caesar, who would be given immense powers to sell off conquered land abroad, and to use the funds thereby released to compulsorily purchase further vast estates in Italy, for an even greater program of resettlement.

Because, although I know you are a genius with words, these men despised you—absolutely loathed everything you said and stood for. What did you offer them, besides stopping Catilina?” “Obviously,” replied Cicero, “I had to promise that I will lead the opposition to Crassus and Caesar and the tribunes when they publish this land reform bill of theirs.” “That will be quite a task,” said Quintus. “And that is all?” persisted Atticus. (It is my belief, looking back, that he was behaving like a good cross-examiner, and that he knew the answer to the question before he asked it, probably from his friend Hortensius.) “You really agreed to nothing else?

“Well, I did have to undertake,” he said reluctantly, “to propose in the Senate, as consul, that Lucullus should be awarded a triumph, and also Quintus Metellus.” Now at last I understood why Cicero had seemed so grim and preoccupied when he left his conference with the aristocrats. Quintus put down his plate and regarded him with undisguised horror. “So first they want you to turn the people against you by blocking land reform, and then they demand that you should make an enemy out of Pompey by awarding triumphs to his greatest rivals?” “I am afraid, brother,” said Cicero wearily, “that the aristocracy did not acquire their wealth without knowing how to drive a hard bargain. I held out as long as I could.” “But why did you agree?”


pages: 316 words: 117,228

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

., The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), The Merchant of Venice, pp. 425, Act IV Scene 1, p. 446. 45. Ibid. 46. Eileen Spring, “Landowners, Lawyers, and Land Reform in NineteenCentury England,” American Journal of Legal History 21, no. 1 (1977):40–59. 47. B. L. Anderson, “Law, Finance and Economic Growth in England: Some Long-Term Influences,” in Great Britain and Her World 1750–1914: Essays in Honour of W.O. Henderson, ed. Barrie M. Ratcliffe (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1975), p. 101. 48. The Economist, July 7, 1866, as cited in Spring, “Landowners, Lawyers,” p. 42. 49. J. Stuart Anderson, “Property Rights in Land: Reforming the Heritage,” in The Oxford History of the Laws of England: Volume XII: 1820–1914 Private Law, ed.

Rachel Kranton and Anand V. Swamy, “The Hazards of Piecemeal Reform: British Civil Courts and the Credit Market in Colonial India,” Journal of Development Economics 58 (1999):1–24 offer a succinct summary of these reforms and their economic and political effects. For an analysis of the long-term effects of land reforms undertaken by British colonizers on the productivity of the land, see also Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer, “History, Institutions, and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India,” American Economic Review 95, no. 4 (2005):1190–1213, showing that land that was given to landlords continued to have lower productivity rates even in post-independence India. 65.


Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity by Torben Iversen, Philipp Rehm

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Big Tech, business cycle, centre right, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crony capitalism, data science, DeepMind, deindustrialization, full employment, George Akerlof, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, lockdown, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, microbiome, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Robert Gordon, speech recognition, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, union organizing, vertical integration, working-age population

Published online by Cambridge University Press CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS GENERAL EDITOR KATHLEEN THELEN Massachusetts Institute of Technology ASSOCIATE EDITORS CATHERINE BOONE London School of Economics THAD DUNNING University of California, Berkeley ANNA GRZYMALA-BUSSE Stanford University TORBEN IVERSEN Harvard University STATHIS KALYVAS University of Oxford MARGARET LEVI Stanford University MELANIE MANION Duke University HELEN MILNER Princeton University FRANCES ROSENBLUTH Yale University SUSAN STOKES Yale University TARIQ THACHIL University of Pennsylvania ERIK WIBBELS Duke University SERIES FOUNDER Peter Lange Duke University Continued after the index OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Christopher Adolph, Bankers, Bureaucrats, and Central Bank Politics: The Myth of Neutrality Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform Michael Albertus, Property without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap Santiago Anria, When Movements Become Parties: The Bolivian MAS in Comparative Perspective Ben W. Ansell, From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Political Economy of Education Ben W. Ansell and Johannes Lindvall, Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Modern Public Services Ben W.

Published online by Cambridge University Press CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS GENERAL EDITOR KATHLEEN THELEN Massachusetts Institute of Technology ASSOCIATE EDITORS CATHERINE BOONE London School of Economics THAD DUNNING University of California, Berkeley ANNA GRZYMALA-BUSSE Stanford University TORBEN IVERSEN Harvard University STATHIS KALYVAS University of Oxford MARGARET LEVI Stanford University MELANIE MANION Duke University HELEN MILNER Princeton University FRANCES ROSENBLUTH Yale University SUSAN STOKES Yale University TARIQ THACHIL University of Pennsylvania ERIK WIBBELS Duke University SERIES FOUNDER Peter Lange Duke University Continued after the index OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Christopher Adolph, Bankers, Bureaucrats, and Central Bank Politics: The Myth of Neutrality Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform Michael Albertus, Property without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap Santiago Anria, When Movements Become Parties: The Bolivian MAS in Comparative Perspective Ben W. Ansell, From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Political Economy of Education Ben W. Ansell and Johannes Lindvall, Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Modern Public Services Ben W.

Published online by Cambridge University Press CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE POLITICS GENERAL EDITOR KATHLEEN THELEN Massachusetts Institute of Technology ASSOCIATE EDITORS CATHERINE BOONE London School of Economics THAD DUNNING University of California, Berkeley ANNA GRZYMALA-BUSSE Stanford University TORBEN IVERSEN Harvard University STATHIS KALYVAS University of Oxford MARGARET LEVI Stanford University MELANIE MANION Duke University HELEN MILNER Princeton University FRANCES ROSENBLUTH Yale University SUSAN STOKES Yale University TARIQ THACHIL University of Pennsylvania ERIK WIBBELS Duke University SERIES FOUNDER Peter Lange Duke University Continued after the index OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Christopher Adolph, Bankers, Bureaucrats, and Central Bank Politics: The Myth of Neutrality Michael Albertus, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform Michael Albertus, Property without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap Santiago Anria, When Movements Become Parties: The Bolivian MAS in Comparative Perspective Ben W. Ansell, From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Political Economy of Education Ben W. Ansell and Johannes Lindvall, Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Modern Public Services Ben W.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Declines of income are rare exceptions, and we pray that soon even such countries will reform in a bourgeois ideological direction, and join the blade of the hockey stick, in the way again of China and India—once also grotesquely mismanaged against “capitalism” in the name of the poor, a mismanagement that locked the poor into poverty. We bleeding-heart libertarians wholly approve, incidentally, of the one-time-and- never-again attack on property called “land reform,” such as Hernando de Soto’s proposal to give property rights to squatters in slums.13 We lament that land reform has not happened in every country in Latin America. But we lament, too, that our colleagues on the left have assailed de Soto’s poor-friendly proposals with the same arguments that the left long applied, equally mistakenly, to the enclosure movement in eighteenth-century England—namely, that private property hurts poor people.14 No, it doesn’t.

True, as Thomas Piketty observes, the United States and the United Kingdom for many decades after the 1920s had very high marginal rates of taxation.8 It is a scientific question whether taking the 30 percent of national income I have imagined in a land reform would reduce the 70 percent earned by the rest of us. In extreme cases, such as centrally planned socialism, it seems to, if not in the (few) well administered land reforms. Maybe we could get away with reinstating 90 percent marginal tax rates—in order, Piketty argues, to reduce high executive compensation that takes now a tiny portion of GDP. Maybe not. In fact the rich have tax lawyers and accountants devoted to avoiding taxes.

Continuing even with the unreasonable supposition that an expropriation would have no effect on the size of the pie, they are anyway only onetime enrichments. A more prudent way of distributing the spoils would be to invest the expropriation or the charity in a fund to be drawn on perpetually for the benefit of the exploited workers. Suppose that the onetime sum was as much as 30 percent of national income, a land reform, say. Suppose that as a rough approximation the whole population goes on earning by non-expropriation the 70 percent remaining. We are assuming that, contrary to socialist fantasies of costless expropriation, the 30 percent earned by the bosses goes away permanently, because the bosses don’t show up any more for entrepreneurial or managerial duty—the checking for social profitability, the deciding what is to be done that plays a larger and larger role as we get better at making goods and services with less hand labor.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The two on gender equality and land reform provoked the most outrage. Using communist jargon, the regime announced its intention to eliminate “the unjust patriarchal and feudalistic relations which exist between husband and wife.” The gender decree prohibited the tradition of gift-giving from the groom and his family to the bride’s family to formalize marriages. It placed a small monetary limit on the dowries given by brides’ families and introduced a rule requiring the bride’s consent for marriage. Sixteen became the minimum age of marriage for females, eighteen for males. The decree on land reform ignited another wave of indignation in the countryside.

The decree on land reform ignited another wave of indignation in the countryside. Article I proclaimed that PDPA land reforms would eliminate “feudal and pre-feudal relations,” ushering in a society “without hostile classes and free of exploitation of man by man.” To achieve this transcendent goal, it limited single-family holdings to 15 acres. Extra land would be seized and divided among the landless and among cooperatives established by farmers with fewer than 12.5 acres.40 The unenforceable land-reform decree generated hostility from tenant and landlord alike. In most of Afghanistan, the two were bound together by tribal and clan ties.

It dispatched a senior KGB officer, Vasily Safronchuk, to Kabul to work on broadening the PDPA’s base. Installed in an office next to Taraki’s presidential suite, Safronchuk appeared to enjoy some initial success. His advice to stop alienating conservative tribal and religious interests led to Taraki’s abrupt announcement on July 15, 1979, that land reform could be wrapped up, since it had been successfully implemented. Taraki and Amin were less amenable to Safronchuk’s appeals on base broadening. “We are among enemies,” Amin bluntly responded.48 Safronchuk became increasingly pessimistic about his ability to influence the PDPA. Khalqi leaders rejected his advice to establish “a national front, like other countries have done.”


pages: 233 words: 75,712

In Defense of Global Capitalism by Johan Norberg

anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, capital controls, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Glaeser, export processing zone, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, open economy, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, zero-sum game

But a more important reason is that people must have some basic assets—things like land in an undeveloped economy and education in a modern one—to be able to work effectively. What matters, then, is a degree of equality in terms of those assets and not in what is usually meant in the political debate, equality of incomes and profits. The crucial reform in a developing country that has ancient, unfair feudal structures and a small, land-owning elite is land reform, so that more people will have a share of the land and thus will be able to participate in the economy. The important thing is for the whole population to obtain an education and have the opportunity to borrow money when they have ideas for business projects. No one must be discriminated against or marginalized, or prevented by licensing requirements, prohibitions, and legal privileges from competing for positions and incomes.

What this example shows is that trade alone does not necessarily create dynamic development in an oppressive society. If a country is static and characterized by enormous privileges and discrimination, there is little chance of trade solving all these problems. For that to happen, the population must acquire liberty and the opportunity of economic participation. Land reforms to put an end to centuries of feudalism would have been needed, coupled with a commitment to education and free markets. But those were not the conclusions drawn by the rulers of Latin America and the Marxist academics who developed the theory of dependence. History, they argued, showed that trade was pernicious and that countries should aim for self-sufficiency and internal industrialization.


pages: 233 words: 75,477

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea by Robert D. Kaplan

Ayatollah Khomeini, citizen journalism, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Live Aid, mass immigration, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, the market place

With short black hair, a clipped moustache, and a cold, authoritative style of speech, Afewerki affected a military disposition. Was he leveling with me about the EPLF's non-Marxist orientation? There is no action that the EPLF has taken within the area under its control that would suggest otherwise. The most left-wing concepts ever pushed by the organization's economic department were a mild land reform program, designed to narrow the gap between peasants and a few rich merchants, and aid to rudimentary worker organizations. Moreover, EPLF officials did not evince the coercive manner of approach to the civilian population that is so apparent in all communist societies. While in Addis Ababa, one often hears phrases like, “This is what we're going to do”; in Eritrea, it is more common for someone in authority to ask, “How do we convince people to do it?”

Tigre and some depopulated areas of Gondar are all the guerrillas want, or ever need, to control. Thus, the issues— for donors interested in famine relief and for strategists interested in knocking a Soviet piece off the board—is how the TPLF fights and how it treats its own people in its own backyard. Marxist pretensions notwithstanding, the TPLF land reform program, the guerrillas' emphasis on women's rights, the creation of a rural health service, the building of schools to augment a literacy campaign, and other infrastructure improvements undertaken by the TPLF in the countryside are exactly the kinds of things that USAID encourages every government in Africa to do.


pages: 476 words: 144,288

1946: The Making of the Modern World by Victor Sebestyen

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, disinformation, Etonian, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, land reform, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, operation paperclip

Until Japan’s catastrophic defeat, Hirohito had shown little enthusiasm for democracy, pacifism, votes for women, or Western-style civil rights in general; he was a stickler for imperial absolutism, hierarchy, aristocratic titles, and feudal forms of land ownership. Now he – or his ministers – proclaimed a constitutional monarchy, women’s suffrage, the removal of the peerage, an independent judiciary, wholesale land reform, and – most revolutionary of all – the abolition of Japan’s armed forces. ‘The Japanese people renounce forever war . . . or the use of force as a means of settling international disputes.’ The government ministers, mostly from the nobility, looked miserable throughout the ceremony. The Emperor appeared uncomfortable, as he often did, but relatively unconcerned; after all, he was still on the throne, and he had evaded all possibility of death by hanging.

But the supposedly rabid Right-winger had more success with the farmers. He stripped the absentee landlords and owners of the huge estates of their holdings, ensuring millions of peasants owned their own farms. He thought – rightly as it turned out, judging by future Japanese elections – that small landowners would be naturally conservative. MacArthur’s land reforms were more radical than anything then happening behind the Iron Curtain. * In Nuremberg on 16 October 1946, nine of the leading Nazi war criminals were hanged one after the other at the gymnasium of the city’s Palace of Justice. In Tokyo, similar trials would continue for another two years and lead to far more serious questions about what the point of the hearings really was.

Farben ref1 India ref1, ref2 and Britain ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 British withdrawal from ref1, ref2 conflict with Pakistan ref1 demand by Muslims for separate state (Pakistan) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Direct Action Day and Calcutta riots ref1 election (1946) ref1, ref2 fight for freedom against the British ref1, ref2 Muslim/Hindu fighting ref1, ref2 and Nehru ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Partition of and massacres accompanying ref1, ref2, ref3 Sikhs in ref1 see also Gandhi, Mohandas Indian National Congress ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 influenza epidemic (1919) ref1 Inverchapel, Lord, see Clark Kerr, Sir Archibald Iran ref1 Allied occupation of during war ref1 conflict with Azerbaijan ref1, ref2, ref3 oil production ref1 and Soviet Union ref1, ref2, ref3 Soviet withdrawal ref1 and United States ref1, ref2, ref3 Iran crisis ref1, ref2 Irgun ref1 bombing of King David Hotel ref1 Iron Curtain ref1 origins of phrase ref1 Isherwood, Christopher ref1, ref2 Israel creation of ref1 Itenberg, Lieutenant Boris ref1 Ivan Suzanin (opera) ref1 Ivan the Terrible (film) ref1 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev ref1 Jacobson, Eddie ref1 Japan ref1, ref2 abdication crisis ref1 black market ref1 censorship under US occupation ref1 constitution ref1 death toll during war ref1 despising of soldiers after war ref1 destruction caused by war ref1 food shortages and starvation ref1 fraternization between GIs and Japanese women ref1 freeing of political prisoners of previous regime by MacArthur ref1 Hirohito’s ‘Declaration of Humanity’ ref1, ref2 lifestyle of US officials in ref1 MacArthur’s land reforms ref1 occupation of China ref1, ref2 occupation of Taiwan ref1 prostitution ref1 punishing of war criminals ref1 reinstatement of people banned ref1 Soviet Union declares war on ref1 trials of leaders ref1 US occupation of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Zaibatsu ref1 Jaspers, Gertrude ref1 Jaspers, Karl ref1 The Question of German Guilt ref1 Jennings, Humphrey ref1 Jerusalem bombing of King David Hotel ref1 Jewish Agency ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘Jewish–Bolshevik conspiracy’ ref1 Jews ref1, ref2 anti-Jewish massacres in post-war years ref1 and Balfour Declaration (1917) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘blood libel’ ref1 establishment of independent state issue ref1 and Holocaust ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 immigration to Palestine proposal ref1, ref2, ref3 massacre of in Kielce (Poland) ref1, ref2, ref3 number of Holocaust survivors ref1 power struggles within Zionism ref1 refugee camps ref1, ref2 in United States ref1 see also anti-Semitism Jiji Shimpo (magazine) ref1 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Johnson, Pamela Hansford ref1 Jünger, Ernst ref1 Kades, Colonel Charles ref1 Karman, Marta ref1 Kästner, Erich ref1 Kavtaradze, Sergei ref1, ref2 Keintopf, Anna ref1, ref2 Kennan, George ref1, ref2, ref3n, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Keynes, Lord ref1, ref2 Khan, Liaquat Ali ref1 Khan, Sir Sayed Ahmed ref1n Khrushchev, Nikita ref1, ref2, ref3 Kielce massacre ref1, ref2, ref3 King David Hotel (Jerusalem), bombing of ref1, ref2 King, Mackenzie ref1 Kitchener, Lord ref1 KKE (Communist Party of Greece) ref1, ref2, ref3 Klemperer, Victor ref1 KMG (Nationalist Kuomintang) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Knoll, Roman ref1 Kocevje killing of Croats and Slovenes at (1945–6) ref1 Koestler, Arthur ref1, ref2 Darkness at Noon ref1 Kollontai, Alexandra ref1 Kovály, Heda ref1 KPD (German Communist Party) ref1, ref2 Krupp, Alfred ref1 Krut, Aleksy ref1 Kubina, Teodor ref1 Kun, Béla ref1 Kuomintang see KMG Kurchatov, Igor ref1, ref2, ref3 Kurt, Professor Albrecht ref1 Kyuichi, Tokuda ref1 LaGuardia, Fiorello ref1, ref2 Lahore Declaration ref1 Lambinowice camp (Poland) ref1 Lane, Arthur Bliss ref1 League of Nations ref1 Leefe, Lieutenant Christopher ref1 Lees-Milne, James ref1 Lehi (Stern Gang) ref1, ref2 Lehman, Herbert ref1 Lend-Lease scheme ref1, ref2 Leningrad (literary journal) ref1 Leningrad Writers’ Union ref1 Leonhard, Wolfgang ref1, ref2 Likharev, Boris ref1 Lin Biao ref1, ref2 Lincoln, General George ref1 Linlithgow, Lord ref1 Lippmann, Walter ref1 Litvinov, Maxim ref1n Locke Jr, Edwin ref1 Long Telegram ref1 Lovett, Robert ref1 Luce, Clare Boothe ref1 Luce, Henry ref1 MacArthur, General Douglas ref1, ref2, ref3 character traits ref1, ref2 enemies ref1 and Japan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Japanese constitution ref1, ref2, ref3 and Japan’s abdication crisis ref1, ref2, ref3 Pershing’s view of ref1 popularity of in Japan ref1 and Roosevelt ref1 and Truman ref1 McCarthy, Joseph ref1 McCormick, Anne O’Hare ref1, ref2 MacDonald, Malcolm ref1 MacInnes, Colin ref1 McIver, Dr Frank D. ref1 Maclean, Donald ref1, ref2 McMahon Act ref1 MacMichael, Harold ref1 MacVeagh, Lincoln ref1 Maisky, Ivan ref1 Malenkov, Georgi ref1 Malinovsky, Rodion ref1 Manhattan Project ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Mao Zedong ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Marcuse, Herbert ref1n Marshall, General George ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Marshall Plan ref1 Marxism ref1 Masanobu, Tsuji ref1 May, Alan Nunn ref1 Menon, V.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

The principled antagonism to independent nationalism that animates US foreign policy took on particular significance in this case.4 After its liberation from the Dutch, Indonesia was ruled by the nationalist leader Sukarno. At first, the United States was willing to tolerate this arrangement, particularly after Sukarno and the army suppressed a land reform movement supported by the Indonesian Communist Party [PKI] in the Madiun region in 1948, virtually destroying the party’s leadership and jailing 36,000 people. But Sukarno’s nationalist and neutralist commitments soon proved entirely unacceptable. The two major power centers in Indonesia were the army and the PKI, the only mass-based political force.

Industrial development was tolerable only if it was “complementary to U.S. industry.” The basic concept was “that Brazilian development was all right as long as it did not interfere with American profits and dominance,” and ample profit remittance was guaranteed. Agricultural development was also promoted, as long as it avoided “destabilizing” programs like land reform, relied on US farm equipment, fostered “commodities that complemented US production, such as coffee, cacao, rubber, and jute,” and created “new markets for U.S. agricultural commodities” such as dairy products and wheat. “Brazilian desires were secondary,” Haines observes, though it was useful “to pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them,” in Dulles’s words.

This “new wave of democracy” has “shifted politicians’ priorities” from the days when they “traditionally represented the established order.” The proof is that they have now dedicated themselves to serving the poor with an imaginative new approach: “Central Americans to use Trickle-down Strategy in War on Poverty,” the headline reads. “Committed to free-market economics,” the Presidents have abandoned vapid rhetoric about land reform and social welfare programs, adopting at last a serious idea: “a trickle-down approach to aid the poor.” “The idea is to help the poor without threatening the basic power structure,” a regional economist observes. This brilliant and innovative conception overturns the “preferential option for the poor” of the Latin American Bishops.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

The government issued certificates of ownership.3 Land could be bought and sold, and used as collateral for loans—the famous Hernando de Soto formula for unlocking the “mystery of capital.” Although externally imposed land reforms have often been disasters, a homegrown reform that respected local custom was more successful. However, when the land tax was insufficient to cover state spending, the inexperienced rulers printed money. Inflation resulted. Matsukata Masayoshi, the architect of the land reform, became finance minister in October 1881. He cut spending and privatized the many state-owned enterprises, using the revenues of the privatizations to buy back currency issues.

The co-op members who lost their lands to the ex-Contras didn’t get any compensation.16 This episode was symptomatic of the confused land question on a national scale. Pre-revolutionary owners of expropriated land, cooperative members, ex-Contras, ex-Sandinistas, and speculators who had bought land from any of the above, competed for the same plots of land. The Chamorro government confused things even more with its own land reform program. Ex-Contras, ex-Sandinistas, and even mixtures of the two again took up arms in some parts of the countryside to agitate for land. The IMF in 2003 summarized this situation as “inadequate protection of property rights.17 With such uncertainty about who owned the land, agricultural production did not rebound strongly after the new government took power.


pages: 58 words: 18,747

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think by Matthew Yglesias

Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, gentrification, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, land reform, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, pets.com, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, statistical model, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white picket fence

The landlord didn’t make the land. For this reason, taxation of rent income was deemed to be an especially efficient form of tax, since it couldn’t deter any useful activity and exacerbate the problem of diminishing returns. By the same token, left-wing politics in developing countries often feature “land reform” as a prominent demand. Vast agricultural estates, unlike complicated industrial business enterprises, can be broken up into small chunks and given to farmers to work rent-free, rather than operated as plantations staffed by peasants stuck at subsistence-living standards. Today, economists often criticize “rent-seeking” behavior by businesses that try to use government regulation to stifle competition.


Scotland Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

agricultural Revolution, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, European colonialism, Ford Model T, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Piper Alpha, place-making, retail therapy, smart cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

In Victorian times, belligerent landowners attempted to prevent walkers from using well-established trails. Moves to counter this led to successful legislation for the walkers and the formation of what later became the Scottish Rights of Way & Access Society. In January 2003 the Scottish parliament formalised access to the countryside and passed the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, creating statutory rights of access to land in Scotland for the first time (popularly known as ‘the right to roam’). Basically, the Scottish Outdoor Access Code states that everyone has the right to be on most land and inland waters, providing they act responsibly. As far as wild camping goes, this means that you can pitch a tent almost anywhere that doesn’t cause inconvenience to others or damage to property, as long as you stay no longer than two or three nights in any one spot, take all litter away with you, and keep well away from houses and roads.

It was always precarious, as rights were granted on a year-by-year basis, so at any moment a crofter could lose not only the farm but also the house they’d built on it. The economic depression of the late 19th century meant many couldn’t pay their rent. This time, however, they resisted expulsion, instead forming the Highland Land Reform Association and their own political party. Their resistance led to several of their demands being acceded to by the government, including security of tenure, fair rents and eventually the supply of land for new crofts. Crofters now have the right to purchase their farmland and recent laws have abolished the feudal system, which created so much misery.

Fares on these crossings have been cut by around 40%, and initial signs are that the scheme has been successful, with tourist numbers up by 25% to 40%. Highlands & Islands Crofting (smallholding in marginal areas) and land ownership are important issues in the Gaelic-speaking areas of northwest Scotland, especially since a headline-grabbing clause in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act (2003) allowed crofting communities to buy out the land that they live on with the aid of taxpayers’ money, in the hope of reversing the gradual depopulation of the Highlands. Several estates have followed Eigg, Gigha, Knoydart and North Harris into community ownership. In 2006 South Uist saw the biggest community buy-out yet.


pages: 207 words: 86,639

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

The one 20th-century movement that embedded elements of what is now new economics was Distributism, inspired by Hilaire Belloc’s 1912 book The Servile State, an influential diatribe against big business and Fabian collectivist policies.4 Distributism knitted together the old Catholic social doctrine of Pope Leo XIII that was so close to Belloc’s heart, inspired originally by Ruskin via Cardinal Manning. It mixed a generous dollop of land reforming Liberalism with unworldly Gandhian simplicity, borrowing the old slogan of Joseph Chamberlain and Jesse Collings from the 1880s, ‘three acres and a cow’. At its heart was the redistribution of land and property so that everyone had some – on the grounds that small enterprises, smallholdings and small units were the only basis for dignity, independence and liberty. 20 THE NEW ECONOMICS Belloc and his friend G.

BizFizz has a proven record of increasing business start-up and survival, but also increases the confidence and sense of self-reliance among the community as a whole. www.bizfizz.org.uk Community finance Community development finance plays a vital role in the UK to address financial exclusion and underinvestment in disadvantaged areas through provision of finance 174 THE NEW ECONOMICS and money advice to individuals and enterprises. nef was instrumental in setting up the Social Investment Task Force, and introducing the idea of Community Investment Tax Relief, helped found the Community Development Finance Association, incubated the London Rebuilding Society, and is a founding partner in the Adventure Capital Fund, as well as of the European Microfinance Network. nef was involved in researching and assisting in the development of seven community banking partnerships in England and Wales, which partner credit unions, community development finance institutions and money advice agencies in the co-delivery of community finance services to low and moderate income households. www.cdfa.org.uk Community land trusts Land trusts were developed at the Institute of Community Economics as a way of dividing the property, which can be owned outright, from the land it stands on, which is owned by a trust. This keeps property prices down and provides greater control over local land use. By separating the land costs from the building costs, community land trusts can reduce the cost of housing by half. They trace their roots to the cooperative land reform efforts of Robert Owen, the Chartists, John Ruskin and the garden cities movement, but the model was forgotten. nef worked with Community Finance Solutions at the University of Salford to lead research to help reintroduce community land trusts to England and Wales. nef has also developed with CDS Cooperatives a new model called Mutual Homeownership. www.communitylandtrust.org.uk Community reinvestment Banks have a moral obligation – and in the USA this is a legal obligation – to lend money in places they are prepared to accept deposits from.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Many countries that have moved from rags to riches have begun with land reforms, which break down feudal structures, take land from the land-owning aristocracy and give individual property rights to the people. This may sound like a form of government redistribution, but it is not a recurring arrangement, it is a one-time correction for a history of looting, often centuries-old with racist overtones, where a small elite has seized huge areas without working for it or receiving it through voluntary transactions (see Nozick’s rectification principle).21 In many cases, land reforms are about legally recognizing what people already possess but are denied by the elite.


pages: 547 words: 148,799

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

call centre, land reform, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, urban decay

‘Fuel and ammunition, medical supplies, helicopter gun-ships, counter-subversion trainers, interrogation technology. All at knockdown prices, and for over twenty years it’s all paid off big time. Quiescent population, low wage economy, export-oriented. Standard neoliberal dream.’ ‘But not any more.’ ‘But not any more. We’ve got another generation of guerrillas in the mountains screaming for land reform, another generation of disaffected student youth in the cities, and we’re all back to square one. Emerging 3Markets got scared and dropped the whole thing like a hot brick -straight into Conflict Investment’s lap. Hewitt gave it to Makin.’ ‘Nice of her.’ ‘Yeah, well this was just after Guatemala, so Makin’s rep was riding pretty high.

His evidence was compelling, it was set up that way, but more powerful was the echo of what he said in the minds of his listeners. Chris looked round the table and saw heads nodding, Mike Bryant’s included. ‘Thus we convert,’ Hamilton declared vibrantly, ‘the uncertainty of change, the certainty of post-land-reform unrest, and the probable budget deficit of the classic revolutionary regime, at a stroke, into a return to the profitable status quo we have enjoyed in the NAME for the last twenty years. It seems to me, ladies and gentlemen, that there is really no question or choice here, only a course of action that common sense and market return dictate.

He tried to write an account of the events leading up to Philip Hamilton’s death, as much as anything to get it clear in his own head, but he kept having to cross out what he’d written and start further back. When his first line read my father was murdered by an executive called Edward Quain, he gave up. Perhaps inspired by the novel he was trying to read, he wrote an imaginary brief for the NAME account set five years into a future where Barranco had taken power and instituted wide-ranging land reform. It also seemed very far-fetched. He started a letter to Carla and tore it up after less than ten lines. He couldn’t think of anything worth telling her. The week ended. Another started. Shorn came for him. He was on morning walkabout, cheated of his usual seat at the fountain by a persistent, heavy drizzle that drenched the exposed patio area and kept him penned under the glass roof.


pages: 511 words: 148,310

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

The UN, by the way, did not like to talk about “delays” in implementing various parts of the agreement, so it called them “recalendarizations.” The UN was not supposed to be involved in land reform, probably the most difficult aspect of the peace agreement. Guerrillas had given land to farmers in areas they controlled but owners wanted their land back after the war. Because the issue threatened the peace, the UN became active in resolving disputes and pushing land reform agreements forward. This illustrates the mission’s ability to learn from, and adapt to, local conditions as they evolve—something that not all UN missions mastered.

Doyle and Sambanis (2006: 21) list as failures Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Cyprus, and list as successes Congo, El Salvador, Cambodia, Croatia, Brcko (in Bosnia), and East Timor. 92 UN’s first return: Durch 2006a: 3. 92 Differed from all previous: Howard 2008: 52. 92 First of five: Fortna and Howard 2008: 293. 92–93 Finally began in 1989: Howard 2008: 53–56, 64, 67. 93 South Africa tried to subvert: Krasno 2003a: 48–49. 94 The remarkable cooperation: Howard 2008: 77–80; Krasno 2003a: 47–48. 94 Tight timetable: Howard 2008: 81, 83. 94 Success stories: Krasno 2003a: 25. 94 El Salvador the UN came in: Howard 2008: 92, 97, 129. 95 Key figure: Howard 2008: 99, 98. 95 Had a clear mandate: Howard 2008: 101–03. 95 Truth Commission: Howard 2008: 108. 96 UN’s police work: Howard 2008: 112–14. 96 Land reform: Howard 2008: 118–21. 96 Similarly, elections: Howard 2008: 122–25; Wood 2000; Wood 2003a: 30. 97 Mixed results. . . . peace talks began: Howard 2008: 131–32, 137. 97–98 The mission lasted eighteen months: Howard 2008: 138. 98–99 An immediate. . . . hostages four times: Howard 2008: 144–49, 151–52, 155. 99 The Khmer Rouge withdrew: Howard 2008: 139, 167–73. 99 UNTAC did not end political violence: Howard 2008: 171, 173, 176. 99–100 The experience gained: Howard 2008: 231–33, 258, 245–46, 249–51, 225; Boothby 2003: 121–23, 127, 129. 100 Paradigm-setting: Doyle, Johnstone, and Orr 1997: 2, 20. 100–01 The UN mission in Mozambique: Howard 2008: 179, 184–85, 189. 101 Sant-Egidio: Giro n.d. 101 Offered itself as mediator: Howard 2008: 191. 101 Both sides asked the UN: Howard 2008: 187. 101–02 An overtaxed, divided: Salomons 2003: 83, 96. 102 High degree of autonomy: Howard 2008: 198–99, 196. 102 Assessed that money could: Howard 2008: 197, 199; Salomons 2003: 112. 102 Another trust fund: Howard 2008: 202; Salomons 2003: 109–10. 102–03 After the UN departed: Salomons 2003: 111; Howard 2008: 219–21. 103 The two sets side by side: 1990 population data from UN Population Division 2009. 104 In addition to the consent: Howard 2008: 8, 10, 15, 16, 19; Doyle and Sambanis 2006: 2; see also Autesserre 2010: 8. 104 Cultural learning that must occur: Rubinstein 2008: 36, 107. 104 Peace missions also need: Rubinstein 2008: 37, 51, 89; see also 138. 105 Made a database: Fortna 2008: 2, 3, 11; Fortna’s dataset is an expanded version of Doyle and Sambanis’s. 105 Evidence is overwhelming: Fortna 2008: 6, 9–10, 106, 116. 105 Resounding yes: Fortna and Howard 2008: 289; Fortna 2008: 125. 105 Several pathways: Fortna 2008: 9, 102. 105–06 Despite these positive outcomes: Fortna 2008: 24, 44; see also Regan 2000: 39; Fortna and Howard 2008: 290; Collier 2009: 84. 106 Separate but parallel: Collier 2009: 83, 95. 106 Very good value: Collier 2009: 96, 97, 99. 106 Reversion to war: Collier 2009: 75, 88. 106 Markedly improved: Griffin 2003: 214. 106 Built a data-set: Doyle and Sambanis 2006: 72, 126; see Durch 2006a: 13–16. 106–07 Roland Paris: Paris 2004: 19, 6, ix, 5, 89, 95, 111, 113, 145–46, 223. 107 The case of Nicaragua: Paris 2004: 139, 118–20; Paris 2009a: 58. 107–08 Daniel Ortega: BBC News 2006. 108 To Paris’s credit: Paris 2009b: 108.


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Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 80-88. 32 There is considerable debate whether the term peasantry ever did in fact accurately describe such systems of small-holding production, especially in Africa. See Margaret Jean Hay, “ ‘Peasants’ in Modern East African Studies,” Peasant Studies 8, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 17-29. 33 On the history of political conflicts over land reform in Guatemala, see Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). More generally, on the continuing inequalities of land ownership and the failures of land reform in Latin America, see Ernst Feder, The Rape of the Peasantry: Latin America’s Landholding System (New York: Anchor Books, 1971); and William Thiesenhusen, Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). 34 For a useful description of the structure and activities of one of the major transnational agribusiness corporations, see Brewster Kneen, Invisible Giant: Cargill and Its Transnational Strategies (London: Pluto Press, 1995). 35 See R.

Latin American agriculture, for example, has been dominated at least since the nineteenth century by an extreme polarization of land ownership, with at one end huge latifundio estates that employ numerous families and at the other landless workers or farmers with holdings too small and infertile to support themselves. Land reform, which was a liberal and revolutionary battle cry in Latin America throughout the twentieth century, from Zapata’s ragged troops to guerilla revolutionaries in Nicaragua and El Salvador, held something like the figure of the middle peasant as its goal. Aside from a few brief exceptions, most notably in Mexico and Bolivia, the tendency in Latin America has constantly moved in the opposite direction, exacerbating the polarization of land tenure and ownership.33 Throughout the subordinated capitalist world small-holding agricultural producers are systematically deprived of land rights as property is gradually consolidated into large holdings, controlled either by national landowners or mammoth foreign corporations.34 This process may appear as a haphazard and undirected movement carried out by an extended and disunited series of agents, including national governments, foreign governments, multinational and transnational agribusiness corporations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and many others.


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Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism by William Baker, Addison Wiggin

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, lost cosmonauts, low interest rates, McMansion, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, naked short selling, negative equity, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, reserve currency, risk free rate, riskless arbitrage, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, time value of money, too big to fail, Two Sigma, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra, young professional

The estates of Rome’s middle classes were eroded by governmental action, mostly the suppression of consumer price inflation through food price controls and repression of wages through competition for labor by slavery. The emergence of populist politicians such as the Gracchus brothers in the first century bc introduced land reform and welfare, and the Roman populace shifted to embrace a socialist framework of rewarding idleness with bread and circuses. The role of money in credit crises is carefully examined. The recurrence of credit panics on the surface seems incongruent with the discipline of hard money developed in the Republic.

Approximately 100 years before the birth of Christ, the resentment of small farmers weary of fighting in military campaigns that enriched the aristocracy and introduced competition from slave labor swelled. The Gracchus brothers were the From the Golden Era to Totalitarianism 247 liberal politicians of their time, putting in place a two-tiered wheat pricing system and land reform. H.J. Haskell, in his 1939 book The New Deal in Old Rome, catalogs the surprising parallels between Roman legislation and Depression-era reforms in the United States. Wheat was initially offered without a means test to those willing to queue up at warehouses at half the market price, which over time would be reduced to being free of charge.

For as the passions of each, according to his years, appeared excited, he furnished mistresses to some, bought horses and dogs for others, and spared, in a word, neither his purse nor his character, if he could but make them his devoted and trustworthy supporters.17 The return of Julius Caesar from Gaul frightened the aristocracy, who thought he would institute land reform like the Gracchus brothers had. Julius Caesar previously as consul had been able to secure land for veterans by using questionable political maneuvers. His crossing the Rubicon with an army (in defiance of a Senatorial order to disband it) induced a financial panic, which he resolved in part by allowing debts to be repaid using collateral priced with pre-crisis values.


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Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos

conceptual framework, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, East Village, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, financial independence, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, land reform, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, Mohammed Bouazizi, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rolodex, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

In the eighteenth century, imperial China controlled one-third of the world’s wealth; its most advanced cities were as prosperous and commercialized as Great Britain and the Netherlands. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, China was crippled by invasion, civil war, and political upheaval. After taking power in 1949, the Communist Party conducted a “land reform” campaign that grouped China’s small family farms into collectives, and led to the killing of millions of landlords and perceived enemies. In 1958, Chairman Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, attempting to vault his country past Britain in just fifteen years. Some advisers told him it was impossible, but he ignored and humiliated them; the head of the national technology commission jumped out a window.

Cafferty, Jack Caijing; government approval required for; growth of; investors in; management buyout plan of Cao, Henry Cao, Leo Caochangdi Cao family Cao Haili Cao Qifeng Carrefour Carter, Jimmy Catholicism Célestin Monga cell phones censorship Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Central Japan Railway Central Publicity (Propaganda) Department; Caijing and; on train crash century of national humiliation Charter 08 Charter 77 Chen Chen Danqing Chen Guangcheng; escape of; house arrest of; in prison; release of Chen Guangfu Chen Guojun Cheng Yizhong Chen Jieren Chen Kegui Chen Xianmei Chen Yun Chen Yunying Cheung Chi-tai Cheung Yan Chicago Tribune Chim Pui-chung China: alleged currency manipulation of; anti-Japanese protests in; average income in; billionaires in; bloggers in; capitalist reforms in; censorship in; central bank of; civil war in; constitution of; creative class in; economic growth in; food in; happiness in; history studies in; housing prices in; inequality in; intergenerational mobility in; Internet use in; investment in; Japanese occupation of; Japan’s Diaoyu Islands dispute with; Jasmine protests in; labor migration in; land reform in; life expectancy in; literacy rates in; luxury goods in; popular approval of; press in; real estate boom in; revolution in; special economic zones in; spiritual awakening in; stereotypes of; stimulus plan in; stock markets in; tax system in; Tibet protests in; travel from; Uighur-Han riot in; urban growth in; Western culture as perceived by China, U.S. relationship with; Belgrade embassy bombing and; and Chinese crackdown on Internet; Mao’s establishment of; U.S. recognition of ChinaAid China Business Times China Can Say No China Center for Economic Research China Central Television China Daily China eCapital China Entrepeneur ChinaGeeks China Miracle, The (Lin, Cai and Li) China Mobile China Newsweek China Railway Signal and Communication Corporation China Stand Up!

Cixi, Empress Dowager class Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (Fussell) Clinton, Hillary CNN Coca-Cola Cohen, Jerome Cohen, Joan Lebold Cold War college admissions Colombia color revolution COMDEX Communist Party, Chinese; alleged virtue of; censorship by; Central Committee of; Charter 08 denounced by; class opposed by; corruption in; culture planned by; dissidents contained by; Eighteenth Party Congress of; free market fundamentalism disdained by; land reform of; membership of; as “Party in Power”; propaganda studied by; Seventeenth National Congress of; on values; and Wenzhou train crash Communist Youth League concubines Confucianism Confucius Confucius Institute Confucius Temple Congress, U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, U.S.


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Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

A more moderate faction on the right, including many younger army officers, began plotting to avoid civil war by overthrowing the hard-liners and attempting to bargain with the left. The coup that followed on October 15, 1979, ended the five-decade run of military rule that had begun with the coup of January 1932, but split itself into two factions in the process. One faction, taking control of the government, pushed for conciliatory measures: land reform, social welfare, and human rights. The other faction, taking control of the military, went ahead with the crackdown, targeting the People’s Revolutionary Army in particular.15 The day after the coup, thirty-five people were killed in San Salvador’s poor suburbs, and then forty more the next day.

Lawson, “Along the Romantic Coffee Trail to Salvador,” The Spice Mill, November 1928, 1976–82. 11. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Coffee in Latin America: Productivity Problems and Future Prospects (New York: United Nations and FAO, 1958). 12. Ethan B. Kapstein, Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 188; and William H. Durham, Scarcity and Survival in Central America: The Ecological Origins of the Soccer War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 7. 13. Interview with Jaime Hill, Perdita Huston Papers [PHP], Series 7, Box 7.3, Unedited Interview Transcripts, El Salvador (Tapes 11–22), Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England, Portland, Maine. 14.

“Traveling Far in Grandfather’s Car: The Life Cycle of Central Colombian Coffee Estates. The Case of Viotá, Cundinamarca (1900–1930).” Hispanic American Historical Review 69, no. 2 (May 1989): 185–219. Judd, John Wesley. Volcanoes: What They Are and What They Teach. New York: D. Appleton, 1881. Kapstein, Ethan B. Seeds of Stability: Land Reform and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Kargon, Robert H. Science in Victorian Manchester: Enterprise and Expertise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2017. Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America.


The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis

Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, Defenestration of Prague, friendly fire, gentleman farmer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, moral panic, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, plutocrats, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

Any land found to be held in excess of the legal limits would be distributed to the poor. Of course, a great many Roman aristocrats stood to lose by this redistribution. Once again, senatorial opinion moved against Tiberius Gracchus. The senate had killed his treaty, and now they would kill his land reform. But this time was different. Tiberius was a tribune. His person was sacrosanct and inviolable. His veto could shut down the state. Worse, he was willing to defy established tradition by bringing his law directly before the people without seeking senatorial approval first. This was a hard-won, though seldom used, right of the plebeian assembly: that its resolutions, once passed, should have the force of law.

Octavius was deposed as tribune, and driven out of the assembly with insults and blows. This was a radical move. No tribune had ever been deposed before. No one knew whether such a thing was even legal. But legal niceties, Tiberius insisted, could not be allowed to stand in the face of such a clear expression of popular will. Octavius’s veto was withdrawn. The land reform law was passed. The slow process of redistribution began. The year 133 BC drew to an end. Tiberius had achieved a great deal. He had made a name for himself among the poor, the desperate, the dispossessed. And he had made many enemies. To maintain his position, it was essential that he continue to hold tribunician power.

abortions 124 Achilles 3, 18 Actium, Battle of 110, 113–14, 218 Adalbert of Tuscany 260 Adelheid, Empress 271, 273 Adonis 135 Adrian, Pope 413 Aeneas the Trojan 4, 7, 82, 114, 192, 296–7 Aequi tribe 18 Aeschylus 33 Africa 221, 235 Agamemnon 3, 18 Agnes, Christian martyr 216–17, 291, 455 agriculture 9, 232 land reform 68–70, 71–2, 73, 88 medieval Rome 270 Agrippa 113, 126, 129, 220, 230 Agrippina 142, 143–4, 144–5 Aguyar, Andrea, the ‘ebony Hercules’ 514, 523, 526 Ahenobarbus 95, 98, 142 Aimée, Anouk 582 Ajax 3 Alaric, Visigoth king 233, 246 Alban kings 4 Alberic II, Holy Roman Emperor 265, 266–8, 269, 270, 277, 282 Alberic of Spoleto 263 Alberini, Filoteo 563 Albrecht of Brandenburg 402, 403, 404 Alcuin 268 Alemanni, Confederation of the 199, 235 Alexander the Great 33–4, 62, 84, 138, 181, 208–9 Alexander VI, Pope (Rodrigo Borgia) 347–55, 357, 361, 365–6, 367, 371, 375 accession to the papacy 348–9, 350 children of 348 death 372 and the Jews 532 Alexandria 35, 98, 103, 111, 138, 188 Alfonso of Aragon 360–1, 363, 366–7, 369 Alfonso, King of Naples 352, 354 Allia, battle of 23–5, 58, 142 Altar of the Fatherland 535, 588 Anatolia 84, 86 Antinous 180 Antioch 138, 188, 226 Antium 139 Antonine emperors 179, 182, 195 Antonine Plague 181 Antoninus Pius, Emperor 180 Antonioni, Michelangelo 568 Apollo 40, 117, 217, 218 in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 128 temple of 109–10 Apollonius of Tyana 185 Appian Way 214, 245 Apuleius 121–2 aqueducts 227–30, 231, 234, 237, 245, 248, 346 Aquitaine 234 Arabs 252 architecture of the ancient city 268 baldacchino of St Peter’s 440–2 baroque 454–5, 460 the Colosseum 156–7, 159 fascist Italy 162 Greek 156 medieval churches 300–2 united Italy 535 Aretino, Pietro 343, 392 Aristarco, Guido 573 aristocracy medieval Rome 269, 277 and the republic 55–9, 60, 75, 76 Aristophanes 33, 34 Aristotle 210 Arnold of Brescia 306–7, 406 Arnuphis 182 Arsinoë, Egyptian princess 97–8 art of classical Greece 463–4 Sarfatti’s ‘fascist culture’ 547–8, 552 see also Renaissance art artisans 269–70 Arzes 244 Asia Minor 237 Athens 28, 33–4, 209, 210 Attila the Hun 234–5, 279 Augsburg Confession 428 Augustine, St 174, 253, 256 City of God 246 on the Jews 530 Augustus, Emperor 111–16, 166, 178, 179 Altar of Peace 116 and Cola di Rienzo 326, 329 death 131 laws against sexual immorality 126, 129 map of the world 308–9, 341 marriage 122 mausoleum 126, 220 as Octavianus 111–16 and Ovid’s Metamorphoses 127–8 possible successors 128–9, 143 as a princeps 115, 128, 267 rebuilding of Rome 125–6 restoration of religion 137 and Virgil’s Aeneid 114–15 Aurelian, Emperor 199, 214, 218 temple of Sol Invictus 220 Aventine hill 1, 78–9, 221, 268 Aventine Secession 56–7 Avignon Cola di Rienzo imprisoned in 338–9 papal city of 310, 314, 320–1, 329, 333, 339, 344–5, 531 Petrarch in 311, 312–14, 315–16 Bacchus (god) 40, 137 Balabanoff, Angelica 540 Balbus 100 Bandiera brothers 503 baronial families 298–9, 302, 304, 309–10, 324 and Cola di Rienzo 325–6, 331–6, 340 see also Colonna barons Basilica of St Peter 242, 244 Bassi, Ugo 514 Bassianus see Elagabalus, boy-emperor baths 230–1, 233, 240, 248 of Caracalla 478–9, 481, 490 ruins of 296 Bayard, Chevalier de 408, 411 Bazzi, Giovanni Antonio 392 Belair 151 Belisarius 237–43, 247–8, 251–2, 268, 421 Belli, Giuseppe 501–2 Bellini, Vincenzo 495 Bembo, Pietro 372, 392 Benedict of Soracte 261, 272 Benedict XI, Pope 286–7 Benedict XXI, Pope 331 Berbers 252 Berengar I, King 260, 263 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 437–8, 439–44, 465 architect of St Peter’s 440–2, 443, 444, 456 Cornaro chapel 446–50, 465 David statue 437–8, 465 early life 437 Piazza Navona fountain 452–4 renovation of the Piazza San Pietro 455–6 self-portrait 439–40 theatrical shows 442–3 Bertrand de Deaulx, Cardinal 332–3 Biagio da Cesena 390 Bibles, vernacular 433 Bibulus 91, 98 Bicycle Thieves (film) 571, 574 Bixio, Nino 521, 526 Black Death (plague) 337–8, 530–1 Boccioni, Umberto 539 Bochas 244 Bohemia 406, 446 Boii tribe 21 Bologna 311, 376, 386 Boniface VIII, Pope 310, 312 borgate (housing developments) 576 Borghese, Scipione 439 Borgia, Alfonso 346–7 Borgia, Cesare, Duke of Valence 342–3, 348, 354, 356, 358, 360–1, 362–3, 364–6, 367, 368, 371–2, 376 Borgia, Giovanni 360 Borgia, Jofré 348, 351, 358, 364 Borgia, Juan 348, 351, 358, 361–2 Borgia, Lucretia 343, 348, 366–8 death 373 early life 348, 349–50 in Ferrara 371–3 marriages 350–3, 357–9, 360–1, 363–4, 368–70 Borgia, Rodrigo see Alexander VI, Pope (Rodrigo Borgia) Borja, Francisco de 445 Borromini, Francesco 441, 453, 455 Boswell, James 461 Botticelli, Sandro 379, 380, 386, 387 Bourbon, Charles, duke of 408–11, 412, 414, 416–18, 419, 428 death 422 and the sack of Rome 420–1 Bragadin, Marco Antonio 444 Bramante, Donato 384, 385, 386, 392, 401, 440 Brambilla, Camilla 554 Brandano, Sienese mystic 399–400, 419 Brennus, Celtic chieftain 27 Britain 92, 246 Britannicus 143 Bronze Age burial urns 10 Brosses, Charles de 459–60 Brunelleschi, Filippo 377, 379 Brutus, Lucius Junius 15, 16, 17, 55, 104 Brutus, Marcus Junius 95, 99–100, 101–2, 111–12, 114 and Caesar’s assassination 104, 105–6, 107–8 Burchard, Johann 357, 360, 365, 370 Burgundians 199, 235 burials Bronze Age burial urns 10 Christian 214, 225 graves 11, 13, 20 Iron Age burial grounds 11, 12–13 tombs 10, 13, 14, 197, 198 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 470–6, 483, 488–9, 490, 497 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 470, 471–4, 475–6, 479–82, 485, 486, 488, 489–90 death 489 and Shelley 474–9, 487, 488, 489 Byzantine empire 252, 258, 261, 346 Byzantine silk 266 Caelian hill 1, 133, 290 Caere 29 Caesar meaning of the name 82, 179 see also Julius Caesar Caesarion 103, 115 Caetani rebellion 331–2 Cajetan, Cardinal 404, 426 Calderon, Pedro 359–60 calendar 40, 100–1 Callimachus 118 Callisto, nymph 130 Callistus, bishop of Rome 213, 214, 225 Calvin, John 432–3 Camillus, Marcus Furius 19, 23, 27, 28, 29, 58, 59, 80, 102 Campania 35 campanilismo 493 Campus Martius 96, 108, 126, 140, 262, 282 Caninius 101 Cannae, battle of 46–50, 82 canon, origins of the word 212 Capitoline hill 1, 59, 80, 315 the Arx 25 and the Gallic sack of Rome 25, 26–7 and medieval Rome 298–9 and the newborn city of Rome 12–13 Petrarch’s ceremony of laureation 317 senators’ palazzo 305–6, 317 temple of Jupiter 14, 15, 52, 96, 109, 235 Captivi (Plautus) 48–9 Caracalla, Emperor 184, 185–6, 186–7, 193 baths of 478–9, 481, 490 Carafa, Cardinal Gian Pietro 435, 436 Carbonari 488, 496–7, 498–500, 502 Carinus, Emperor 199 Carlo Alberto, King of Piedmont 503–4, 507, 513 Carlotta of Aragon 362–3 Carmina Burana 295 carnival 461, 531 Carocci, Cesira 550, 551, 553 Carolingian empire 254–9, 272 Carpophorus 162 Carthage 14, 42, 50–1, 62–4, 246 destruction of 64–5, 67, 142, 161 Dido, Queen of 4 foundation of 42 in Petrarch’s Africa 316 Roman colony at 75, 100, 181–2 Carus, Emperor 199 Casca 106 Cassius 114 assassination of Caesar 104, 106, 107, 111–12 lions of 161–2 Cassius Dio (historian) 161, 163, 191, 192, 193 Castel Sant’Angelo 242, 266–7, 275, 282, 290, 353, 420, 421 castrati 495, 500 catacombs 214, 225 Catullus 118–19, 121–2 Catanei, Vannozza 347–8, 350, 361 Catherine of Alexandria, St 349 Catherine of Siena, St 345 Catholic Action 573 Catholicism and Christian Democrats 573–4 doctrine of transubstantiation 431–2, 435 and Italian nationalism 502 and Protestant tourists 465–6 religious orders 323–4, 435 and Shelley 477 sixteenth-century revival 434–6, 444–6, 447, 449–51 and the Thirty Years War 451–2 and the Virgin Mary 262, 284–5, 293, 297, 445–6 see also Christian Church; Jesuits; papacy; Virgin Mary Catiline 87, 88–91, 94 Cato the Elder 63, 65, 68–9, 75 Cato the Younger 90–1, 93–4, 95, 98–9, 101–2, 149, 180, 185 Caudine Forks 66 Cavafy, Constantine 115 Cavour, Count 525, 534 Celentano, Adriano 582 Cellini, Benvenuto 421–2, 423 Celsius 230 Celts see Gauls/Celts Cenci, Vicolo 533 Ceres, goddess 48 Ceri, Renzo da 419–20 Charlemagne 251, 254–9, 260, 266, 268, 271, 273, 304, 309 Charles (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’) 460 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor 338 Charles ‘the Hammer’ Martel 252, 254, 258 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 405, 406, 407, 410, 417, 428, 435 Charles VIII, King of France 352, 353–4, 355, 409 Charybdis 4 children, and gladiators 172 Chorsamantis 244 Christian Church Apostles 286, 287, 293 cardinals 283 doctrine of indulgences 402, 403 and the eastern Roman empire 253 evolution of the early church 208–10 Festival of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary 284–5 Franciscan Fraticelli on the End Times 323–4 and the kingdom of Frankia 255–6 medieval 273–4, 277 and myths of ancient Rome 296–7 patriarchal basilicas in Rome 280–5, 291, 295–6, 298, 300–1 relics of saints 272, 292–3, 293–4 simony 285–6, 287 see also Catholicism; churches; papacy; Protestantism Christian Democrats 573–4 Christians 185, 208–20 and ancient Roman religious rites 214–16 charity 213–14 Constantine and Christianity 218–20, 223–4, 530 damnatio ad bestias (condemned to the beasts) 164–5 and Eternal Rome 246, 247 Frankish kingdom 251 Gnostics 212 hierarchy and teachings 213 and Jews 207–8, 212, 529–31, 533 and the Lateran Basilica 224 martyrs 216–17, 291, 292, 293, 295 and neoplatonism 380 Nero’s persecution of 147–9, 150, 151–2, 215–17 and the Roman authorities 211–12 see also Christian Church; churches; papacy churches architecture 300–2 Basilica of St Laurence 291 Basilica of St Paul 224, 295–6, 298, 338, 398 Basilica of San Clemente 301–2, 303 Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore 262, 284–5, 289, 301, 329 Basilica of the Santi Quattro Coronati 290 medieval Rome 262, 269 Santa Maria in Aracoeli 321, 328, 335, 419, 462 Santa Maria del Popolo 384 Santa Maria della Vittoria, Cornaro chapel 446–50 Santa Maria Nova 282, 285 Santa Maria in Trastevere 301 see also Lateran Basilica; St Peter’s Basilica; Sistine Chapel Churchill, Winston 523 Cicero 87–9, 90, 91, 94, 96, 99, 101, 102, 104 death 112 on gladiators 174 and humanism 377 and Petrarch 310, 311, 313, 315 Pro Caelio speech 122 Cimber, Tillius 107 cinema 561–86, 589 Cinecittà studios 564, 567, 569–70, 583, 583–4 neorealist cinema 568–9, 572–3, 574, 583 and poverty in Rome 575–7 Circe, witch-queen 3, 7 Circus Maximus 78–9, 96, 120, 220–1, 297 and the Great Fire of Rome 133–4 Cisalpine Gaul 94–5, 100 Cispian hill 1 cities city states 300 Greek cities in southern Italy 12 medieval 299–300 Rome becomes a city 12–14 see also Italian city states citizenship 73–4 Clairmont, Claire 474, 475, 486 Claudius the Blind 229 Claudius, Emperor 139, 143, 144, 170, 171 Claudius Marcellus 95 Clement IX, Pope 502 Clement V, Pope 310 Clement VI, Pope 319–20, 339 Clement VII, Pope 413, 423, 426, 427, 429, 434 Cleopatra 98, 103, 110, 113, 115 Cloaca Maxima 15, 38, 229, 466 Clodia Pulchra 121–2 Clough, Arthur Hugh 511, 516–17 Clovis, Frankish king 251, 254 Clusium 22, 28 Cola di Rienzo 318–41, 406, 419 Africa 340 and the barons 325–6, 331–6, 340 buono stato (Good Estate) 326–31 coronation 329–30 death 340, 589 early career 319 end of tribunate 336–7 and the government of the Thirteen 319–20 imprisoned in Avignon 338–9 legacy of 340–1 origins 318 and Petrarch 33, 320–1, 327, 328, 330–1, 493–4 propaganda paintings 321–2, 324 seizes power 324–6 Collatinus 15, 16, 17 Colline gate 26 Colonna barons 33–5, 277, 307, 308, 310, 319, 339–40, 353, 413, 588 Colonna, Cardinal Giovanni 312–13, 315, 317, 319, 320, 321, 322, 337–8 Colonna, Giacomo, Bishop of Lombez 312, 314–15, 317 Colonna, Janni 334–5, 336 Colonna, Marc’ Antonio 445 Colonna, Pietro 335 Colonna, Prospero 408, 411 Colonna, Stefano il Vecchio 312, 317, 322, 325, 326, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337–8 Colonna, Stefanuccio 334–5, 336 Colonna, Vittoria 434, 436 the Colosseum 153–77, 588 animals 161–5 building 156–9 executions 164–6 gladiators 153–4, 167–77 inaugural games 158, 160, 163 and the Romantic poets 478, 480, 490 ruins in medieval times 268, 282, 297 seating 159–60, 166–7 and tourists 458, 467, 489 Columbus, Christopher 356 Commodus, Emperor 163, 166, 171, 177, 182 communal government 299–300, 309, 327 communism anti-fascist resistance movement 566, 567, 574 and Christian Democrats 573–4 and fascist Italy 545, 550 Concord, Temple of 59, 80, 89, 477 concrete 156–7 Condivi, Ascanio 379, 390–1 Constantine, Emperor 201, 202, 218–26, 237, 261, 588 Arch of 477 baptism 276 baths of 222 Battle of the Milvian Bridge 204–6, 218, 219–20, 233 and Christianity 218–20, 223–4, 530 and Cola di Rienzo 329 death and burial 226 Donation of 281, 283, 344–5, 377, 405–6, 430 Lateran Basilica 222, 223–4, 226 and Rome 220–3 triumphal arch 222–3 Constantine XI Paleologos 346 Constantinople 226, 231, 237, 252 religious crisis in 253 Constantius, Emperor 200, 201, 217–18 consuls 55, 58, 60 Contarini, Cardinal 434, 435 Coraboeuf, Madeleine 549 Corella, Don Miguel de 367 Cornelia Gracchus 60–1, 63–4, 71 Cornelia, wife of Julius Caesar 83, 86–7 Corneto 325 Cortes, Niccoló Pignatelli Aragona 579 Corvinus, Marcus Valerius Messalla 117 cosmetics 123 Cottin, Major 499 Council of Deputies 491, 507 courtesans 124, 342–3, 344, 346, 370 Crassus 83, 85–6, 89, 92, 93, 177 cremation, and early Romans 10–11 Cremera, Battle of the River 18 Crescentius 273 Crescentius II 274–5 Crispus 225 Croton 12, 34 Cumae 12, 17 Cuny, Alain 582 Curculio (Plautus) 36–8 Curia Hostilia (earliest Senate House) 13 Curia of Pompey 106 cursus honorum 61–2, 74, 75 customs officers 460 Cybele (goddess) 135, 136, 137, 210, 284 Cynoscephalae, battle of 62 Cyprus 444 D’Albret, Charlotte 363 D’Allegre, Yves 353 Danaids 109 Dandolo, Emilio 521–2 Daniel, magus and prophet 137–8, 207 d’Annunzio, Gabriele 541, 563 Danube frontier 188, 199, 231, 233, 248 David, Jacques-Louis 468 De’ Grassi, Paride 375, 390 Decius, Emperor 214, 215 della Rovere, Cardinal Giuliano 352, 353–4, 367, 372 see also Julius II, Pope della Rovere, Francesco Maria 416, 418 Delphi Oracle 15 dialects 493, 494 Diana, goddess 14, 79, 86 Dido, Queen of Carthage 4 Diocles 192, 193 Diocletian, Emperor 199–201, 214 baths of 231, 233, 315 persecution of Christians 216–17 Diomedes 3 Dionysius I of Syracuse 28 divorce 122 Dominican Order 323, 370 Domitian, Emperor 178, 179, 452 Donatello 346, 379 drama comedies of Plautus 30–3, 35–41, 51 Greek comedy 33–5, 36, 51 Greek tragedy 33 Dunant, Henri 525 the dux 252 earthquake (1349) 338 eastern Roman empire 138, 223, 252 see also Constantinople economic decline 231–3 education in ancient Rome 110–11 Egypt 60, 115, 215, 237 Ekberg, Anita 579, 580, 581, 582, 585 El Prete 370–1 Elagabal, sun god 186, 189–90 black stone of 179, 189, 191 temple of 190–1 Elagabalus, boy-emperor 182, 186–7, 188–96, 198, 200, 213, 231, 380 dances 191 death 195, 196, 214, 589 marriage and sexuality 192–3 portrait in the Senate House 178–9, 189, 191 English cemetery 482, 483, 484, 485–6 Enlightenment, and the Jews 534 equites (knights) 23, 74, 76, 160, 166 equites singulares 203, 204–5, 223, 224 Erasmus, Desiderius 376, 428–9, 436 Esquiline hill 1, 140 Este, Alfonso d’ 368, 372–3, 397, 416, 417 Este, Duke Ercole 368, 369–70 Este, Isabella d’ 370, 410, 419, 442 Eternal Rome idea 245–7, 248, 300, 588 Ethiopia 556 Etruscan language 11 Etruscans 9–10, 12, 35 and the Celts/Gauls 20–2, 29 and Roman drama 32 Rome’s wars with 18–19 Euboea, Greek island 12 Euripides 33 Eusebius of Caesarea 216, 218, 219–20 Evander the Arcadian 3, 7, 12, 220 Fabii clan 18, 22, 23 Fabius Maximus, Quintus 45 Farinacci, Roberto 552 farmers 58, 68–70, 73, 75 Farnese, Alessandro 427 Farnese, Giulia 350, 352, 353 the fasces 55, 468 fascist Italy 544–60 anti-fascist resistance movement 566–7 architecture 162 see also Mussolini, Benito Faunus 2, 54 Fausta, wife of Constantine 201, 225 Fellini, Federico 562–3, 564, 565, 567, 568, 570–3, 574–5, 577, 579–86, 589 Felsina 21 Ferdinand II, King of the Two Sicilies 510, 518 Ferdinand, King of Aragon (and Spain) 351, 354, 357, 405, 532 Ferrante, King of Naples 351, 352 festivals 48, 86, 215 Christian 284–5 Ludi Romani 32–3, 86, 292 Lupercalia 32, 81, 102, 103 and Plautus’s comedies 40–1 Fetiales 32 Fiametta 366 Ficino, Marsilio 380 Fidenae 18 film industry see cinema Fiorentino, Giuliano 423 fires 29, 85 destruction of Carthage 64–5, 67, 142 Great Fire of Rome 133–5, 139–42, 221 First World War 538–44 Flaiano, Ennio 578, 581 Florence 376, 384 and Cola di Rienzo 328 Florentine art 379, 381 Medici rule 346, 379–80 Michelangelo in 381–2, 383 Florian, Emperor 199 Foà, Ugo 557 Fontana, Domenico 438 Formosus, Pope 250–1, 259–60 Forum 13, 76, 81, 83, 221, 228, 315 Column of Phocas 471–2 and the Gallic sack of Rome 25 and Julius Caesar 86, 87, 93, 96 and Mazzini’s new republic 512 and Plautus’s comedies 38–9 and the Romantic poets 476–7 the Rostra (speaker’s platform) 72, 81 temple of Caesar 114–15 Forum Boarium 229 Foscolo, Ugo, The Last Letter of Jacopo Ortis 498 foundation myths 1–8, 13, 53–4, 297 France 1848 revolution 506 empire 469–70 French army and the Italian legion 515–24 French Revolution 468–9, 471 Huguenots 433, 444 invasion of Italy (1494) 353–5, 356 massacre of St Bartholomew 444 Second Empire 510, 525 Francis of Assisi, St 322–3 Franciscan Order 323–4, 330, 338 François I, King of France 404–5, 407–8, 409–10, 411–13, 414 Frangipani family 299, 302, 304, 306, 307 Franks 199, 205, 232, 235, 251–2, 253 Frankish empire 254–9, 260 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria 539 Fraticelli 323–4, 338, 406 Frederick Barbarossa 306–7, 309, 495, 504, 509 French Revolution 468–9, 471, 510, 534 Friedrich the Wise of Saxony 405, 407 Frundsberg, Georg von 411–12, 414, 415–16, 417, 419 Fuller, Margaret 511, 524 Fulvius 77–9 funerals 32, 86–7, 108, 168 the Furies 79–80 Futurists 538–9, 541 Gaius Gracchus 60, 61, 71–80, 221, 325 Galerius 200, 201, 202 Gallic empire (Gaul) 196 Gallus 118 Garibaldi, Anita 512–13, 524 Garibaldi brigades 566 Garibaldi, Bruno 541 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 1, 512–18, 534, 538 appearance and dress 514–15 battle on the Janiculum 519–25 early life 512–13 the Garibaldini 513–14, 519 grandsons of 540–1 and Italian unification 525, 526 Garibaldi, Peppino 541 Gaul 199, 235 Gauls/Celts armies 24 Caesar’s victories in Gaul 92–3, 97, 100 and the Catiline conspiracy 89 Celtic culture 20–3 Gallic Sack of Rome 9–10, 23–9, 32, 35, 58, 180 in Hannibal’s army 46–7 Roman citizens 168 Gelasius I, Pope 257 Genoa 376 Gentile, Giovanni 552 Germanic tribes 180, 181, 199, 231, 232 invasions by 233–5 see also Goths; Huns; Visigoths Geta 183–4, 185–6 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 379 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 379, 381, 386 Gibbon, Edward 459–60, 461–2, 470 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 247, 462, 475 Gil de Albornoz 339 Giotto 379 gladiators 153–4, 167–77 death of 173–6 popularity of 172–3 prisoners of war as 168 slaves as 168 Spartacus 85, 168, 177 training 169–70, 171 Gnostics 212 gods and goddesses 2, 14, 189, 192 Egyptian 124, 135, 182, 215 and the Gallic sack of Rome 23, 27–8 Greco-Roman 215 of immigrants and foreigners 135–6, 189–90 and the kings of Rome 54–5 pagan mythology and Renaissance art 380–1 Roma Dea 246, 247, 248, 349 and the Trojan War 3 the Unconquerable Sun cult 214, 218 see also Elagabal, sun god Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 464, 465–8, 470 Golden House 141, 157, 588 Gonsalvo de Cordoba 372 Gonzaga, Caterina 352 Gonzaga, Ferrante 419 Gonzaga, Francesco, Marquis of Mantua 355, 368, 372, 409 Goths 199, 237–45, 246 Ostrogothic kingdom 236–7 siege of Rome 239–45, 247–8 Gracchus brothers see Gaius Gracchus; Tiberius Gracchus Grand Tour 458–9, 462, 470 Gratian, John 287 Gratian’s Concordance 303–4 Greece architecture 156 art 463–4 Battle of Pharsalus 95–6, 99, 100 cultural renaissance 188 and the early Christian church 208–10 revolt against Ottoman rule 489 Roman acquisition of 51, 59 theatres 157, 167 Greeks cities in southern Italy 12, 34 drama 33–5, 51, 151 and elegiac metre 118 and the Gauls 20 Greco-Roman religion 215 and Plautus’s comedies 36–8, 39, 51 and Rome’s foundation myth 3 Gregorovius, Ferdinand 533–4 Gregory IX, Pope 345 Gregory of Tusculum, Count 276, 277, 286–7 Gregory VII, Pope (the Great) 287, 288–9, 290, 298, 299, 307, 531 Gregory XVI, Pope 503, 504 Grey, Nadia 582 Guiccioli, Teresa 488 Guillaume, Ferdinand (Polidor) 582 Gullace, Teresa 567 Guy of Tuscany 264–5 Habsburg Empire rule in Italy 493, 510 and the Thirty Years War 451–2 Hadrian, Emperor 126, 180, 222 and Eternal Rome 246 Mausoleum of 220, 242, 266 Hannibal 42–50, 60, 61, 62, 68, 98 as character in Plautus’s comedy Poenulus 41, 43, 44 Hawkwood, Sir John 345 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Marble Faun 489 Heiric of Auxerre 309 Helena, mother of Constantine 225 Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor 287 Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor 289–90 Henry VIII, King of England 409, 410, 433 Herculaneum 173 Hercules 3, 7, 14, 110, 166, 214 Altar of 220 Hermes Aërios 182 Herod Antipas 208 Hesiod 111 Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII) 287, 288–9, 290, 299 hills surrounding Rome 1–2 Hitler, Adolf 555, 556, 558 Hoffstetter, Gustav von 518, 521 Homer 111 homosexuality 118–19, 126 Horace 114, 117, 126, 313 Horatius Cocles 204 Hugh of Provence 264, 265–6, 267, 270, 271 humanism 341, 345–6, 377–8 Humbert of Moyenmoutier 287 Huns 232, 233, 234–5, 244, 495 Hus, Jan 345, 406, 433 I Vitelloni (film) 572, 580 Icelandic pilgrims 278–80, 295, 306 Ignatius of Antioch 164–5 Il Bidone 577 Iliad 3 Innocent II, Pope 304, 305, 306, 307 Innocent III, Pope 348 Innocent VI, Pope 339 Innocent X, Pope 443–4, 446, 452–4 insulae (tenement blocks) 83 Ireland, Christianity in 255–6 Iron Age Italy 10–11 Isabella and Ferdinand 357, 405, 532 Isaiah, prophet 207 Isaurians 238, 244 Ischia 12 Isis, Egyptian goddess 135, 138, 194 Islam 252 Italian city states 309, 376 and Cola di Rienzo 328, 331 Italian Legion 515–17, 519–24 Italian nationalism 494–508 the Carbonari 488, 496–7, 498–500, 502 and the Jews 536 Mazzini’s Giovine Italia 500–1, 503, 508 and the papacy 501–6 uprising of 1848 509–12 see also Mazzini, Giuseppe Italian unification 341, 430, 493–4, 525 and the Jews 534–6 see also Garibaldi, Giuseppe Iuthungi tribe 189 Jacobinism 492, 493, 495, 502 James, brother of Jesus of Nazareth 209 James, Henry 489 James III (the Old Pretender) 460 Janiculum hill 1 Garibaldi’s battle with French troops 519–25 Janni de Vico 331 Janus (god) 2 Temple of 243–4 Jefferson, Thomas 469 Jerome, St 246 Jerusalem 86, 138, 529 Christians in 208, 209 Temple 151, 154–5, 206–7, 212 Jesuits 434–5, 436, 445, 446, 448, 502 missionaries 450–1 theatre at Jesuit schools 450 Jesus of Nazareth 185, 208, 213, 257, 403 and Constantine 220 relic of 294 Jewish war 151 Jews 137–9, 147, 148, 185, 208–9, 212, 436, 529–60 and Christians 207–8, 212, 529–31 conversion to Christianity 533 deportation of (1943) 558–60 expulsion from Spain 357 and the First World War 542 ghettos 502, 532–6, 559 Great Synagogue 529–30, 535–6, 557 history of the Jews in Rome 528–9 and Italian nationalism 536 and Italian unification 534–6 and Mussolini’s Italy 551, 554–5, 556–8 and the papacy 530–2 peddlers 533–4 physicians 532, 551 pogroms of 530 sacred menorah 155, 235, 528 and socialism 536–7 and Zionism 536 see also Sarfatti, Margherita Joachim of Fiore 323, 327 Joanna the Mad of Castile 405, 407 John of Austria, Don 445 John the Baptist 208, 294 John of Leiden 432 John Philagathos 275 John X, Pope 263, 264–5 John XI, Pope 266 John XII, Pope 270–2 Juba of Numidia 97–8 Judea 137, 138, 206–7 Julia, aunt of Caesar 86–7 Julia, daughter of Augustus 129, 130, 142 Julia, daughter of Caesar 108 Julia Domna 184–6, 193 Julia Maesa 186, 187, 193, 194, 195 Julia Mamaea 194, 195 Julia Sohaemias 194, 195 Julian calendar 101 Julianus, Didius 183 Julio-Claudian dynasty of emperors 155 Julius Caesar 81–108, 178, 179, 220, 297, 528 Anticato 101–2 appearance and dress 81, 82–3, 90, 96–7 assassination 104–8, 111–12 and Augustus/Octavianus 111, 127 and the Catiline conspiracy 88–91 and Cesare Borgia 365–6 conquest of Gaul 92–3 cremation 108 crossing of the Rubicon 94–5, 99 deification of 114–15, 137 descent from Aeneas 81–2 as dictator 102–3 early life 83–6 and the Games 161–2, 163, 171 the Julian clan 82–3 Marcus Antonius’s attempt to crown 82, 103–4 rise to power 86–7 sexuality 84 statue of 102, 112 triumphant return to Rome 96–8 and the triumvirate 92–3 wins consulship 91–2 Julius II, Pope 375–6, 377, 378, 383–5, 419, 440, 532 as Cardinal della Rovere 352, 353–4, 367, 372 death 376, 401 decoration of apartments 391–2 as the ‘Fearsome Pope’ 375–6 Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling 385, 386, 387, 397 and Raphael 392–3 Juno, goddess 19, 27, 136 Jupiter (god) 6, 19, 130, 181, 214 Capitoline Temple 2, 14, 15, 27, 109, 235 festival of Jupiter Optimus Maximus 32–3 and Numa Pompilius 54, 56 Justinian, Emperor 237, 239, 247 Juvenal 158, 167, 169, 170, 172, 176–7, 204 Kaiserchronik 145 Kappler, Herbert 558 Keats, John 483–5, 488, 570 Endymion 483 Kerr, Deborah 570 kings of Rome 4, 13–14, 15–16, 54–6, 115, 142 Ostrogoths 236–7 Kircher, Athanasius 452 Knights Hospitaller 444 Koutilas 244 Kuliscioff, Anna 537, 538 La Dolce Vita 561–2, 580–6 La Presa di Roma 563 La Strada (film) 572–3, 574, 575, 584 Labienus 95, 98 Lactantius 219 Lambert of Spoleto 260 land reform 68–70, 71–2, 73, 88 Laocoön statue 394–5 Lars Porsenna 17–18, 22 Lateran Basilica 145, 222, 223–4, 226, 238, 250–1, 270, 280–1, 282, 292, 298, 438 Cola di Rienzo at 322 Lateran Palace 264, 280, 281 Lateran Treaty 555 Latin language 11, 12, 256 Latium 2, 18, 35, 284 laureation, Petrarch’s ceremony of 316–18 Laurentius (Laurence) 216, 224, 291 Lauroleus 164 law, tables of 57, 58 Lee, Belinda 581 Leigh, Augusta 474 Lentulus Spinther 95 Leo I, Pope 235 Leo X, Pope 373, 401–2, 404, 405, 406, 413 Leonardo da Vinci 392, 395 Leopardi, Count Giacomo 494–5, 496 Lepanto, Battle of 445 Lepida, Domitia 142, 143 Lesseps, Ferdinand de 518, 519 Leuderis 238 lex sacrata 57, 58–9 The Liberal 487, 489 Libya 539, 564 Licinius, eastern Roman Emperor 223 lions 161–2, 163, 165 Lippi, Filippo 379 Liudprand, bishop of Cremona 261, 262, 265, 267, 272 Livia, wife of Augustus 122, 123, 124, 129 Livius Andronicus 36 Livy 14–15, 16, 18, 22, 245, 495 on the Gallic sack of Rome 23, 26, 27, 28, 29 on the Hannibalic Wars 47–8 and Petrarch 313, 314, 315 Lo Sceicco Bianco (the White Sheik) 570–1, 571–2 Lodewyk the Belgian 312 Lodovico Buonarroti 381, 397 Lollobrigida, Gina 578 Lombard League 495, 504, 509 Lombards 252, 253–4, 256, 257, 265 Longinus, Gaius Cassius 101 Loren, Sophia 578 Lotto, Lorenzo 391 Louis the Pious 259 Louis XII, King of France 362, 364, 369 Louis XVI, King of France 492 Louise, Queen 409–10 love elegies metre 118 Ovid 117–25, 126 Loyola, Ignatius 434–5, 436, 450 Lucan 149 Lucia, Sister 369–70 Lucius II, Pope 306 Lucretia, rape of 15–16, 17, 315 ludi see festivals Ludi Romani festival 32–3 Lugdunum, Battle of 183 Lumiere brothers 563 Luni 279 Lupercalia festival 32, 81, 102, 103 Luther, Martin 403–7, 413, 434, 446 and the Diet of Worms 406–7 Disputation 404 and the Jews 532 Lutheranism 432–3 and the Peasants’ War 414 and the sack of Rome 428, 429 visit to Rome 400–1 Machiavelli, Niccolo 364–5, 414–15, 436, 494 Macrinus, Emperor 184, 186, 187–8 Maderno, Carlo 440 Maecenas 113–14, 129 magic 138 magistrates 16, 17, 58 magistracy of the cursus honorum 61–2 and Roman citizens 73–4 tribunes 56 Magna Mater (Great Mother Cybele) 40, 86 Magnani, Anna 567, 569, 578 Magnesia, battle of 62 Mago, brother of Hannibal 44 Magyars 270, 277, 295, 336 Mahon 44 Maidalchini, Donna Olimpia 453–4 Malta 444 Mameli, boy poet 523 Manara, Luciano 514, 518, 521, 523 Mancinus, Gaius 65–6 Manicheans 216 Manius Curius Dentatus 65 map of the world 308–9, 313, 341 Marcellus 129 Theatre of 220, 319, 325 Marcion 212, 213 Marcomannic Confederation 180 Marcus Antonius 105, 107, 110, 111, 112–13, 115, 129 offers crown to Caesar 82, 103–4 Marcus Aurelius, Emperor 168, 180, 181–2, 185, 188, 195, 222, 274 statue of 270, 272 Marcus Lepidus 112 Marcus Manlius 58 Marcus Papirius 26 Maria Enriques, Doña 351 Marignano, battle of 408, 409, 412 Marinetti, Filippo 539, 541, 544, 552 Marozia 262, 263–7, 276, 282, 286 Mars (god) 4, 6 Marshall Plan 569 Marsyas, satyr 40 Martial 154, 155–6, 158, 160–1, 162, 164, 166, 176, 230 Martin V, Pope 345, 346 Martino del Porto 326 Marx, Karl 468, 469 Masaccio 346, 379 Masina, Andrea 514, 519, 521, 522, 523 Masina, Giulietta 572, 575, 578 Mastroianni, Marcello 581–2, 584–5 Matteotti, Giacomo 550 Mavrocordato, Alexander 484, 489 Maxentius, Emperor 198, 201, 202–6, 218, 220 Basilica 221, 222 Maxentius’s Circus 197–8, 225 Maximian 200, 201 Maximilian, Holy Roman Emperor 354, 404 Maximinus Daia 223 Maximinus Thrax 198 Mazzini, Giuseppe 497–501, 523–4, 538 and the Carbonari 498–500 and Garibaldi 513, 515, 527 Giovine Italia 500–1, 503, 508 and Italian unification 525, 526 and the new Roman republic 509–12, 525 as triumvir 518–19 Medici, Giovanni de’ (of the Black Bands) 413, 415–16, 420 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 379–80, 381, 382, 384, 385, 401 Medici, Piero 382 medieval Rome 267–70, 282, 296, 298–9, 315, 376–7 Melqart, Phoenician trader-god 14 Menander 34 Metternich, Prince Klemens von 493, 494, 497, 499, 505, 506, 507, 534 Michelangelo 436, 437, 462, 464, 465 background 378–9 Battle of the Centaurs sculpture 381 and Bernini 448 character 390 David 383 dome of St Peter’s basilica 430, 440, 441 and the Laocoön statue 394–5 move to Rome 382–3 myth of 379 Pietà 383 and Raphael 392 Sistine Chapel frescoes 385–98, 429, 465 tomb for Pope Julius II 384–5, 389 middle class, in medieval Rome 319, 324 Mila, Adriana 350, 352, 353 Milan 226, 231, 289, 299, 300, 376 French invasions of 407–8, 411–12, 416–18 and Italian unification 506 Sforza family 346, 349 mills, and the siege of Rome 240–1 Milphio 43, 44–5 Milvian Bridge Battle of 204–6, 218, 219–20, 223, 233 destruction of 319 Mirabilia Urbis Romae 296–7, 299, 300 Mithras, Persian god 138, 302 Mithridates 86, 94, 97 Mochi, Francesco 441 Mommsen, Theodor 29 Mons Albanus 11, 18–19 Montanus 210 Monte Mario 2, 279, 294, 339 Monteverdi, Orfeo 442 Mucius Scaevola 166 Munda, Battle of 101 Müntzer, Thomas 414 Mussolini, Anna Maria 579 Mussolini, Benito 539–57 background 537–8 and the Blackshirts 544–7, 550 and cinema 564, 565 conquest of Ethiopia 556 death 557 and the First World War 542–4 and the Jews 551, 554–5, 556, 557–8 march on Rome 545–7 and Nazi Germany 558, 565–6 and women 549–50, 553–4 Mussolini, Rachele 544, 551, 554 Mussolini, Vittorio 565, 566 Mutina, Battle of 111, 112 Mytilene, Siege of 84 Namatianus 234 Nana, Aïché 579, 581 Naples 12, 237–8, 336, 346, 351, 376, 478 French invasion (1494) 353, 354–5, 356 and Italian unification 507 Petrarch in 316 Napoleon Bonaparte 469–70, 471, 472, 502, 534 new settlement in Italy 492, 493, 494 Napoleon III, Emperor (Louis-Napoleon) 510, 515, 517, 518, 525 Narses 248 nationalism see Italian nationalism Nazi Germany and the Jews 555, 557–60 occupation of Italy 558, 565–6 Neoplatonism 218, 380, 395–6 Nero, Emperor 139–52, 166, 183, 204, 209, 229, 230–1, 286 as the Antichrist 152 death 150–1, 155 early life 142–3 Golden House 141, 157, 588 and the Great Fire 139–42, 147 and the Jews 528 performance of the Fall of Troy 141–2 persecution of Christians 147–9 pursuit of art and extravagance 145–7 Nerva, Emperor 179 Newman, Paul 581 Nicholas V, Pope 346 Nicodemus 279 Nicomedes, King 84 Nikulás of Munkathverá 279–80, 284, 286, 291, 294–5, 298, 299–303, 306, 307 Ninchi, Annibale 564, 582 Noah 297 Normans 288, 290 notaries in medieval Rome 318–19 Notti di Cabiria (film) 575, 576, 577–8 Numa Pompilius 54, 56, 78 Numantia 66, 67 Numerian, Emperor 199 Numidian cavalry 45–6, 47, 50 Numitor 4 Ocrisia 7 Octavia 123, 129 Octavian (Pope John XII) 270–2 Octavianus (later Augustus) 111–16 see also Augustus, Emperor Octavius, Marcus 70 Odo, Abbot of Cluny 269 Odoacer 235 Odysseus 3, 4, 7 Odyssey 3 opera 442, 495–6, 505–6, 508–9 Opimius 76–7, 78, 80 Oppian hill 1 Oppius 100 Orsini clan 319, 331, 332–3, 336, 340, 350, 353, 413 Orsino, Orsini 350, 353 Orsino, Prince Filippo 581 ostriches 163 Ostrogoth kingdom 236–7, 251–2 Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor 261, 272–3 Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor 273 Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor 273–6 Ottoman Turks 346–7, 349, 444–5, 489 Oudinot, General 515, 518, 519, 525 Ovid 54, 109–11, 116–32, 118, 185, 245, 256 Amores 118, 119, 125, 126 Ars Amatoria 126–7, 130 death 131 education 110–11, 116–17 exile of 130–1 Heroides 127 love elegies 117–25, 126 marriages 125 Medea 127 Metamorphoses 127–8, 131–2, 381 and Petrarch 341 Remedia Amoris 127 and Renaissance art 381 Tristia 131, 467 pagan mythology see gods and goddesses Pagano, Bartolomeo 563–4 Paine, Thomas 469 Paisà (film) 568–9 Palatine hill 83, 96 early fortifications 12 House of Romulus 7 and the newborn city of Rome 12–13 Otto III’s palace 275 and Rome’s foundation myths 1, 2, 3, 7 ruins of ancient Rome 275 stage for Plautine plays 40 temple of Apollo 109–10 Palestine 216, 217, 246 Palladium 192 Pallottelli, Alice 554 Pantheon 126, 220, 441 papacy and the 1848 rebellion 492 in Avignon 310, 314, 320–1, 329, 333, 339, 344–5 the ‘barbarian popes’ and German reformers 286–90 and Bernini 438, 439–40 and the Byzantine emperor 252 cadaver synod 250–1, 259–60, 261 and the ‘cardinal nephew’ 438–9 and the Carolingian dynasty 254, 257–8 and the Colonna barons 310 Curia (papal court) 304, 504 the dark century 260–1, 262–5, 266, 270–1, 273, 274–5 decretals 304 Donation of Constantine 281, 283, 344–5, 377, 405–6, 430 Easter procession in Rome 281–4 ending of temporal power 506–9 and fascist Italy 362 Gratian’s Concordance 303–4 and the Holy Roman Empire 414–15 In Coena Domini (papal bull) 399 and Italian nationalism 501–6 and Italian unification 526 and the Jews 530–2, 533, 560 and the medieval senate 305–7 move to Avignon 310 and Mussolini 555 nepotism 347 origins of 226 Renaissance popes 345–7 responses to Protestant reformers 434–6 return to Rome from Avignon 344–7 schism 345 see also Lateran Basilica Paris 316, 444 Parthians 168, 180–1, 184 Pasolini, Paolo 575–7, 581, 584 Passeri, Bernardino 422 Pastrone, Giovanni 563–4 patricians 55–9, 60, 70, 80 Paul III, Pope 434, 435 Paul IV, Pope 532 Paul, St 152, 209–10, 212, 213, 286 basilica 224, 295–6, 298, 338, 398 Paul V, Pope 437, 439 Paullus, Lucius Aemilius 62, 63 Pavia, battle of 411, 412–13, 414 Peace of the Gods (pax deorum) 137 Peasants’ War 414 Pellegrino Rossi, Count 491–2, 507–8 Peloponnesian War 33 Pepin, King of the Franks 254, 257 Perseus, Macedonian king 62 Persians 237 Pertinax, Emperor 182 Perugino, Pietro 386, 387, 391 Petacci, Claretta 553–4, 557 Peter Damian 287 Peter, St 152, 224, 254, 257, 286, 300, 456 see also St Peter’s Basilica Petracollo the Florentine 309, 310, 311 Petrarch 309–18, 337–8, 343, 345, 346, 377, 436 Africa 315–16 background 309 ceremony of laureation 316–18 and Cola di Rienzo 33, 320–1, 327, 328, 330–1, 339, 340, 493–4 De Viris Illustribus 315 early life 310–13 engagement with ancient Romans 313–14 and Italian unification 493–4 and Laura 311–12, 316, 317, 337, 341 visits to Rome 314–15, 316–17, 338 Petronius 149 the Satyricon 145–6, 173 Pharsalus, Battle of 95–6, 99, 100, 103 Philip II, King of Spain 444–5 Philippi, Battle of 112, 114, 122 Philocrates 80 Phoenicians 14 Piazza Colonna 181 Pico della Mirandola 380, 382 Picus (prophetic woodpecker) 2, 54 Piedmont, and Italian nationalism/unification 497–8, 498–9, 503–4, 506–7, 513, 525 Pierleoni family 299, 302, 307, 533 pilgrimages 278–80, 291–5, 401 see also Nikulás of Munkathverá Pincian hill 1 Pinturicchio 349, 384, 391 Piranesi, Giambattista 466 Views of Rome 462–3 Pisa 279, 300 Pistoia, Giovanni da 393 Pius II, Pope 346, 347 Pius IX, Pope (Pio Nono) 504–5, 506, 507–8, 510, 515 and the Jews 534 Syllable of Errors 526 Pius VII, Pope 502 Pius XII, Pope 560 plague 337–8, 530–1 Plato 185, 210, 218, 380 Neoplatonism 218, 380, 395–6 Phaedo 98 Plautus, Titus Maccius 30–2, 33, 35–41, 51, 371 Captivi 48–9 Curculio 36–8 Poenulus 41 Pseudolus 39–40 plebeians 56–9, 69–71, 80 tribunes 56, 58–9, 60, 70–1, 72–4, 78, 88 Pliny the Elder 394 Pliny the Younger 211–12 Plotinus 218, 380 Plutarch 78, 495 Pole, Cardinal 434, 435 Poliziano, Angelo 381 Polybius 59, 64 Polyphemus 4 the pomoerium 6 Pompeii 172 Pompey 83, 86, 92, 93, 94, 95–6, 98, 99, 106, 112, 138, 162, 177 Jewish captives 428 Theatre of 157, 220, 236 Pomponius 79 Pomponius Mela 308, 313 Pomptine Marsh 100 Pons Aurelius 228 Pontius Pilate 529 Popilius Laenas 106 Porcia, wife of Brutus 102, 106 the Pornocracy 265 Porphyry 380 Porta Flaminia 238 Porta Salaria 242 Portus 244 potters 269 poverty in Rome, and cinema 575–7 Praetorian Guard 182–3, 194, 195, 196, 199, 203 battle of the Milvian Bridge 205, 206 Praturlon, Pierluigi 581 priests 55–6 Caesar as pontifex maximus 87, 96 Luperci 81 Salian 32 prisoners of war Caesar’s 97 as gladiators 168 Probus, Emperor 199 Procida, Don Gaspar de 350–1 Procopius, historian 238, 244, 245 Prometheus 479, 481–2 Propertius 117, 118, 313 prostitution 124, 126, 342–4, 346, 418, 461 in cinema 575, 577–8, 584–5 and syphilis 355–6 Protestantism 432–4, 438 and Catholic reformers 434–6, 445, 446 Hussites 446 and the Jews 532 Luther and the Reformation 403–7, 428, 430, 432–3 Protestant tourists 465–6 and the Thirty Years War 451–2 Pseudolus (Plautus) 39–40 Ptolemy VIII of Egypt 60 Pucci, Lorenzo 350 Punic language 41 Punic wars 42, 60, 61, 63 Pydna, battle of 62 Quinn, Anthony 572 Quirinal hill 1, 222 Quo Vadis 569–70 Raphael 391–3, 398, 401, 465 Ravenna 231, 233, 235, 247, 252, 254 Reformation see Protestantism Regensburg 274 regia 13, 87 religion 135–7 deified emperors 138 and Elagabalus 189–90, 193–4 priests and patricians 55–6 rituals of Roman religion 32, 214–15 and the state 136–7 see also Christian Church; Christians; festivals; gods and goddesses; Jews Remus 3–8, 10, 12 Renaissance art 377, 378–81, 383–6 fresco painting 387–9 see also Michelangelo republic (ancient Rome) ending of 80, 103, 108, 136 establishment of 16–17, 55–60 and the French Revolution 469 and Octavianus (Augustus) 115 republic (Mazzini, declared 1849) 509–12, 525 republic (postwar) 566–7 rex sacrorum 17 Reynolds, Joshua 464 rhetoric 111, 116 Rhine frontier 188, 196, 221, 231, 235 Richlin, Amy 35 Risorgimento 526, 538 see also Italian nationalism; Italian unification River Trebbia, battle of 43–4, 45 Robert Guiscard 290 Robert the Wise, King of Naples 316, 336 Roma Dea (divine spirit of Rome) 246, 247, 248, 349 Romanticism English poets 470–90 and Italian nationalism 494–5, 496, 498 Rome: Open City (film) 565, 567–8 Romulus 3–8, 10, 12, 228, 589 and Augustus 126 and Caesar 102–3 and the kings of Rome 13, 53–4 and Octavianus/Augustus 114, 126 Romulus Augustulus, child-emperor 235 Romulus, son of Maxentius 198 Rossellini, Roberto 565, 567, 567–8, 568–9 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 475 ruins of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century tourists 457–8, 462–3, 466–7, 470–1 and humanism 377–8 and Martin Luther’s visit 401 and the medieval city 268, 275, 296, 315, 376–7 and Napoleon 472 and the Romantic poets 471–2, 472–4, 477–8, 479–81 Sabine women 122–3 Sacks of Rome Gallic 9–10, 23–9, 32, 35, 58, 180 imperial troops (1527) 418–30 Vandals 235, 236, 237 Visigoths 233–4, 253 St Peter’s Basilica 254, 258, 271–2, 282, 295, 300–1, 306, 307, 426 baldacchino 440–2, 456 rebuilding of 384–5, 401, 403, 430, 440, 443, 444 Salian priests 32 Salus, goddess 102 Samnite Wars 66 Samnites 35 Sancia of Aragon 351, 358, 364, 366, 367 Sangallo, Giuliano da 384, 392, 393, 394, 401, 440 Sansovino, Andrea 384 Santis, Giuseppe 568 Saracens 263, 273, 277, 290 Sardinia 72 Sarfatti, Cesare 537, 538, 540, 551 Sarfatti, Fiammetta 549, 553 Sarfatti, Margherita 537, 538–9, 545–53, 554, 555, 557 and the First World War 542–3, 543–4 Sarfatti, Roberto 542, 553 Sarmatians 232 Saturn (god) 2 Savelli clan 319 Savelli, Luca 336 Savonarola, Girolamo 381–2, 383, 406 Saxons 272 Schmalkaldic League 435 Scipio Aemilianus 63–4, 67, 71, 75 Scipio Africano (film) 564, 582 Scipio Africanus 50, 61, 62, 63, 98, 114 and Petrarch’s Africa 315–16 Scipio, Publius Cornelius 42 Scipio, Quintus Metellus 98 Sebastian, St 291 Secchiaroli, Tazio 579, 580, 581, 583 Second Sophistic era 210 Second World War 558 Seleucia 181 Seleucid empire 62 Sempronia Gracchus 63 senate 60, 74, 75 the Ultimate Decree 77, 88, 89, 90 Senate House 178–9, 183, 189 senators at the Colosseum 160, 166 medieval 305–7 Theophylact 261, 305 Seneca 116, 119, 144, 149–50, 154, 164, 180, 313 Senones 21–2, 28 Second World War, Nazi occupation of Italy 558, 565–6 Sergius III, Pope 261, 262, 265 Sertorius 86 Servian Walls 58, 180 Servilia 91, 99 Severn, Joseph 483–4, 485 Severus Alexander, Emperor 194–5, 195–6, 198 Severus, Emperor 183–4, 184–6, 193, 221, 438 sewers 15, 38, 229, 236–7 Sextus Tarquinius 16 Sforza, Ascanio 349, 351, 358–9, 363, 367 Sforza, Caterina 365, 415 Sforza, Giovanni 351–3, 357–9 Sforza, Ludovico, duke of Milan (Il Moro) 351, 353, 358, 408 Sforza, Massimiliano 407–8 shanty towns 576–7 Shapur I of Persia 199 Shelley, Mary 474, 476–7, 482, 484, 487 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 474–9, 481–3, 484–8, 490 Adonais 483, 485–6, 488 and Byron 474–9, 487, 488, 489 death 487–8 and Mazzini 501 Prometheus Unbound 481–2, 485 Shelley, William (Willmouse) 482–3, 484 Sibylline Books 151, 202 Sica, Vittorio de 571, 574 Sicily 12, 237 and the Gallic sack of Rome 28 and Italian unification 525, 526 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 497, 510 siege of Rome (Goths) 239–45, 247–8 Siena 279 Signorelli, Luca 386, 391 silk, Byzantine 266 Silverius, Bishop of Rome 243 Simon Magus 152, 285–6, 287 Sironi, Mario 552 Sistine Chapel 374–5, 378 Goethe’s visit 466 renovation of the ceiling 385–6, 385–98, 429 Sixtus IV, Pope 385–6 Sixtus V, Pope 438, 455 slaves at the Colosseum 160 Cato the Elder on 68–9 characters in Plautus’s plays 35–6, 37 as gladiators 168, 176 in the Hannibalic wars 50 Spartacus’s revolt 85 socialism and fascist Italy 550 and the First World War 543 and the Jews 536–7 and Mussolini 537–8, 539–40 Socrates 33, 209 Soderini, Piero 383, 386 Solferino, Battle of 525 Sophocles 33 Sorani, Rosina 520, 529, 557 Sordi, Alberto 571 Spain 50, 62, 65–7, 68, 91, 101, 235, 252, 255 and Catholicism 434 Jewish refugees from 532 Spanish Steps 460, 484, 570 Spartacus 85, 168, 177 Spiritual Franciscans 323–4, 330, 338 Statius 317 Stephen, Christian martyr 208 Stephen II, Pope 254 Stephen VI, Pope 250–1, 259–60, 261 Stoics 144, 149–50, 185, 210 suasoria 116 Suetonius 107–8, 125–6, 317 Sulla 83–4, 85, 89, 102 Sulla, Faustus Cornelius 95 Sulpicia 117 Sulpicianus, Titus 182–3 Swiss Confederacy 407–8 Swiss Guard 419–20, 422–3 Sybaris 12 Sylvester I, Pope 226, 275, 281, 283, 405–6 Sylvester II, Pope 275 syphilis 355–7, 362 Syracuse 12, 28 Syria 86, 180–1, 184, 196, 198–9, 237 Tacitus 146, 150 Tacitus, Emperor 199 Tanzi, Cornelia 554 Tarentum 12, 34, 35 Tarmoutos 244 Tarpeian rock 58 Tarquin the Elder 298 Tarquin the Proud 15, 16–17, 55, 466 Tebaldi, Pier Paolo 424 television 573 Teresa of Avila 446–8, 449–50, 465 Terpnus 143 Tertullian 182, 217 Testaccio 1–2 Tetzel, Johannes 402, 403, 404, 405 Theoderic the Goth 279 Theoderic, King 236–7, 239, 247 Theodora 237, 262–3 Theodora the Younger 262 Theophanu 273 Theophylact 262–3, 264, 276, 286, 298, 305 Theophylact clan 261–77 Theos Hypsistos (god) 219 Thirteen, government of the 319–20 Thirty Years War 451–2 Thrasea Paetus 149 thumb signals 174 Tiber, River 13, 228 and early trade routes 11 and the Jewish ghetto 533 in medieval Rome 268–9 and Rome’s foundation myth 2 Tiberius, Emperor 131, 139 Tiberius Gracchus 50, 52–3, 60, 61, 62–7, 69–71, 72, 77 tibia (musical pipe) 40, 41, 42 Tibullus 118 Titus, Emperor 154–5, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 165, 171, 175–6, 206–7, 212, 230, 588 and the Jews 528, 531 Tivoli 305 Torrella, Gaspar 356 Toscanini, Arturo 544 Totila, Gothic king 248 tourists 587, 588 eighteenth-century 458–67, 470–1 postwar 570 Romantic poets 470–90, 494–5 Tours, Battle of 252, 253, 254 trade Celts/Gauls 20, 21 early Roman trade routes 11–12 tragedy, Greek 33, 36 Trajan, Emperor 179, 211, 222 Column 282 Transtiberim 134, 135, 138, 227 Tree, Iris 582 Trent, Council of 435–6, 440, 445 Treves, Claudio 537 tribunes Cola di Rienzo 326, 329 plebeians 56, 58–9, 60, 70–1, 72–4, 78, 88 Trier 221, 226 Trojan war 3, 4, 18, 19, 142 Turati, Filippo 537 Tuscan dialect 494 Tuscany, and Italian unification 506–7 Tusculum 18 Twain, Mark 489 Twelve Tables 57 Uccello, Paolo 379 unification see Italian unification United States, American films made in Italy 569–70 Urania, goddess 192 Urban V, Pope 344–5 Urban VIII, Pope 439–40, 443, 453, 515–16 Ustinov, Peter 570 Utica 98 Valdo, Augusto 429 Valerian, Emperor 198–9, 216 Valla, Lorenzo 377, 405 Vandals 199, 234, 235, 236, 237, 251–2 Vasari, Giorgio 378–9, 387–8, 390, 393, 397 the Vatican 297, 298 Vatican hill 2 Vatican Palace, chestnut ball 342–3, 370 Veii, Etruscan city 18–19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 418, 419 Velian ridge 1 Venice 346, 355, 376, 384 and Italian unification 506, 510, 526 Vercingetorix 97 Verdi, Giuseppe 495, 505, 508–9 Veronica, St 294, 441 Vespasian, Emperor 137, 146, 151, 155, 157, 322, 528 Vesta (goddess) 6 temple of 87, 192, 297, 384 Vestal Virgins 84, 166 and Elagabalus 192, 194 and the Gallic sack of Rome 25, 26, 27 and Rome’s foundation myths 4 temple 221 Vesuvius, Mount 172 Via Appia 197–8, 225 Via Flaminia 203 Via Lata 262, 264, 267, 282 Via Sacra 83, 96, 106, 221 Titus’s arch 154–5 Via Veneto 570, 578, 580, 583, 584–5, 586 Vienna, Congress of 492–3 Villa Corsini 520–3 Viminal hill 1 Virgil 113, 114, 117, 185, 218, 245, 256 Aeneid 114–15, 127–8 Feast of the Assumption 284–5, 329 and Petrarch 311, 313, 341 and Renaissance popes 345, 346 Virgin Mary 262, 284–5, 293, 297, 445–6 Visconti, Luchino 568, 574 Visigoths 233–4, 235, 236, 246, 252, 253, 495 Viterbo 345 Vittigis, Gothic king 239 Vittorio Emanuel II, King of Italy 525, 535 Vittorio Emanuel III, King of Italy 546, 548, 565 Vivian, Charles 487 Volsci tribe 18 Waterloo, Battle of 492 weapons 205, 241–2 Westphalia, Peace of 452 Whitby, Synod of 256 White Company 345 White Mountain, Battle of 446, 451 Williams, Edward 484, 486–7 Williams, Jane 486, 487 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 463–4, 465, 470, 472, 477 women at the Colosseum 166 early Christian 213 executions of female criminals 164 female sexuality 122 and gladiators 172, 177 Jewish 529 and Ovid’s love elegies 121–5 see also prostitution women’s suffrage 552 written word, and Greek drama 33–5 Wycliffe, John 345, 406 Year of the Four emperors 155 Zama, Battle of 50, 51, 62 Zealots 207, 208 Zenobia of Palmyra, Queen 196, 199 Zionism 536 Zosimus, Byzantine historian 204 Zoticus 192–3 Zwingli, Huldrych 432 THE ETERNAL CITY Pegasus Books, Ltd. 148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor New York, NY 10018 Copyright © 2018 by Ferdinand Addis First Pegasus Books hardcover edition November 2018 All rights reserved.


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

Over time, if an economy develops and its population expands, the un-owned land available for improvement will become scarcer and eventually there will be no ‘rent-free’ land left. The rent then becomes determined by locational value. In his classic text Progress and Poverty ([1879] 1979, pp. 95–101), land reformer Henry George describes an ‘unbounded savannah’ with a single settler, who, though blessed with all the gifts of nature and an abundance of free land, is actually materially poor for there is little he can do on his own to raise himself beyond subsistence. Over time, as more settlers arrive, the settlement develops around the original settler and the collective efforts of the increasing population enable economic growth.

Brown, Meta, Lee Donghoon, Joelle Scally, Katherine Strair, and Wilbert van der Klaaw. 2016. ‘The Graying of American Debt’. Liberty Street Economics. 24 February. http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/02/the-graying-of-american-debt.html#.V_AHIoWmqU0. Bryden, John, and Charles Geisler. 2007. ‘Community-Based Land Reform: Lessons from Scotland’. Land Use Policy 24 (1): 24–34. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York: W. W. Norton. BSA (Building Societies Association). 2015. ‘The History of Building Societies (BSA Factsheet)’. https://www.bsa.org.uk/information/consumer-factsheets/general/the-history-of-building-societies.


Pirates and Emperors, Old and New by Noam Chomsky

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, union organizing, urban planning

Statistics compiled for the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization’s annual meeting in Rome this week [June 11, 2002] show that the number of people with chronic hunger in Central America has risen by almost a third in the last decade, from 5 million to 6.4 million of the 28 million population.4 UN agencies are seeking remedies, “but without effective land reform these measures can have only limited impact.” The popular organizations that might have led the way to land reform and other measures to benefit the poor majority were effectively destroyed by Washington’s “war on terror.” Formal democracy was instituted, but it impresses mostly ideologues. Polls throughout the hemisphere reveal that faith in democracy has steadily declined, in part because of the destruction of the social base for effective democracy, and in part, very likely, because the institution of formal democracy was accompanied by neoliberal policies that reduce the space for democratic participation.


pages: 306 words: 92,704

After the Berlin Wall by Christopher Hilton

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce

The cut-off was 1933, when the Nazi anti-Semitic legislation became law and Jewish property was liable to confiscation. The dead hand of Soviet occupation was more profound in its impact than anything in the Hitler era. An author, A. James McAdams, summed this up by writing: Under the pretext of engaging in ‘land reform’ in their occupation zone, Soviet authorities undertook the sweeping and, in many cases, brutal confiscation of nearly one-third of the landed property of the area that would eventually become the GDR. Some of the occupation regime’s measures were directed against identifiable war criminals and former Nazi leaders and their sympathisers.

If the GDR towns struck the visitor as dilapidated, the countryside conveyed openness: the fields were enormous and seemed to stretch to the horizon. This was the collective in operation. ‘The farming is a very exciting topic because it was a very interesting development,’ Dr Händler says. ‘First of all we had the land reform from 1945 onwards and every farmer would get a piece of land as his working property. He was not allowed to sell it but he could use it free of charge, no rent. From the beginning of the 1950s there were machine and tractor stations. It meant the farmers could rent big machines and all could share them.


pages: 323 words: 94,406

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, Cape to Cairo, Crossrail, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, railway mania, refrigerator car, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban planning

While comparisons with the United States are inevitably simplistic, the changes were nevertheless radical and ‘Siberian migration produced a society much more like that of America than was the Russian society from which it stemmed.’12 Moreover, the migration afforded by the railway not only transformed Siberia but had repercussions throughout Russia: ‘Siberian migration resulted in the creation of a new Siberian society, which had a higher level of prosperity and a greater degree of social flexibility than European Russia.’13 The migration led to a new type of peasant who owned a smallholding, a different model from the communal one they left behind. This apparent liberalization by the monarchist regime was a response to the failed 1905 revolution. The relatively progressive politician Pyotr Stolypin, who became prime minister the following year, was anxious to win over the discontented peasantry. Land reforms directed at the remaining peasants in European Russia provided them with more freedom and created for the first time legally independent farmers living on their own land. Oddly, despite these improvements to the peasants’ conditions in European Russia and the gradual move away from the oppressive and inefficient commune system, the end of the Russo-Japanese War (during which there had been a steady flow of around 800 migrants per week to Siberia) led to a remarkable increase in the rate of migration.

., 94 Newby, Eric, xix, 30, 253–4 Nicholas I, Tsar, 2–3, 5, 11 and railways, 13–21, 24 Nicholas II, Tsar, 58, 70, 249 foreign tour, 59–60 and railways, 59–62 and Russo-Japanese War, 139–41 Nikolaevsk, 113, 200–1 Nikolayev Railway, 16–24, 74 fares, 22 finance, 21 gauge, 18–19 lack of connections, 23 route, 18, 20 speed of construction, 21 topography, 20 travelling conditions, 22 volume of traffic, 21 Nizhneudinsk, 198 Nizhny-Novgorod, 29, 31, 39 Nizhny Tagil, 12 North Korea, 245 Novokuznetsk, 217, 219, 222 Novonikolayevsk, 73, 84–6, 156, 198, 218 see also Novosibirsk Novosibirsk, 219, 260 station architecture, 220 see also Novonikolayevsk Novosibirsk Railway Museum, 108 Ob, river, 42, 68, 73, 82, 84–5, 101, 220 Ob River–Krasnoyarsk line, 65 October Manifesto, 139–40 Odessa, 24–5, 80, 86, 184–5 Odessa Railway, 49–50 Odessa University, 48 oil, 159, 174, 246 and environmental damage, 243–4 Old Believers, 144–5 Omsk, 73–4, 81–2, 161, 260 and civil war, 184, 187–8, 190, 195–8 coal thefts, 119–20 garden city, 156 panorama, 110 population increase, 155 station architecture, 92, 253 Omsk paper currency, 197 Omsk–River Ob line, 65 Orenburg, 42, 190 Orient Express, 109 Orthodox Church, 144–5 Orwell, George, 236 Ozerlag camp complex, 234 Pacific Fleet, Russian, 38, 56, 167 Page, Martin, 93–4 Panama Canal, 75 panoramas, 109–10 Paris, 25, 51 Paris Exposition Universelle, 84, 109–10, 114 passports, internal, 1, 21, 147–9 Pasternak, Boris, 193 Pauker, General German Egorovich, 44 Pavlovsk, 15 Peking–Paris road race, 162–3 Penrose, Richard, 152–3 Penza, 140, 180 Perm, 29, 39, 41–2, 192, 195, 209 permafrost, 65, 69, 103, 125, 168 and construction of BAM, 232–3, 239–40, 243, 247 Pertsov, Alexander, 134–5 Peter the Great, Emperor, 9, 20 Peyton, Mr, 32 photography, 253–4 Plehve, Vyacheslav von, 141 Pogranichny, 122 Pokrovskaya, Vera, 81 Polish provinces, 14, 24, 28, 144 Poltava, 151 Polyanski (agent), 51 Port Arthur, 109, 114, 123, 126, 129, 131, 133–4, 137, 139, 165 Port Baikal, 89, 101, 135 post houses, 4–5 Postyshevo, 233 Posyet, Konstantin, 39–40, 44, 52 Primorye region, 36–7, 40–1 prisoners of war, 226, 234, 246 Progressive Tours, 253 propaganda, 203–7, 252 Pushechnikov, Alexander, 88–9, 96, 122 Putin, Vladimir, 244 Pyasetsky, Pawel, 109–10 rails, convex, 12 railway administrators, enlightened, 151–2 ‘railway barons’, 26, 42, 50 railway colonies, 93 railway currency, 213 Railway Guard, 127–8, 130 railway managers, and Stalin’s purges, 221–3, 225 railway troops, 238 railway workers, 117–20, 156–7 wages, 118–19 railways, horse-drawn, 11–13, 30 railways, military, 24, 45 Ransome, Arthur, 206–7 Ready, Oliver, 114 Reid, Arnot, 102–3 roads, 2–3, 5–6, 13, 20, 98, 162, 257 Rosanov, Sergei, 186 Rothschilds, 46 rouble, linked to gold, 57 Royal Engineers, 95 Russia absolutism, 1 advent of railways, 27–8 censorship, 111 collapse of communism, 247–8, 257, 259 economy, 1–3, 26, 28, 55–6, 58, 95, 97–8, 255 expansion of railway network, 41–2 expansionist policies, 122–4, 130, 139 first horse-drawn railway, 11–12 German invasion, 224–5, 232, 258 industrialization, 55, 57, 95, 207, 211, 216–19, 221, 256, 258 land reforms, 154 liberalization, 21–2, 154 opposition to railways, 13–14, 16 unified railway network, 53 Russian civil war, xvi, 133, 138, 171–201, 223 Russian Revolution (1905), xvi, 154 (1917), xvi, 9, 121, 172, 174–8, 214 Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, 199–201 Russian Technical Society, 67 Russo-Japanese War, xvi, 91, 94, 107, 121, 129–42, 154, 161, 163, 165 peace treaties and aftermath, 139, 166–7, 213–14 Russo-Turkish War, 19, 36–7, 40, 49, 140–1 St John’s, Newfoundland, 64 Saint Nicholas, 73 St Petersburg assassination of von Plehve, 141 construction of, 20 massacre of demonstrators, 139 meat deliveries to, 158 renamed Petrograd, 162 St Petersburg–Moscow highway, 2 St Petersburg–Moscow Railway, see Nikolayev Railway St Petersburg time, 115 St Petersburg–Warsaw Railway, 24–5, 28 saints’ days, 104 Sakhalin Island, 31, 80, 199, 201, 242, 249 Samara, 140 see also Kuibyshev Samarkand, 39 San Francisco, 32 Schaffhausen-Schönberg och Schaufuss, Nikolai, 168 schools, building of, 157–8 Sea of Japan, 2, 7, 31, 173 Second World War, 19, 133, 200, 218–19, 221, 223–7, 229–30, 233 Semipalatinsk, 218 Semipalatinsk Cossacks, 185 Semyonov, Gregori, 182–5, 192, 198, 200 serfs, 12, 16–18, 34, 74, 141, 178 emancipation of, 11, 34, 145, 147 Sevastopol, siege of, 24, 37 Severobaikalsk, 231, 235, 241 Severomuysky Tunnel, 241, 244, 246 Shanghai, 114, 164 Shika, river, 69, 88, 101 Shoemaker, Michael Myers, 115 shovels, 81 Siberia Allied intervention, 172–201 architecture, 156–7 area, 7–8 cartography, 66–7 climate, 1, 7–8, 243, 246 economy, 31, 36, 207 fire damage, 243 first railway, 42–3 immigration, 143–60, 207, 220 increased productivity, 158–9 indigenous peoples, 11, 65, 118, 145–6, 149 industrialization, 207, 211, 216–19, 220–2, 256, 258 infrastructure improvements, 59, 61, 83, 98, 159 population, 1, 7, 10–11, 143, 159, 219 regionalist movement, 35 and Russian Empire, 34–6 time zones, 7 travel, 3–7, 32 urbanization, 154–6 Siberian Committee, 33–4 signallers, 118–19 Simpson, James, 150–1 Sino-Japanese War, 70–1 slaves, American, 35 sleepers, 64, 81, 84, 103, 106, 239 Sleigh, Mr, 31 sleighs, 3, 6, 32 Slyudyanka, 228 snowdrifts, 104 Sofiysk, 31 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 231 Some Like It Hot, 116 South Manchuria Railway, 126, 128–9, 137–9, 164, 214 Southwestern Railway, 50 Sovetskaya Gavan, 231, 233, 248 Soviet Sociology, 237 Soviets, 179 Sretensk, 38, 41, 88–9, 101, 108, 121–2, 168 Stakhanovite movement, 222–3 Stalin, Joseph, 10, 177, 215, 224–6, 229–30, 235 his death, 226, 234, 242 escape route from Moscow, 226 industrialization under, 207, 211, 216–19, 220–2, 256, 258 his train, 212, 252 Standard newspaper, 133 Stankevich, Andrei, 152 stations, 27, 74, 91–3, 156–7, 219–20, 257 architecture, 92, 157, 220 catering, 103, 107–8, 209–10 military areas, 157 steamboats, 4, 13 Stephenson, George and Robert, 12 Stevens, John F., 191 Stolypin, Pyotr, 154 submarine warfare, 176 submarines, 173 Suchan coal mines, 187 Sudan, 64 Suez Canal, 37, 70, 86, 164 suicides, 10 Suprenenko, Governor, 30 Sverdlovsk, 219 see also Yekaterinburg Swedish Red Cross, 185 Syzran, 42 taiga, 68, 78–9, 83–4, 236, 238, 243 tarantasses, 3–4, 6, 32, 91, 106 Tashkent, 218 Tayga, 155 Taylor, Richard, 204, 207 Tayshet, 231, 233–4, 239, 246 Tblisi, 48 telegas, 3 telegraph systems, 33, 140, 179, 194 Tibet, 233 tigers, 80 timber, shortages of, 64, 73, 84, 124, 126 Times, The, 22, 165 Timireva, Anna, 197 Tokyo, 161, 188 Tomsk, 38, 41, 68, 86, 107, 155–6, 217 First World War bottleneck, 172, 175 and railway administration, 68, 120 Tomsk province, 155 track gauge, 15–16, 18–19, 137–8, 256–7 trains armoured trains, xvi, 179, 183, 193, 203 butter trains, 158 coal trains, 172 Lux Blue Express, 212 luxury trains, 108–11, 114, 163–4, 252 propaganda trains, 203–7 Rossiya, 117, 257–8 troop trains, 133–4 tsar’s train, 44, 113, 198 ‘typhus trains’, 197–8 V.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

“They take economic control of countries.”31 Elsewhere, China was exerting sinister pressure on One Belt, One Road beneficiaries that refused to bow down to its political desires. Kazakhstan, an oil-rich and strategic country of 18 million people on the northwestern border of China’s Xinjiang, was home to popular resentment over China’s influence. In November 2015, Kazakhstan passed a so-called land reform law that would allow foreign citizens to rent land for twenty-five years, an increase from the previous limit of ten years. In many countries, such changes to the law wouldn’t sound like a big deal, and could actually liberate the market. But Kazakhstan shared a border with China, and anxious Kazakh farmers feared many Chinese investors would arrive and, in effect, buy up their land with a twenty-five-year lease that the government could then extend by decree, turning them into indentured servants to China.

Brahma Chellaney, “China’s Debt-Trap Diplomacy,” Project Syndicate, January 23, 2017, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-one-belt-one-road-loans-debt-by-brahma-chellaney-2017-01. 31. Nicholas Casey and Clifford Krauss, “It Doesn’t Matter If Ecuador Can Afford This Dam. China Still Gets Paid,” New York Times, December 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/americas/ecuador-china-dam.html. 32. BBC News, “Kazakhstan’s Land Reform Protests Explained,” April 28, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36163103. 33. Daniel C. O’Neill, “Risky Business: The Political Economy of Chinese Investment in Kazakhstan,” in Journal of Eurasian Studies 5, no. 2 (July 2014), 145–56, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879366514000086. 34.


pages: 950 words: 297,713

Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 by Charles Emmerson

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Etonian, European colonialism, Ford Model T, ghettoisation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

She rejects an offer to visit the ex-Tsar and his family. It would compromise her mission, she explains. Petrograd is full of words, words, words. Liberals book up theatres and music halls to give patriotic lectures to their supporters. The city Soviet is packed with workers’ representatives declaring their positions on everything from land reform to Ukraine’s latest bid for autonomy from Russia. War Minister Kerensky, the provisional government’s most dynamic and recognisable leader, never stops talking. But the most stunning newcomer on the speaking circuit is the principled non-tipper Leon Trotsky, with his wild gesticulations, mordant wit, quivering pince-nez and rousing speeches against the war.

Benito Mussolini is in no doubt what is needed: Italy must dedicate itself once more to war. Cafés, concert halls and theatres should be shut. Order must be re-established. The Socialists, Mussolini’s old comrades until they took the path of pacifism, must be locked up. Radical social change should be introduced to give soldiers something to fight for: land reform for the peasants and better conditions for the workers. But this is socialism for the nation, to strengthen its living force, not socialism against it. After Caporetto, it is clearer than ever to Mussolini that Italy must defeat two enemies to win this war: the Austrians at the front, and the pacifist-internationalist tendency behind it.

Two o’clock in the morning passes. Then three. Then four. Eventually the captain of the loyal Bolshevik troops on duty, a reliable Kronstadt man, decides to call time. ‘The guards are tired’, he announces. ‘I suggest you vacate the premises.’ The chairman frantically puts everything he has proposed to the vote–land reform, statements on peace, the federalisation of Russia. All these measures are adopted overwhelmingly. At five in the morning the remaining delegates go home. ‘Perhaps this is not the end’, one delegate says to another hopefully. The next morning the delegates of the Constituent Assembly are refused access to the Tauride Palace.


pages: 927 words: 236,812

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

agricultural Revolution, air gap, American ideology, Bletchley Park, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial exploitation, distributed generation, European colonialism, fixed income, full employment, global village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, labour mobility, land reform, mass immigration, means of production, profit motive, rising living standards, trade route, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

The Soviet eastern bloc continued to be characterized by a lack of consumer goods, poor-quality food and shortages. Having won the civil war in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party was now ready to implement its land reform policies. Wary of provoking hostility from the peasantry during the war against Japan, the communists had softened their approach. Now that they were in power they pursued class warfare with vigour and during the land reform programme of 1949–50 one million ‘rich’ peasants were murdered. Then, in the 1950s, Mao decided to push China’s modernization forward with a vigorous programme for industrialization and agricultural reform.

This is why Britain still imports fresh beans by air from Kenya.79 In the Rhodesias the political power of the settler communities had expanded to such a point that they were able to push through the creation of a Native Labour Supply Commission which recruited African labour to work on white farms right up until the 1970s, reinforcing the neglect of African farming.80 The bitter consequences of the resentments this caused are still being felt today in Zimbabwe (as Southern Rhodesia was renamed), where Robert Mugabe’s ‘land reform programme’ has dispossessed white farmers, and raging inflation has left the African population destitute, ravaged by hunger and a cholera epidemic in 2008. WEST AFRICA AND THE DOLLAR DEFICIT In 1939 West African farmers were faced with the same depressing prospect as East Africa’s settler farmers: their crops (cocoa beans, palm produce and peanuts) were surplus to requirements.

They were thus in a position of trying to live off the land like an army of occupation rather than an army based in its own country. An additional disadvantage was that their base area was under-developed, agriculturally poor and prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods and droughts.59 In the early years of its existence the Communist Party had adopted an aggressive policy of land reform which confiscated land from rich peasants and landlords. During the war, it seemed politic to adopt a more conciliatory approach which minimized the extent of social and economic disruption.60 Thus, rather than evicting landlords, they set about redistributing wealth by reducing the amount of rent landlords could demand and the interest which could be charged on loans.


Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, full employment, Howard Zinn, Khyber Pass, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, long peace, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing

A report of the Human Rights Commission of Costa Rica documents dozens of complaints of illegal expulsion and abuse of authority during the past two years, including several assassinations, implicating the security forces, especially the Rural Guard, in violence against campesinos. Father Elias Arias, a priest imprisoned with 100 squatters, stated that “Costa Rica urgently needs land reform, but the legislators are reluctant to carry out this type of reform which is against their own self-interest. Instead of helping the campesinos, they have been protecting the property of John Hull,” the wealthy U.S. landowner and CIA asset who was actively involved in the attack against Nicaragua from Costa Rican bases.13 Through the 1980s, Costa Rica was able to defer these problems thanks to rising U.S. aid, understood to be conditional on its general support for U.S. objectives in the region.

They are not further identified, but he presumably has in mind the four American churchwomen raped and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard supported by the U.S. and directed by General Vides Casanova, who was promoted to Defense Minister under the Duarte government in the “fledgling democracy”; and two Americans working on land reform, assassinated in a restaurant by soldiers under orders from officers of the National Guard and the chief of staff, who were never charged. None of these facts are mentioned, and they occasion no thoughts on the source of terrorism in that traumatized country. One might also ask whether the phrase “perished in the civil war” does justice to the element of “international state-sponsored terrorism” in these atrocities.

One is in paragraph eighteen of one of the many articles condemning the Sandinistas on the matter of amnesty, where a mother of a Sandinista soldier killed in action is quoted as opposing amnesty for “the people who killed our sons.” A second is in an insert in a survey of the land crisis in Central America, quoting cooperative members who express appreciation for land reform measures.147 The articles are largely devoted to diplomatic maneuverings and the tribulations of the internal opposition, who are presented as the true voice of Nicaragua. One learns next to nothing about the country, not an untypical feature of media coverage. The procedure of highly selective sourcing is second nature even among journalists who take some pains to keep independent of government propaganda.


pages: 614 words: 176,458

Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie

agricultural Revolution, air gap, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, Food sovereignty, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Haber-Bosch Process, household responsibility system, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Just-in-time delivery, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, military-industrial complex, Northern Rock, Panamax, peak oil, precautionary principle, refrigerator car, rewilding, scientific mainstream, sexual politics, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

On the failure of the Borsodi’s first settlements: Issel, W (1967), ‘Ralph Borsodi and the Agrarian Response to Modern America’ in Agricultural History, Vol XLI, No 2, April 1967. On Borsodi in India: Slastrom, P (1975), ‘Ralph Borsodi’s Vision of Land Reform’, The Green Revolution, Sept 1975, www.cooperativeindividualism.org/salstrom-paul_on-borsodi-and-land-reform.html. On Community Land Trusts: Loomis, M (1978), ‘Ralph Borsodi’s Principles for Homesteaders’, Land and Liberty Nov-Dec 1978 http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/loomis_borsodi_bio.html. School of Living: http://www.schoolofliving.org/ 63 See Lang, T and Raven, H (1994), ‘From Market to Hypermarket: Food Retailing in Britain’, The Ecologist, July/August 1994. 64 NFU Countryside, April 2007. 65 Heinberg, Richard (2006), ‘Fifty Million Farmers’, Energy Bulletin, 17 November 2006, http://energybulletin.net/22584.html 66 Gunther, F, Ruralization: A Possible Way to Alleviate Our Current Vulnerability Problems, IV Biennial International Workshop Advances in Energy Studies, Unicamp, Campinas, SP Brazil; 15-19 June 2004.

There are those who argue that Kenyans should be lifted out of poverty through the otherwise fatuous business of flying fresh flowers and out of season vegetables to Europe.49 On the other hand, trucking goods across continents to regions where they can be grown satisfactorily causes environmental damage and results in unsustainable concentrations of biomass and nutrients where they are not needed, for the sake of an economic advantage which is pocketed by supermarkets, not by farmers. As for countries like New Zealand that have a surplus of land and food, perhaps they should open their doors to immigrants and parcel out some of their farms to landless peasants. If we are going to globalize everything else, we should globalize land reform as well. At the end of their paper, Weber and Matthews point out that GHG emissions are ‘only one dimension of the environmental impacts of food production’. Food miles may not be over-extravagant in their energy use, but they are thickly implicated in a centralized distribution system which multiplies our energy expenditure at every opportunity and whose impacts include excessive packaging and refrigeration, waste, traffic congestion, road-building, noise, accidents, loss of local distinctiveness, exploitation and displacement of peasants, excessive immigration, urban slums, deforestation and habitat destruction, removal of biomass from third world countries, the undermining of local communities in the UK, the collapse of UK farming and the blood which is spilt over oil fields.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

He stood for plebeian tribune in 133 BC, then used his office to propose land reform: a commission would investigate whether public lands were being illegally occupied and would redistribute land in excess of the legal limit of three hundred acres to landless Roman citizens. The three-hundred-acre limit was in fact part of an old law, though ignored and not implemented for centuries. Tiberius Gracchus’s proposal sent shockwaves through the senatorial class, who were able to block implementation of his reforms for a while. When Tiberius managed to use the power of the mob supporting him to remove another tribune who threatened to veto his land reform, his proposed commission was finally founded.

When Tiberius managed to use the power of the mob supporting him to remove another tribune who threatened to veto his land reform, his proposed commission was finally founded. The Senate, though, prevented implementation by starving the commission of funds. Things came to a head when Tiberius Gracchus claimed for his land reform commission the funds left by the king of the Greek city Pergamum to the Roman people. He also attempted to stand for tribune a second time, partly because he was afraid of persecution by the Senate after he stepped down. This gave the senators the pretext to charge that Tiberius was trying to declare himself king. He and his supporters were attacked, and many were killed. Tiberius Gracchus himself was one of the first to fall, though his death would not solve the problem, and others would attempt to reform the distribution of land and other aspects of Roman economy and society.


Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, land reform, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, remote working, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing, work culture

He died there at the age of forty-six. Many aristocrats, particularly the former ‘Junkers’, as the Prussian landed gentry were called, suffered such fates. For once there was unity in purpose between the SPD and the KPD: both wanted far-reaching social reform and both harboured a deep-seated resentment towards the nobility. Land reforms were a rather uncontentious issue between them. Supported by the Soviets who pointed to their own brutal history of land redistribution in the wake of the First World War as an example, they set to work under the slogan ‘Junker land in peasant hands’. On 29 August 1945, the ‘Democratic Bloc’ formed of the representatives of all the new parties decided that any private land above 100 hectares, an area equivalent to 140 football pitches, would be seized without compensation.

., 141–2, 153 Eisenhüttenstadt (Ironworks City), 115, 150 Eisleben, 347, 348 Eisler, Gerhart, 74 electoral politics: doctrine of ‘democratic centralism,’ 91–2; fixed, allocated seat shares in GDR parliament, 81, 91, 91–2, 390–1; local elections (May 1989), 390–3; March 1990 election, 411, 412–13, 421; shift to multi-party democracy, 420–1; voting process, 92–3, 390–3; Western democracies today, 92 energy supplies: brown coal (lignite), 114–15, 282, 330; and dependency on USSR, 6, 115, 243, 281–2, 306, 329–31, 332–3, 336, 338; Druzhba gas pipeline, 360–5; GDR’s desperate need of, 115, 169, 279, 306; self-sufficiency drive, 114–15 see also oil production/supplies Engelberg, Ernst, 350–1 environmental issues, 114–15, 282, 330, 384, 387–9, 391–2 Erhard, Ludwig, 168, 232 Erler, Peter, 10 Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organization, 318 Ernsting, Stefan, 265 Erpenbeck, Fritz, 31–2, 47 Ethiopia, 299–300 European Defence Community, 119 Ewald, Manfred, 237–8 Falge, Andreas, 402–4 Falin, Valentin, 58–9 Faustmann, Regina, 111–12, 117, 135, 155–6, 200 Fechter, Peter, 178–81 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), 145; Adenauer’s election victories, 110; Angela Markel’s family move from, 338; Basic Treaty (1972), 261, 275; Brandt as first Social Democrat Chancellor, 90; constitution labelled as ‘provisional,’ 79, 276; cracking down on opponents, 85; declared the continuity state, 4, 417–22; demonstration in Essen (11 May 1952), 101–2; differences to GDR, 76–7, 114; economic aid from Western Allies, 76; exploits June uprising, 142; Federal Intelligence Service, 273–4; FIFA World Cup hosted by (1974), 266–8; food rationing ended (1950), 124; foreign contract workers, 303; as geopolitical pawn, 168; Germany Treaty (26 May 1952), 121; ‘Grand Coalition,’ 233; grants Israel arms purchase credit, 232; growth of trade volume with GDR (from 1984), 345–6; Hallstein Doctrine (1955), 156, 232–3, 275; idea of 1945 as ‘zero hour,’ 4, 38; and immigration from GDR, 130–1, 162; and inner-German thaw (1970s), 275–6, 322–5, 327, 331–2; limited social mobility in, 240, 316–17; as much larger than GDR, 76, 114; national debt in 1980s, 280; NATO membership, 108, 119, 145–6; new capital in Bonn, 76; ‘ohne mich’ (count me out) generation, 168; open welcome to former Nazis, 117; outright ban of the KPD (1956), 85; proclamation of constitution (23 May 1949), 73–4; rearmament/remilitarization (from 1952), 119, 122, 145–6; religious populations of, 76; reunification as a constitutional aim, 276; Schalck–Strauß ‘channel,’ 341–6, 357; selling of prisoners to, 277–9, 282, 387; Stalin Note (10 March 1952), 119–22, 141; Stasi spies in, 272–3, 274; streamed education system, 227; Welcome Money for East German arrivals, 405–6, 407; women’s employment rates in, 156 see also Adenauer, Konrad; Kohl, Helmut; West Berlin Feist, Margot, 77–8 Fensch, Eberhart, 266 Field, Noel, 89, 90, 103, 106–7 First World War, 14, 15, 104 Fleischer, Anneliese, 118–19, 122 Forck, Bishop Gottfried, 389 foreign labour programme, 300–6 Forum Handelsgesellschaft, 322, 323 France, 119, 121 Frank, Mario, 86 Frederick the Great, 350, 351 Frederick William I, King of Prussia, 351 Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), 59, 187, 189, 321 Free German Youth (FDJ), 77–9, 93–6, 112; and 10th World Festival of Youth and Students (1973), 260; banned in West Germany (June 1951), 101–2; and ‘Blue Jeans,’ 255–6, 257; and building of Berlin Wall, 176–7; ‘Convention of the German Youth’ (June 1950), 100–1; denounces Western culture, 160, 212; and Druzhba gas pipeline, 361, 362; Forum (student newspaper), 201; as ‘Hitler’s children,’ 100, 167–8; Honecker as founder, 99–100, 256; Jugendtourist (Youth Tourist), 367; Kuhfeld’s delegation to Berlin (1969), 224, 225–6; Angela Merkel’s role in, 288, 369; militarization of, 144, 145; stuffy image of, 160, 202; waning enthusiasm for, 200–1; Western members of, 101 Freie Welt (Free World) magazine, 264, 265 Freikorps, 14–15 Freudenberg, Ute, 269 Friedrich, Walter, 383 Fritschen, Brigitte, 44, 125, 162 Fritz Heckert (state-owned cruise ship), 186–8, 189, 224 fruits, exotic, 190, 218, 279 Fukuyama, Francis, 3–4 Fulbright Scholarship scheme, 373 Fulbrook, Mary, 93, 108, 205 Fürnberg, Louis, 82–3 Gaddafi, Muammar, 300 Gagarin, Yuri, 200 Geige, Hans die, 364 gender equality: childcare system, 155, 345, 413, 419–20; divorce rates, 207; female officers/recruits in NVA, 380–2; impact of reunification, 415, 419; as inherent feature of socialist ideology, 15, 155, 205; and kindergarten system, 138, 155, 236, 239; limited success of programme, 206–7; obstacles to, 205–7; pragmatic reasons for, 205; women in higher education, 203–5, 207; women in workplace, 111–12, 155–6, 319–20, 380, 419; women’s organizations, 92, 139–40; women’s rights activists, 16; women’s social lives, 156 Genex (mail order catalogue), 323–4, 361, 365, 366 Gerbilskaya, Luba, 21–2 German Communist Party (KPD): and creation of SED (May 1946), 62–4; exiles in Soviet Union, 9–10, 12–14, 15–20, 21–7, 28, 29–33, 36–8, 102; founding of (1918/19), 28, 29; Honecker joins Central Committee, 99; illegal information hubs in Nazi era, 78; members executed in Soviet Union, 19, 22, 102, 106; and Molotov– Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939), 26–7; Nazi suppression of, 11–12, 19, 21–2, 166; Neumann–Remmele group in Soviet Union, 102, 103; outright ban of in FDR (1956), 85; persecution during Stalin’s Terror, 9–10, 13–14, 17–21, 22–6, 31–3, 102; and post-war East Germany (pre-GDR), 35–8, 46–9; prisoners in Soviet gulags, 9–10, 13–14, 17, 25, 33; refounded under Pieck (June 1945), 58; Reichstag deputies (1933), 11–12; resentment towards the nobility, 65–6; Soviet deportations back to Germany, 20–1, 32; survivors of Stalin’s purges, 28, 29, 31–3, 36–8, 46–7, 87; in Weimar era, 14–15, 64, 105–6; in West Germany, 102 German Democratic Republic (GDR): 1950s as decade of missed chances, 167–9; acceptance of conscientious objection, 176, 315; alcohol consumption in, 366; alienates creative artists over Biermann, 291, 292; anti-Soviet sentiment of German men, 146; appeal of a genuinely anti-fascist, socialist state in 1950s, 110–11, 167–8; border crossings of November 1989 period, 403–7; ceases to exist (midnight 3 October 1990), 415–16; closer relations with West (late-1980s), 372–7; consolidation/stabilization (late 1950s/early 1960s), 5, 152–6, 158; dams of change broken (October 1989), 397–406; differences to FRG, 76–7, 114; feeling of helplessness as country dismantled, 415, 418–19; feeling of stability in 1987 period, 365–7; few natural resources in, 114–15, 169, 192–3, 198–9, 258, 281–2, 333; foundation of (7 October 1949), 74, 76; as geopolitical pawn to Moscow, 141, 168, 331–2; German refugees from the east in, 76; historiography of Prussia, 349–51; ideological purges of early 1950s, 87–91, 108; Khrushchev’s continued demand for reparations, 161; lack of political reform in last years of, 382–4, 390–3, 397–9; leadership’s deep mindset of fear, 108, 147, 163–7, 168, 219, 293, 318–19, 388–9; life as dull/stuffy in 1980s, 325, 360–1, 362, 367, 369–71; life as fairly comfortable in 1980s, 261–2, 320–1, 325, 362, 367, 371, 394–5; loses right to write its own history, 4; and ‘Luther Year’ (1983), 346–9; Angela Merkel’s life in, 1, 2–3, 259, 288–9, 367–9, 422; as much smaller than FRG, 76, 114; national flag of, 121, 228; normalization of German history in, 346–51; as not a footnote in German history, 5, 7, 418–23; ‘ohne mich’ (count me out) generation, 168; optimism/hope of early 1970s, 259–64; Ore Mountains (Thuringia and Saxony), 115–16; political events after opening of borders, 408–14; political repression in late-1960s, 228–9, 240; progress during 1960s, 186–98, 199–208, 219–20, 224–8, 229–31, 240, 242, 244–5; public hopes for peace/security/food in 1950s, 109, 110; regime as frightened of its own people, 109, 163–7; religious populations of, 76, 85, 112, 135, 138, 278, 284–9, 292, 349; rich cultural scene in 1950s, 112; room for private withdrawal in, 288–9; serious opposition to Ulbricht’s reforms, 93; show trials in, 89; silence over Red Army rapes, 45–6; Soviet backing of in late 1950s, 153; sudden disintegration of, 2, 397–416; suffocating weight of original economic burden, 114–18, 123–4, 138, 168–9; Ulbricht’s Soviet-style reforms, 86–7, 91, 93; vast Soviet reparations extracted from, 115–17, 168; widening gulf between regime and people, 166–7; widespread discontent at economic situation (early 1950s), 127–30 see also Honecker, Erich; Ulbricht, Walter German Democratic Republic (GDR), economy: 1970s as high point in living standards, 324–5; Apel’s death (December 1965), 214; Bavarian loan (1983/4), 343–5, 357; begins to catch up with the West (1960s), 194–5, 208; collaboration with Japan, 336, 337–8; consequences of land reforms, 66, 124; currency issues, 72–3, 169, 277, 322–4; desperate need for credit in early-1980s, 340–5; East Germans as highly attuned to 1980s crisis, 339–40; economic crisis of 1980s, 334–7, 338–42; economic planning commission, 194; economic/financial crisis (early-1950s), 123–5, 127–30; few natural resources, 114–15, 169, 192–3, 198–9, 258, 281–2, 333; first five-year plan (1951), 123–5; five-year plan (1981), 335; food rationing finally ends (1959), 124, 156; foreign trade/export markets, 6, 156, 192–4, 232, 234, 243, 258–9, 277–81, 319, 342, 345, 350; and FRG’s Hallstein Doctrine (1955), 156, 232–3, 275; fruit and vegetable production, 117, 124; game of ‘catch-up,’ 111–18, 123–4, 168; government lies about 1980s crisis, 338–9; growth of trade volume with FRG (from 1984), 345–6; haphazard/absurd efficiency measures (1981), 335; highest living standards in communist world (1970s), 6, 324–5; ‘Honecker Account,’ 279, 281; Honecker returns economy to Soviet bloc, 254–5, 274; Honecker’s five-year plan (1971), 253–9; illusion of progress as post-1975 state policy, 281–2; impact of armed forces build-up, 124–5; impact of denazification, 118; impact of emigration on, 125, 130–1, 138, 153, 161–2, 169–70, 171; impact of Russian oil price rise (1975), 281–2, 306; inherent dependence on Soviet Union, 6, 280–1, 306, 329–31, 332–3, 336; loss of expertise/resources to USSR, 118; nationalization policies, 36, 70, 71, 153, 161, 169, 254; need for high-tech future in 1980s, 335–6; ‘New Course’ (9 June 1953), 132, 138; ‘New Economic System’ (NES, 1963)., 193–5, 198–9, 210, 214, 335; possession of foreign currencies legalized (1974), 322–4; rising living standards from late-1950s, 153, 158, 229–31; rising living standards in 1970s, 279–80, 320, 324–5; rising living standards in post-1953 period, 138–9; rising productivity in 1970s, 279–80; sale of Nazi era paraphernalia, 282; Schalck–Strauß ‘channel,’ 341–6, 357; seven-year plan (1959), 161; Soviet loan and food subsidies (1953), 139; Treuhand’s privatization of, 414–15, 418; Ulbricht’s sharp U-turn, 160–1; Ulbricht’s Westpolitik policy, 243–4, 274; Western creditors in 1970s, 279, 281; withdrawal of Western investments (1982), 338 see also consumer goods German Democratic Republic (GDR), emigration/escape from: Baltic Sea route (‘State Border North’), 385; brain drain as inevitable with open border, 169–70; brief lull in emigration figures (1958), 153, 162, 169; from cruise ships, 187; economic and social impact of, 125, 130–1, 138, 153, 161–2, 169–70, 171, 385–6; facilitated by Western intelligence agencies, 139, 153; impact of ‘New Course,’ 138; legal methods in 1980s, 369–70, 384–5; and Karl-Heinz Nitschke, 385–7; from open sector borders in Berlin, 125, 130–1, 171; record number of leave applications (1988/89), 389–90, 398; refuge in West German embassies (1989), 398; through Eastern bloc after Gorbachev’s reforms, 398; by writers/artists/actors, 160 see also Berlin Wall; border, inner-German German Democratic Republic (GDR), foreign policy/diplomacy: Basic Treaty (1972), 261, 275; and Brandt’s Ostpolitik, 233–4, 242–3, 274; closer relations with West (late-1980s), 382–3; ‘coffee agreement’ with Mengistu, 299–300; de facto break with Moscow (1978), 378, 383; foreign aid to socialist nations, 303–4, 305–6; foreign contract workers, 300–6; friendship with Arab nations, 231–3; and Honecker-Kohl relationship, 353–6, 357, 359–60; inner-German thaw (1970s), 275–6, 322–5, 327, 331–2; joins United Nations, 261; membership of United Nations (1972), 6, 261; recognition by foreign countries, 6, 231–3, 261–2; signs Helsinki Accords (August 1975), 291–2, 386; Transit Agreement (1971), 275 German Democratic Republic (GDR), governmental structure: constitution (1968), 228–9; designed for easy merging with West Germany, 79, 110; first constitution, 79–85, 80, 109; fixed, allocated seat shares in parliament, 81, 91, 91–2, 390–1; forced democratization of (from October 1989), 399–406; illusion of civil rights and basic freedoms, 85, 109; as initially bicameral, 81; initially designed as federal system, 79–81; interim governing arrangements after collapse of SED, 410, 411; Ministerrat (Council of Ministers), 82; People’s Chamber (Volkskammer), 77–8, 81, 82, 84–5, 91–3, 132, 408–10, 415; and pretense of democracy, 49, 54–5, 61–2, 81, 390–3; role of President abolished (1960), 81; Round Table, 411; Staatsrat (Council of State), 81–2 see also Central Committee of SED; politburo of the Central Committee German Democratic Republic (GDR), political protests/opposition: 17 June uprising (1953), 5, 128–9, 130, 133–6, 139–40, 141–2, 168, 200; coverage in the Western media, 133, 385, 386–7, 388–9, 392; against denied applications for permanent leave, 370, 385, 386–7, 388–9; deportations to FRG, 389; environmental groups, 384, 387–9; events of October/November 1989, 393–4, 399–406; growth of in late-1980s, 389; human rights groups, 386, 389; idea of collective action as powerful, 387–9; Krenz promises Wende (turning point), 401, 407–8; as largely absent in 1960s, 245; and local elections (May 1989), 390–3; New Forum proclamation, 398–9; Karl-Heinz Nitschke, 385–7; organized groups from mid-1970s, 370, 384–93; pacifist/peace organizations, 384, 387, 388–9; question of GDR’s future (November 1989 period), 411–12; Red Flags targeted, 133, 146; as regular in 1953 period, 131, 132–5; ‘Riesa Petition for the Full Accomplishment of Human Rights’ (1976), 386; Soviet crushing of 17 June uprising, 134–5, 141; strike at Stalinallee (June 1953), 129, 130, 132–3, 150; Ulbricht’s responses to 1953 uprising, 136, 138, 141; white circles, 387 German reunification (1990): day of (3 October 1990), 415–16; debates in GDR (from November 1989), 411–13; desire to see as happy ending, 3–4, 417; Deutsche Mark exchange rate issue, 413, 414; East Germans’ refusal to forget GDR, 421–2; East-West economic imbalance, 418–19; final treaty signed (31 August 1990), 415; FRG-GDR negotiations, 414, 415; impact on childcare system, 419–20; Kohl’s ten-point plan for (28 November 1989), 412; limited social mobility after, 240; many successes of, 1–2; and March 1990 election, 412–13; monetary union, 414; nostalgia for GDR as not desire to bring it back, 421–2; old fault lines as not disintegrating, 418–22; People’s Chamber formally votes for, 415; popular support for in GDR (1989-90), 411–13; and role of women, 415, 419; and shift to multi-party democracy, 420–1; ‘solidarity surcharge’ (1991), 418; Treuhand’s privatization of GDR economy, 414–15, 418; triggers wave of change for East Germans, 417–22; Two Plus Four negotiations, 415; Wende as beginning of a dynamic process, 423; ‘West German’ equated with ‘normal,’ 417, 420–2; writing of GDR out of national narrative, 3 German Social Union, 413 German Unity Day (3 October), 1–3, 415 Germany: arrival of Red Army at end of war, 39–46, 47, 63, 146; Deutsche Mark (DM) introduced (1948), 72–3, 74, 169; four zones of occupation, 35–6, 58, 67, 68–9, 70–1, 72, 74, 76, 114, 172–3; German prisoners of war on Eastern Front, 30, 51; ‘Gruppe Ulbricht’ arrives in (April/May 1945), 46–9; ‘magnet’ theory on reunification, 243; merging of US and British zones (1947), 72; move towards division (1948-9), 71–4; Parteiselbstschutz (paramilitary wing), 105–6; post-war influx of refugees from the east, 51–2, 59, 76; process of ‘overcoming’ its own history, 422–3; question over inevitability of division, 74–5; rapes committed by Red Army soldiers, 40, 42–3, 45–6, 48, 146; reunification issue in 1960s/70s, 233–4; Revolution (1918-19), 10, 78; Ruhr industrial heartlands, 69, 115; Second World War reparations, 35, 68–9, 76, 115–17, 129, 139; shortages in post-war period, 41, 48, 50, 51; Soviet desire for reunification, 86–7, 100–1, 108, 110, 119–21, 122, 131–2; Soviet Zone of Occupation, 32–4, 35–8, 46–9, 51, 53–7, 58–66, 68–73, 74–5, 76, 114, 143; unification (1871), 417; wartime ruin/devastation, 47, 50–1, 53, 55–6, 77, 112, 153–4, 156–7; Weimar era, 14–15, 63, 64, 68, 105–6, 144, 166, 197; Western sectors, 63, 70–1, 72–3, 76 see also Federal Republic of Germany (FRG); German reunification (1990); Nazi Germany and entries for German Democratic Republic (GDR) Gieseke, Jens, 274 Goebbels, Joseph, 28–9, 62 Good Bye Lenin!

., 141–2 Party of Democratic Socialism (SED-PDS), 410–11, 413, 415 People’s Republic of China, 119, 303; Tiananmen Square massacre (June 1989), 399 photography, 269–70 Pieck, Wilhelm: background of, 27–8; and build-up of GDR armed forces, 121–2; and creation of SED (May 1946), 62–4, 78–9; death of (1960), 81, 158–9, 263; and ‘eradication’ of ‘subversives’ in SED (1950-1), 87, 90; house on Majakowskiring, 163; ill health of, 137–8, 158–9; as KPD leader-in-exile in Moscow, 26, 27, 46, 48, 49, 106; meetings with Stalin (1948/1949), 73, 74; planning for post-war order in Germany, 37; as President of GDR, 74, 77, 78–9, 81, 86, 211; and public discontent, 132; returns to Germany (1 July 1945), 58; survives purges in Moscow, 28, 87 Pingel, Clemens, 68 Poland, 221, 242, 303, 304, 331; bankruptcy of (1981), 338; displaced Germans move westwards, 52; social unrest in 1980s, 332, 333, 366, 367; Solidarity trade union movement, 332, 333, 367 politburo of the Central Committee, 89, 96, 125, 193, 203, 226, 296–7, 340; anti-Gorbachev sentiments in, 376–7, 378; concern over clashes with Moscow, 356–7; criticism of Honecker within (late-1980s), 383–4; and de-Stalinization, 149–51; ‘Decree for the Supply of Coffee’ (1977), 295; existential fear in late-1950s, 219; ‘Expatriation of Wolf Biermann,’ 290–1; and fall of Ulbricht, 247–52; and Honecker-Kohl relationship, 353–4; and Honecker’s personal life, 211; Jarowinsky as responsible for trade and supplies, 257, 281; members live at the Waldsiedlung, 163–7, 217–18, 221; militarization of society (from late 1970s), 313–16, 317–19; no woman as ever full member of, 207; place within SED structure, 84, 88; and powers of the Stasi, 217, 218, 219, 224, 326–7; replaces Honecker with Krenz (17 October 1989), 400–1; and SED-SPD joint paper (1987), 376; seeks ‘third way,’ 150–1; Soviet-style nomenklatura in, 87; and Stalin’s death, 127; Ulbricht’s opponents in, 150–1, 169; Youth Commission of, 201–2, 210 Poppe, Ulrike, 411 post-colonial situation in West, 305, 306 Potsdam, 39–41, 351, 394 Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945), 67, 74, 79, 120 Prague Spring (1968), 215, 233 Prenzlau, Brandenburg, 289, 290 Presley, Elvis, 158, 160 Protestantism, 76, 100, 278, 283–9, 292, 347; American pilgrimages to Lutheran sites, 349; and local elections (May 1989), 392; and pacifist/environmental organizations, 387, 388–9 Prussia, Kingdom of, 349–51 the Puhdys (rock band), 270–2, 364 Radchenko, Sergey, 35 radio stations: Berliner Rundfunk, 203, 213; Deutschlandsender (Stimme der DDR), 90, 255; RIAS (Radio in the American Sector of Berlin), 129, 133, 141, 177, 203; SFB (West German), 203; Stern-Radio Berlin, 338 Rajk, László, 89 Rákosi, Mátyás, 89 Ramelow, Bodo, 421 Reagan, Ronald, 338, 352, 356, 373 Red Army, 39–46, 47, 48, 53, 61, 63, 117; behaviour of soldiers stationed in GDR, 146–7; and Berlin Wall, 174, 177; rapes committed by in Germany, 40, 42–3, 45–6, 48, 146; uniforms of, 145, 146 Reed, Dean, 264–6 Reed, Wiebke, 264, 265 Reichstag fire (February 1933), 11–12, 21, 37 Reinhold, Otto, 375, 377 Reinicke, Erika, 51 Reise ins Ehebett (musical film), 267 Remmele, Anna, 26, 33 Remmele, Hedwig, 26, 33 Remmele, Hermann, 15, 19, 26, 33, 102, 103 Reuter, Fritz, 96 Rexin, Manfred, 260 Rieley, Jack, 268 Riesa, Saxony, 385–6 Roesler, Jörg, 254 Roloff, Herbert, 338 Romania, 338 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 35 Rosenberg, Hans, 102 Rostock, 51, 322, 397, 399, 402, 404–5 Rudat, Andrea, 255–7 Rudat, Gerhard, 130 Rudat, Manfred, 309–10 Rügen, island of, 189, 252, 274 Rusakov, Konstantin, 333 Russian Civil War (1917-22), 22 Russian Federation, 20 Russian Revolution (1917), 10, 14 Saar region, 96–7, 98–9, 274–5, 348, 360 Sanssouci Park, Potsdam, 351, 394 Sarajevo Winter Olympics (1984), 380 Schabowski, Günter, 401–2, 403 Schalck-Golodkowski, Alexander, 276–9, 282, 294, 387, 410; meeting with Franz Josef Strauß, 340–2, 343–5 Schanuel, Charlotte, 98, 211 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 414 Schenk, Fritz, 86 Schindler, Walter, 175 Schirdewan, Karl, 149 Schleevoigt, Christa, 129, 135 Schmidt, Elli, 139–40, 150, 169 Schmidt, Helmut, 331–2, 344–5 Schmidt, Inga, 196–7 Schmidt, Inge, 72–3 Schmieder, Uwe, 259–60 Schmutzler, Georg-Siegfried, 85 Schneider, Roland, 396–7, 399, 402, 404–5 Schnitzler, Karl Eduard von, 134 Schöbel, Frank, 7, 262, 263, 266–7, 268, 422 Schönhausen Palace, East Berlin, 163 Schumacher, Kurt, 122 Schumann, Horst, 202 Schürer, Gerhard, 383–4 Schuster, Susi, 202–3 Schwanitz, Wolfgang, 409 scientists, German, 66–8, 118; Soviets allow return of (1953), 138 scooters and mopeds, 229 Second World War: bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 94; end of (May 1945), 39–42; Mielke during, 106; Nazi brutality on Eastern Front, 41; Nazi invasion of Soviet Union (June 1941), 28, 29–30; questions of culpability, 34; Stalingrad (1942-3), 30–1; tank battle at Kursk, 134 security and policing: and 17 June uprising (1953), 129, 133, 134–5, 141; brutality in Leipzig (October 1965), 212–13; ‘Commission for Security Questions,’ 142; KG (paramilitary organization), 143–4, 174, 175–6; KVP (Barracked People’s Police), 145–6, 216–17, 393–4; militarization of society after June 1953 events, 142–7; National Defence Council, 142; NVA (National People’s Army), 145–6; pathological paranoia of, 286–93; prisoner releases (1961-5), 191; Ulbricht scales up state oppression (1953), 129–30; Volkspolizei (VoPo, People’s Police), 143, 145, 146, 174, 411–12; Voluntary Auxiliary, 143; voluntary organizations, 143–5, 147, 174–6 see also Stasi (Ministry for State Security) Seifert, Wolfgang, 210 Selbmann, Fritz, 133 ‘self-criticism’ practice, 97 Sibinski, Eveline, 240 Siekmann, Ida, 182–3 Simon, Hans, 388 Sindermann, Horst, 195, 346 Six-Day War (June 1967), 233 Social Democratic Party (SPD): and creation of SED (May 1946), 62–4; and ‘eradication’ of ‘subversives’ in SED (1950-1), 87; in FRG, 90, 233–4, 275, 331–2, 359, 374–7; and Honecker’s FDJ, 100; joint paper with SED (1987), 374–7; and March 1990 election, 413; resentment towards the nobility, 65–6; in the Soviet Zone, 59; in Weimar era, 63, 64 social structure: collapse of during war, 53; middle classes, 14, 54, 55, 133, 144, 169–70, 178, 228; and militarization of society, 317–18; repression of landed gentry, 64–6, 117; social mobility, 6, 105, 144, 155, 158, 191–2, 203–5, 228, 240, 245, 317, 320, 325, 327 see also working classes Socialist Unity Party (SED): and 17 June uprising (1953), 128–9, 130, 133–6, 139–40, 141–2, 168; and 1968 constitution, 229; agitation for an East German state, 71–2, 73, 74; consolidation of power (1950-5), 86–91; creation of (May 1946), 62–4, 78–9; declining number of working class members, 130; disintegration of (November 1989), 410; elite living at the Waldsiedlung, 163–7, 217–18, 221, 252, 409; ‘eradication’ of ‘subversives’ in (1950-1), 87–9, 90, 108, 150; and events of October/November 1989, 399–403, 407–8, 409–10; German Economic Commission, 70; joint paper with SPD (1987), 374–7; Kaderpolitik (cadre policy), 84; ‘Lied der Partei’ (Song of the Party), 82–3; members who escaped Nazis by moving West, 89, 90, 107; militarization of society after June 1953 events, 142–7; ‘New Course’ (9 June 1953), 132, 138; and obstacles to gender equality, 205–7; Party Academy Karl Marx, 94; politicization and control of public discourse, 85; record membership level (1986), 366–7; rehabilitations due to de-Stalinization, 150; as ruling party in GDR, 81, 82–5, 86–91; structure of (from 1950), 88; as target of protests/attacks (June 1953), 128–9, 131, 133–5; Ulbricht elected as General Secretary of (1950), 86; Ulbricht removes opponents (1953-4), 140; Ulbricht’s internal opponents, 132, 135, 138, 139–40, 169; Ulbricht’s purges (1956-7), 151; Ulbricht’s responses to 1953 uprising, 136, 138, 141; Ulbricht’s Soviet-style reforms, 86–7, 91, 93; Vilm as private holiday island for elite, 252–3 see also Central Committee of SED; politburo of the Central Committee Sokolovsky, Vasily, 134 Somalia, 299 Sonneberg, Thuringia, 191–2 Sonnenburg, KZ, 11 Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD): Antifa Committees, 59–62; bicycles torn out of German hands, 45, 69; dismantling of German industry in, 70; East German marks introduced, 72; fate of Junkers/aristocrats, 64–6; forced removal of German scientists from, 66–8, 118, 139; gradual nationalization of economy, 70–1, 74–5; and Honecker’s FDJ, 99–100; land reforms, 65–6; and move towards division (1948-9), 71–4; political parties/organizations allowed by, 58, 59–62, 390–2; power handed to Germans, 58, 59–62; and pretence of democracy, 60–2; purges of ‘suspicious’ Germans (1945-50), 60–2, 64–6, 146; purpose of, 58; refounding of KPD (June 1945), 58; reparations extracted from, 68–9, 76, 115–16; rich cultural scene in, 112; starts work (9 June 1945), 58; systematic hollowing out of industry, science and culture, 66–8, 70, 139; Tiulpanov as director of propaganda, 71, 72 Soviet Union (USSR): abandons unification idea, 138–9; Adenauer’s prisoner-release deal (1955), 90, 104; Brezhnev’s conservatism, 214; the Cheka, 157–8, 216, 222; Chernenko’s funeral (13 March 1985), 351–2; crushing of 17 June uprising, 134–5, 141; de-Stalinization, 131–2, 135–6, 138–9, 148–50, 212; deep economic crisis (early-1980s), 332–3; directive to Ulbricht after June uprising, 135–6; Druzhba gas pipeline, 360–5; fall of Beria, 136, 138, 140, 148, 149; GDR’s inherent dependence on, 6, 280–1, 306, 329–31, 332–3, 336; German children abandoned or orphaned in, 23–5, 32; German prisoners of war, 30; Gorbachev’s openness to the West, 358, 376–7; gradual de-Stalinization after Stalin’s death, 90; Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG), 246–7; Gruppe Ulbricht’s brief, 47–9, 53–4; gulags, 9–10, 13–14, 17, 19, 25, 33; invasion of Afghanistan (1979), 332; Merkel’s independent tour in (1983), 367–9; Molotov– Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939), 26–7; Nazi invasion of (June 1941), 28, 29–30; NKVD Order 00439 for arrest of Germans, 17–18, 19–21, 32; nuclear industry, 115–16; objection to inter-German dialogue, 331–2, 352–3, 355–6, 358–9, 377; Operation Osoaviakhim (22 October 1946), 66–8, 139; post-Stalin policy of two states, 139; post-Stalin triumvirate, 131–2, 135–6; rejects SED-SPD joint paper (1987), 376–7; and space exploration, 199, 200, 244–5; suppression of Prague Spring (1968), 215, 233; What Did 58 German Workers See in Russia?


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

The winning formula that the Republican Party came up with was to combine the American System of the Whigs with the free distribution of public land (often already illegally occupied) so strongly wanted by the Western states. This call for free distribution of public land was naturally anathema to the Southern landlords, who saw it as the start of a slippery slope towards a comprehensive land reform. The legislation for such distribution had been constantly thwarted by the Southern Congressmen. The Republican Party undertook to pass the Homestead Act, which promised to give 160 acres of land to any settler who would farm it for five years. This act was passed during the Civil War in 1862, by which time the South had withdrawn from Congress.

Neely from the original French edition published in 1988 by Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago), p. 224, note 46. 36 The consolidation of a protectionist trade policy regime was not the only economic legacy of Lincoln’s presidency. In 1862, in addition to the Homestead Act, one of the largest land reform programmes in human history, Lincoln oversaw the passage of the Morill Act. This act established the ‘land grant’ colleges, which helped boost the country’s research and development (R&D) capabilities, which subsequently became the country’s most important competitive weapon. Although the US government had supported agricultural research from the 1830s, the Morrill Act was a watershed in the history of government support for R&D in the USA. 37 Bairoch (1993), pp. 37–8. 38 Bhagwati (1985), p. 22, f.n. 10. 39 Bairoch (1993), pp. 51–2. 40 In reviewing my own book, Kicking Away the Ladder, the Dartmouth economist Doug Irwin argues that ‘the United States started out as a very wealthy country with a high literacy rate, widely distributed land ownership, stable government and competitive political institutions that largely guaranteed the security of private property, a large internal market with free trade in goods and free labor mobility across regions, etc.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

The winning formula that the Republican Party came up with was to combine the American System of the Whigs with the free distribution of (often already illegally occupied) public land so strongly wanted by the Western states. This call for free distribution of public land was naturally anathema to the Southern landlords, who saw it as the start of a slippery slope towards a comprehensive land reform. The legislation for such distribution had been constantly thwarted by the Southern Congressmen. The Republican Party undertook to pass the Homestead Act, which promised to give 160 acres of land to any settler who would farm it for five years. This act was passed during the Civil War in 1862, by which time the Southern Congressmen had withdrawn.

Neely from the original French edition published in 1988 by Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago), p. 224, note 46. 36 The consolidation of a protectionist trade policy regime was not the only economic legacy of Lincoln’s presidency. In 1862, in addition to the Homestead Act, one of the largest land reform programmes in human history, Lincoln oversaw the passage of the Morill Act. This act established the ‘land grant’ colleges, which helped boost the country’s research and development (R&D) capabilities, which subsequently became the country’s most important competitive weapon. Although the US government had supported agricultural research from the 1830s, the Morrill Act was a watershed in the history of government support for R&D in the USA. 37 Bairoch (1993), pp. 37–8. 38 Bhagwati (1985), p. 22, f.n. 10. 39 Bairoch (1993), pp. 51–2. 40 In reviewing my own book, Kicking Away the Ladder, the Dartmouth economist Doug Irwin argues that ‘the United States started out as a very wealthy country with a high literacy rate, widely distributed land ownership, stable government and competitive political institutions that largely guaranteed the security of private property, a large internal market with free trade in goods and free labor mobility across regions, etc.


pages: 359 words: 98,396

Family Trade by Stross, Charles

book value, British Empire, glass ceiling, haute couture, indoor plumbing, junk bonds, land reform, Larry Ellison, new economy, retail therapy, sexual politics, trade route

“You’re—” he swallowed. “Miriam.” He held out his arms to her. “You’re strong, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been trying to resist the pressure for years. It doesn’t work. The Clan will get you to do what they want you to do in the end. I spent years trying to get them to do something—land reform on their estates, educating the peasants, laying the groundwork for industrialization. All I got was shit. There are deeply entrenched political groupings within the Clan who don’t want to see any modernization, because it threatens their own source of power—access to imported goods. And outside the Clan, there are the traditional nobility, not to mention the Crown, who are just waiting for the Clan nobility to make a misstep.

I figure with their social standing the Clan could push industrialization and development policies that would drag the whole Gruinmarkt into the nineteenth century within a couple of generations, and a little later it would be able to export stuff that people over here would actually want to buy. Land reform and tools to boost agricultural efficiency, set up schools, build steel mills, and start using the local oil reserves in Pennsylvania—it could work. The Gruinmarkt could bootstrap into the kind of maritime power the British Empire was, back in the Victorian period. As the only people able to travel back and forth freely, we’d be in an amazing position—-a natural monopoly!


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Japan had numerous ikki or peasant uprisings, particularly in the fifteenth century; the consolidation of power under the shogun in 1600 finally put an end to the disturbances.11 There were numerous uprisings and revolutions in Mexico, but it was only in the early twentieth century that the peones finally overturned the quasi-feudal regime left over from the Spanish legacy. They achieved significant land reform, but at the cost of well over a million lives.12 In Russia, with its overwhelmingly rural society, peasant rebellions were commonplace by the seventeenth century. A revolt among Ural Cossacks under Emelian Pugachev threatened the czarist regime in 1773, during the reign of Catherine the Great.

After failing civil service exams several times, Hung Hsiu-ch’uan read some Christian tracts and connected their message with hallucinations he had experienced. He designed his own religion, in which he was part of the Holy Trinity, but with doctrines based mainly on the Ten Commandments, and he preached it to destitute laborers.14 His Taiping Rebellion called for the overthrow of the Manchu Ch’ing dynasty, land reform, improving the status of women, tax reduction, eliminating bribery, and abolishing the opium trade. The rebellion was finally put down more than a decade later, with massive loss of life. Some of the Taiping program would later be adopted by Sun Yat-sen, who would overthrow the imperial regime, and then by Mao Tse-tung and the Communists.15 The Revolt against Mass Migration The contemporary versions of peasant rebellions, particularly in Europe and the United States, are in large part a reaction against globalization and the mass influx of migrants from poor countries with very different cultures.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

For example, many Neoclassical economists, even the ‘liberal’ Paul Krugman, argue that we should not criticize low-wage factory jobs in poor countries because the alternative may be no job at all. This is true, if we take the underlying socio-economic structure as given. However, once we are willing to change the structure itself, there are a lot of alternatives to those low-wage jobs. With new labour laws that strengthen worker rights, land reform that reduces the supply of cheap labour to factories (as more people stay in the countryside) or industrial policies that create high-skilled jobs, the choice for workers can be between low-wage jobs and higher-wage ones, rather than between low-wage jobs and no jobs. The Neoclassical school’s focus on exchange and consumption makes it neglect the sphere of production, which is a large – and the most important, according to many other schools of economics – part of our economy.

I have already mentioned that the recent dramatic upswings in inequality in the US and the UK can mainly be explained by deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. The absence of inequality upswing in Korea or Taiwan in their early stages of economic development between the 1950s and the 1960s can also be explained by policies. During this period, these countries implemented programmes of land reform, in which landlords were forced to sell most of their land to their tenants at below-market prices. Their governments then protected this new class of small farmers through import restrictions and the provision of subsidized fertilizer and irrigation services. They also heavily protected small shops from competition by large stores.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Social and national revolutions There are two aspects, social and national, to the victory of communist parties in the Third World countries. I shall illustrate them with the most important example, that of China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advocated and implemented, first in the areas that it controlled in the 1920s–1930s, and then after its victory in 1949 throughout China, a comprehensive land reform, the abolition of quasi-feudal relations in rural areas, and a weakening of clan-based social relations, which were replaced by a more modern nuclear family structure and gender equality. It also promoted widespread literacy and education with “affirmative action” in education and employment in favor of children from peasant and workers’ families.

Regional decentralization, which in recent times Xu dates to the Great Leap Forward, allowed provincial and municipal governments to implement various economic policies and thus to discover what was best for them—as long as it was not in flagrant violation of the central rules and Communist Party ideology. (Although the disregard of the ideology was in reality accepted as long as it was well camouflaged and the policies were successful.) Xu shows that all crucial developments, from the introduction of the household responsibility system (land reform) to the privatization of state-owned enterprises, started at the lower levels of government. They were not, as is sometimes believed, part of some grandiose plan of experimentation thought up at the top, but came about entirely through lower level–based initiatives.53 If reforms were successful, their local promoters were able to get higher positions within the government and the party, to accede to central policy-making bodies (that’s where the centralization part kicks in), and to try to apply the same recipe elsewhere.


pages: 564 words: 182,946

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 by Frederick Taylor

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, German hyperinflation, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, the market place, young professional, éminence grise

Ulbricht and the Soviets played successfully on this antipathy to the past. They expropriated the big landowners within months of the war’s end (‘Junkers’ lands into farmers’ hands’ went the slogan), and nationalised almost half the big-business concerns in the Soviet Zone as retribution for their complicity in the crimes of Nazism. The land reform was popular with small farmers, as such redistributions generally are. The substantial majority that voted for it had not read their history. In 1917, Lenin drummed up support in the Russian countryside with the appeal ‘All Land to the Peasants!’. In the 1930S, those peasants found their newly granted lands absorbed into state-run collectives.

., 114, 131 Ganéval, General Jean, 56, 60 Gartenstrasse, 187 Gatow Airport, 55 Gaudian, Christian, 397 Gelb, Norman, 137 Geneva, 382 Gensler Strasse, 194-5 George, Heinrich, 196 Georgetown, 171, 202 Georgia, 104, 214, 228 German Administration of the Interior (DVdI), 47-8, 142 German Confederation, 17 German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany): elections, 68, 75, 99-100; established, 68-9; flag, 69, 442; population, 72, 446; 504 / THE BERLIN WALL borders, 75-7, 124, 143, 331-2, 367, 374, 397, 433; collectivisation of agriculture, 76-7, 80-1, 102, 119; campaign against churches, 77, 81; population loss, 77, 79-81, 100, 117, 119, 153, 345, 347; industry, 79, 81, 102, 119, 388-9, 415, 438, 443-4; economy, 79-80, 100, 102, 117-19, 122, 127, 149, 205, 270, 287, 389; workers’ uprising, 82-7, 158, 193, 322, 411; securiry, 100, 105-6; strategic importance, 118, 120; Soviet missiles stationed in,120 ; flow of refugees, 123-6, 135-6, 138-9, 146, 148, 150-4, 159, 173, 189, 205; Soviet support for, 135; Soviet forces reinforced, 144-5, 149; army, 144, 153-4, 158, 161, 175, 177, 183, 349, 374, 383, 411, 428, 431; economic links with West Germany, 148; Western intelpligence gathering, 150-1; increasing repression, 152-3; Allies and possibility of unrest, 175; Lutheran Church in, 184-5; consequences of border closure, 190-3; education system, 191-2, 347-8, 405, 438; political prisoners, 193, 199, 376; deportations, 200; and magnet theory, 269; international recognition, 276-7, 344-5, 368, 381; press, 283; repression eases, 290; conscription introduced, 310; and convergence, 343-4; economic improvements, 347-9, 373; youth in, 347, 405; pollution, 348, 377, 389, 438; communal pride, 348-9; sports, 348-9; Western perceptions of, 357, 370-1; and homosexuality, 359; denazification, 359; judiciary, 359-60; punks in, 363-4; visiting rights, 367, 369; signs Basic Treaty, 368; technology imports, 373, 375-6; economic crisis and KoKo system, 374-6; military budget; credit agreement, 377-8, 387-9, 392-3, 415-16; signs Helsinki Accord, 381; subcultures, 383-4, 439; black economy, 384; exit-visa movement, 384-5, 395; outward transfer of technology, 388-9, 443-4; national anthem, 392; abolishes death penalty, 396; rigged local elections, 401-2; plans for concentration camps, 402; fortieth anniversary, 402, 405-6, 408-9; Soviet publications banned, 403; economic collapse, 408-9, 414-15; Gorbachev visits, 409-10; borders opened, 422-8; leadership Stands down, 431-2; free elections, 432-3; post-reunification emigration, 438; reconstruction, 439; age profile, 446 German Football Association, 388 German People’s Party, 35 German State Opera House, 44 INDEX / 505 Germany admiration for Frederick the Great, 11; and War of Liberation, 14; 1848 revolution unification, 15-17; ‘Prussianisation’, 19; army, 19, 24; industrialisation, 19; welfare system, 20; navy, 21, 24; and First World War, 23, 27; economic collapse, 27-8, 94; Communists return, 30-1; post-war dismantling, 33, 38; divided between Allies, 37; borders redrawn, 45, 76, 132, 368; post-war hunger and unemployment, 50; currency reform and economic recovery, 52-4; free trade area, 53, 70; country divided, 61, 67-70, 75; strategic importance, 70; US forces in, 73; national anthem, 84; birthplace of Marxism, 135; industrial production, 388; reunification, 429-30, 433-7; currency, 436-7; border controls abolished, 437; all-German elections, 437; faces economic competition, 444-5; see also Federal Republic of Germany; German Democratic Republic Germany, Soviet Zone, 32-3; political revival and creation of SED, 42-4; elections, 47, 68; arrests, 47-9; special camps, 47-8; nationalisation and land reform, 51, 67; and Marshall Plan, 51-2; food supplies, 54; Soviet troops in, 72; border closed, 76; SED tightens grip, 105-6 Germany Treaty, 77 Gerstenmaier, Eugen, 218 Gestapo, 29-30, 92-5, 97, 195, 346 Giessen, 400 Gildner, Jay, 242 Girrmann, Detlef, 297, 314 Girrmann Group, 293, 298, 301, 304-5, 314 Gisecke & Devrient company, 388 glasnost, 388 Gleisdreieck, 242 Glienicke, 257, 394; bridge, xxiii Goebbels, Josef, 26, 181, 196, 262, 345 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xxiv Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 101, 148, 287 Good Bye, l111in!

., 38-9, 246 Roosevelt, Theodore, 121 Rosinenbomber, 57 Restock, 446 Resow, Walt, 114, 146, 205, 209-11, 246, 336 Rothenkirchen, 389 Royal Corps of Military Police, 65, 170 Rüdow, 172 Rühmann, Heinz, 35 522 / THE BERLIN WALL Ruhr industrial area, 22, 27, 42, 46, 53, 391 Rummelsburg station, 175 Ruppiner Strasse, 239 Rusk, Dean, 114, 152, 205, 214-15, 218, 223-4, 247, 286 Russia, 11-12, 16, 48; Napoleon invades, 14; and triple alliance, 21; 1917 revolution, 24; land reform, 51; Stalin’s, 75, 364, 418; See also Soviet Union Saarland, 42, 91, 93, 391, 430 Sabolyk, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert, 272-3, 280-1 Sachsenhausen, 47, 60, 196 Salinger, Pierre, 205, 224 SALT II arms-reduction treaty, 385-6 San Antonio, 225 San Francisco, 18, 230 Sandanistas, 385 Sanitz, 314 Santiago, 441-2 São Paulo, 441 SAP (Socialist Workers’ Party), 94-5 Sauerbruch, Dr, 34-5 Saxony, 58, 86, 144, 197, 384; invaded by Prussia, 11; socialism in, 22, 27; careerists disliked, 125; industries, 388-9, 443; growing unrest, 410; neo-Nazi parties in, 439 Saxony-Anhalt, 444 S-Bahn, 256, 260, 306, 311, 370; strike, 66-7; cut off at border, 162-168; stations, 179; attacks on trains, 293 Schabowski, Günter, 110, 190, 414; addresses demonstrators, 418-19; announces open borders, 422-5; expelled from SED, 432 Schacht, Dr Hjalmar, 27 Schadow, Johann Gottfried, 13 Schalck-Golodkowski, Alexander, 375-6, 378 Scharnhorst, General, 14 Scharoun, Hans, 35 Schiffbauerdamm, 295 Schiller Friedrich, xxiv INDEX / 523 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 14, 83 Schirdewan, Karl, 100-1 Schlaffke, Horst, 83 Schlesinger, Arthur, 114 Schleswig-Holstein, 17, 371 Schloss Wilkendorf, 161 Schmidt, Helmut, 372, 381, 387 Schmidt, Lutz, 394-5 Schmidtchen, Jörgen, 310 Schmollerstrasse, 264 Schönbrunn Palace, 128 Schöneberg, 58, 123; Town Hall, 167, 176, 227, 244-5, 253; Kennedy's speech at Town Hall, 338, 340 Schönefeld Airport, 139, 146, 266, 394, 442 Schönfliess, 156 Schönhausen Castle, 106 Schönholz, goods station, 305 Schönholzer Strasse, 324-5 Schröder, Gerhard, 396 Schröder, Louise, 49 Schubert, Hermann, 30 Schulte, Fritz, 30 Schultz, Egon, 328, 335 Schulze, Peter, 58 Schulz-Ladegast, Klaus, 184-5, 193-4, 196-9, 234; sentence halved, 199, 360; escapes, 332-3; father released, 376 Schumacher, Kurt, 71 Schumann, Corporal Conrad, 239-41, 265, 292, 447 Schürer, Gerhard, 415-16 Schwander, Rudi, 85-6 Schwedler Strasse, 186 Schwerin, 156, 446 Scott-Heron, Gil, 428 Sebastianstrasse, 316 Second World War, 6, 75, 92, 144; aftermath of, 71, 73, 132, 368, 433, 443 524 / THE BERLIN WALL SED (Communist Party), xxv, 61, 237, 348; creation of43-4, 47, 98; trails in elections, 47; and introduction of Communism in Germany, 51-2; demonstrations, 59; and establishment of GDR, 67-9; purged, 68, 77; and East Berlin administration, 74; admits mistakes, 81; and workers’ uprising, 83-4, 87-9; cultural credibility, 89; Honecker and, 92, 97, 99; Brandt and, 97; lifestyle of élites, 106-11; Mielke and, 142-3; and border closure, 153-4, 158, 178-80, 18990; members escape, 265, 313; establishes links with SPD, 396; leadership and demonstrations, 418-19; members leave, 432; participates in free elections, 432; changes name, 437, 439 Seidel, Harry, 315-16, 322 Seifert, Major-General, 141 Sejna, Jan, 126 Selbmann, Fritz, 83 Selbstschussanlagen, 367, 393 Semenov, Vladimir, 81, 87-9, 140 Seoul, 72 Serov, General Ivan, 33 Sesta, Domenico (’Mimmo’), 322-6 Seven Years War, 11 Shanghai, 69 Shelepin, Alexander, 146 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 437 Showalter, Colonel, 203 Siekmann, Ida, 188 Silesia, 10, 46, 76 Sindermann, Horst, 135 skinheads, 364, 439 Slovakia, 444-5 Smaroda, Major, 195 Smolensk, 116 socialism, 19-21 Solidarity, 401-2, 426 Soloviev Colonel Andrei I., 223, 279, 283-4 Sonnena1lee (film), 445 INDEX / 525 Sonnenallee crossing point, 257-9 Sorensen, Theodore, 340-1 South Korean airliner, shot down, 387 Soviet Military Administration (SMA), 36, 42-3, 47, 61, 69, 85 Soviet Union, 47, 59, 132; defence of, 26; German Communists in, 30; war reparations, 33; and division of Berlin, 36-7; opposes free trade area, 53; and advent of Cold War, 69; nuclear weapons, 72-3, 103, 116-18, 120-1, 145, 282; post-Stalin leadership, 79-81, 85; economy, 79, 127, 275; flag torn down, 85; purges, 95; rocket science, 102, 113, 115-16; relations with China, 118, 122, 282; support for GDR, 135, 149; consequences of border closure, 224, 226, 274; policy on Berlin, 277-8, 282-3; acquires German territory, 343; and Berlin Agreement, 367; oil exports, 373-4, 409; involvement in Afghanistan, 385-6; confrontation with USA, 387; and German unity, 392; and Brezhnev Doctrine, 403; reform of, 434; troops withdrawn from Germany, 437; collapse of, 440; see also Russia Soviet War Memorial, 320 Spain, 142 Spandau, 172, 200, 296 Spandau Ship Canal, 307 Spanish Civil War, 95 Spartakist League, 24 SPD (Social Democratic Party), 20, 22-4, 28-9, 35, 48-9; re-formed, 42; and creation of SED, 43-4, 47, 98; election gains, 47, 270, 344; activists arrested, 47; continues to work in East, 59; under Schumacher, 71; song, 84; Brandt and, 94, 97; in Berlin elections, 99; Stasi and, 143; clandestine network in GDR, 154; American relations with, 244; joins government, 344-5; establishes links with SED, 396; re-forms in GDR, 417; and German reunification, 430, 433, in GDR elections, 433; in all-German elections, 437; coalition with PDS, 448 Speer, Albert, 83 spies, 124, 150, 156, 197-9, 371-2; exchanges, xxiii; SED, 180; tools of trade, 197; positive effects of spying, 213; Guillaume affair, 371-2 Spree, river, 3-4, 7, 168, 257, 260, 293-5 526 / THE BERLIN WALL Springer, Axel, 217, 227, 317-18, 321; hostility towards Ostpolitik, 343; and attack on Dutschke, 360-1; and political prisoners, 376 Sputnik, 102, 113, 275 Sputnik magazine, 403 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The, (film) 333 SS, 168 Stalin, Josef, 26, 30-1, 33, 39, 82, 119; pact with Hitler, 30, 95; and Berlin, 35, 57, 243; and division of Germany, 37-8, 67-8, 70; and nuclear weapons, 40; and creation of SED, 43-4; and introduction of Communism in Germany, 50-2; and Korean War, 72-3; offer on German unification, 75-6; and GDR borders, 76, 78; death, 78, 89; and ’doctors’ plot’, 78; portraits burned, 82; denounced by Khrushchev, 100, 103, 275, 281-2, 346; mocks Khrushchev, 103, 117; personality cult, 123; body removed from mausoleum, 282; Ulbricht rejects, 346; and Baltic states, 401; and mass murder, 443 Stalinallee, 82-3, 90, 346 Stalingrad, battle of, 49, 55, 119, 263 Star Wars project, 386 Starnberger See, 342 Stasi136, 185, 190, 215, 360, 402; leaders, 48; established, 69; ’night and fog’ actions, 76; and SED leaders, 108-9; headquarters, 142; Mielke heads, 142-3; motto, 143; and border closure, 144, 158-9, 206; forbidden area, 194-5, 213, 234; interrogation prison, 196-9, 234, 332; interrogation methods, 198; military arm, 237, 311; and border escapes, 265-6, 294, 296-8, 301, 303-7, 314, 316-17, 324, 329, 332-3, 394-5, 398; counter-espionage, 291; and crossing permits, 335; strength, 346; informers, 346, 420; and sports, 349; and punks, 363; dog-training school, 366; foreign espionage, 371-3; costs of, 374; and KoKo, 374-6; observers at Checkpoint Charlie, 380-1, 385, 396; and Helsinki activists, 382; and exit-visa movement, 384-5; surveys popular opinion, 392; and collapse of GDR, 410, 412, 418-21, 426, 431; Mielke’s apologia for, 432; Hagen Koch’s career, 435-6; aids Chilean dissidents, 441; killings in West Germany, 442; films reveal reveal truth about, 445-6 State Opera, 125, 406 State Porcelain Factory, 252, 255 INDEX / 527 Steel, Sir Christopher, 220 Stegliz, 170, 356 Stoph, Willi, 108, 141, 143, 412, 415, 419 Strasbourg, 403 Strasse des 17.


pages: 583 words: 182,990

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

Indian agriculture moving into its post–green revolution is also a giant step toward independent subtropical knowledge production, achieved in collaboration with Indonesian and African and South American permaculturists, and its importance going forward cannot be over-emphasized. Land reform is part of that, because with land reform comes a return to local knowledge and local ownership and thus political power. The new agriculture is also labor intensive, as to a certain extent people must replace the power of fossil fuels and pay close attention to small biomes, and of course we have that labor power and that close attention.

Yes, and who wouldn’t be? We don’t want what happened to them to happen in China, or anywhere else. So now they’re teaching us regenerative agriculture, and we need it. But of course it keeps coming back to how we pay for these good things. I suppose, Mary groused. Chan smiled. Of course. Think of it as land reform. That’s a financial arrangement too. So, land taxes, which in China means a tenure tax. Creation of a commons for every necessity. Also, simply the legal requirement that private businesses be employee-owned. Mary shook her head skeptically as she listened, but she was smiling too, thinking that now the baton had passed to this woman.


The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

Ironically, given nationalists’ castigation of previous local government, councillors were also in the long run to gain a reputation for jobbery and petty corruption which was not seriously challenged until after independence in 1922. George Wyndham (Chief Secretary 1900–1905) attempted further rationalisation of the administration, particularly in the context of land reform. Although Wyndham privately made noises about being theoretically predisposed to the idea of Home Rule, he also believed it was not ‘as yet within the range of practical politics’,21 and his belief in taming nationalist sentiment through fairer administration was to be his undoing. His political career in Ireland was destroyed by opposition to his proposed measures of devolution.

‘Banished to an island off the Clare Coast for 3 weeks, a party of the RIC who attempted to rescue them were pelted with stones and abused by the prisoners who declared proudly they were citizens of the Irish republic and that the police had no right to interfere.’29 But for all such declarations of faith in native justice, the reality was that the Minister for Defence, Cathal Brugha, had little time for police or courts, seeing them as a deflection from the priority of war. Austin Stack, Minister for Home Affairs, was often bullying and pedantic in his abusive missives to overworked and confused registrars in his attempt to control district courts. Cahir Davitt, son of land reform crusader Michael, and largely responsible for the courts operating in Munster as a circuit judge of the Dáil courts, recalled that after the creation of the hierarchy of courts, most were administering justice as they saw fit, with no prescribed code of law for them to administer and with no rules of court.

Writing to Cosgrave in 1924, Hogan noted: ‘there are about 500,000 tenants in Ireland; there are about one and a half million landless men and only about 30,000 holdings for them, and these landless man are at present prepared to exercise their claims with gun and torch’.114 That Hogan was attempting land reform in this climate was commendable, especially given the constant complaints of the Department of Finance about its cost. But ultimately, it was tenant purchasers rather than those with no land that legislation benefited, with labourers’ representatives concentrating instead on wages and conditions rather than the pursuit of the unrealisable goal of land ownership.


Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

The Mapuche signed the Treaty of Killin with the colonizing Spaniards in 1641 (the document solidified the territorial autonomy of the Mapuche and 28 others over two centuries of diplomatic relations). Yet, in the late 1800s, the Chilean and Argentine military massacred an estimated 100,000 Mapuche. From 1965 to 1973, land reform improved the situation for the Mapuche, but the military coup of 1973 reversed many of these gains. Between the restoration of democracy in 1989 and 2012, the Mapuche people made limited progress in their continuing fight for reparations and the return of their lands. However, most of the court rulings granting them land were effectively overturned by powerful business interests.

For most of the 1930s and ’40s the democratic left dominated Chilean politics. Meanwhile, the early 20th century saw North American companies gain control of the copper mines, the cornerstone – then and now – of the Chilean economy. WWII augmented the demand for Chilean copper, promoting economic growth even as Chile remained neutral. LAND REFORM In 1915, the British Royal Navy took down the German SMS Dresden in the harbor of Isla Robinson Crusoe. The infamous war cruiser had successfully slipped detection throughout WWI, only to be discovered because its sailors had joined a soccer match on shore. In the 1920s, haciendas (large rural landholdings) controlled 80% of the prime agricultural land.

Reformist sentiment stirred fear in the old order. Conservative and liberal parties decided to join forces. Their candidate, Jorge Alessandri, son of former president Arturo Alessandri, scraped through the 1958 election with less than 32% of the vote. An opposition Congress forced Alessandri to accept modest land-reform legislation, beginning a decade-long battle with the haciendas. The 1964 presidential election was a choice between socialist Salvador Allende and Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva, who drew support from conservative groups. Both parties promised agrarian reform, supported rural unionization and promised an end to the hacienda system.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Securing as much of the world as possible for Team Freedom was essential for capitalists, not to secure trade access—socialist countries were happy to exchange goods across ideological lines—and certainly not to monitor “human rights,” but because Freedom meant a state devoted to high profits. In capitalist countries, capital could rely on the state to both respect and enforce its property rights, even in the face of workers who organize for land reform and confiscatory taxation. Capital could rely on the capitalist state to take its side during labor conflicts and otherwise assist in controlling wages. Without those guarantees, U.S. investments abroad were subject to the political whims of local populations, and being subject to the political whims of local populations degrades an investment’s expected return.

Russia exited 1945 as battered as any nation ever was but triumphant, with a claim on the future at least as strong as capitalist America’s. And if the West had a monetary advantage, the Communist International was better positioned when it came to the main political issues in the postwar Third World: decolonization and land reform. Fascism interrupted the conflict between deputized colonial leaders installed near the close of the nineteenth century and the national liberation movements that opposed them. The sides paused and realigned according to the war alliances. But the core issues of popular sovereignty and economic democracy were yet unresolved across the colonized world.

In the Republic of Korea, Rhee’s parliamentary installation was preordained by American occupiers. From the perspective of East Asia’s indigenous anticolonial movements, the Cold War reoriented but did not recast decades-long conflicts. For the region’s peasants, economic democracy was about avoiding or managing proletarianization, about land reform and the national ownership of national resources in the true national interest. Like most of the agricultural strikers in California, the “communists” in East Asia were more often working people struggling to reduce their level of exploitation via collective action in the face of modern capitalists who were always finding ways to get more for less, new ways to grind their laborers down.


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With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

Better, he does so in the tradition of our Founders, who worked hard to ensure that every citizen would enjoy equal access to common sources of well-being.” —Barry Lynn, author of Cornered WITH LIBERTY AND DIVIDENDS FOR ALL ALSO BY PETER BARNES Pawns: The Plight of the Citizen-Soldier The People’s Land: A Reader on Land Reform in the United States (ed.) Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons Climate Solutions: A Citizen’s Guide WITH LIBERTY AND DIVIDENDS FOR ALL How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough PETER BARNES With Liberty and Dividends for All Copyright © 2014 by Peter Barnes All rights reserved.


A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

By the end of the decade, the great barons of the Indian 244 A Concise History of Modern India countryside, many of whose properties went back to the earliest days of colonial rule, were no more. Yet the extent of the transformation can easily be exaggerated. Despite protests from India’s socialists, the landlords were guaranteed compensation for all property taken. Further, under the constitution land reform as a subject was allocated to the states, not the centre, with the result that the well-to-do peasant castes who dominated the state Congress parties saw to it that ceilings were set high enough so that they would not be adversely affected. In addition, the abolition legislation was itself riddled with loopholes.

In this respect, India today stands well behind where Japan stood at the time of the Meiji restoration in the mid-nineteenth century, and far distant from what South Korea, Taiwan, China, Thailand and other countries in east and south-east Asia achieved well before their market-oriented economic expansion began . . . Indian reformist leaders . . . have failed to acknowledge the role of widespread literacy and numeracy and other forms of social achievement (completed land reform, good health care, etc.) which permit a shared and participatory process of economic expansion. India has not had difficulty in raising its overall rate of economic growth by removing constraints and restrictions and by making use of opportunities of trade . . . But a large part of Indian society remains excluded from the range of economic opportunities.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Displacement by Starvation Wages and Rising Seas Migration is increasingly the joker in the globalization pack. —Stuart Hall, “Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Cities” Three decades of structural adjustment in Bangladesh have reversed the nationalization of jute, textile, and energy production; slashed public funding, especially to healthcare and education; introduced land reforms geared toward privatization; and imposed capitalist investment and export schemes.14 Rural and coastal communities are forced into monoculture rice production and shrimp farming geared for export, while agribusinesses profit from cheap land leases. Proletarianized workers form a growing reserve army of labor and are driven into industrial production in EPZs, where capitalist interests can guarantee higher profits from the value created by workers.

Almost half a million people were forcibly evicted from rural communities between July 2016 and December 2018, and martial law was declared in mineral-rich Mindanao in 2017, lasting more than two years.49 On Negros Island in 2019, the armed forces and national police launched counterinsurgency operations of mass killings and arrests, aimed at landless farmer groups and impoverished sugar workers advocating for land reform of colonial-era sugar plantations. That same year, Duterte became an overnight international environmental hero after threatening to declare war on Canada for dumping one hundred containers of nonrecyclable waste on the Philippines. The president, though, is no environmentalist. The Lumad people continue to face threats to their lands and livelihoods from extractivism, and have long been fighting to uphold their customary laws and cultures against a “systemic war of extinction.”50 Threats to their communal lands have increased under the forces of transnational capitalist plunder.


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The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

British Empire, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, global reserve currency, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, land reform, lone genius, megacity, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, spice trade, surveillance capitalism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile

Their job it was to protect the slow-moving and cumbersome infantry and artillery columns from flanking attacks by irregular Indian light horse, as had happened with fatal consequences at Talegaon and Pollilur. This was a form of warfare in which the Marathas were especially skilled.93 Unlike the perennially cash-strapped Warren Hastings, Wellesley had no problem paying for this vastly increased military establishment. After the rural upheavals of Cornwallis’s land reforms had settled down, the Company in Bengal found it had a considerable annual revenue surplus of Rs25 million. In contrast, Scindia was able to realise only Rs1.2 millionf from his poorly irrigated home base in Malwa. This dependable surplus in turn allowed the Company easy access to credit from the Bengal money market, so much so that under Wellesley, between 1798 and 1806, the Company’s debt in India more than tripled.

Major John here Bogle, George here Boigne, Comte Benoît de here, here, here, here Bolts, William here Considerations on Indian Affairs here Bombay acquisition of here dry dock here harbour here garrison here growth here population here Protestant community here Bombay Castle here Boston Tea Party here, here Bourquien, Louis here, here Braithwaite, John here bribery here, here, here, here British Empire, mission civilisatrice here British Parliament, relationship with EIC here, here, here, here, here brothels here Brown, Katherine Butler here Brown Bess muskets here buccaneers here Buckingham, James Silk here Budge Budge here Burdwan here, here Burgoyne, General John here, here Burke, Edmund here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Burney, Fanny here Burrell, William here Buxar here Buxar, Battle of here, here Shuja ud-Daula’s escape here casualties here looting here Caillaud, Major John here, here, here, here, here Calcutta here, here foundation of here city walls rebuilt here, here Clive on here exports here growth here docks here European houses here Governor’s House here population here, here profit here Writers’ Building here Maratha threat here defences here, here, here Black Town here, here diversity here Indian population here merchants here Shushtari on here prostitution here English inhabitants here mortality rate here cost of living here militia here vulnerability here repair programme here Siraj ud-Daula’s advance on here fall of here the Great Tank here looted here, here Drake flees here Siraj ud-Daula enters here the Black Hole here reconquest of here Government House here St Anne’s church here Clive’s night attack here Mir Jafar visits here Clive returns to here government moved to here Belvedere here Cornwallis arrives in here beauty here wages here revenues here Canning, Lord here Cape, the here Careri, Giovanni Gemelli here Carnac, John here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Carnatic, the here Carnatic music here Carnatic Wars here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cartier, John here cartographical survey here Catherine of Braganza here Chait Singh, Raja of Benares here, here Chandernagar here fall of here, here defences here growth here vulnerability here Charles I, King here Charles II, King here Charnock, Job here, here charter here, here, here extended here revoked here Chevalier, M. here Child, Sir Josiah here, here Chin Qilich Khan, Nizam ul-Mulk here, here, here, here, here China here Choiseul, Duc de here Christianity, forced conversions here Chunar here Claremont estate here Clavering, General here, here Clive, Edward, 1st Earl of Powis here, here, here Clive, Henrietta, Countess of Powis here Clive, Margaret (nee Maskelyne) here, here, here Clive, Richard here, here, here, here, here Clive, Robert, 1st Baron Clive here, here mental stability here pillage of Bengal here wealth here, here political career here, here, here offer of employment here, here background here birth here attempted suicide here first arrival in Madras here hatred for India here letters here first EIC career here military training here early military career here marriage here appointed Deputy Governor of Madras here return to England, 1753 here on Calcutta here return to India here Royal Commission here reconquest of Calcutta here declares war on Siraj ud-Daula here offensive against Siraj ud-Daula here taking of Chandernagar here Siraj ud-Daula’s attempt to win friendship of here and plot to remove Siraj ud-Daula here ultimatum to Siraj ud-Daula here advance to Plassey here campaign against Siraj ud-Daula here crisis of confidence here Battle of Plassey here advance on Murshidabad here enters Murshidabad here and the Jagat Seths here prize money here, here return to Murshidabad here on Mir Jafar here, here despatches to London here self-confidence here loot here return to Britain here land purchases here Shropshire estate here return to India, 1765 here, here buys Company shares here life in England here as governor here return to Calcutta here meeting with Shuja ud-Daula here negotiations with Shah Alam here Treaty of Allahabad here triumph here public opinion swings against here Select Committee defence here depression here Grand Tour here suicide here burial here intercepts Shah Alam’s gifts here Colebrooke, Sir George here Coleroon River here Collins, John Ulrich here, here Collins, Wilkie, The Moonstone here Comoro Islands here Compagnie des Indes here, here, here Compagnie Van Verre here Coorg here Cornwallis, Charles, 1st Marquess Cornwallis here arrival in Calcutta here replaces Hastings here on Calcutta here alliance against Tipu Sultan here Third Anglo-Mysore War here reforms here tax reforms here land reforms here Coromandel, the here corporate capitalism here corporate influence, danger of here corporate lobbying here corporate violence here corruption here court miniatures here credit system here CROATOAN here Cuddalore here Cumberland here Dalrymple, Alexander here Dalrymple, James here, here, here Dalrymple, Stair here, here Dara Shukoh here Daria-i-Noor Diamond here Da’ud Khan here Daulat Rao Scindia here, here, here, here, here, here ultimatum to here declares war on the Company here Battle of Assaye here Davis, Thomas here Day, Francis here Daylesford here Debates in the Asiatic Assembly here Debrit, John here Deccan, the here, here Mughal occupation here Delhi here, here, here capture of here population here imperial court here splendour here Nader Shah’s massacre here, here impoverishment of here civil war here occupations here Imad ul-Mulk clings to power in here Afghan occupation here Shah Alam sets out on expedition to here Marathas capture here Shah Alam enters here ruined and depopulated here Shah Alam takes control of here Ghulam Qadir takes here Scindia’s rescue operation here earthquake here Battle of here, here occupation of here Delhi expedition line of march here Shah Alam set out on here importance here EIC response to here Najaf Khan appointed army commander here meeting with Shuja ud-Daula here advance to Farrukhabad here entry into Delhi here breakdown of Maratha alliance here Deptford here Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex here Dhaka here, here, here Dhaka Red Fort here, here Dickinson, John here, here Dip Chand here Diwani, the here, here, here, here, here Dodally here Dow, Alexander here, here Drake, Sir Francis here, here Drake, Roger here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Drugeon, Louis Guillaume François here Ducarel, Patty here Dumdum here Dundas, Henry here, here Dupleix, Joseph François here, here arrival in India here becomes governor of Pondicherry here wealth here pact of neutrality here siege of Madras here, here as a military entrepreneur here awarded rank of Mansab here disgraced here Durrani, Ahmad Shah here, here, here, here, here, here Dutch, the here, here, here, here, here Dutch East India Company see VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) East India bubble, bursts here East India Company loot here authorised to wage war here becomes ruler of India here charter here, here army strength here, here, here, here, here, here, here headquarters here, here commercial efficiency here employees here aims here, here, here causes of success here relationship with British Parliament here, here, here, here, here share price here, here, here, here, here, here, here shareholders here, here, here global trade here debts here, here, here, here, here, here government bailout here, here, here status here foundation here, here, here investors here, here subscriptions here expenses here as joint stock corporation here subscribers here legal identity here structure here monopoly here, here, here, here first fleet here first fleet profit here capital here inadequate funding here quality of recruits here turn to India here, here regard for Mughal authority here profits here, here Second Joint Stock here first fortified Indian base here power here, here, here, here, here, here alliance with Jagat Seths here borrowing from Jagat Seths here becomes increasingly assertive here strategy here head office here balance sheets here Charter extended here stock here looting of Bengal here Burdwan, Midnapur and Chittagong ceded to here alliance with Shah Alam here war against Mir Qasim here, here control of Bengal here transformation into autonomous imperial power here tax revenue here, here veneer of Mughal legitimacy here exploitation of India here lack of concern here abuses exposed here public opinion swings against here financial stability here financial crisis, 1772 here default, 1772 here military expenses here remittances, 1772 here Bank of England loan here Select Committee investigation here chartered privileges here nationalisation here, here position shaky here treatment of Shah Alam here government supervision here arms factories here land holdings here Anglo-Indians excluded from employment here consolidation of position here credit system here financiers back here army followers here supremacy established here as Regent here recalls Wellesley here, here monopoly abolished here power curtailed here the Great Uprising here navy disbanded here removed from power here shut down here brand name here legacy in India here integrated business organisation here relevance here East India Company Charter Bill here East India House here Edinburgh Review here Edward, Prince of Wales here Edward Bonaventure here Egerton, Colonel here Egypt here Elizabeth I, Queen here, here Ellis, William here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here England Elizabethan here manufacturing industry here population here English, terms of abuse for the here English language first Indian words to enter here Indian words connected with weaving here European here Evelyn, John here extortion here Facebook here Farrukhabad here, here Farrukhnagar here Ferishta here financial crisis, 1772 here first fleet here Fitch, Ralph here Floyer, Charles here Foote, Samuel here Fordyce, Alexander here Fort d’Orléans here, here Fort St David here, here, here Fort St George here, here Fort William here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Fox, Charles James here France economy here population here ambitions here strategy here Francis, Philip here, here ambition here and Hastings here, here, here arrival in India here approach to India here governmental paralysis here Hastings denounces here challenges Hastings to duel here duel with Hastings here and the impeachment of Hastings here, here Fraser, William here freebooters here French and Indian Wars here French Navy here Fryer, Dr John here Fullarton, William here Fulta here Gaekwad here Gagabhatta here Ganges here, here, here Gentil, Jean-Baptiste here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Gentleman’s Magazine here, here George III, King here, here, here Ghasiti Begum here, here, here Ghazi ud-Din here Gheria, Battle of here Ghulam Husain Salim here Ghulam Qadir Khan Rohilla here as captive of Shah Alam here advance on Delhi here takes Delhi here imprisons Shah Alam here reign of terror here has Shah Alam blinded here Scindia’s defeat of here flight here capture here Gibbon, Edward here, here, here global financial crisis, 2008 here Globe here Goa here Golconda here, here Golconda, Sultanate of here gold here, here Golden Hinde here gonorrhoea here grand Mughal alliance Mir Qasim’s idea for here comes together here French prisoner-of-war regiment here, here, here forces here crosses the Ganges here Naga sadhus here, here, here ultimatum to the EIC here advance on Patna here tensions within here lack of discipline here siege of Patna here Shuja leaves here Grant, Captain here, here, here Grant, James here Great Mughal Diamond here Great Uprising, the here Gregory, Khoja here Grenville, Lord here Grose, John here Guler here Gurgin Khan here, here assassination of here, here Hadaspur, Battle of here Hafiz Rehmat Khan here Haidar Ali here, here declares war on the Company here forces here, here alliance with Marathas here advance into the Carnatic here EIC advance against here Battle of Pollilur here treatment of prisoners here failure to follow up Pollilur victory here advice on good government here, here death of here, here Hakluyt, Richard here Hamilton, Alexander here Hansi here, here Hariana here Haripant Phadke here Harper, Lieutenant Gabriel here Harris, General here, here, here, here Hastings, Marian here Hastings, Warren here at siege of Kasimbazar here and Bengal’s descent into chaos here appearance here background here character here, here education here defence of the rights of the Bengalis here recognition of Mir Qasim here promotion here and Mir Qasim here and Ellis crisis here, here Mir Qasim appeals to here on tax collection here appointed Governor General here and Francis here, here, here as Governor General here Indophilia here, here sensitivity to criticism here reputation here and EIC rule here moves government to Calcutta here reforms here governmental paralysis here denounces Francis here Francis challenges to duel here duel with Francis here learns of Pollilur catastrophe here Treaty of Salbai here Shah Alam’s appeal for funds here ceases all payments to Shah Alam here impeachment here accusations against here, here supporters here achievements here cleared of all charges here Hatim here, here Hawkins, Captain William here, here Hector here, here Helsa, Battle of here, here Herculean, HMS here Hippon, Captain here Hodges, William here Holdernesse, Lord here Holkar, Tukoji here, here, here, here, here Holland, Republic of here Holwell, John Zephaniah here, here, here Hong Kong here House of Lords, impeachment of Hastings here Hughli here, here, here, here, here Hughli Bandar here Hume, David here Hunter, Sir William here Hunter, William here Hyderabad here, here, here, here, here Iberian empires here Iceland here Id Gah, the here Ile de Bourbon here Imad ul-Mulk, Ghazi ud-Din Khan here background here seizes power here appearance here appoints Alamgir II here jealousy of Shah Alam here relations with Shah Alam here clings to power here murder of Alamgir II here ousted here imperialism here collapse of here India turn to here, here economic power here manufacturing industry here population here textiles industry here religious wounds here militarised society here British supremacy established here India Act here, here Indian Mutiny here Indonesia here insider trading here intermarriage here Iraq here Ireland here Jackson, Ira here Jacobite 1745 uprising here Jafarganj here Jagat Seths, the here, here, here, here alliance with EIC here power here EIC borrowing here and Siraj ud-Daula here, here and Plassey here and Clive here and Mir Jafar here and Mir Qasim here, here Jahangir, Emperor here, here character here and Roe here birthday celebrations, 1616 here piety here Jaipur here James I, King here, here, here Jasrota here Jaswant Rao Holkar here, here, here, here, here Jats here, here Java here jizya tax here Jodhpur here Johnson, Samuel here joint stock companies here, here, here Jones, Sir William here Kabul here kalawants here Kanchipuram here Kanpur here Kanua here Karle here Karmanasa here, here, here, here Kasimbazar here, here, here, here, here siege of here Katwa here Katwa, Battle of here Keir, Archibald here Kent here, here, here, here Khair ud-Din Illahabadi here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Khan, Ghulam Hussain here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Khardla, Battle of here Khelna River here Khoja Antoon here Khuldabad here Khwaja Petrus Aratoon here, here Kilpatrick, Major here Kindersley, Jemima here Kirkpatrick, James Achilles here, here, here Kirkpatrick, William here, here, here Kora here Kora, Battle of here Kortalaiyar here Kotvan here Lake, Gerald, 1st Viscount here Lake, Lord here, here, here, here siege of Aligarh here Battle of Dehli here occupation of Dehli here kisses the Begum Sumru here Lakheri, Battle of here Lancaster, Sir James here, here land reforms here Langlade, Charles here Law, Jacques here Law, Jean here, here, here, here, here, here, here Law de Lauriston, John here joins Shah Alam here appointed Master of Mughal Artillery here at Battle of Helsa here last stand and capture here Lawrence, Stringer here, here Levant Company here, here, here, here, here, here Lindsay, William here London Founders’ Hall here, here, here, here docks here Haymarket Theatre here London Magazine here London Post here London Stock Exchange here, here Lontor here loot here, here, here Lucan, Lieutenant here, here Lucknow here Lutf un-Nissa here Macartney, Lord here Macaulay, Thomas Babington here, here, here Madec, René here, here, here, here, here, here, here Madras here, here, here, here foundation of here growth here pagoda coins here population here garrison here siege of here, here restored to EIC here Clive’s first arrival in here Clive appointed Deputy Governor here Select Committee here Tipu Sultan raids, 1767 here Madras Council here Madraspatnam here Maharashtra here Mahfuz Khan here Mahtab Rai Jagat Seth here, here, here, here Malartic, M. here Malcolm, John here Malika-i-Zamani Begum here, here, here, here Manikchand, Raja here, here, here, here Mansur Ali Khan here, here, here Manucci, Niccolao here Marathas, the here, here resistance to Mughal Empire here, here, here army here attacks in Bengal here threat to Calcutta here recovery here, here defeat EIC force, 1779 here alliance with Haidar Ali here Shah Alam seeks alliance with here Shah Alam’s agreement with here take Delhi here breakdown of alliance with Shah Alam here modern military training here unravelling of confederacy here Wellesley’s war against here, here, here Maratha Confederacy here Maratha War, 1803–1805 here background here Shah Alam and here EIC forces here final preparations here ultimatum to Daulat Rao Scindia here Daulat Rao Scindia declares war here Battle of Assaye here siege of Aligarh here Battle of Dehli here, here occupation of Dehli here Markar, General here Marlborough here Marwari Oswal here Maskelyne, Edward here, here, here, here Maskelyne, the Reverend Nevil here Masulipatnam here, here, here Masumpur, Battle of here Mauritius here, here, here May Flowre here Mehrauli here Melkote here mercenaries here, here, here Metcalfe, Charles here Mexico here Middleton, Sir Henry here Midnapur here, here Mihir Chand here military assistance, sale of here military developments European here Indian improvements here Mill, James here Mills, Colonel here Minchin, Colonel here, here Mir (poet) here Mir Alam here, here, here Mir Ashraf here Mir Jafar, Nawab of Bengal here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here visits Calcutta here Clive on here, here and the EIC here and Bengal’s descent into chaos here and the Jagat Seths here and Plassey here rebellions against here taste for fine jewels here rivals eliminated here EIC undermines here at Battle of Helsa here and death of son here coup, 1761 here brought out of retirement here Shuja takes prisoner here Mir Madan here Mir Qasim, Nawab of Bengal here character here education here coup, 1761 here administrative skills here, here taxes here restructuring here and the Jagat Seths here, here moves capital to Bihar here army reforms here disappearances here intelligence network here and EIC alliance with Shah Alam here confirmed governor of Bengal here meets Shah Alam here breakdown of relations with EIC here, here war declared on here war against here, here paranoia here, here assassination of Gurgin Khan here, here appeal to Hastings here kills prisoners here grand Mughal alliance proposal here, here crosses the Karmanasa here siege of Patna here, here wanderings here death of here Miran here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mirza Mahdi Astarabadi here Mirza Mehdi here Mirza Muhammad Shafi here mission civilisatrice here Modave, Comte de here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mohammad Reza Khan here, here, here Mohammad Taki here Moluccas, the here, here moneylenders here scarcity of here Mongalkote here Monghyr here, here, here, here Monserrate, Fr Antonio here Monson, Colonel here, here, here, here Moreton Say here, here Morse, Governor here, here Mughal Empire here cities here wealth here first contacts with here army strength here Roe’s mission to here artists’ skill here status of the English here, here EIC regard for authority here Roe’s advice on dealing with here Josiah Child attacks here resistance to here, here, here extent here succession disputes here regional governors here EIC becomes increasingly assertive here imperial court here decline here Nader Shah invades here, here cavalry here financial crisis here militarised society here collapse of here, here trade here contraction of here Mughal India, fracturing of here Mughal nobility, effective extinction of here Muhammad Ali here Muhammad Ali Hazin here Muhammad Shah Rangila here, here, here, here, here, here Nader Shah captures here hedonism here Muizuddin, Prince here Mullick family here multinational corporations here Mun, Thomas here Munna Lal here, here, here, here Munro, Sir Hector here, here, here, here, here, here, here Munro, Thomas here Murshid Quli Khan here, here Murshidabad here, here, here, here, here coup, 1761 here Murtaza Husain here Muscovy Company here Mustafa Khan here Mysore here, here Nabakrishna Deb here Nabob, The here Nader Shah Afshar invasion of Mughal Empire here, here return to Persia here Nadia here Naga sadhus here, here, here, here, here Najaf Khan, Mirza here, here, here, here appointed commander of Shah Alam’s army here background here Delhi expedition here campaign against Zabita Khan here siege of Pathargarh here rewards here army here campaign of reconquest here siege of Agra Fort here court intrigue against here illness here, here made regent here death of here territorial gains lost here tomb here Najib ud-Daula, Najib Khan Yusufzai here, here, here Najib-ul-Tawarikh here Nana Phadnavis here, here, here Nandakumar here Napoleon Bonaparte grand strategy here plans to invade England here threat to India here Narayan Rao, death of here Narayan Singh here, here National Archives of India here, here National Museum, Delhi here nationalisation here, here Nawal Singh here Nawazish Khan here New France here New York here Nidha Mal here Nile, Battle of the here Nizam Ali Khan here North, Lord here, here North West Passage here, here Nur Jahan, Empress here Ochterlony, Sir David here, here official memory here opium here, here Opium Wars, the here Orme, Robert here, here, here Ottoman Turkey here Owain Gruff ydd ap Gwenwynwyn here Padshahnama, the here Palmer, William here, here, here Panipat, Battle of here Pathargarh, siege of here Patissier, Charles-Joseph, Marquis de Bussy here, here Patna here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here battle of here grand Mughal alliance proposal on here siege of here famine here Patna Massacre, the here, here, here Pattlee here Pearse, Colonel Thomas Deane here Pedron, Colonel here pepper here Permanent Settlement, the here Perron, Pierre Cuiller- here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Persia here, here Pester, John here, here, here Philip II, King of Spain here pirates here Pitt, William here Plassey, Battle of here advance to here Council of War here Siraj ud-Daula’s army here, here the battle here cannonade here monsoon storm here Mir Madan’s cavalry charge here Mir Jafar withdraws here casualties here the pursuit here Siraj ud-Daula escapes here aftermath here, here first anniversary here Polier, Antoine here, here, here, here Pollilur, Battle of here, here impact of here Pondicherry here, here, here French presence here Dupleix becomes governor here garrison here reinforcements here War of Austrian Succession here Port Lorient intelligence here Portugal here, here, here, here Powis Castle here, here, here Pownall, Thomas here Prasad, Ishwari here Prince George here privateers here, here profits here, here prostitution here Pune here, here, here, here, here, here, here Pune expedition, 1779 here Purana Qila here Purnea here Qudsia Begum here Quiberon Bay here Qu’tb ud-Din Baktiar Khaki here Raghuji Bhosle, Raja of Berar here, here Raghunath Rao here Raigad here Raja Khan here Raja Rammohan Roy here Rajan, Raghuram here Rajasthan here Rajat Kanta Ray here Rajmahal here, here Rajputs here, here Raleigh, Sir Walter here, here Ram, Ganga here Ram Narain, Raja here assassination of here Ramdulal Dey here Rana Khan here, here Rangpur here Raymond, Michel Joachim Marie here, here, here Red Dragon here regime change here Regulating Act here, here, here Reinhardt, Walter (Sumru) here, here, here, here, here Renault, M. here, here Rennell, James here, here Renny, Captain David here, here, here Reynolds, Joshua here Riyazu-s-salatin here, here Roanoke Island here Roe, Sir Thomas here, here mission to Mughal Empire here return to England here, here advice on dealing with the Mughal Empire here Rohilla, the here, here, here, here, here Rohilla War here Rothenstein, William, The Building of Britain here, here Royal Navy here, here Roznamchai-Shah Alam here Sa’adat Khan here, here, here Safdar Jung, Nawab of Avadh here, here, here, here Saharanpur here Saif ud-Daula here St Thomas Mount here, here Salbai, Treaty of here Salisbury Journal here salt here saltpetre here Sambhaji here San Thome here, here Satara here Sauda here, here Saunders, Thomas here Sayyid Reza Khan here Scindia, Daulat Rao see Daulat Rao Scindia Scindia, Mahadji here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Scourge of Malice here Scrafton, Luke here, here, here, here Scurry, James here scurvy here Second Joint Stock here Secret Committee here Select Committee here, here Serai Alamchand here Seringapatam here Seven Years War first act here scale here Port Lorient intelligence here outbreak here Shah Abdul Aziz here Shah Alam here, here, here, here, here capture of here appearance here, here, here character here, here background here birth here interest in literature here titles here Sufism here Imad ul-Mulk’s jealousy of here relations with Imad ul-Mulk here exile here, here invasion of Bengal here campaign to recapture Bengal here, here crosses the Karmanasa here, here nobility of Bengal join here learns of father’s murder here mystique here French forces here ascension to the imperial throne here Battle of Masumpur here advance on Murshidabad here at Battle of Helsa here defeat here pursuit of here alliance with EIC here meets Mir Qasim here EIC allowance here income here and grand Mughal alliance proposal here, here, here relations with EIC here accommodation with EIC here at Battle of Buxar here negotiations with Clive here Treaty of Allahabad here, here departure on Delhi expedition here seeks alliance with Marathas here life in Allahabad here EIC treatment of here envoy to George III here agreement with Marathas here appoints Najaf Khan commander here meeting with Shuja ud-Daula here Delhi expedition here Scindia prostrates self here begins reconquest of empire here entry into Delhi here campaign against Zabita Khan here and Ghulam Qadir here treatment of prisoners here takes control of Delhi here breakdown of Maratha alliance here achievements here, here poetry and songs here, here, here, here, here and the siege of Agra Fort here court intrigue here court re-established here piety here, here Polier on here faults here, here Modave on here appeals to Hastings for funds here lack of funds here, here Hastings ceases all payments to here appoints Najaf Khan Regent here goodbye to Najaf Khan here territorial gains lost here seeks Scindia’s protection here Ghulam Qadir imprisons here blinding of here mutilation here, here Scindia’s rescue operation here ceases to worry about this world here Tipu Sultan breaks off relations with here in old age here Maratha protection here taken into EIC protection here and Maratha War here, here, here and the Battle of Dehli here EIC as regent here Shah Alam Nama here, here, here, here Shahamat Jang here Shahdara here Shahjahanabad here, here, here, here, here Shaista Khan, Nawab of Bengal here, here Shakespeare, William here Macbeth here Shakir Khan here, here, here share price here, here, here, here, here, here, here shareholders here, here, here Sharia law here Shaukat Jung of Purnea here Shell here Sheridan, Richard Brinsley here, here Shipman, Sir Abraham here Shitab Rai here Shivaji Bhonsle here, here, here Shuja ud-Daula, Nawab of Avadh here, here reputation for treachery here strength here appearance here vices here and grand Mughal alliance proposal here, here ultimatum to the EIC here siege of Patna here, here withdrawal to Buxar here takes Mir Qasim prisoner here Battle of Buxar here escape from Buxar here resistance here surrender here reinstated here meeting with Clive here Rohilla War here meeting with Shah Alam here Shushtari, Abdul Lateef here Siddons, Sarah here Sierra Leone Company here Sikander Jah here Sikandra here, here Sikhs here, here, here, here silver here, here Siraj ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal here, here, here character here, here reputation here sexuality here alienates the Jagat Seths here hold over Aliverdi Khan here named heir here EIC fails to cultivate here siege of Kasimbazar here demands for Drake here advance on Calcutta here, here takes Calcutta here enters Calcutta here declaration of war on here Clive’s night attack here Clive’s offensive against here retreat here signs Treaty of Alinagar here and the fall of Chandernagar here, here attempt to win the friendship of Clive here plot to remove here Clive’s ultimatum here Clive’s campaign against here and Plassey here escape from Plassey here flight here body paraded through streets here, here capture of here death of here family murdered here Sivabharata here Skinner, James here, here, here slave trade here, here smallpox here, here Smith, Adam here, here Smythe, Sir Thomas here, here, here, here, here Soame, Sir Stephen here Sobel, Dava here Spain here, here, here Spanish Armada here Spice Islands here Spice Routes here spice trade attempts to break into here profit here, here Srirangam here Srirangapatnam here, here, here fortifications here assault on here Revolutionary Jacobin club here siege of here fall of here rape of here looting of here remains here Stein, Burton here Stevens, Fr Thomas here Stevenson, Colonel here Stewart, Captain James here Strachey, Jane here Strachey, Richard here Stretham here subprime bubble, 2007–9 here Subrahmanyam, Sanjay here subscription book here Sulaiman, Prince here Sumru here, here, here, here, here Sumru, Begum here, here, here, here, here Surat here, here, here Susan here Suvali here Suvarnadurg here Swaroop Chand here Swinton, Archibald here Tagore, Dwarkanath here Talegaon here Tamil culture here Tangier here Tanjore here coup attempt, 1749 here Tarikh-i Muzaffari here, here tax collectors here tax defaulters here taxes here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here tea here, here tea tax here textiles industry here, here, here Third Anglo-Mysore War here Thomas, George here Thorn, Major William here, here, here Tipu Sultan here, here campaign tent here Madras raid, 1767 here Battle of Pollilur here, here treatment of prisoners here character here takes over throne here appearance here father’s advice on good government here, here military skill here commercial department here reforms here patronage of Hindus here as a champion of Islam here British portrayal here culture of innovation here library here violence here flaws here breaks off relations with Shah Alam here Third Anglo-Mysore War here speed of advance here army strength here troops desert here peace treaty here embassy to Napoleon here French support here Wellesley’s letter to here Wellesley’s campaign against here propaganda against here spies here support here forces here resources here French corps here defence of Srirangapatnam here last stand here body found here tomb here people’s love for here throne here wealth here possessions distributed here Tiruvannamalai here Tooke, William here Tower of London here Travancore Lines, the here Trichinopoly here, here Trinomalee here Turkey Company here Twining, Thomas here Tyger here, here Udaipur here Udhua Nullah, siege of here Valentia, Lord here van Neck, Admiral Jacob Corneliszoon here Vaneshwar Vidyalankar here Vansittart, Henry here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Vellore here, here Venice Company here Verelst, Henry here Victoria, Queen here, here Victorian period official memory here sense of embarrassment here Vijayanagara empire here village republics here Virginia here, here, here Vitoji Rao here Vizagapatam here VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), Dutch East India Company here, here, here, here, here Voltaire here Volton, Joseph de here, here Wadgaon, Treaty of here Wadyar dynasty, restoration here Walcott here Walmart here Walpole, Horace here, here, here, here, here Waqi’at-i Azfari here War of Austrian Succession here, here Warid here Washington, George here, here Watson, Admiral here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Watts, William here, here, here Wellesley, Colonel Arthur (later Duke of Wellington) here background here welcomes brother here Tipu Sultan campaign here and the attack on Srirangapatnam here and Tipu Sultan’s throne here Maratha War preparations here Battle of Assaye here Wellesley, Richard Colley, 1st Marquess Wellesley here arrival in India here appearance here background here character here attitude to the EIC here goals here and French threat here neutralises French forces in Hyderabad here letter to Tipu Sultan here campaign against Tipu Sultan here propaganda against Tipu Sultan here spies here army strength here war against the Marathas here, here, here and Shah Alam here military expenses here cunning here conception of British Empire in India here EIC nervousness about here ultimatum to Daulat Rao Scindia here achievement here almost bankrupts EIC here accusations against here recalled here, here West, Benjamin here Yorktown, Battle of here Young, Arthur here Yusuf Ali Khan here Zabita Khan Rohilla here, here, here, here, here, here Zaman Shah here Zeenat Mahal here Zinat Mahal here A Note on the Author William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapucinski Prize-winning Return of a King.

Major John here Bogle, George here Boigne, Comte Benoît de here, here, here, here Bolts, William here Considerations on Indian Affairs here Bombay acquisition of here dry dock here harbour here garrison here growth here population here Protestant community here Bombay Castle here Boston Tea Party here, here Bourquien, Louis here, here Braithwaite, John here bribery here, here, here, here British Empire, mission civilisatrice here British Parliament, relationship with EIC here, here, here, here, here brothels here Brown, Katherine Butler here Brown Bess muskets here buccaneers here Buckingham, James Silk here Budge Budge here Burdwan here, here Burgoyne, General John here, here Burke, Edmund here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Burney, Fanny here Burrell, William here Buxar here Buxar, Battle of here, here Shuja ud-Daula’s escape here casualties here looting here Caillaud, Major John here, here, here, here, here Calcutta here, here foundation of here city walls rebuilt here, here Clive on here exports here growth here docks here European houses here Governor’s House here population here, here profit here Writers’ Building here Maratha threat here defences here, here, here Black Town here, here diversity here Indian population here merchants here Shushtari on here prostitution here English inhabitants here mortality rate here cost of living here militia here vulnerability here repair programme here Siraj ud-Daula’s advance on here fall of here the Great Tank here looted here, here Drake flees here Siraj ud-Daula enters here the Black Hole here reconquest of here Government House here St Anne’s church here Clive’s night attack here Mir Jafar visits here Clive returns to here government moved to here Belvedere here Cornwallis arrives in here beauty here wages here revenues here Canning, Lord here Cape, the here Careri, Giovanni Gemelli here Carnac, John here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Carnatic, the here Carnatic music here Carnatic Wars here, here, here, here, here, here, here Cartier, John here cartographical survey here Catherine of Braganza here Chait Singh, Raja of Benares here, here Chandernagar here fall of here, here defences here growth here vulnerability here Charles I, King here Charles II, King here Charnock, Job here, here charter here, here, here extended here revoked here Chevalier, M. here Child, Sir Josiah here, here Chin Qilich Khan, Nizam ul-Mulk here, here, here, here, here China here Choiseul, Duc de here Christianity, forced conversions here Chunar here Claremont estate here Clavering, General here, here Clive, Edward, 1st Earl of Powis here, here, here Clive, Henrietta, Countess of Powis here Clive, Margaret (nee Maskelyne) here, here, here Clive, Richard here, here, here, here, here Clive, Robert, 1st Baron Clive here, here mental stability here pillage of Bengal here wealth here, here political career here, here, here offer of employment here, here background here birth here attempted suicide here first arrival in Madras here hatred for India here letters here first EIC career here military training here early military career here marriage here appointed Deputy Governor of Madras here return to England, 1753 here on Calcutta here return to India here Royal Commission here reconquest of Calcutta here declares war on Siraj ud-Daula here offensive against Siraj ud-Daula here taking of Chandernagar here Siraj ud-Daula’s attempt to win friendship of here and plot to remove Siraj ud-Daula here ultimatum to Siraj ud-Daula here advance to Plassey here campaign against Siraj ud-Daula here crisis of confidence here Battle of Plassey here advance on Murshidabad here enters Murshidabad here and the Jagat Seths here prize money here, here return to Murshidabad here on Mir Jafar here, here despatches to London here self-confidence here loot here return to Britain here land purchases here Shropshire estate here return to India, 1765 here, here buys Company shares here life in England here as governor here return to Calcutta here meeting with Shuja ud-Daula here negotiations with Shah Alam here Treaty of Allahabad here triumph here public opinion swings against here Select Committee defence here depression here Grand Tour here suicide here burial here intercepts Shah Alam’s gifts here Colebrooke, Sir George here Coleroon River here Collins, John Ulrich here, here Collins, Wilkie, The Moonstone here Comoro Islands here Compagnie des Indes here, here, here Compagnie Van Verre here Coorg here Cornwallis, Charles, 1st Marquess Cornwallis here arrival in Calcutta here replaces Hastings here on Calcutta here alliance against Tipu Sultan here Third Anglo-Mysore War here reforms here tax reforms here land reforms here Coromandel, the here corporate capitalism here corporate influence, danger of here corporate lobbying here corporate violence here corruption here court miniatures here credit system here CROATOAN here Cuddalore here Cumberland here Dalrymple, Alexander here Dalrymple, James here, here, here Dalrymple, Stair here, here Dara Shukoh here Daria-i-Noor Diamond here Da’ud Khan here Daulat Rao Scindia here, here, here, here, here, here ultimatum to here declares war on the Company here Battle of Assaye here Davis, Thomas here Day, Francis here Daylesford here Debates in the Asiatic Assembly here Debrit, John here Deccan, the here, here Mughal occupation here Delhi here, here, here capture of here population here imperial court here splendour here Nader Shah’s massacre here, here impoverishment of here civil war here occupations here Imad ul-Mulk clings to power in here Afghan occupation here Shah Alam sets out on expedition to here Marathas capture here Shah Alam enters here ruined and depopulated here Shah Alam takes control of here Ghulam Qadir takes here Scindia’s rescue operation here earthquake here Battle of here, here occupation of here Delhi expedition line of march here Shah Alam set out on here importance here EIC response to here Najaf Khan appointed army commander here meeting with Shuja ud-Daula here advance to Farrukhabad here entry into Delhi here breakdown of Maratha alliance here Deptford here Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex here Dhaka here, here, here Dhaka Red Fort here, here Dickinson, John here, here Dip Chand here Diwani, the here, here, here, here, here Dodally here Dow, Alexander here, here Drake, Sir Francis here, here Drake, Roger here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Drugeon, Louis Guillaume François here Ducarel, Patty here Dumdum here Dundas, Henry here, here Dupleix, Joseph François here, here arrival in India here becomes governor of Pondicherry here wealth here pact of neutrality here siege of Madras here, here as a military entrepreneur here awarded rank of Mansab here disgraced here Durrani, Ahmad Shah here, here, here, here, here, here Dutch, the here, here, here, here, here Dutch East India Company see VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) East India bubble, bursts here East India Company loot here authorised to wage war here becomes ruler of India here charter here, here army strength here, here, here, here, here, here, here headquarters here, here commercial efficiency here employees here aims here, here, here causes of success here relationship with British Parliament here, here, here, here, here share price here, here, here, here, here, here, here shareholders here, here, here global trade here debts here, here, here, here, here, here government bailout here, here, here status here foundation here, here, here investors here, here subscriptions here expenses here as joint stock corporation here subscribers here legal identity here structure here monopoly here, here, here, here first fleet here first fleet profit here capital here inadequate funding here quality of recruits here turn to India here, here regard for Mughal authority here profits here, here Second Joint Stock here first fortified Indian base here power here, here, here, here, here, here alliance with Jagat Seths here borrowing from Jagat Seths here becomes increasingly assertive here strategy here head office here balance sheets here Charter extended here stock here looting of Bengal here Burdwan, Midnapur and Chittagong ceded to here alliance with Shah Alam here war against Mir Qasim here, here control of Bengal here transformation into autonomous imperial power here tax revenue here, here veneer of Mughal legitimacy here exploitation of India here lack of concern here abuses exposed here public opinion swings against here financial stability here financial crisis, 1772 here default, 1772 here military expenses here remittances, 1772 here Bank of England loan here Select Committee investigation here chartered privileges here nationalisation here, here position shaky here treatment of Shah Alam here government supervision here arms factories here land holdings here Anglo-Indians excluded from employment here consolidation of position here credit system here financiers back here army followers here supremacy established here as Regent here recalls Wellesley here, here monopoly abolished here power curtailed here the Great Uprising here navy disbanded here removed from power here shut down here brand name here legacy in India here integrated business organisation here relevance here East India Company Charter Bill here East India House here Edinburgh Review here Edward, Prince of Wales here Edward Bonaventure here Egerton, Colonel here Egypt here Elizabeth I, Queen here, here Ellis, William here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here England Elizabethan here manufacturing industry here population here English, terms of abuse for the here English language first Indian words to enter here Indian words connected with weaving here European here Evelyn, John here extortion here Facebook here Farrukhabad here, here Farrukhnagar here Ferishta here financial crisis, 1772 here first fleet here Fitch, Ralph here Floyer, Charles here Foote, Samuel here Fordyce, Alexander here Fort d’Orléans here, here Fort St David here, here, here Fort St George here, here Fort William here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Fox, Charles James here France economy here population here ambitions here strategy here Francis, Philip here, here ambition here and Hastings here, here, here arrival in India here approach to India here governmental paralysis here Hastings denounces here challenges Hastings to duel here duel with Hastings here and the impeachment of Hastings here, here Fraser, William here freebooters here French and Indian Wars here French Navy here Fryer, Dr John here Fullarton, William here Fulta here Gaekwad here Gagabhatta here Ganges here, here, here Gentil, Jean-Baptiste here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Gentleman’s Magazine here, here George III, King here, here, here Ghasiti Begum here, here, here Ghazi ud-Din here Gheria, Battle of here Ghulam Husain Salim here Ghulam Qadir Khan Rohilla here as captive of Shah Alam here advance on Delhi here takes Delhi here imprisons Shah Alam here reign of terror here has Shah Alam blinded here Scindia’s defeat of here flight here capture here Gibbon, Edward here, here, here global financial crisis, 2008 here Globe here Goa here Golconda here, here Golconda, Sultanate of here gold here, here Golden Hinde here gonorrhoea here grand Mughal alliance Mir Qasim’s idea for here comes together here French prisoner-of-war regiment here, here, here forces here crosses the Ganges here Naga sadhus here, here, here ultimatum to the EIC here advance on Patna here tensions within here lack of discipline here siege of Patna here Shuja leaves here Grant, Captain here, here, here Grant, James here Great Mughal Diamond here Great Uprising, the here Gregory, Khoja here Grenville, Lord here Grose, John here Guler here Gurgin Khan here, here assassination of here, here Hadaspur, Battle of here Hafiz Rehmat Khan here Haidar Ali here, here declares war on the Company here forces here, here alliance with Marathas here advance into the Carnatic here EIC advance against here Battle of Pollilur here treatment of prisoners here failure to follow up Pollilur victory here advice on good government here, here death of here, here Hakluyt, Richard here Hamilton, Alexander here Hansi here, here Hariana here Haripant Phadke here Harper, Lieutenant Gabriel here Harris, General here, here, here, here Hastings, Marian here Hastings, Warren here at siege of Kasimbazar here and Bengal’s descent into chaos here appearance here background here character here, here education here defence of the rights of the Bengalis here recognition of Mir Qasim here promotion here and Mir Qasim here and Ellis crisis here, here Mir Qasim appeals to here on tax collection here appointed Governor General here and Francis here, here, here as Governor General here Indophilia here, here sensitivity to criticism here reputation here and EIC rule here moves government to Calcutta here reforms here governmental paralysis here denounces Francis here Francis challenges to duel here duel with Francis here learns of Pollilur catastrophe here Treaty of Salbai here Shah Alam’s appeal for funds here ceases all payments to Shah Alam here impeachment here accusations against here, here supporters here achievements here cleared of all charges here Hatim here, here Hawkins, Captain William here, here Hector here, here Helsa, Battle of here, here Herculean, HMS here Hippon, Captain here Hodges, William here Holdernesse, Lord here Holkar, Tukoji here, here, here, here, here Holland, Republic of here Holwell, John Zephaniah here, here, here Hong Kong here House of Lords, impeachment of Hastings here Hughli here, here, here, here, here Hughli Bandar here Hume, David here Hunter, Sir William here Hunter, William here Hyderabad here, here, here, here, here Iberian empires here Iceland here Id Gah, the here Ile de Bourbon here Imad ul-Mulk, Ghazi ud-Din Khan here background here seizes power here appearance here appoints Alamgir II here jealousy of Shah Alam here relations with Shah Alam here clings to power here murder of Alamgir II here ousted here imperialism here collapse of here India turn to here, here economic power here manufacturing industry here population here textiles industry here religious wounds here militarised society here British supremacy established here India Act here, here Indian Mutiny here Indonesia here insider trading here intermarriage here Iraq here Ireland here Jackson, Ira here Jacobite 1745 uprising here Jafarganj here Jagat Seths, the here, here, here, here alliance with EIC here power here EIC borrowing here and Siraj ud-Daula here, here and Plassey here and Clive here and Mir Jafar here and Mir Qasim here, here Jahangir, Emperor here, here character here and Roe here birthday celebrations, 1616 here piety here Jaipur here James I, King here, here, here Jasrota here Jaswant Rao Holkar here, here, here, here, here Jats here, here Java here jizya tax here Jodhpur here Johnson, Samuel here joint stock companies here, here, here Jones, Sir William here Kabul here kalawants here Kanchipuram here Kanpur here Kanua here Karle here Karmanasa here, here, here, here Kasimbazar here, here, here, here, here siege of here Katwa here Katwa, Battle of here Keir, Archibald here Kent here, here, here, here Khair ud-Din Illahabadi here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Khan, Ghulam Hussain here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Khardla, Battle of here Khelna River here Khoja Antoon here Khuldabad here Khwaja Petrus Aratoon here, here Kilpatrick, Major here Kindersley, Jemima here Kirkpatrick, James Achilles here, here, here Kirkpatrick, William here, here, here Kora here Kora, Battle of here Kortalaiyar here Kotvan here Lake, Gerald, 1st Viscount here Lake, Lord here, here, here, here siege of Aligarh here Battle of Dehli here occupation of Dehli here kisses the Begum Sumru here Lakheri, Battle of here Lancaster, Sir James here, here land reforms here Langlade, Charles here Law, Jacques here Law, Jean here, here, here, here, here, here, here Law de Lauriston, John here joins Shah Alam here appointed Master of Mughal Artillery here at Battle of Helsa here last stand and capture here Lawrence, Stringer here, here Levant Company here, here, here, here, here, here Lindsay, William here London Founders’ Hall here, here, here, here docks here Haymarket Theatre here London Magazine here London Post here London Stock Exchange here, here Lontor here loot here, here, here Lucan, Lieutenant here, here Lucknow here Lutf un-Nissa here Macartney, Lord here Macaulay, Thomas Babington here, here, here Madec, René here, here, here, here, here, here, here Madras here, here, here, here foundation of here growth here pagoda coins here population here garrison here siege of here, here restored to EIC here Clive’s first arrival in here Clive appointed Deputy Governor here Select Committee here Tipu Sultan raids, 1767 here Madras Council here Madraspatnam here Maharashtra here Mahfuz Khan here Mahtab Rai Jagat Seth here, here, here, here Malartic, M. here Malcolm, John here Malika-i-Zamani Begum here, here, here, here Manikchand, Raja here, here, here, here Mansur Ali Khan here, here, here Manucci, Niccolao here Marathas, the here, here resistance to Mughal Empire here, here, here army here attacks in Bengal here threat to Calcutta here recovery here, here defeat EIC force, 1779 here alliance with Haidar Ali here Shah Alam seeks alliance with here Shah Alam’s agreement with here take Delhi here breakdown of alliance with Shah Alam here modern military training here unravelling of confederacy here Wellesley’s war against here, here, here Maratha Confederacy here Maratha War, 1803–1805 here background here Shah Alam and here EIC forces here final preparations here ultimatum to Daulat Rao Scindia here Daulat Rao Scindia declares war here Battle of Assaye here siege of Aligarh here Battle of Dehli here, here occupation of Dehli here Markar, General here Marlborough here Marwari Oswal here Maskelyne, Edward here, here, here, here Maskelyne, the Reverend Nevil here Masulipatnam here, here, here Masumpur, Battle of here Mauritius here, here, here May Flowre here Mehrauli here Melkote here mercenaries here, here, here Metcalfe, Charles here Mexico here Middleton, Sir Henry here Midnapur here, here Mihir Chand here military assistance, sale of here military developments European here Indian improvements here Mill, James here Mills, Colonel here Minchin, Colonel here, here Mir (poet) here Mir Alam here, here, here Mir Ashraf here Mir Jafar, Nawab of Bengal here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here visits Calcutta here Clive on here, here and the EIC here and Bengal’s descent into chaos here and the Jagat Seths here and Plassey here rebellions against here taste for fine jewels here rivals eliminated here EIC undermines here at Battle of Helsa here and death of son here coup, 1761 here brought out of retirement here Shuja takes prisoner here Mir Madan here Mir Qasim, Nawab of Bengal here character here education here coup, 1761 here administrative skills here, here taxes here restructuring here and the Jagat Seths here, here moves capital to Bihar here army reforms here disappearances here intelligence network here and EIC alliance with Shah Alam here confirmed governor of Bengal here meets Shah Alam here breakdown of relations with EIC here, here war declared on here war against here, here paranoia here, here assassination of Gurgin Khan here, here appeal to Hastings here kills prisoners here grand Mughal alliance proposal here, here crosses the Karmanasa here siege of Patna here, here wanderings here death of here Miran here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mirza Mahdi Astarabadi here Mirza Mehdi here Mirza Muhammad Shafi here mission civilisatrice here Modave, Comte de here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Mohammad Reza Khan here, here, here Mohammad Taki here Moluccas, the here, here moneylenders here scarcity of here Mongalkote here Monghyr here, here, here, here Monserrate, Fr Antonio here Monson, Colonel here, here, here, here Moreton Say here, here Morse, Governor here, here Mughal Empire here cities here wealth here first contacts with here army strength here Roe’s mission to here artists’ skill here status of the English here, here EIC regard for authority here Roe’s advice on dealing with here Josiah Child attacks here resistance to here, here, here extent here succession disputes here regional governors here EIC becomes increasingly assertive here imperial court here decline here Nader Shah invades here, here cavalry here financial crisis here militarised society here collapse of here, here trade here contraction of here Mughal India, fracturing of here Mughal nobility, effective extinction of here Muhammad Ali here Muhammad Ali Hazin here Muhammad Shah Rangila here, here, here, here, here, here Nader Shah captures here hedonism here Muizuddin, Prince here Mullick family here multinational corporations here Mun, Thomas here Munna Lal here, here, here, here Munro, Sir Hector here, here, here, here, here, here, here Munro, Thomas here Murshid Quli Khan here, here Murshidabad here, here, here, here, here coup, 1761 here Murtaza Husain here Muscovy Company here Mustafa Khan here Mysore here, here Nabakrishna Deb here Nabob, The here Nader Shah Afshar invasion of Mughal Empire here, here return to Persia here Nadia here Naga sadhus here, here, here, here, here Najaf Khan, Mirza here, here, here, here appointed commander of Shah Alam’s army here background here Delhi expedition here campaign against Zabita Khan here siege of Pathargarh here rewards here army here campaign of reconquest here siege of Agra Fort here court intrigue against here illness here, here made regent here death of here territorial gains lost here tomb here Najib ud-Daula, Najib Khan Yusufzai here, here, here Najib-ul-Tawarikh here Nana Phadnavis here, here, here Nandakumar here Napoleon Bonaparte grand strategy here plans to invade England here threat to India here Narayan Rao, death of here Narayan Singh here, here National Archives of India here, here National Museum, Delhi here nationalisation here, here Nawal Singh here Nawazish Khan here New France here New York here Nidha Mal here Nile, Battle of the here Nizam Ali Khan here North, Lord here, here North West Passage here, here Nur Jahan, Empress here Ochterlony, Sir David here, here official memory here opium here, here Opium Wars, the here Orme, Robert here, here, here Ottoman Turkey here Owain Gruff ydd ap Gwenwynwyn here Padshahnama, the here Palmer, William here, here, here Panipat, Battle of here Pathargarh, siege of here Patissier, Charles-Joseph, Marquis de Bussy here, here Patna here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here battle of here grand Mughal alliance proposal on here siege of here famine here Patna Massacre, the here, here, here Pattlee here Pearse, Colonel Thomas Deane here Pedron, Colonel here pepper here Permanent Settlement, the here Perron, Pierre Cuiller- here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Persia here, here Pester, John here, here, here Philip II, King of Spain here pirates here Pitt, William here Plassey, Battle of here advance to here Council of War here Siraj ud-Daula’s army here, here the battle here cannonade here monsoon storm here Mir Madan’s cavalry charge here Mir Jafar withdraws here casualties here the pursuit here Siraj ud-Daula escapes here aftermath here, here first anniversary here Polier, Antoine here, here, here, here Pollilur, Battle of here, here impact of here Pondicherry here, here, here French presence here Dupleix becomes governor here garrison here reinforcements here War of Austrian Succession here Port Lorient intelligence here Portugal here, here, here, here Powis Castle here, here, here Pownall, Thomas here Prasad, Ishwari here Prince George here privateers here, here profits here, here prostitution here Pune here, here, here, here, here, here, here Pune expedition, 1779 here Purana Qila here Purnea here Qudsia Begum here Quiberon Bay here Qu’tb ud-Din Baktiar Khaki here Raghuji Bhosle, Raja of Berar here, here Raghunath Rao here Raigad here Raja Khan here Raja Rammohan Roy here Rajan, Raghuram here Rajasthan here Rajat Kanta Ray here Rajmahal here, here Rajputs here, here Raleigh, Sir Walter here, here Ram, Ganga here Ram Narain, Raja here assassination of here Ramdulal Dey here Rana Khan here, here Rangpur here Raymond, Michel Joachim Marie here, here, here Red Dragon here regime change here Regulating Act here, here, here Reinhardt, Walter (Sumru) here, here, here, here, here Renault, M. here, here Rennell, James here, here Renny, Captain David here, here, here Reynolds, Joshua here Riyazu-s-salatin here, here Roanoke Island here Roe, Sir Thomas here, here mission to Mughal Empire here return to England here, here advice on dealing with the Mughal Empire here Rohilla, the here, here, here, here, here Rohilla War here Rothenstein, William, The Building of Britain here, here Royal Navy here, here Roznamchai-Shah Alam here Sa’adat Khan here, here, here Safdar Jung, Nawab of Avadh here, here, here, here Saharanpur here Saif ud-Daula here St Thomas Mount here, here Salbai, Treaty of here Salisbury Journal here salt here saltpetre here Sambhaji here San Thome here, here Satara here Sauda here, here Saunders, Thomas here Sayyid Reza Khan here Scindia, Daulat Rao see Daulat Rao Scindia Scindia, Mahadji here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Scourge of Malice here Scrafton, Luke here, here, here, here Scurry, James here scurvy here Second Joint Stock here Secret Committee here Select Committee here, here Serai Alamchand here Seringapatam here Seven Years War first act here scale here Port Lorient intelligence here outbreak here Shah Abdul Aziz here Shah Alam here, here, here, here, here capture of here appearance here, here, here character here, here background here birth here interest in literature here titles here Sufism here Imad ul-Mulk’s jealousy of here relations with Imad ul-Mulk here exile here, here invasion of Bengal here campaign to recapture Bengal here, here crosses the Karmanasa here, here nobility of Bengal join here learns of father’s murder here mystique here French forces here ascension to the imperial throne here Battle of Masumpur here advance on Murshidabad here at Battle of Helsa here defeat here pursuit of here alliance with EIC here meets Mir Qasim here EIC allowance here income here and grand Mughal alliance proposal here, here, here relations with EIC here accommodation with EIC here at Battle of Buxar here negotiations with Clive here Treaty of Allahabad here, here departure on Delhi expedition here seeks alliance with Marathas here life in Allahabad here EIC treatment of here envoy to George III here agreement with Marathas here appoints Najaf Khan commander here meeting with Shuja ud-Daula here Delhi expedition here Scindia prostrates self here begins reconquest of empire here entry into Delhi here campaign against Zabita Khan here and Ghulam Qadir here treatment of prisoners here takes control of Delhi here breakdown of Maratha alliance here achievements here, here poetry and songs here, here, here, here, here and the siege of Agra Fort here court intrigue here court re-established here piety here, here Polier on here faults here, here Modave on here appeals to Hastings for funds here lack of funds here, here Hastings ceases all payments to here appoints Najaf Khan Regent here goodbye to Najaf Khan here territorial gains lost here seeks Scindia’s protection here Ghulam Qadir imprisons here blinding of here mutilation here, here Scindia’s rescue operation here ceases to worry about this world here Tipu Sultan breaks off relations with here in old age here Maratha protection here taken into EIC protection here and Maratha War here, here, here and the Battle of Dehli here EIC as regent here Shah Alam Nama here, here, here, here Shahamat Jang here Shahdara here Shahjahanabad here, here, here, here, here Shaista Khan, Nawab of Bengal here, here Shakespeare, William here Macbeth here Shakir Khan here, here, here share price here, here, here, here, here, here, here shareholders here, here, here Sharia law here Shaukat Jung of Purnea here Shell here Sheridan, Richard Brinsley here, here Shipman, Sir Abraham here Shitab Rai here Shivaji Bhonsle here, here, here Shuja ud-Daula, Nawab of Avadh here, here reputation for treachery here strength here appearance here vices here and grand Mughal alliance proposal here, here ultimatum to the EIC here siege of Patna here, here withdrawal to Buxar here takes Mir Qasim prisoner here Battle of Buxar here escape from Buxar here resistance here surrender here reinstated here meeting with Clive here Rohilla War here meeting with Shah Alam here Shushtari, Abdul Lateef here Siddons, Sarah here Sierra Leone Company here Sikander Jah here Sikandra here, here Sikhs here, here, here, here silver here, here Siraj ud-Daula, Nawab of Bengal here, here, here character here, here reputation here sexuality here alienates the Jagat Seths here hold over Aliverdi Khan here named heir here EIC fails to cultivate here siege of Kasimbazar here demands for Drake here advance on Calcutta here, here takes Calcutta here enters Calcutta here declaration of war on here Clive’s night attack here Clive’s offensive against here retreat here signs Treaty of Alinagar here and the fall of Chandernagar here, here attempt to win the friendship of Clive here plot to remove here Clive’s ultimatum here Clive’s campaign against here and Plassey here escape from Plassey here flight here body paraded through streets here, here capture of here death of here family murdered here Sivabharata here Skinner, James here, here, here slave trade here, here smallpox here, here Smith, Adam here, here Smythe, Sir Thomas here, here, here, here, here Soame, Sir Stephen here Sobel, Dava here Spain here, here, here Spanish Armada here Spice Islands here Spice Routes here spice trade attempts to break into here profit here, here Srirangam here Srirangapatnam here, here, here fortifications here assault on here Revolutionary Jacobin club here siege of here fall of here rape of here looting of here remains here Stein, Burton here Stevens, Fr Thomas here Stevenson, Colonel here Stewart, Captain James here Strachey, Jane here Strachey, Richard here Stretham here subprime bubble, 2007–9 here Subrahmanyam, Sanjay here subscription book here Sulaiman, Prince here Sumru here, here, here, here, here Sumru, Begum here, here, here, here, here Surat here, here, here Susan here Suvali here Suvarnadurg here Swaroop Chand here Swinton, Archibald here Tagore, Dwarkanath here Talegaon here Tamil culture here Tangier here Tanjore here coup attempt, 1749 here Tarikh-i Muzaffari here, here tax collectors here tax defaulters here taxes here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here tea here, here tea tax here textiles industry here, here, here Third Anglo-Mysore War here Thomas, George here Thorn, Major William here, here, here Tipu Sultan here, here campaign tent here Madras raid, 1767 here Battle of Pollilur here, here treatment of prisoners here character here takes over throne here appearance here father’s advice on good government here, here military skill here commercial department here reforms here patronage of Hindus here as a champion of Islam here British portrayal here culture of innovation here library here violence here flaws here breaks off relations with Shah Alam here Third Anglo-Mysore War here speed of advance here army strength here troops desert here peace treaty here embassy to Napoleon here French support here Wellesley’s letter to here Wellesley’s campaign against here propaganda against here spies here support here forces here resources here French corps here defence of Srirangapatnam here last stand here body found here tomb here people’s love for here throne here wealth here possessions distributed here Tiruvannamalai here Tooke, William here Tower of London here Travancore Lines, the here Trichinopoly here, here Trinomalee here Turkey Company here Twining, Thomas here Tyger here, here Udaipur here Udhua Nullah, siege of here Valentia, Lord here van Neck, Admiral Jacob Corneliszoon here Vaneshwar Vidyalankar here Vansittart, Henry here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Vellore here, here Venice Company here Verelst, Henry here Victoria, Queen here, here Victorian period official memory here sense of embarrassment here Vijayanagara empire here village republics here Virginia here, here, here Vitoji Rao here Vizagapatam here VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), Dutch East India Company here, here, here, here, here Voltaire here Volton, Joseph de here, here Wadgaon, Treaty of here Wadyar dynasty, restoration here Walcott here Walmart here Walpole, Horace here, here, here, here, here Waqi’at-i Azfari here War of Austrian Succession here, here Warid here Washington, George here, here Watson, Admiral here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Watts, William here, here, here Wellesley, Colonel Arthur (later Duke of Wellington) here background here welcomes brother here Tipu Sultan campaign here and the attack on Srirangapatnam here and Tipu Sultan’s throne here Maratha War preparations here Battle of Assaye here Wellesley, Richard Colley, 1st Marquess Wellesley here arrival in India here appearance here background here character here attitude to the EIC here goals here and French threat here neutralises French forces in Hyderabad here letter to Tipu Sultan here campaign against Tipu Sultan here propaganda against Tipu Sultan here spies here army strength here war against the Marathas here, here, here and Shah Alam here military expenses here cunning here conception of British Empire in India here EIC nervousness about here ultimatum to Daulat Rao Scindia here achievement here almost bankrupts EIC here accusations against here recalled here, here West, Benjamin here Yorktown, Battle of here Young, Arthur here Yusuf Ali Khan here Zabita Khan Rohilla here, here, here, here, here, here Zaman Shah here Zeenat Mahal here Zinat Mahal here A Note on the Author William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapucinski Prize-winning Return of a King.


A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About by Kevin Meagher

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, kremlinology, land reform, Nelson Mandela, period drama, Right to Buy, trade route, transaction costs

Gladstone began by disestablishing the Church of Ireland, serving to underscore the decline of the old Protestant ascendancy. In 1874, the Home Rule League was formed to campaign for a restoration of the Irish Parliament, managing to win half the seats in Ireland (aided, no doubt, by this being the first general election to employ the secret ballot). The next few years were dominated by the question of land reform with poor tenant farmers mobilised under the National Land League, founded by Michael Davitt and headed by MP, Charles Stewart Parnell. The Land League demanded reform of the rotten system whereby absentee landlords could charge extortionate rents and evict tenants on a whim. In one memorable incident, the League’s direct action included refusing to harvest the crop of Lord Erne, an absentee landlord, whose agent, a Captain Charles Boycott, subsequently entered the lexicon as a verb.


pages: 424 words: 122,350

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Chance favours the prepared mind, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, land reform, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, place-making, precautionary principle, rewilding, seminal paper, social intelligence, trade route

I have come across a similar fetishization in Australia and New Zealand, North America, Norway, the Alps and the Carpathians. There is a reason for this sanctification, but it is rapidly becoming outdated. While sheep were used in Wales as an instrument of enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during the twentieth there was a partial but widespread process of land reform in the uplands. In the aftermath of David Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909, which increased income tax and inheritance tax for the very rich, the big landowners in Wales, many of whom were English, began to sell off some of their property.4 They appear to have been less attached to their Welsh estates than to their English properties or their sporting land in Scotland, so these were shed first.

Jenny Farrant, 2 February 2012, by email. 21. Northern Potential, 2011, ‘The Highlands of Scotland’, http://northern-potential.net/the_highlands_of_scotland 22. Alan Watson Featherstone, 2001, ‘The wild heart of the Highlands’, Trees for Life, http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/tfl.wildheart.html 23. Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2003/2/contents 24. Peter Fraser, Angus MacKenzie and Donald MacKenzie, 2012, ‘The economic importance of red deer to Scotland’s rural economy and the political threat now facing the country’s iconic species’, Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association. 25.


pages: 371 words: 122,273

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

the issue of international investors: Reality Check Team, ‘Rent control: Does it work?’, BBC News, 3 February 2019, www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47028342 particularly in Scotland: Douglas Maxwell, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s law faculty, examines this here: ‘Socio-Economic Rights and Land Reform in Scotland: Learning from South Africa’, Oxford Human Rights Hub, 3 December 2018, ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/socio-economic-rights-and-land-reform-in-scotland-learning-from-south-africa/ right to live somewhere in security: www.ohchr.org/en/issues/housing/pages/internationalstandards.aspx The incorporation of the right to housing: For further reading on this, including the potential pitfalls and difficulties of such an idea, try Jessie Hohmann, The Right to Housing: Law, Concepts, Possibilities (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2013).


pages: 160 words: 46,449

The Extreme Centre: A Warning by Tariq Ali

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, deindustrialization, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Great Leap Forward, labour market flexibility, land reform, light touch regulation, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, obamacare, offshore financial centre, popular capitalism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck

We won’t allow the next Holyrood government to leave communities at the mercy of corrupt landlords. Scotland’s people will have the power to own and control their resources. Our land will support our goals of sustainability and social justice: it won’t be used as hunting and fishing estates for aristocrats and tax exiles. We will call a demonstration for land reform centred in one of Scotland’s rural communities. 4. We won’t allow equality to become a buzzword. We will expect positive action to reverse inequalities between men and women, and we will punish politicians who fail to take this seriously. Our better Scotland must abandon the macho political culture of Westminster and the macho economic culture of the City of London.


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Among democratic choices that might be barred are those calling for local ownership, sharing of technology, local managers, corporate accountability, living wage provisions, preferences (for deprived areas, minorities, women, etc.), labor-consumer-environmental protection, restrictions on dangerous products, small business protection, support for strategic and emerging industries, land reform, community and worker control (that is, the foundations of authentic democracy), labor actions (which could be construed as illegal threats to order), and so on. “Investors” are permitted to sue governments at any level for infringement on the rights granted them. There is no reciprocity: citizens and governments cannot sue “investors.”


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Faced with insufficiency of Chinese support, Zimbabwe has attempted to obtain financing elsewhere, including Libya, which at one time provided most of Zimbabwe’s oil. In fact, China never seemed as keen about its relationship with Zimbabwe as Zimbabwe was about China. As early as 2002, even before Mugabe launched the “Look East” policy, China expressed concern about the possible negative impact of factory invasions and chaotic land reform policies on Chinese economic interests.43 Though Zimbabwe has among the most important platinum deposits in the world, as well as over forty other minerals, many of these resources are as yet unexploited and require significant investment to do so (unlike tobacco, which is more easily cultivated).44 The return on such investments was unknown, especially when there were “arrangements with local government elites that inhibit profit making.”45 China grew increasingly worried about whether its loans would ever be repaid, a concern that increased when the Zimbabwean government failed to meet some of its obligations.

China model, and, 182; ONCC Videsh and, 120; 288; Zimbabwe and, 261 Sudan and, 264; trade flows and, 95; International Olympics Committee, 68 transparency and, 124 International system, 297, 299, 306 Indian Ocean: development and, 144; Internet, 283 naval strategy and, 181–84 Interparliamentary exchanges, 241–42 Indian Ocean Newsletter, 173 Iran, 17, 39, 151; arms transfers and, Industrial and Commercial Bank of 176; military ties and, 159, 163, 165, China, 148 171 Information management, 238 Iraq, 59, 304; military assistance and, Infrastructure, 1, 87, 218, 272, 300; 159 ambivalence regarding, 75; capital Islam, 126, 239, 302; Union of Islamic for, 117; challenges to, 301; China Courts and, 304 model and, 298; colonialism and, 40; Israel, 263, 304; arms transfers and, 176 16-7561-4 index.qxd 9/16/08 4:25 PM Page 329 Index 329 Janjaweed militias, 256, 258; Darfur Kordofan, Sudan, 258 and, 128; oil and, 109, 113 Kurlantzick, Joshua, 217–18, 222 Japan, 3, 32; colonialism and, 116; eco- nomic growth of, 226; high pay- Labor, 258–59, 280–81, 292, 297; Angola ments and, 123; imports from, 97; and, 11; Chinese as, 2, 11, 18, 72–74; network trade and, 107; ODA and, isolation of, 76; discipline and, 122; 213; oil and, 111; Sudan and, 126; FDI and, 106; legal violations trade flows and, 95 against, 252; Nigeria and, 280, 291; Jiang Enzhu, 242 product diversification and, 102; Jiangsu International, 165 south-south trade and, 88; standards Jiang Zemin, 21, 234; hospitality of, 236; for, 290, 301 theory of the Three Represents, 237 Lagos, Nigeria, 281–86, 287 Jia Qinglin, 24 Lamu, Kenya, 131 Jibrin, Walid, 279 Landmines, 178 Jilin University, 29 Land reform, 262 Ji Pengfei, 28 Langfang, China, 178 Johnson, Douglas, 128 Language, 302; Chinese, 279; Chinese Johnson-Sirleaf, Ellen, 178 immigration and, 287; concessional Juba, Sudan, 131, 171 loan information and, 226; loan Junggar Basin, 110 information and, 218–20; in Nigeria, 281 Kabila, Laurent, 161 Latin America, 58–60; FDI and, 105; Kaduna, Nigeria, 278–79 national security and, 155; raw mate- Kajola, Ogun State, Nigeria, 276 rials and, 94 Kakiri, Uganda, 172 Lee, Henry, 5 Kano, Nigeria, 279 Lee Kuan Yew, 252 Kapiri Mposhi, Zambia, 146 Legal codes, 14 Kaunda, Kenneth, 146, 273 Legal responsibility, 253–56; human Kebbi State, 278 rights lobbying and, 264; in Sudan, Kenya, 3, 70; arms transfers to, 9, 163; 257–59, 264–66; vs. moral culpabil- Confucius Institutes in, 29; embassy ity, 251, 264; Zimbabwe and, 263–66 attacks in, 304; Japanese companies Leon, Tony, 240 in, 32; military assistance and, 161; Lesotho, 11, 70–71; Taiwan and, 211; oil and, 4, 115 visited by Chinese leaders, 28 Kenyan Pipeline Corporation, 131–32 Li Anshan, 8 Kew, Darren, 11, 272 Liao Xiaqi, 149 Khartoum, Sudan, 112–13, 124–26, 132; Li Baodong, 235 Darfur and, 128–29; military assis- Liberation movements, 25, 156–57, tance and, 160, 170, 183 232–33, 260; Chinese support of, 9, Khrushchev, Nikita, 112, 202 273, 299; political outreach to, 231 Kiir Mayardit, Salva, 239–40 Liberia, 6, 100; peacekeeping in, Kisangani, Democratic Republic of 177–78; SEZs and, 147; Taiwan Congo (Stanleyville), 157, 160 and, 211–12 16-7561-4 index.qxd 9/16/08 4:25 PM Page 330 330 Index Libya, 27, 155; arms transfers to, 163; Marsa al-Bashair, Sudan, 125, 131 military assistance and, 161, 183; oil Martial arts, 77 reserves and, 115; Taiwan and, 162; Massacres, 254; in Zimbabwe, 260–61 Zimbabwe and, 262 Matabebeland, 260 Li Chengwen, 238 Mauritania, 27, 156, 161; oil reserves Ling Guiru, 71 and, 115 Li Peng, 28, 33 Mauritius, 70, 95, 101, 106; apparel and, Lisbon, Portugal, 117 107; development and, 143; Egypt Liu Guijin, 13, 130, 170 and, 150; foreign aid and, 200; Liu Naiya, 239 Indian Ocean development and, 145; Li Xianlian, 28 SEZs and, 140, 147 Li Zhaoxing, 210 Ma Wenpu, 242 Loans, 7, 33, 80; from China, 303; to Mayardit, Salva Kiir, 128 Nigeria, 276, 278, 292; as political Mbeki, Thabo, 10, 66, 290 outreach, 235; Zimbabwe and, 262.


pages: 447 words: 142,527

Lustrum by Robert Harris

Boris Johnson, land reform, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, plutocrats

'Balbus,' he said wearily, 'you have obviously come here to say something – so would you kindly just say it?' 'Of course. You are busy, I can see that. Forgive me.' He pressed his hand to his heart. 'Caesar wishes me to tell you that he and Pompey have reached an agreement. They intend to settle this question of land reform once and for all.' Cicero gave me a quick look: it was exactly as he had predicted. To Balbus he said: 'On what terms is this to be settled?' 'The public lands in Campania will be divided between Pompey's demobbed legionaries and those among the Roman poor who wish to farm. The whole scheme will be administered by a commission of twenty.

He and his followers escaped from the forum and eventually found sanctuary in the Temple of Jupiter the Protector – the same building from which Cicero by his oratory had driven Sergius Catilina. Thus, in the most contemptible of circumstances, was carried on to the statute book Caesar's great land reform act, which awarded farms to twenty thousand of Pompey's veterans and afterwards to those among the urban poor who could show they had more than three children. Cicero did not stay for the voting, which was a foregone conclusion, but slunk back to his house, where – such was his depression – he shunned all company, even Terentia's.


The Rough Guide to Prague by Humphreys, Rob

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, clean water, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, Johannes Kepler, land reform, Live Aid, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace of Westphalia, sexual politics, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile

That Czechoslovakia’s democracy survived as long as it did is down to the powerful political presence and skill of Masaryk, the country’s president from 1918 to 1935, who shared executive power with the cabinet. It was his vision of social democracy that was stamped on the nation’s new constitution, one of the most liberal of the time (if a little bureaucratic and centralized), aimed at ameliorating any ethnic and class tensions within the republic by means of universal suffrage, land reform and, more specifically, the Language Law, which ensured bilinguality to any area where the minority exceeded twenty percent. The elections of 1920 reflected the mood of the time, ushering in the left-liberal alliance of the Pětka (The Five), a coalition of five parties led by the Agrarian, Antonín Švehla, whose slogan, “we have agreed that we will agree”, became the keystone of the republic’s consensus politics between the wars.

By the end of 1947, the Communists were beginning to lose support, as the harvest failed, the economy faltered and malpractices within the Communist-controlled Ministry of the Interior were uncovered. In response, the KSČ began to up the ante, constantly warning the nation of imminent “counter-revolutionary plots”, and arguing for greater nationalization and land reform as a safeguard. | History The Third Republic CONTE XTS the extremely fanatical SS troops, in and around the capital. Barriers were erected across the city, and an American OSS jeep patrol arrived from Plzeň, which the Third Army were on the point of taking. The Praguers (and Vlasov’s men) were pinning their hopes on the Americans.


pages: 489 words: 132,734

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

Thus, 9/11 both showered oil profits on the Gulf and ensured that those profits would be invested close to home. As the regional financial center, Dubai was the logical place to invest locally. Sheikh Mohammed moved quickly to turn the increasing capital flows into a gusher. In 2002, Mohammed issued a land reform decree allowing foreigners to own real estate in Dubai—a first in any Gulf state. Before the reforms, Dubai had no real estate market. Land was given out under a quasi-feudal system; all land was held by the sheikhs or by favored Emirati friends upon whom the sheikhs had bestowed parcels. Everyone else—including every foreigner—was a renter.

What Miami had long been for the elite of Latin America—a place to park wealth too risky to keep back home—Dubai became for the magnates and kleptocrats of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and the former Soviet Union. The apotheosis of this trend would come in 2009, when the dictator of Azerbaijan amassed nine waterfront mansions during a two-week, $44 million buying spree—all purchased in the name of his eleven-year-old son. With the unprecedented land reform in place, the global real estate consulting firm Jones Lang LaSalle touted Dubai, along with Dublin and Las Vegas, as its “World Winning Cities” for 2002. The report put Dubai on global investors’ maps alongside the better-known capital of the Celtic Tiger and the Mojave Desert outpost that was then the fastest-growing city in the world’s largest economy.


pages: 485 words: 133,655

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

By the second century BCE, Rome turned its sights on the Hellenistic kingdoms of the east. The second century BCE was in many ways the apex of the struggle between the rights of owners and the collective good. Between 133 and 121 BCE, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchi—brothers and plebeian tribunes—tried to enact land reforms to redistribute the ager publicus, the public lands largely in the hands of patricians. They argued that people were entitled to a share in the common property. Both were killed. After that, the republic turned increasingly aristocratic, dominated by the Senate and the occasional strongman. As the size and scale of the Roman world increased, the ability of its institutions to mediate the rights of individual citizens and collective action on the landscape strained further.

The regime had been born out of the grievances of the military against the landed elites of the imperial government during the famines. But its commitment to single-party communist rule was the symptom of the growing influence of the Soviet Union on the continent. The Derg regime enacted land reforms. While initially hailed as the righting of a wrong, all the reforms did was collectivize land ownership in line with its Marxist-Leninist credo, but they did little to correct the cronyism and power relations on the land. By 1977, after a complex power struggle, Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam remained as the sole autocratic dictator of the self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist regime.


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people—people didn’t mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women—had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn’t be fair, so we have to prevent this.30 James Madison made the same point, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich.31 They would carry out what we these days call land reform. And that’s unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce inequality so the poor wouldn’t take property from the rich. And he actually proposed a vision for a city that would put in place what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

They were no greater than in the years before the war, especially in real terms.6 At the end of the twentieth century much land was still in the hands of the same rich families as in 1900. Half of the great once-landowning families had no land; the rest had, on average, half the acreage they once held. Edwardian landowning families ceased to function as a distinct class but had most certainly not been expropriated by taxes or land reform at any time in the twentieth century.7 The seeming decline of the aristocracy illustrated by the tearing-down of country houses in the interwar years – a much echoed theme – was grossly overstated. Illustration 4.1: Kingdom of Capital 1928. The British Capitalists singled out by Low were from left to right: Sir J.

Ibid., pp. 392, 410. 5. A. H. Halsey (ed.), Trends in British Society since 1900 (London, 1972), table 3.6. 6. Report of the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry (1925) with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices, vol. 1, report (1926), Cmd. 2600, pp. 44–5. 7. John Beckett and Michael Turner, ‘Land Reform and the English Land Market, 1880–1925’, in Matthew Cragoe and Paul Readman (eds.), The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950 (London, 2010), pp. 219–36. 8. Around 1900 US labour productivity in coal was around three times that of the British. Report of the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry (1925), p. 127. 9.

Perhaps the most powerful is that in Alexander Mackendrick (dir.), The Man in the White Suit (1951), where there is a particularly sinister senior capitalist who comes up from London. The critique is largely balanced by the fact that labour and capital have the same interests in this case. 5. John Beckett and Michael Turner, ‘Land Reform and the English Land Market, 1880–1925’, in Matthew Cragoe and Paul Readman (eds.), The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950 (London, 2010), pp. 219–36. 6. Ibid., p. 222, see table, which is uncorrected for increased post-war prices. 7. F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property: Collapse and Survival’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 40 (1990), pp. 1–24. 8.


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

Unlike the Decembrists they had managed to win the support of large numbers of ordinary soldiers, and a part of the artisan class, driven to revolt by poor economic conditions and the feeling that these owed a lot to Russian exactions. What the rebels really needed was to rouse the peasantry, that is, the overwhelming mass of the population. Some of them realized this. But an attempt to introduce land reform into the legislature disappeared without trace in the face of the indifference of the landowning majority. The peasants remained quiescent, and the uprising a purely urban phenomenon. This had been an essentially internal affair as far as the tsar was concerned. There was no involvement on the part of the other European Powers, although the Polish conspirators had tried to get Austria to intervene.

But the tsar repudiated Ypsilantis’s action and refused to support this dangerous attack on state authority, instead sending troops into Moldavia with the claim that the Holy Alliance sanctioned intervention of this kind. Ypsilantis managed to persuade a minor Romanian boyar (landowner) called Tudor Vladimirescu (1780–1821) to lead an uprising with the aid of a band of mercenaries, and soon Vladimirescu’s promise of land reforms had roused the Wallachian peasants, enabling his force to occupy Bucharest. Despite his efforts, however, they burned and sacked indiscriminately, attacking the property even of Greek landowners who supported the cause of independence. This cut the ground from underneath Ypsilantis’s plan of using the Greek landowners in the region to provide a basis for destroying Ottoman power there.

Since the providence of Almighty God offers pity for all his creatures, how could he suffer that the shepherds of the Galkura plains should possess in some cases 500, in others 800 or even 1000 sheep, while we possess only tiny flocks numbering less than a hundred each? Brigandage was such a major problem in the 1860s that the newly created Italian state sent a large military force to the south, making up at one point two-thirds of the entire Italian Army, during the so-called ‘brigand wars’. The Napoleonic land reforms still needed to be implemented in many respects, and peasant land hunger had not been appeased. Kidnapping, murder, cattle-rustling, highway robbery and other crimes were met with thousands of arrests – 12,000 in the second half of 1863 alone. By this time more than 2,500 insurgents had been shot.


pages: 225 words: 54,010

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Bretton Woods, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, invention of agriculture, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Parkinson's law, post-war consensus, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, technological determinism, Thomas Malthus, urban sprawl

Family farms could not compete against big estates using slave labour; they went bankrupt or were forced to sell out, and their young men joined the legions. The ancient commons of the Roman peasantry were alienated with even less legality. As in Sumer, public land passed quickly into private hands, a situation the Gracchus brothers tried to remedy with land reform in the late second century B.C. But the reform failed, the commons were lost, and the state had to placate the lower orders by handing out free wheat, a solution that became expensive as the urban proletariat increased. By the time of Claudius, 200,000 Roman families were on the dole.15 One of the revealing ironies of Rome’s history is that the city-state’s native democracy withered as its empire grew.


pages: 184 words: 54,833

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

Let it be noticed, however, that he didn’t approve at all of the British intervention in Greece (the undeclared clause in the Churchill-Stalin pact over Poland) and that he even, with misgivings, signed a petition to reduce the sentence of Alan Nunn-May, a scientist who had handed nuclear formulae — it would be a stretch to call them ‘secrets’, as Orwell appreciated — to the Soviet Union. One can also eliminate the mercenary motive. Some of those who worked with the IRD were later paid, modestly enough it is true, to write pamphlets or booklets showing that Stalin or Mao were not just enthusiastic land-reformers. Later in its life, the IRD went the way of many British Cold-War outfits and surrendered to the lavish corruption of the CIA. However, Orwell continued to make no money for his publications, to refuse to charge exile groups any royalties, and in general to act as if the ravens would feed him.


Meghnad Desai Marxian economic theory by Unknown

book value, business cycle, commoditize, Corn Laws, full employment, land bank, land reform, means of production, Meghnad Desai, p-value, price mechanism, profit motive, technological determinism

These immigr~lts had often left a near-feudal peasant status and taken up the status of free labour in the U.S. The degree of exploitation in such a situation would be mediated by the availability of land on which a person could produce for himself~ By contrast, the emergence of free labour in many other countries takes the form of dispossessing of peasants or share croppers by some form of land reform legislation or by processes now known as detribalization-urbanization, migration to foreign plantations, etc. In the U.K., the classic pattern was the Enclosure movement and the breakdown of cottage industries which dispossessed farmers and craftsmen and created over a period of two or three hundred years an industrial proletariat.7 In many countries where introduction to capitalism has not immediately led·to industrialization, we may have pools of landless labourers in a relation of feudal dependence or on pe~ent employment to the local landlord only slowly emerging as casual labour being paid money wages and free of the dependent status.


Yucatan: Cancun & Cozumel by Bruce Conord, June Conord

Beryl Markham, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, Day of the Dead, feminist movement, if you build it, they will come, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Yogi Berra

By then, the Yucatán reflected the turmoil that was going on back in Europe, where the French had overthrown the Spanish monarchy; and in Mexico, where elements of liberalism agitated for civil rights. Soon blood spilled. Traditional rivals, Campeche and Mérida fought for power while the entire peninsula ignored the rest of Mexico, which was embroiled in a series of continuing revolutions. Unhappy with centralism and liberal land reforms, the powerful families in the Yucatán declared the region’s independence from Mexico in 1838. Facing economic realities, it came back into the fold in 1843, but that made no difference to the Indian community, which was still under the yoke of Hispanic oppression. In early 1847 the Yucatán seceded again after secessionists armed the Maya to serve as soldiers against the Mexican garrisons.

He claimed to be a descendant of the Mayapán king who drove the Itzás from Chichén 700 years before. Under his liberal leadership he gave women the right to vote, organized Feminist Leagues, and placed women in governmental posts. He legalized birth control and established the first family planning clinics in the Americas. He supported land reform by forming edijos, communal farming groups. He built schools and roads and encouraged cottage industries for the poor. Most memorably, however, he was a vocal proponent of civil rights for the Maya. Love Story n 49 They both knew it was love at first sight, but Carrillo was married, with grown children.


pages: 513 words: 156,022

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

He was right, of course, but the question remained, how would he achieve the necessary redistribution? White farmers braced themselves. Mugabe had massacred his own people, what respect would he have for the original sinners? They were right to be anxious. The Zimbabwean parliament passed a programme of ‘revolutionary’ land reform, enabling the state to take its pick of whichever farms it fancied, at whatever price. There were celebrations in parliament. An ebullient Mugabe was not going to be restrained by international opinion, particularly the sort that came from Westminster. The aim, he said, was to acquire 13 million acres, almost half the white-owned farmland in Zimbabwe.

During the Bush War, Mrs Mujuru had taken the nom-de-guerre ‘Spill Blood’ and remained a physically formidable woman well into her fifties – despite claiming Z$389,000 for battle injuries from the discredited War Victims Compensation Fund. Her husband, Solomon Mujuru, was the former leader of Mugabe’s guerrillas. The couple had a sense of entitlement few dared challenge. Shortly after the murder of Martin Olds, during the so-called Land Reform Programme, they seized a white-owned farm themselves, 5,000 hectares of prime tobacco and maize-growing land, and gave the owner just an hour to leave. When the diamond rush began, Joice Mujuru was swept away in the excitement, treating the hillock as her own tract of diamondiferous real estate.


pages: 539 words: 151,425

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, false flag, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

The Revolutionary Command Council, which he and his colleagues had established in the wake of the previous year’s coup, had proved an ineffective talking shop, which had failed to make headway on any of the domestic reforms that they had promised. The Free Officers were uncomfortably aware that the most important of these, land reform, was not feasible, because there were simply too many Egyptians to divide the large estates between. Meanwhile the Egyptian economy continued to stagnate, and falling cotton prices were contributing to an angry public mood, which the Muslim Brotherhood was successfully exploiting. As Nasser’s colleague Anwar Sadat explained, the regime sanctioned the fedayeen’s attacks on the canal base because: ‘If our people do not fight you, they will fight us, and we prefer that they should fight you.’

Once again the British heard rumours at a party – this time that Iraqi paratroopers were being deployed south. Once again, the rumours came to nothing. The Turkish military attaché assured the British that Qasim’s comments were a smokescreen, designed to divert people’s attention away from the parlous state of Iraq, which had once been a net exporter of wheat, but following a bodged land reform and drought was now in the humiliating position of having to buy in both grain and rice. By now Qasim was also fighting a Kurdish rebellion in the north of the country. A Kurd himself, such was his lack of trust in his own kinsmen that he removed Kurdish officers and NCOs from the forces fighting the insurgency, but not before there had been desertions to the rebel side.


Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

Winter walking on the higher hills of Scotland requires the use of an ice axe and crampons and is for experienced mountaineers only. A hiker on the West Highland Way | DAVIDHOWELL/SHUTTERSTOCK © Access & Rights of Way There is a tradition of relatively free access to open country in Scotland, a custom that was enshrined in law in the 2003 Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, popularly known as ‘the right to roam’. The Scottish Outdoor Access Code (www.outdooraccess-scotland.scot) states that everyone has the right to be on most land and inland waters, providing they act responsibly. You should avoid areas where you might disrupt or disturb wildlife, lambing (generally mid-April to the end of May), grouse shooting (from 12 August to the third week in October) or deer stalking (1 July to 15 February, but the peak period is August to October).

It was always precarious, as rights were granted on a year-by-year basis, so at any moment a crofter could lose not only the farm but also the house they’d built on it. The late 19th-century economic depression meant many couldn’t pay their rent. This time, however, they resisted expulsion, instead forming the Highland Land Reform Association and their own political party. Their resistance led the government to accede to several demands, including security of tenure, fair rents and eventually the supply of land for new crofts. Crofters now have the right to purchase their farmland and 2004 laws finally abolished the feudal system, which created so much misery.

In Shetland, the Shetland Amenity Trust (www.camping-bods.com) has created a number of böds – converted croft houses or fishing huts with bunks, and washing and cooking facilities, but often no electricity or heating – many in remote and dramatic locations. Beds cost £10 to £12, but you’ll need to prebook through the trust in Lerwick, which will give you the keys. Camping & Caravan Sites Free wild camping became a legal right under the Land Reform Bill of 2003. However, campers are obliged to camp on unenclosed land, in small numbers, and away from buildings and roads. Most commercial campsites offer a variety of pitches for touring campers – hardstanding and grass, with or without electricity – and accept tents, campervans and caravans; some are caravan only.


Lonely Planet Scotland by Lonely Planet

always be closing, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, country house hotel, demand response, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Ford Model T, gentrification, James Watt: steam engine, land reform, Neil Armstrong, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, retail therapy, rewilding, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban sprawl

When to Go The best time of year for hill walking is usually May to September, although snow can fall on the highest summits even in midsummer. Winter walking on the higher hills of Scotland requires the use of an ice axe and crampons and is for experienced mountaineers only. Access & Rights of Way There is a tradition of relatively free access to open country in Scotland, a custom that was enshrined in law in the 2003 Land Reform (Scotland) Bill, popularly known as 'the right to roam'. The Scottish Outdoor Access Code (www.outdooraccess-scotland.com) states that everyone has the right to be on most land and inland waters, providing they act responsibly. You should avoid areas where you might disrupt or disturb wildlife, lambing (generally mid-April to the end of May), grouse shooting (from 12 August to the third week in October) or deer stalking (1 July to 15 February, but the peak period is August to October).

It was always precarious, as rights were granted on a year-by-year basis, so at any moment a crofter could lose not only the farm but also the house they’d built on it. The late 19th-century economic depression meant many couldn’t pay their rent. This time, however, they resisted expulsion, instead forming the Highland Land Reform Association and their own political party. Their resistance led the government to accede to several demands, including security of tenure, fair rents and eventually the supply of land for new crofts. Crofters now have the right to purchase their farmland and 2004 laws finally abolished the feudal system, which created so much misery.

In Shetland, the Shetland Amenity Trust (www.camping-bods.com) has created a number of böds – converted croft houses or fishing huts with bunks and washing and cooking facilities, but often no electricity or heating – many in remote and dramatic locations. Beds cost £8 to £10 but you will need to prebook through the trust in Lerwick, who will give you the keys. Camping & Caravan Parks Free wild camping became a legal right under the Land Reform Bill of 2003. However, campers are obliged to camp on unenclosed land, in small numbers and away from buildings and roads. Most commercial campsites offer a variety of pitches for touring campers – hardstanding and grass, with or without electricity – and accept tents, campervans and caravans; some are caravan-only.


pages: 196 words: 61,981

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

China has one of the largest rates of income inequality in the world, due to the rural-urban income gap. Rural migrants work for little pay in cities but are unable to actually stay in urban areas. Yet hukou system reform is beginning, although there are new signs that rural hukou holders are less enthusiastic about switching to urban hukous.5 China’s land reform has continued by allowing farmers to lease out their land or transfer land rights to another, enabling an extra source of income. And as China is a country built on experiments, Rural Revitalization just might succeed in creating sustainable growth in the countryside. The constitutionally sanctioned Organic Law of Villages allows villagers to democratically elect their governing committees, which in some places has resulted in villagers holding those in power more accountable for social and economic well-being.


pages: 585 words: 165,304

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

The huge management vacuum left at the top of many large Japanese corporations was filled for the most part by younger middle managers without particularly large equity stakes in their companies. The zaibatsu networks quickly reconstituted themselves as keiretsu under these new managers, but ownership had already become highly deconcentrated. Land reform, which broke up large agricultural estates, a steep tax on personal assets, and the deflation of equity values as a result of the war left few large fortunes available to flow into the void.22 The result of these developments was the emergence of Japanese firms in the postwar period that more closely fit the description of the modern corporation set forth by Berle and Means than they did in the prewar period.

Over the next two hundred years, all European societies and many of those outside Europe were transformed beyond recognition from poor, uneducated, rural, agricultural, authoritarian ones to urban, industrialized, wealthy democracies. In the course of these transformations, governments played a major role in precipitating or facilitating change (and in some cases, trying to stop it). They abolished entire social classes, engaging in land reform and the disbanding of large estates; they introduced modern legislation guaranteeing equality of rights for ever-larger circles of the population; they built cities and encouraged urbanization; they educated entire populations and provided the infrastructure for modern, complex, information-intensive societies.


pages: 605 words: 169,366

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, capital controls, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, export processing zone, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, microcredit, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, the new new thing, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

Even in countries with first-rate technocrats, there was a role for a friendly outside institution that could distil global experience. In Brazil, for example, the Bank had helped the government to put in place a successful AIDS program in the early 1990s,56 and around the same time it improved the design of Brazil’s land reform.57 Moreover, the Bank had used its engagement in Brazil to enrich its own stock of development experience—which it then passed along to Africans and others lower down the development ladder. Keeping the Bank in middle-income countries strengthened the Bank’s role as a factory of ideas.58 But to remain relevant in such countries, the Bank would have to deliver faster

Except during the emerging-market crisis, the Bank has not recently been in danger of hitting its prudential lending limits. Its problem has been the opposite: declining demand for its lending. Allan Meltzer interview, November 25, 2003. 5. As noted in Chapter 4, the Bank helped Brazil to put in place a successful AIDS program in the early 1990s, and around the same time it improved the design of Brazil’s land reform. The Bank’s constructive role on AIDS in Brazil is noted both by Michael Merson, who headed the United Nations Global AIDS program, and by Murilo Portugal, who was then the director of the Brazilian Finance Ministry. Merson interview, November 12, 2003. Portugal interview, November 18, 2003. 6.


pages: 235 words: 65,885

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

The USDA will need to cease supporting and encouraging industrial monocropping for export, and begin supporting smaller farms, rewarding those that make the effort to reduce inputs and to grow for local consumption. In the absence of USDA policy along these lines, we need to pursue state, county, and municipal efforts to support small farms in various ways, through favorable zoning, by purchasing local food for school lunches, and so on. We will also require land reform. Those millions of new farmers will need access to the soil, and there must be some means of making land available for this purpose. Here we might take inspiration from Indian Line Farm, a model for farmland preservation and conservation, which pioneered the use of conservation easements and community land trusts to make farmland available to working farmers.8 Since so few people currently know much about farming, education will be essential.


pages: 239 words: 64,812

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

According to a nineteenth-century report, “Very secretly this movement has become powerful … The majority [of the Kartabhajas] are lower class and female.”22 All of these people practiced a kind of equalizing meta-religion which appeared precisely at the onset of colonialism, as the East India Company began to impose land reforms that displaced millions of peasants to the cities. These new members of the urban proletariat hijacked the language of markets and mercantilism to construct a sandhabhasha, a cryptic “intentional language” in which they both mocked the powerful and celebrated themselves: I will tell you a funny story, some news about a king.


pages: 281 words: 69,107

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order by Bruno Maçães

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Admiral Zheng, autonomous vehicles, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, cloud computing, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, global value chain, high-speed rail, industrial cluster, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, one-China policy, Pearl River Delta, public intellectual, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, trade liberalization, trade route, zero-sum game

Speaking at a conference at Tsinghua University, Lou argued that the government needed to solve the problem of structural imbalances and market distortions in the economy within the next five to seven years while maintaining 6.5 to 7 per cent growth in order to avoid the middle-income trap. To that end, he highlighted reforms in five sectors, including encouraging imports of agricultural products, accelerating reform of the hukou (household registration) system, speeding up human resources reform, pushing rural land reforms, as well as tackling social security system-related issues. Agriculture is a particularly important case. Lou argued that China needs to encourage more food imports so that it can transfer rural laborers to fill vacancies at industrial and services sectors. He called for a reduction in subsidies for farmers, urging the country to import more farm goods from abroad.


pages: 699 words: 192,704

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica) by Jan Morris

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centralized clearinghouse, Corn Laws, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

He had Parnell and most of his principal lieutenants arrested, and locked up on suspicion of subversion in Kilmainham Jail—a grim old fortress above the Liffey in Dublin which was the traditional place of incarceration for Irish patriots. Having proved his readiness to quell violence by force, he promptly put through a grandly conciliatory land reform bill, assuring the Irish tenants fair rents and fixed tenures. Then, in a political act of great imagination, he persuaded the imprisoned Parnell to help him implement these reforms. ‘The Chief’ was offered his release if he would use his influence to calm the country, and see the Land Act safely through.

‘Be assured it will not be in vain,’ he told Lady Frederick Cavendish, and she responded in kind: ‘across all my agony,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘there fell a bright ray of hope, and I saw in a vision Ireland at peace, and my darling’s life blood accepted as a sacrifice….’ Assured still of Parnell’s support, Gladstone proceeded from land reform towards Home Rule—domestic autonomy, that is, within a federal arrangement. Though he was briefly out of office in 1885, in 1886 he was returned again, and presented his first Home Rule Bill to Parliament. It split the nation.1 Conservatives declared it a gross betrayal of the Anglo-Irish, especially the Protestant majority of Ulster in the north—‘essentially like the English people’, cried Lord Randolph Churchill, ‘a dominant, imperial caste….


pages: 742 words: 202,902

The Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America's Doomed Invasion of Cuba's Bay of Pigs by Jim Rasenberger

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Gunnar Myrdal, Kitchen Debate, land reform, Neil Armstrong, Seymour Hersh, Ted Sorensen, Torches of Freedom, William of Occam

“If this had been done, Castro could not have later claimed that the U.S. did not wish to help the revolution.” In general, U.S. actions either pushed moderates to the left or left them out in the cold. The United States insisted Cuba immediately pay up, in cash, for example, for any American-owned lands expropriated in land reform measures, a demand both unrealistic and niggling, according to López-Fresquet, since everyone knew Cuba did not have the assets to do this. Worse was letting Major Díaz Lanz testify in front of Congress. This reeked of old-fashioned American high-handedness—“a direct interference in the domestic affairs of Cuba by an organ of the United States government” is how the American ambassador, Philip Bonsal, later characterized the Cuban perspective.

Cousteau, Jacques, 296 Crespo, José, 255, 256, 257 crime, organized, 24, 29 in Castro assassination plot, 81–82, 83, 89, 141–44 Crutchfield, Robert, 302, 303 Cruz, Máximo, 85, 210, 211, 250, 251, 254, 255, 257, 259, 260, 261, 262, 279, 302, 322, 324 Cuba: anti-Americanism in, 40, 77 anti-Castro stunt in, 34, 35 Bay of Pigs commemorations in, xix–xx, 401 communism in, 3, 17, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33–34, 47, 49 dictators in, 29 dissident groups in, 96, 162, 171, 214, 229, 239, 324, 393 Eisenhower’s final advice to Kennedy on, 109, 386 invasion evidence sought in, 202 invasion protested by, 198–99, 203–4, 221 land reform in, 20, 26–27, 30, 77 moderates in, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 77 organized crime in, 24, 29, 81 revolution in, 11 Soviet aid to, 52–53, 76, 78 tourism in, 29, 32, 228 U.S. concerns about, 19, 48; see also “Program of Covert Action” U.S. economic involvement in, 27, 28–29, 48, 76–77 U.S. embassy in, 35, 105 U.S. intervention in, see United States–Cuba relations U.S. trade embargo against, 92, 373 Cuban air force: Castro’s deployment of, 208, 208n, 391 in combat, 243, 244, 246, 247–49, 251, 252, 255, 271, 273, 291, 294, 301, 392 danger of, 225, 226, 229, 232, 237 equipment of, 190, 195 first strike damage to, 196, 200, 207–8 planned attack on, 4, 118, 140 second strike required on, 208, 209, 229 Soviet MiGs in, 117, 132, 271n, 376 unsuccessful follow-up strike against, 264 U.S. reconnaissance of, 171, 190 vulnerability of, 208 Cuban-Americans, conflict among, 88 Cuban exiles: Castro’s intelligence from, 170 CIA’s proposed use of, 55, 56, 68–69 CIA’s recruitment of, 73–75, 84, 96, 120, 121, 143 conflict among, 73, 119, 144 in Florida, 35, 73, 170, 313, 374, 401–2 in Watergate conspiracy, 397 see also Cuban Expeditionary Force Frente Revolutionario Democrático Cuban Expeditionary Force: accidental deaths in, 85, 206 air cover for, 234, 235, 240–42, 247–48, 255–56, 268, 269, 271, 273, 275–77, 279, 281–82, 285–86, 287–88, 289, 291–93, 295, 297 air strikes critical to, 208, 211, 221, 222, 225, 226, 235–36, 245, 247 capture of, 321, 323, 342; see also Cuban prisoners casualties in, 321, 325 in combat, 231, 232, 243, 244, 246, 247–49, 250–51, 252, 254–58, 259, 260–63, 267, 271, 273, 294–95, 300–301, 392 ground war of, 250–51 Happy Valley arrival of, 183 Happy Valley departure of, 5–6, 186 heavy equipment of, 237, 247, 254, 258, 261 Kennedy administration blamed by, 342, 380, 401 landing craft for, 106, 120, 224–25, 232, 237, 238–39 landing of, 230–33, 237–39, 243–44, 245–46, 247, 392 marooning of, 277, 279, 299, 303 memories of, 401–2 morale of, 211 retreat of, 263, 267–68, 301–2 size of, 85, 120, 134, 166 supplies for, 248, 251, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 267, 268, 273, 279, 286, 290, 323 survivors of, 321–23, 341–42 Taylor Committee’s findings on, 340 training of, 75, 84–85, 96, 97, 102, 105, 106, 107, 120, 136, 167, 184 U.S.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

It commenced in July 1971, when Fernando Flores, then head of the Chilean Production Development Corporation, asked British operations research and cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer to build a computer system that would assist the Chilean government in planning its economy. A year earlier, physician Salvador Allende had become the first elected Marxist president in Latin America. He had been aiming for a socialist “third way” for the economy, eschewing both free markets and a Soviet-style command economy. His platform featured land reform and the nationalization of large-scale industry as its main components. But the newly nationalized industries required management. This was the reason Flores sought out Beer. They were an odd pair: the socialist economic administrator (who later would become Chile’s economic and finance minister), desiring to centrally manage most of Chile’s industry, and the iconoclastic British business-school-professor-turned-management-consultant, who had a penchant for cigars, chocolate, and whiskey.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Land purchases in Siberia have prompted a rash of headlines in the local press not only about the effect of price rises and the influx of outsiders, but warning that the Chinese had territorial intentions over Lake Baikal and the surrounding area.102 Such anxieties were hardly calmed by statements on tourism websites in China that the region had once been under Chinese control.103 The changing world is also not easy to navigate. In an unusual turnaround, land reform was put on hold in Kazakhstan in the summer of 2016 after unrest triggered by Chinese buyers acquiring leases for large areas of farmland, and proposed changes to the land code. Local farmers were concerned that they would not be able to compete with better-resourced rivals, while others voiced their unease that the country’s prime land was being parcelled off without thought of what the long-term consequences would be.104 The complexities that stem from the hard-line US approach to Iran provide another useful reminder of the realities that accompany a world on the move.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

While one part of that is to continue pursuing outright bans, like those already in place in France, Germany and New York, this must be done alongside the demand for something better. Here advocates must clamour for the alternative with and alongside communities targeted for fracking, demanding indigenous rights, local democracy and radical land reform along with calls for an end to drilling. In this respect movements in Alaska, Canada and Australia already serve as stunning examples, not to mention the case of Balcombe, a tiny village in Sussex, where a coalition of campaigners and local residents opposed plans for fracking while demanding the alternative of community-owned solar power.


pages: 193 words: 63,618

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich by Ndongo Sylla

"there is no alternative" (TINA), British Empire, carbon footprint, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, degrowth, Doha Development Round, Food sovereignty, global value chain, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, labour mobility, land reform, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

As an example, Chiquita, the world leader of the banana trade held or controlled close to 85 per cent of available land in 1954 for growing this fruit in the main producing countries of Latin America, with the exception of Ecuador. In 80 Sylla T02779 01 text 80 28/11/2013 13:04 controversies around fair trade fact, when the government of Guatemala wanted to push its land reform by attacking Chiquita’s interests, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) led a secret operation to topple it (Myers, 2004: 43ff.). There is also the fact that the inclusion of plantations leads to a bias in the Fair Trade approach, as multinationals prefer to work with them rather than with a multitude of small organisations of producers who often live far from the main roads.


pages: 232

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

With its triumphant Sputniks and ICBMs, the Soviet Union was still a plausible model of breakneck industrialization via heavy industries and five-year plans. On the other side, the Kennedy administration officially diagnosed Third World revolutions as "diseases of modernization," and prescribed — in addition to Green Berets and B-52s — ambitious land reforms and housing programs. To immunize Colombians against urban subversion, for example, the Alliance for Progress subsidized huge housing projects such as Ciudad Kennedy (80,000 people) in Bogota and Villa Socorro (12,000 people) in Medellin. The Allian^a was advertised as a Western Hemisphere Marshall Plan that would soon lift pan-American living standards to southern European, if not gringo, levels.


pages: 192

Kicking Awaythe Ladder by Ha-Joon Chang

Asian financial crisis, business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, fear of failure, income inequality, income per capita, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land bank, land reform, liberal world order, moral hazard, open economy, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, scientific management, short selling, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus

To turn to other instances, De Soto documents how the recognition of squatter rights in the violation of the rights of existing property owners was crucial in developing the American West. Upham cites the famous Sanderson case in 1868, where the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overrode the existing right of landowners to claim access to clean water in favour of the coal industry, which was one of the state's key industries at the time.49 Land reform in Japan, Korea and Taiwan after the Second World War violated the existing property rights of the landlords but contributed to the subsequent development of these countries. Many argue that the nationalization of industrial enterprises after the Second World War in countries like Austria and France contributed to their industrial development by transferring certain industrial properties from a conservative and non-dynamic industrial capitalist class to professional public-sector managers with a penchant for modern technology and aggressive investments.


Central America by Carolyn McCarthy, Greg Benchwick, Joshua Samuel Brown, Alex Egerton, Matthew Firestone, Kevin Raub, Tom Spurling, Lucas Vidgen

airport security, Bartolomé de las Casas, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, digital map, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, land reform, liberation theology, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Arévalo was succeeded in 1951 by Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who looked to break up estates and foster high productivity on small farms. But the US supported the interests of large companies such as United Fruit, and in 1954 (in one of the first documented covert CIA operations) the US government orchestrated an invasion from Honduras led by two exiled Guatemalan military officers. Arbenz was forced to step down and land reform never took place. Violence, oppression and disenfranchisement ensued, fueling the formation of left-wing guerrilla groups and fomenting discord. Civil War During the 1960s and ’70s, economic in­equality and the developing union movement forced oppression to new heights. Amnesty International estimates that 50,000 to 60,000 Guatemalans were killed during the political violence of the 1970s.

Conflict simmered under this gross imbalance of power. A revolt against Spain in 1811 was led by Padre (Father) José Delgado. While it failed, it planted a seed of discontent. Independence was gained 10 years later, on September 15, 1821, when El Salvador became part of the Central American Federation. Pushing for land reform, Anastasio Aquino led an indigenous rebellion in 1883. Though it was subdued and Aquino executed, he became a national hero. El Salvador withdrew from the Central American Federation in 1841, but Independence Day continues to be celebrated on September 15. In Comes Coffee In the late 19th century, synthetic dyes undermined the indigo market, and coffee took the main stage.

EASTERN EL SALVADOR Eastern El Salvador may not possess the star attractions of elsewhere in the country, but with timeless mountain villages such as Alegría, the devastating war around Morazán, and its long, deserted golden beaches, even the most worldly traveler will be pleasantly surprised. Prior to the war, subsistence farming was long the primary means of survival here. The inevitable demand for nationwide land reform resonated throughout the poorer communities, and the northeast in particular became a fierce guerrilla stronghold. Far from the capital, these mountainous areas witnessed horrific atrocities – none worse than El Mozote – but barely a village was spared from the fighting, and the resilience of the locals will stir visitors for generations to come.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The Chinese Communists - like the communist tradition more widely - sought to underline the extent to which they represented an utterly new kind of regime marking a complete break with the past. That, after all, is what revolutions are supposed to be about, especially socialist revolutions. The Communist Party directed its venom against many Chinese traditions, from the long-standing oppression of women to Confucian notions of hierarchy, and carried out a sweeping land reform in the name of class struggle. Meanwhile the West, with the exception of a brief period during the Second World War, has, more or less ever since the 1917 October Revolution, regarded Communist regimes as the devil incarnate. As a result, too little attempt has been made to understand them in their historical and cultural context, to appreciate the continuities with previous history and not just the discontinuities.

It has also, since Deng, pursued an entirely different strategy, moving away from socialism and towards capitalism, including a significant dose of neo-liberalism. China’s socialist legacy has nonetheless left a deep and continuing mark on society: the destruction of the old feudal elite in the Maoist land reform (in contrast to India); an attachment to the notion of a classless society even though this is now in rapid retreat; a strong belief in egalitarianism even amongst the urban intelligentsia; and the continuing appeal of a socialist vocabulary, as in the recent commitment of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao to build a ‘socialist countryside’.67 Whatever the fortunes of the Communist regime, however, the main political impact of China on the world will be its Confucian tradition, its lack of a Western-style democracy or tradition, the centrality of the state and the relative weakness of any civil society that is likely to develop.


pages: 650 words: 203,191

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

As so often before in Eurasian history, China’s role was crucial. By the end of 1950 its mainland had been unified under Communist rule. Mao’s remarkable victory may have owed much to the ‘peasant nationalism’ of China’s rural masses (kindled by hatred of Japan’s occupation),19 as well as to the appeal of the party’s land reform programme. The proportions are still disputed.20 But there was no doubt that China had once more resumed a premier place in East Asia, with a huge battle-hardened army. Under certain conditions, this might have resulted in an inward-looking policy of domestic reform that left China’s Asian neighbours to their own devices.

Women were enfranchised and the voting age was lowered, more than doubling the electorate. A new constitution prescribed by the occupiers barred the armed forces from a seat in the government and renounced war as an instrument of national policy. The great family-ruled business combines or zaibatsu were broken up. Land reform reduced the power of the landlords and doubled the proportion of those who farmed their own land to some 60 per cent.27 Trade unions were encouraged. New textbooks were written, and the educational syllabus was democratized.28 So fierce an assault upon the pre-war order might have provoked a hostile reaction, since the civilian elite with whom the Americans dealt remained deeply conservative.


CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition) by Susan L. Wilson

air freight, anti-communist, call centre, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land reform, RAND corporation, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route

Nasser became Prime Minister of Egypt in 1954 and subsequently negotiated an end to Britain’s 72-year occupation of Egypt. Nasser was elected president of Egypt in 1956 and remained in office until his death in 1970. His accomplishments included the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the institution of land reforms and a programme of industrialisation, and the restoration of Egyptian self-government. 278 CultureShock! Egypt Anwar el-Sadat (1918–1981) Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser as the president of Egypt in 1970, and retained the office until he was assassinated in 1981. He shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.


pages: 322 words: 84,752

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Both groups were fighting back against authoritarian elites, who had relied on oppression and subsidies—essentially bribes—to keep their restive populations contented and dissidents marginalized. Yet the disenfranchised used the internet to catch political elites off guard. The Zapatistas did not achieve their immediate welfare and land-reform objectives, but they were successful in commanding international attention and did much to dissolve the authority of the ruling PRI party, which subsequently was voted out after ruling Mexico for more than sixty years. The leaders of the Arab Spring were successful in toppling multiple dictators, and upsetting the political status quo across an entire geopolitical region.


pages: 309 words: 86,909

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

South Korea faced North Korea, and the governments of Singapore and the Philippines faced guerrilla forces. Describing policy in these countries, John Page, writing in a 1994 World Bank publication, said: Very explicit mechanisms were used to demonstrate the intent that all would have a share of future wealth. Korea and Taiwan carried out comprehensive land reform programs; Indonesia used rice and fertilizer price policies to raise rural incomes; Malaysia introduced explicit wealth sharing programs to improve the lot of ethnic Malays vis-à-vis the better off ethnic Chinese; Hong Kong and Singapore undertook massive public housing programs; in several economies, governments assisted workers’ cooperatives and established programs to encourage small and medium-sized enterprises.


Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man.’7 Other commentators suggest that giving indigenous peoples the rights to their own land is a better guarantee of their protection than leaving them open to exploitation by corporations.8 The LAND AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT 189 BOX 12.1 MST: THE LAND RIGHTS CAMPAIGN IN BRAZIL One of the most prominent movements for land reform is the MST in Brazil (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or Movement of Landless Rural Workers). The movement began in October 1983, when a large group of landless peasants from across the state of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil occupied a 9200ha cattle ranch which was owned by an absentee landlord.


The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison

Atul Gawande, crowdsourcing, gentrification, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, land reform, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, subprime mortgage crisis

Cat lives in a ramshackle house strung with Mexican fiesta flags and skirted by an apron of oddly comforting debris: a pile of old dresses, a bucket of crushed PBR cans, an empty tofu carton with its plastic flap crushed onto the dirt. Cat lives there with her boyfriend, Drew, a veteran of anarchist communal living who now works deconstruction and salvage—taking apart empty homes and selling their flooring to hip bars in northern states—and with Andrew, a community organizer who works on land reform. Their home reveals itself in dream-like pieces: a pile of crusted dishes, a bone on the floor, a giant spider lurking in a white ceramic mug, a fabric owl covered in sequins, a square of vegan spanakopita catching fire in the toaster oven, a dog to whom the bone belongs, a creek out back and a giant slab of rock for sunning and a garden too, full of beets and cabbage and spinach-for-vegan-spanakopita and blossoming sweet peas curling up wire lattice and even the tiny, barely sprouted beginning of a pecan tree.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation.33 What Fanon is calling for here is a kind of decolonisation – that we should decolonise the imaginary of economic development and allow different approaches to flourish.34 What does this look like, in practice? It means, following the example of states like Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, Cuba and Kerala, investing in robust universal social policy to guarantee healthcare, education, water, housing, social security. It means land reform so that small farmers have access to the resources that they need to thrive. It means using tariffs and subsidies to protect and encourage domestic industries. It means decent wages, labour laws and a progressive distribution of national income. And it means building economies that are organised around renewable energy and ecological regeneration rather than around fossil fuels and extractivism.


pages: 277 words: 85,191

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

Also, being Chinese, you never knew, maybe a business opportunity would arise and one of us would have to rush back early to cut a deal. On board, as our wives chatted and sampled sushi, we played doudizhu, or Fight the Landlord, a popular Chinese card game with its roots in Communist China’s brutal land reform campaign of the early 1950s. Through multiple rounds of bidding, the first person to shed all his cards—and “kill the landlord”—wins. I was amazed at the stakes. I’m not an accomplished gambler and I was a reluctant participant. I dropped $100,000 on that leg. I was more embarrassed than concerned.


pages: 453 words: 79,218

Lonely Planet Best of Hawaii by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, G4S, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, low cost airline, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation

The missionaries formulated an alphabet for the Hawaiian language, and with this tool, Hawaiians learned to read with astonishing speed. The Great Land Grab Throughout the period of the monarchy, the ruling sovereigns of Hawaiʻi fought off continual efforts on the part of European and American settlers to gain control of the kingdom. In 1848, under pressure from foreigners who wanted to own land, a sweeping land-reform act known as the Great Mahele was instituted. This act allowed, for the first time, the ownership of land, which had previously been held exclusively by monarchs and chiefs. The chiefs had not owned the land in the Western sense but were caretakers of both the land and the commoners who lived and worked on the land, giving their monarchs a portion of the harvest in return for the right to stay.


pages: 255 words: 92,719

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work by Joanna Biggs

Anton Chekhov, bank run, banking crisis, Bullingdon Club, call centre, Chelsea Manning, credit crunch, David Graeber, Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial independence, future of work, G4S, glass ceiling, industrial robot, job automation, land reform, low skilled workers, mittelstand, Northern Rock, payday loans, Right to Buy, scientific management, Second Machine Age, Sheryl Sandberg, six sigma, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, wages for housework, Wall-E

When the reporter John McPhee visited Colonsay, an island south of Lewis in 1969, he accompanied a crofter on rent day, the one day of the year a crofter met the man who owned the land he worked. The crofter paid his rent, the laird murmured something about the year’s farming and then poured two drams of whisky which they drank together. Now much of the land on the Hebrides is owned communally following the Land Reform Act – brought in four years after the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999 – which gave crofters the right to buy the land they farmed at any time. There’s no longer whisky on rent day, just £35 handed to the land’s trustees. Modern crofters take care of livestock but also of the welfare and future of isolated communities, of the Gaelic language, of the idea that Sundays aren’t work days.


pages: 295 words: 89,430

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom

autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, big-box store, correlation does not imply causation, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Richard Florida, rolodex, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, too big to fail, urban sprawl

Ninety-six percent of Dubai residents are foreign-born, and Dubai kharfours, or supermarkets, feature foods and beverages customized for 16 or so different nationalities (there are over 100 different varieties of rice alone). Most of Dubai’s foreign-born residents work in the city’s financial and construction industries, attracted by the absence of corporate income taxes and a 2002 land reform law that allows foreigners to buy local real estate. Like Las Vegas, Dubai is the twenty-first-century version of a Pop-Up City, a city renowned for its seeming mission to be the first, the tallest, the fastest, the biggest, the most ornate and outrageous city in the world. Dubai has the tallest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa, and “the world’s most luxurious hotel” in the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah, a seven-star hotel that sits on its own man-made island overlooking the Arabian Gulf (seven stars, maybe needless to say, is a rating, and a star system, that exists nowhere else in the world).


pages: 268 words: 89,761

Unhealthy societies: the afflictions of inequality by Richard G. Wilkinson

attribution theory, business cycle, clean water, correlation coefficient, experimental subject, full employment, fundamental attribution error, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, invisible hand, land reform, longitudinal study, means of production, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, twin studies, upwardly mobile

(World Bank 1993, p. 157) The authors of the World Bank report describe the policies explicitly aimed at creating greater equality. They also point out that most of these policies did not involve direct income transfers from rich to poor but were aimed instead at overcoming obstacles and disadvantages to people’s economic achievement. Among the approaches they used were land reform and land redistribution, universal education, increased employment opportunities, and intervention in the housing market to provide low-cost housing. It is clear however that what pushed them into these policies was—as it had been in Britain—war or the threat of it, the challenge of communist rivals, and resulting crises of legitimacy.


pages: 273 words: 93,419

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

Even to compete amongst themselves in producing tropical commodities, because of the “green” revolution, developing countries often had to invest heavily in agro-industrial seed, and mechanical and chemical inputs that would only be possible for the larger wealthier farms. Further, the green revolution became a substitute for much-needed land reform in many developing countries. As a result, huge numbers of people were driven off the land as only the richer farmers benefited. According to Davis: 136 L E T T H E M E AT J U N K the Third World now contains many examples of capitalintensive countryside and labor-intensive deindustrialized cities.80 As large numbers of small farmers have been forced off the land, city slums have grown to the point that now onethird of all the world’s urban dwellers live in slums, and this percentage is expected to increase in the near future.81 The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has impacted upon Mexico much as SAPs have affected other developing countries.


pages: 323 words: 89,795

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future by Andrew Heintzman, Evan Solomon, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

But opening for real change began toward the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which held power between 1964 and 1985. During Brazil’s transition to democracy, leaders of religious communities and social movements came together to form the Landless Workers Movement, or MST, an acronym from its Portuguese name, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurals Sem Terra, to push for just land reform. As the fledging democracy drafted its constitution, the MST and others struggling for the rights of the landless ensured that a clause was included to allow the government to expropriate and redistribute idle land in order to fight hunger. The constitution now reads: It is within the power of the Union to expropriate on account of social interest, for purposes of agrarian reform, the rural property which is not performing its social function.14 Despite this clear constitutional mandate, the MST frequently has had to resort to civil disobedience to pressure the government to make good on the constitution’s promise.


pages: 372 words: 92,477

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cashless society, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, circulation of elites, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Corn Laws, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Etonian, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Norman Macrae, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, open economy, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, pension reform, pensions crisis, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, profit maximization, public intellectual, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, TED Talk, the long tail, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, total factor productivity, vertical integration, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, zero-sum game

Kurlantzik, Democracy in Retreat, p. 142. 26. Lant Pritchett, “Is India a Flailing State: Detours on the Four-Lane Highway to Modernization,” Kennedy School of Government, working paper, May 2009. 27. Allison and Blackwill, Lee Kuan Yew, p. 15. 28. Interview with John Micklethwait, March 5, 2013. 29. Dexter Roberts, “Is Land Reform Finally Coming to China?,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, November 20, 2013. 30. Jiang Xueqin, “Christmas Comes Early,” Diplomat, November 24, 2010. 31. Timothy Beardson, Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 73. 32. David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 188. 33.


There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

These are my top tips. (1) Please be careful not to cause a baby to be born unless you really want to look after it. (2) Please don’t encourage, pressurise or force anyone else to do so. (3) Please try, wherever you have influence, to make it easy for others not to have babies unless they really want them. (4) Push for greater investment in the poorest people. Specifically, push for (a) education, especially of women2, (b) information and access to contraception, When is a ‘job’ a good thing? 151 (c) land reform so that more people have secure tenure of the land they work on, (d) end hunger – of course3. And that’s it. The more people who follow those tips, the better life will be for everyone who does get born. One of the ways in which we distribute wealth is though employment and pay. But here in the Anthropocene, the whole concept of jobs could do with a return to first principles.


pages: 369 words: 94,588

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

Marx for one placed little if any value on the social forms destroyed by original accumulation and he did not argue, as some do now, for any restoration of pre-capitalist social relations or productive forms. It was for socialism and communism to build upon the progressive aspects of capitalist development. These progressive aspects included movements for land reform, the rise of democratic forms of government (always sullied by the role of money power), freedom of information (always contingent but nevertheless vital) and of information and of expression, and the creation of rights civil and legal. While struggles against dispossession can form a seedbed of discontent for insurgent movements, the point of revolutionary politics is not to protect the ancient order but to attack directly the class relations and capitalist forms of state power.


pages: 209 words: 89,619

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

Their rural anchor blocks them from acquiring roots in urban areas and prevents rural productivity and incomes from rising through land consolidation. The rural areas provide a subsidy for industrial labour, making it possible to keep money wages below subsistence level, so making those fancy commodities even cheaper for the world’s consumers. Land reform has been under consideration. But the Communist Party has been fearful of the consequences. After all, when the global crisis hit, the rural system acted as a safety valve, with millions returning to the land. The Chinese precariat is easily the largest such group in the world. Earlier generations of social scientists would have called them semi-proletarian.


China's Good War by Rana Mitter

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, land reform, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, sexual politics, South China Sea, Washington Consensus

From the founding of the party in 1921 through the Long March, the “leading” role in the war against Japan, and then final “liberation” of the country in 1949, the powerful genealogy of CCP power excluded all the non-Communist elements of the war—Nationalists, Americans, and collaborators, in particular. Mao’s China had a prime ideological touchstone: the pursuit of class struggle by all means necessary, including violent ones. The early years of the PRC were ones of land reform, struggle sessions, the persecution of landlords, and the creation of an essentially hereditary class system.2 By the time of the Cultural Revolution, class had become a shibboleth rather than a means of analysis.3 The Cultural Revolution was also a xenophobic and nationalistic time, but that nationalism was not primarily based on historical events other than a stylized discourse about “imperialism” and “foreign enemies,” although one of the Eight Model Operas of the era, The Legend of the Red Lantern (Hongdengji), was set during the war years.


pages: 288 words: 89,781

The Classical School by Callum Williams

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, helicopter parent, income inequality, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, new economy, New Journalism, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income

Unlike Ricardo, he did not consider it utterly inevitable that a smaller and smaller group of landlords would get richer and richer. “I certainly do think it fair and reasonable”, Mill declared before a parliamentary committee in 1861, “that the general policy of the State should favour the diffusion rather than the concentration of wealth”. Shortly before his death in 1873 he delivered a speech in which he advocated land reform. According to Blackwood’s Magazine, it was “one of the worst exhibitions of class hatred and animosity” ever seen. To facilitate the said “diffusion”, Mill was in favour of income taxes that fell more heavily on the rich than on the poor. But perhaps a more important policy recommendation was what can only be described as an extreme system of inheritance taxation.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

Household consumption has even begun to rise relative to total production, although it remains far below where it was as recently as the early 2000s as a share of Chinese economic output. The next step, and the crucial one, will be to transfer substantial wealth and income from elites—particularly China’s provincial and municipal governments and state-owned entities—to households. This means land reform, hukou reform, tax reform, privatization, the legalization of unions, and other measures so that household income can continue growing quickly even if GDP growth slows substantially.26 The only safe prediction is that over the next decade or two, China’s imbalances will have been reversed, which means household income growth will substantially exceed GDP growth.


pages: 356 words: 103,944

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

The transformation that the two economies began to experience in the early 1960s placed them on a path that would turn them into major industrial powers. Their strategies in many ways mirrored Japan’s. They required first a government that was single-mindedly focused on economic growth. Prior land reform in both countries had established some space for governments to act independently from landed elites. Both countries also possessed an overarching geopolitical motive. South Korea needed to grow so it could counter any possible threats from North Korea. Taiwan, having given up on the idea of reconquest of mainland China, wanted to forestall any possible challenge from the Communists.


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

The “neoliberal reforms have also given rise to alarming levels of poverty and inequality; approximately 55 percent of Colombia’s population lives below the poverty level” and “this situation has been aggravated by an acute crisis in agriculture, itself a result of the neoliberal program,” as in Latin America generally.17 The respected president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vázquez Carrizosa, writes that it is “poverty and insufficient land reform” that “have made Colombia one of the most tragic countries of Latin America,” though as elsewhere, “violence has been exacerbated by external factors,” primarily the initiatives of the Kennedy administration, which “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades.”


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

The children of the poor cannot afford an education and so are excluded from skilled employment. Where there is extreme inequality of opportunity, growth is slow simply because much of the nation’s talent is wasted. In Taiwan in the early 1950s, for example, just before the start of its rapid growth spurt, the government enacted a major land reform, redistributing the nation’s farming assets toward the poor. The ensuing drop in inequality—Taiwan by then had one of the world’s least unequal income distributions—arguably helped to jump-start the economy in its growth to affluence.10 Other poor countries remain trapped in a vicious cycle of inequality causing low growth, which perpetuates the inequality.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

We wanted to be part of the world. We wanted to cut with isolism.” He knew his audience was interested in making the world a better place, so he decided to focus his remarks on his plan to reduce poverty in Argentina. Even so, he came nowhere near the concepts of equality and justice and power; he didn’t broach a topic like land reform or the concentration of wealth in a handful of families. Instead, he spoke of making it easier to do business. “We know—we all know—that to cut poverty, you have to create good jobs, quality jobs,” he said. “And for that you need to create an environment of trust, of confidence. You have to assure the investors you will be attached to the rule of law, that you will be reliable.”


pages: 332 words: 100,601

Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations by Nandan Nilekani

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, call centre, carbon credits, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, digital rights, driverless car, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, fail fast, financial exclusion, gamification, Google Hangouts, illegal immigration, informal economy, information security, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, law of one price, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, more computing power than Apollo, Negawatt, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, price mechanism, price stability, rent-seeking, RFID, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software is eating the world, source of truth, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

In a common market with a well-designed tax regime, tax considerations will no longer distort business decisions. Tax reform is only one step towards building a common market. It must be accompanied by reform in several other sectors as well: farmers should be able to sell their produce freely in any market in the country; land reform and better land titling systems should create a countrywide market for land; and a common national grid should allow for easy transfer of surplus electricity between producers and consumers so that all parts of the country can have a robust electricity infrastructure capable of supporting manufacturing units.


pages: 348 words: 102,438

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

From the Romantic movement on, these wider public interests in the countryside came to challenge the idea that the land is a matter of purely private property rights, and gradually these have been attenuated. For most of the history of agriculture the challenge to the sole rights of the owners had been about who should own the land, rather than the multiple public claims upon it. Land reform is a long-running political saga, going back centuries, and brings into play the rights of tenants against landlords, and the rights to the commons, which were trampled on in the enclosure processes with the repeated parliamentary approval of specific enclosures.21 This public interest is in the public goods, and the ownership question arises in terms of who should have access to them, and who should pay for them.


pages: 307 words: 102,734

The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River by Dan Morrison

airport security, colonial rule, company town, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, off-the-grid, Potemkin village, Rubik’s Cube, satellite internet, Silicon Valley

Here the Nile split into its eastern and western branches, each feeding a complex network of irrigation canals and waterways. It was here that the silt of the ages had been deposited, creating a fertile 9,600-square-mile triangle between Cairo and the Mediterranean. It was here that the electricity from the High Dam had been put to use irrigating the land and powering the looms. Nasser’s land reforms had turned serfs into small landowners and his factories had created employment for two generations of workers. Now factory towns like Zagazig, Mahalla and Kafr el-Dawwar were in foment. A wave of wildcat strikes was shaking the great state-owned textile mills, where workers were spooked over low wages, high prices and threats of privatization.


pages: 302 words: 97,076

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher

Bletchley Park, centre right, colonial rule, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, trade route, urban sprawl, éminence grise

While Jovo did everything he could to support Gavrilo, there were occasions when he was not good for the money, forcing his younger sibling to change digs – hence the many addresses I found on Princip’s school records. ‘I did not have the means to maintain myself here,’ he said at his trial. ‘I always lived on credit.’ He found himself exactly where his serf forebears had been, anchored to the bottom of a social order imposed by a foreign power. The anger only got worse when he went home on school holidays. Land reform had been one of the promises made by the Habsburgs, and yet whenever he travelled to Obljaj – such as in 1909, when he scratched his initials on the wall in the garden of the family homestead – he saw that Bosnian peasants like his own family were no better off under the Austro-Hungarians than they had been under the Ottomans.


pages: 346 words: 101,255

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George

American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anton Chekhov, Bob Geldof, Celtic Tiger, clean water, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, low cost airline, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Steven Pinker, urban planning

There are no mobile phone signals, there are bicycles to borrow, and the campus canteen makes excellent Indian chow mein for breakfast, at least when the monkeys aren’t baiting the cooks. The place runs efficiently and confidently. Gram Vikas has won major international awards, like the 2006 Kyoto World Water Grand Prize, a big deal in the watsan world. Yet its mission didn’t start with toilets. The young Madiath began by lobbying for land reform, because people were moving to the cities when life on the land got too hard, and the land was suffering. Eventually, his focus shifted to biogas, which also made poor farmers’ lives easier. Over 50,000 cow-dung digesters were installed over ten years. Still it wasn’t enough. Gram Vikas conducted field surveys to find the most acute problem stifling village development.


pages: 388 words: 99,023

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

“There are few very competent experienced older people, in or out of the government, and those that do exist cannot, in many cases, be separated from their present positions to work with the Planning Board,” Edward Mason, who directed the Harvard Advisory Group from 1954 to 1962, lamented.25 With pressure to produce the document, the advisers wrote large parts of the plan and had little time to train their Pakistani counterparts.26 The plan was completed late, two years into the period it covered, and its recommendations were politically unfeasible. The Pakistani government was preoccupied with debates about regional autonomy, the electoral system, and foreign policy. Among other things, the plan recommended large-scale land reforms, which would have challenged the country’s wealthiest families. Running hundreds of pages, the document was technical, and little effort was made to communicate its contents to the 80 percent of Pakistan’s population that was illiterate.27 Nor did Pakistan’s president, Iskander Mirza, formally endorse the plan.28 But the exercise was still useful in two respects.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth Century America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. SENG, Loh Kah. (2011). “The British Military Withdrawal from Singapore and the Anatomy of a Catalyst,” Singapore in Global History, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. SENIOR, Clarence. (1958). Land Reform and Democracy, Gainesville: University of Florida Press. SETHI, Amit. (2014, July 12). “Are Mumbai’s property-end users swifly moving towards the suburbs?,” Times of India, http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31804&articlexml=Are-Mumbais-property-end-users-swiftly-moving-towards-12072014301015.


Discover Kaua'i Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

carbon footprint, Easter island, G4S, haute couture, land reform, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, profit motive, union organizing, white picket fence

The gods owned the land and people were stewards. In practical terms, the king controlled the land and foreigners had no means to own any. In the 1840s, Americans sought to secure long-term property rights. In 1848, they convinced the Hawaiian government to enact the Great Mahele, a revolutionary land reform act that redistributed all kingdom lands into three parts: crown lands, chief lands and government lands (for the benefit of the general public). Two years later the government went further and allowed foreign residents to buy land. Sugar growers and land speculators bought huge parcels for minimal sums from chiefs lured by quick money and from commoners ignorant of deeds, taxes and other legal requirements for fee-simple land ownership.


pages: 392 words: 106,532

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Able Archer 83, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative

In April, 1978, to the surprise of Moscow, a Marxist coup took place in Afghanistan, resulting in the overthrow of that country’s pro-American government. The temptation to exploit this opportunity was too great to resist, and soon the Soviet Union was sending aid to the new regime in Kabul, which undertook an ambitious program to support land reform, women’s rights, and secular education. It did so, however, just as the revolution was brewing in neighboring Iran, which in January, 1979—in a severe setback for the United States—forced its long-time ally Shah Reza Khan Pahlavi into exile, replacing him with the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Russians and their new Afghan clients were no more prepared for this development than the Americans had been, and in mid-March a violent rebellion broke out in Herat, close to the Iranian border, which resulted in the deaths of some 5,000 people including fifty Soviet advisers and their families.


pages: 366 words: 107,145

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

But it is a fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm, rather than the bloodless and bowdlerized fare that our parents' generation sought to raise us on! This is a castle of the German aristocracy, descendants of the Teutonic Knights and servants of the Russian Empire until the late upheaval deprived them of the object of their loyalty. And it is an estate that has been cut down to size, thanks to the decrees of the Riigikogu relating to land reform and the rights of the peasants to the fruits of their labor. Evgenia and I visited with the Hoyningen-Huenes last weekend, ostensibly to write a tub-thumper for the Guardian about the equitable settlement in Rapla County, which has not seen so much turbulence and persecution of the former rulers as other areas: I put it about that we would also like to see the countryside thereabouts, and talk to some of the local landlords about the recent changes.


pages: 403 words: 110,492

Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments by Andrew Henderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, birth tourism , bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, capital controls, car-free, content marketing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, digital nomad, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Elon Musk, failed state, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, intangible asset, land reform, low interest rates, medical malpractice, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive income, peer-to-peer lending, Pepsi Challenge, place-making, risk tolerance, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, too big to fail, white picket fence, work culture , working-age population

There are many good things that come from this natural instinct, but it is our complacency with the tribes that have been chosen for us that causes us to go (or stay) where we are treated poorly. Even in the worst of cases, our sense of patriotism can cause us to stay where we are unwelcome. Consider when the African nation of Rhodesia achieved independence a generation ago. The enormous victory was followed by a series of land reforms that devolved from a fair process between willing buyers and sellers to outright confiscation of large farms from the white minority. Some of those farmers are still there in modern-day Zimbabwe. They had years of advanced notice, but for some reason they chose to stick around and watch their land get confiscated.


Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

Heath at the time interpreted this intense level of drinking as a particularly dramatic attempt to forge some sense of group cohesion in an otherwise non-cohesive, atomistic society. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Camba land was connected to more densely populated areas by paved highways and railroads; around the same time, land reforms began breaking up the large sugarcane estates that previously dominated the region. Inspired by this revolutionary liberation movement, the Camba began to form local peasant unions, or sindicatos, cooperating with each other on a much more frequent and intimate basis. Heath found that this new sense of social solidarity, and commitment to a group cause, led to a marked decrease in binge drinking.


The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939 by Adrian Tinniswood

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Etonian, gentleman farmer, land reform, off-the-grid, plutocrats, spinning jenny, upwardly mobile

Those who had no country house to connect them to the land fit for heroes could always follow John Buchan’s example and buy themselves a piece of the past. a Taaffe, who was also a count of the Holy Roman Empire, was doubly unfortunate: four weeks after losing his Irish titles, he learned that the newly established Austrian republic had abolished the nobility altogether and with it his remaining title. Land reform in the new Czechoslovakia then took away most of his Bohemian estates, and plain Mr. Henry Taaffe died in debt in Vienna in 1928. b The genealogically minded will already have noticed that Roland and Sonia were the grandparents of the present Duchess of Cornwall. 3 IT IS OURS The transfer of country houses from one owner to another was one of the most significant features of the property market between the wars.


pages: 1,056 words: 275,211

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, defense in depth, European colonialism, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869

On the one hand demobilized veterans and displaced civilians continued to be repatriated from the Asian continent; millions remained homeless; food rationing had broken down; and black markets were flourishing everywhere. Farmers had begun political struggles for the democratization of local village government. Land reform had not yet begun, but tenants and small owner-cultivators were demonstrating their grievances against the landlord class—a social pillar of the prewar monarchy ever since Meiji. On the other hand the confusion and demoralization so noticeable earlier were starting to give way to intellectual ferment and excitement.

-Soviet Cold War rivalry and, 624, 627, 634, 646, 651 war dead memorial services in, 651, 652–53, 658–59 war declared against U.S. by, 436–37 Washington Conference debates in, 146–51 West and collective identity of, 279–80 and Western democratic and social ideas, 103, 105 in withdrawal from League of Nations, 256, 261–63, 265, 268, 269, 279 xenophobic nationalism in, 8–9 Yasukuni Shrine controversy in, 682–83 Japan, occupied: abdication issue in, 550, 552–53, 571–73, 628 antimilitary campaign in, 555–59 atomic bomb awareness in, 637 black market in, 539–40, 619 Communists and, 552 “crab walk” incident in, 632–33 demobilization in, 544 economy of, 539–40, 624–25 educational reform in, 552, 560 election of April 25, 1947 in, 624–27 end of occupation, 647 and fear of occupiers, 537–38 food distribution crisis in, 619–20 GHQ-government conflict in, 551–52 GHQ’s reforms in, 551–52 and Hirohito-MacArthur photograph, 548, 549–51, 553 Hirohito’s domestic tours of, 620–26, 628–31 Hirohito’s religious tours in, 553–55 Hirohito’s status as emperor in, 568–70 Hirohito war crimes issue in, 559, 567–68 Hiroshima visit in, 628–31 Korean War and, 636, 640–43 Kyoto University protest incident in, 644–45 land reform in, 619 MacArthur-Eisenhower “Secret” telegram and, 567–68 MacArthur’s strategy for, 544–45 media censorship in, 551 Meiji past and, 560–62 name change in, 621 New Year’s poetry reading in, 632 Okinawa issue in, 646 peace movement in, 642 peace treaty debate in, 634–35, 639–40 Pearl Harbor responsibility issue in, 546–47 and preservation of kokutai, 535, 537, 538, 540, 542, 544, 545, 547, 551, 552, 559 protect monarchy campaign in, 536–37, 542–43, 568–70 racial fears in, 538–39 and rehabilitation of emperor’s image, 553–54, 561, 563–66 renewal of nationalism in, 636, 638 and rewriting of history, 555–59 Shinto Directive of, 560 U.S. military alliance with, 644, 646 U.S. military in, 627, 640, 641–42 U.S.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Production, employment, and wages stagnated, then fell. The country slid into a major economic crisis in 1998, which led to widespread riots and strikes. Zimbabwe’s military adventurism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s civil war made both the domestic and regional situations worse. The 1999 land reform program began ad hoc seizures of white-owned farms for redistribution to blacks. Mugabe refused to cede power, and the longer he remained, the worse the situation became. The government intensified its human rights abuses, imposed strict laws limiting media freedom, and rigged elections. Several government ministers who did not toe the line died in mysterious “accidents.”


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

The Riddle of the Modern World. Palgrave. Mingardi, Alberto 2011. Herbert Spencer. Bloomsbury Academic. On Churchill, Johnson, B. 2014. The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. Hodder & Stoughton. On Chinese reform: The secret document that transformed China. National Public Radio report on Chinese land reform 14 May 2014. On the American presidency, Bacevich, A. 2013. The Iran deal just shows how badly Obama has failed. Spectator 30 November 2013. On the impact of Gutenberg, Johnson, S. 2014. How We Got to Now. Particular Books. On mosquitoes and wars, Mann, Charles C. 2011. 1493. Granta Books. And McNeill, J.R. 2010.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Striking regional events even more deeply debunked the curve’s erroneous law. The East Asian ‘miracle’ – from the mid 1960s to 1990 – saw countries such as Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia combine rapid economic growth with low inequality and falling poverty rates. It was achieved largely thanks to rural land reform that boosted the incomes of smallholder farmers, coupled with strong public investments in health and education, and industrial policies that raised workers’ wages while restraining food prices. Far from being inevitable, the Kuznets process had turned out to be avoidable: it was indeed possible to achieve growth with equity.


pages: 390 words: 119,527

Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, European colonialism, failed state, friendly fire, Golden arches theory, IFF: identification friend or foe, jobless men, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, old-boy network, operational security, Potemkin village, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, walking around money

In essence, the U.S. government was putting into practice strategies that had been advocated by veterans of colonial administration like Thompson, who believed the problems of guerrilla war could basically be solved by intelligent civilian administration, better policing, and political reconciliation. Land reform was an example of how this could work. The Communists had made a promise of land redistribution to win support.21 With U.S. government encouragement, the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu forwarded a program called “land to the tiller,” whereby the government of South Vietnam gave deeds to tenant farmers who actually worked the land.


pages: 390 words: 115,769

Healthy at 100: The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World's Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples by John Robbins

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, Donald Trump, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, land reform, life extension, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

Second was democratization—his staff created the constitution that is in use in Japan to this day, providing for a representative democracy, free universal education, the right of labor unions to organize and engage in collective bargaining, the right of women to vote, and the right of everyone to a decent life. And the third was decentralization—MacArthur broke up the family dynasties that ran the huge corporations that had controlled the country. He mandated a maximum wage for business and corporate leaders. He also carried out the most successful land reform program in history. Land was purchased from landlords who had amassed huge holdings, then sold to the tenants at the same price. The tenants were given thirty-year interest-free loans to make the purchase. Essentially, he leveled the playing field. His reforms were followed by the most rapid rise in health and longevity ever documented in any major country in world history.


pages: 429 words: 120,332

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

In other words, those claims that infringe the City’s ancient liberties are worthless. Earlier that century, the British crown had asked the Corporation to extend its ancient legal protections and privileges to new areas of London, outside the City, that were receiving tens of thousands of refugees from brutal land reforms known as the Enclosures. But the Corporation refused, instead shipping excess populations off to the Ulster Plantation and the Corporation of Londonderry in what is now Northern Ireland,32 helping build a large Protestant community there and contributing to bitter future conflict. Glasman calls this the “Great Refusal”: the moment where the City turned its back on London and when London’s history properly became a tale of two cities, with a mayor for the vibrant, troubled, and poverty-scarred metropolis, and a Lord Mayor for the City: the world’s most ancient political institution, at the disposal of finance.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

But the bumpier road travelled by some of its Southeast Asian neighbours suggests that success cannot be taken for granted. And it will depend on government policies, also including in the crucial area of social stability. The East Asian ‘tiger’ economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan had also enacted land reform and other forms of redistribution that allowed their growth to be accompanied by greater equity. By contrast, China’s lack of such policies contributes to it having levels of inequality that are causing social resentment. That is another lesson to note from the growth experience of its neighbours.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

But the bumpier road travelled by some of its Southeast Asian neighbours suggests that success cannot be taken for granted. And it will depend on government policies, also including in the crucial area of social stability. The East Asian ‘tiger’ economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan had also enacted land reform and other forms of redistribution that allowed their growth to be accompanied by greater equity. By contrast, China’s lack of such policies contributes to it having levels of inequality that are causing social resentment. That is another lesson to note from the growth experience of its neighbours.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

When I asked a local businessmen how this could be, he said Koreans don’t like to pay for services and prefer to just stay with friends or family when they’re in town. The government has grown increasingly conscious of the political risks of the manufacturing boom. South Korea is an intensely egalitarian society increasingly dominated by a few big manufacturing combines. In its early years the country managed to grow while reducing inequality, first through land reforms that distributed property formerly held by large landowners or the Japanese after World War II, and later through a commitment to universal education that borders on fanaticism. From the 1950s to the 1980s South Korea had by far the highest levels of school enrollment among emerging nations, and today it also has the highest enrollment in basic education (and the third highest in higher education) of any nation, period.


pages: 467 words: 116,902

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In addition to federal civil rights legislation, the Reconstruction Era brought the expansion of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency charged with the responsibility of providing food, clothing, fuel, and other forms of assistance to destitute former slaves. A public education system emerged in the South, which afforded many blacks (and poor whites) their first opportunity to learn to read and write. While the Reconstruction Era was fraught with corruption and arguably doomed by the lack of land reform, the sweeping economic and political developments in that period did appear, at least for a time, to have the potential to seriously undermine, if not completely eradicate, the racial caste system in the South. With the protection of federal troops, African Americans began to vote in large numbers and seize control, in some areas, of the local political apparatus.


Discover Maui by Lonely Planet

California gold rush, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, land reform, Maui Hawaii, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, sustainable-tourism, trade route

Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum (Click here) PHOTOGRAPHER: GREG ELMS/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © The Great Land Grab Throughout the monarchy period, the ruling sovereigns of Hawaii fought off continual efforts on the part of European and American settlers to gain control of the kingdom. In 1848, under pressure from foreigners who wanted to own land, a sweeping land reform act known as the Great Mahele was instituted. This act allowed, for the first time, the ownership of land, which had previously been held exclusively by monarchs and chiefs. The chiefs had not owned the land in the Western sense but were caretakers of the land, and the commoners who lived on the land worked it, giving a portion of their harvest in return for the right to stay.


Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

agricultural Revolution, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, failed state, financial independence, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, land tenure, liberal world order, market fundamentalism, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

In a defense of the NIEO, he endorsed developing nations’ demands for “fundamental changes of international economic relations” and criticized the limited availability of multilateral aid for development. However, he did not identify the NIEO with his prior conceptualization of a welfare world. Instead, anticipating some of the NIEO’s critics, Myrdal highlighted the “inequality problem” within developing countries and argued for the prioritization of land reform.85 But while Myrdal himself did not link the NIEO to his internationalization of welfare, both critics and sympathizers took up this perspective. For instance, the neoliberal economist Ernst-­Ulrich Petersmann, who played an important role in spearheading reforms of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, rejected the NIEO for its “internationalized welfare world.”86 On the opposite end, the international lawyer Bernard Röling celebrated the egalitarian ambitions of the NIEO and described it as an effort to transform the UN from a peace to a welfare organization.87 In describing the NIEO as an internationalization of the welfare state, both Petersmann and Röling sought to capture the ways that this project of anticolonial worldmaking marked a radical departure from the postwar international order.


pages: 380 words: 116,919

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

The money from high import duties, so the argument ran, could be used to fund the social reforms necessary to rally the population for the great tasks that lay ahead. Another central plank in the project of national regeneration was the land question. In 1904, the Liberal MP Herbert Samuel warned against the evils of ‘tenements’ and praised the virtues of land reform with reference to national security. ‘Waterloo was won,’ he reminded his readers, ‘not on the playing fields of Eton alone but on the village greens of England as well; and if there are no more village greens, our Waterloos of the future, in spite of all that England can do, may have a different ending.’90 Foreign policy – and that meant, principally, Europe and the German threat – also shaped British electoral politics.


pages: 831 words: 110,299

Lonely Planet Kauai by Lonely Planet, Adam Karlin, Greg Benchwick

call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Easter island, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Paradox of Choice, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, union organizing

The gods owned the land and people were stewards. In practical terms, the king controlled the land and foreigners had no means to own any. In the 1840s, Americans sought to secure long-term property rights. In 1848, they convinced the Hawaiian government to enact the Great Mahele, a revolutionary land reform act that redistributed all kingdom lands into three parts: crown lands, chief lands and government lands (for the benefit of the general public). Two years later the government went further and allowed foreign residents to buy land. Sugar growers and land speculators bought huge parcels for minimal sums from chiefs lured by quick money and from commoners ignorant of deeds, taxes and other legal requirements for fee-simple land ownership.


pages: 1,800 words: 596,972

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

“It is the bandit groups that are the problem and the dispossessed landlords who had their land taken from them by our Decree Number Six and they are assisted by students of imperialism. These people are trained in camps in Pakistan. They are taught by the imperialists to shoot and throw grenades and set off mines.” The governor still visited the nearest villages during daylight, in the company of three soldiers, to inspect the progress of land reform and Jalalabad’s newly created irrigation scheme. But he understood why the reforms had created animosity. “We tried to make sure that all men and women had equal rights and the same education,” he said. “But we have two societies in our country, one in the cities and one in the villages. The city people accept equal rights but the villages are more traditional.

Sixteen months later, on 4 November 1964, he delivered a speech in which he condemned a new law giving American forces immunity from prosecution for any crimes committed inside Iran. Henceforth, an American who murdered an Iranian could leave the country; an Iranian who murdered an Iranian could be hanged.23 Next day, Khomeini was exiled to Turkey. The Shah’s “White Revolution” succeeded in alienating the middle classes by legislating for land reform and the clerics by increasing the secular nature of the regime, especially by giving electoral power to women. By 1977, less than two years before the Islamic revolution, the Shah was predicting that within ten years Iran would be as developed as western Europe, and shortly thereafter one of the five most powerful countries in the world.

Their grey jackets were torn and their trousers frayed where the rubble and thorns in the fields had scratched them. They wore cheap plastic sandals. There was only one girl with them, a thirteen-year-old with dark hair who had wrapped herself shroud-like in a pink and grey chador. “Then things improved for us,” Sheikh Zaude said. “Sardai and Solehi left with the land reforms.” There was no perceptible change in the mullah’s face. He had been asked about that year’s Islamic revolution but he was talking about the Shah’s “White Revolution” seventeen years earlier when the monarch’s reform laws ostensibly curtailed the power of the big landowners. Private holdings were redistributed and landowners could retain only one village.


Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States by Francis Fukuyama

Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, crony capitalism, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, land reform, land tenure, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

There is a remarkable parallel between the process outlined by Tawney in early modern Britain and that which has taken place in Chile over the last quarter of a century. Starting in 1967, agrarian reforms led to an expropriation of 52 percent of agricultural land by the government. After the Pinochet coup in 1973, land reform was stopped. About 30 percent of the land (still in the hands of the government at the time of the coup) was returned to the previous owners. About 10 percent was sold, 19 percent held by the government, and the rest left to the beneficiaries of reform.52 But most of these sold out, and out of this massive destruction of the traditional agricultural system, a new breed of capitalist farmers emerged.


pages: 449 words: 127,440

Moscow, December 25th, 1991 by Conor O'Clery

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, haute couture, It's morning again in America, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Sinatra Doctrine, The Chicago School

A breakthrough has been made on the road to democratic reforms. Free elections, freedom of the press, freedom of worship, representative legislatures, and a multiparty system have all become realities. We have set out to introduce a pluralistic economy, and the equality of all forms of ownership is being established. In the course of the land reform, peasant ry is reviving, individual farmers have appeared, and millions of hectares of land have been allocated to the urban and rural population. Laws were passed on the economic freedom of producers, and free enterprise, shareholding, and privatization are under way. Shifting the course of our economy towards a free market, we must not forget that this is being done for the benefit of the individual.


pages: 414 words: 128,962

The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland by Rory Stewart

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, connected car, Etonian, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Khyber Pass, land reform, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, rewilding, Silicon Valley

But that is tainted for me here by the knowledge that the landowner near here has destroyed the footpath and the woodland. Still,’ he reflected, ‘one of our glories in Britain is mixed deciduous woodland.’ He paused. ‘But nowhere is trapped in the past.’ I learned that he had been involved in environmental and land-reform movements and been invited to Parliament to discuss reforming the law. I was struck by his very formal sentences – and the sudden shifts from contemporary protest to a romantic ideal of Britain, to the contemporary cliché again. And then suddenly – like other Cumbrians I knew – he left the Cumbrian landscape entirely, leaving this border again for another border.


Discover Hawaii the Big Island by Lonely Planet

Day of the Dead, land reform, Maui Hawaii, new economy, off-the-grid, sustainable-tourism

ʻAumakua protect living family members, who in turn protect their guardian spirits: an ancient example of ‘modern’ environmental protection. Hawaiian Kingdom Overthrown Under the Hawaiian monarchy, Westerners had no way to own real property: the king controlled the lands. Americans sought to secure long-term property rights and in 1848 the Hawaiian government enacted the Great Mahele, a revolutionary land reform act that divided all kingdom lands into three parts: crown lands, chief lands and government lands (for the benefit of the general public). Two years later the government further acquiesced by allowing foreign residents to buy land. Haole (Caucasion) sugar growers and land speculators bought huge parcels for minimal sums from chiefs lured by quick money and from commoners ignorant of deeds, taxes and other legal requirements for fee-simple land ownership.


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The U.S. did demand a price for its help, however: British Petroleum now had to share its access to Iranian oilfields with several U.S. companies. U.S. military and foreign policy leaders were cheered by the success of their plan, recovering Iran at a low cost politically, militarily, and financially. Guatemala was the next test case for this indirect method of policing empire. In May 1952, President Jacobo Arbenz announced a land reform program that would have nationalized unused land belonging to landlords and, especially, the holdings of Boston’s United Fruit Company, the country’s largest landowner. His inspiration was Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act of 1862, with Arbenz hoping to enable peasants and rural laborers to become independent small farmers.


The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor

activist lawyer, banking crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, financial innovation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, kremlinology, land reform, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, one-China policy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, reserve currency, risk/return, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Upton Sinclair

Beijing has been smart enough to harness local dynamism to test new ideas, and then feed back the successful experiments into the national policy grid. The market economy was built on allowing special economic zones in places like Shenzhen in the early eighties to pursue liberal investment policies, while the rest of the country remained stuck with central planning. Policies on health, pensions and land reform have all been stress-tested at local level in recent years before being expanded nationally. The golden age of decentralization under communist rule–the period from 1978 to 1993–was also the apogee of private sector growth and wealth generation. China’s GDP increased by 280 per cent in these fifteen years; absolute poverty was cut by 50 per cent in the first half of the eighties alone and real incomes rose rapidly.


Autonomia: Post-Political Politics 2007 by Sylvere Lotringer, Christian Marazzi

anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, business cycle, collective bargaining, dematerialisation, disinformation, do-ocracy, feminist movement, full employment, Great Leap Forward, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, social intelligence, wages for housework, women in the workforce

~ador Allende (left) speaks to squatters who ha~e unlawfully taken over a housing estate In a poor section of Sentlago, They are part of a movement which Is protesting the bad hOUsing conditions by seizing other people's homos and refusing to mo~e, Allende Is eJ<pected to decree Iha establlshment of a National Council of Peesants, Dec. 21st. According to the Agriculture Ministry, the councH will speed the peasant's participation In the government's land reform program, (UPI) 12121/70 \\/3 19885 FLINT, MICH.···iHERE'S PRIVACY, TOO, FOR THE MORE FASTIDIOUS "SITTER". THESE HAVE ESTABLISHED INDIVIDUAL ROOMS IN INCOMPLETED AUTO BODIES. THEY HAVE EVEN INSCRIBED THEIR NAMES AND NUMBERS, ALSO BITS OF HUMOR ON THE DOORS OF THEIR OUARTERS. 2-10:37 ilI4' Funeral for Ille victims of the Everett Massacre, 1916.


pages: 469 words: 146,487

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

He also had the wit to be well advised. Charles Buller, his private secretary, had been born in Calcutta, studied history with Thomas Carlyle and had won a reputation as a brilliant barrister before entering the House of Commons; while Durham’s principal adviser, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, had written extensively on land reform in Australia – ironically, while languishing in Newgate prison, where he had been sent for three years for abducting an under-age heiress. He was just one of many thinkers of his generation who were haunted by the spectre, conjured up by the statistician Thomas Malthus, of unsustainable population growth at home.


pages: 524 words: 143,596

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart

bread and circuses, call centre, East Village, fear of failure, impulse control, land reform, Lao Tzu, Socratic dialogue, the medium is the message

In addition to two lawsuits, one patient committed suicide (thirty-five dollars an hour out of the window), one was arrested for leading to the delinquency of a minor, and a last disappeared at sea in a sailing canoe on his way to Tahiti. On the other hand, I had a few distinct successes. One man, a highly paid advertising executive, gave up his job and family and joined the Peace Corps, spent two years in Peru, wrote a book on faking land reform in underdeveloped countries, a book highly praised by everyone except the governments of Peru and the United States, and is now living in a cabin in Tennessee writing a book on the effects of advertising on underdeveloped minds. Whenever he's in New York he drops in to suggest I write a book about the underdeveloped psyches of psychiatrists.


pages: 495 words: 138,188

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, borderless world, business cycle, central bank independence, Corn Laws, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, inflation targeting, joint-stock company, Kula ring, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price mechanism, profit motive, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor, Works Progress Administration

When the counterrevolutionary smoke dissolved, the political systems in Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin were found to be not very different from what they had been before the war. This was true, roughly, of Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and even Italy and Germany, up to the middle of the twenties. In some countries a great advance was made in national freedom and land reform—achievements which had been common to Western Europe since 1789. Russia, in this respect, formed no exception. The tendency of the times was simply to establish (or reestablish) the system commonly associated with the ideals of the English, the American, and the French revolutions. Not only Hindenburg and Wilson, but also Lenin and Trotsky were, in this broad sense, in the line of Western tradition.


Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities by Diana Leafe Christian

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Community Supported Agriculture, double entry bookkeeping, intentional community, land reform, off grid, search costs, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, urban sprawl

Serve and reach out to the local and global community, encouraging spiritual and cultural diversity and other forms of creative expression while providing a sense of inclusion, integration and celebration through responsible community activities. 10. Encourage the growth of our village until we have at least 66 site holders. 11. Encourage the establishment of memberowned and managed, ecologically sound businesses. 12. Actively support the intentional communities, permaculture and land reform movements as we are able. Abundant Dawn, Virginia Following is Abundant Dawn’s vision statement: • We are creating a loving and sustainable culture. We live close to one another, cooperate, and share resources, so that we may live more lightly and joyously on the earth. • As we seek to realize ourselves through service, and work towards ecological and social responsibility, we respect the diversity of our members’ life choices. 232 CREATING A LIFE TOGETHER • Whether in times of peace or conflict, we meet each other face to face, with openness and caring.


pages: 1,150 words: 338,839

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson, Evan Thomas

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, George Santayana, guns versus butter model, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

Counterinsurgency, known in the jargon of the time as CI, was in vogue among some of Kennedy’s young lieutenants, particularly activists such as Walt Rostow, who believed that the U.S. had to play a greater role in the Third World. Rostow envisioned, his colleagues joked, “a TV in every thatched hut.” The purpose of CI was in fact appealing: to win the hearts and minds of the peasants with land reform, honest elections, and generous amnesties, to field special forces that could instruct the locals how to harvest crops and deliver babies as well as how to fight guerrilla warfare. The President was sufficiently impressed to establish, with much fanfare, the Green Berets, an elite special forces unit trained in counterinsurgency.

He believed that counterinsurgency would buy time for the diplomats to work out a Laos-type solution. Whatever the merits of CI, it was never really tried in Vietnam. Hilsman had ambitious plans for a network of “strategic hamlets” to fence out the Viet Cong, but Diem handed the program over to his nefarious brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who had little use for notions like land reform or honest elections. Brother Nhu was principally interested in crushing dissent. In May of 1963, on the 2,587th birthday of Buddha, government troops opened fire into a crowd of monks, or bonzes, in Hue City, killing nine. President Diem refused to apologize; he did not want to lose face. The Buddhists, foes of the ruling Catholic family, began dousing themselves with gasoline and sitting in the lotus position while they burned to death.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

The staff and the program flourished.3 Unfortunately, such cases were actively discouraged by program officials. Fran and I subsequently observed the same devastating consequences 10 PROLOGUE of rigid central control play out in programs throughout South and Southeast Asia in health care, agricultural extension, irrigation, forestry, land reform, education, and community development. Programs intended to serve the poor consumed substantial human and material resources to no useful end. Even more alarming was the frequent disruption of the ability of villagers and their communities to control and manage their own resources to meet their needs.


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

Firstly, India was a democracy from the very start, so compulsion was not possible. Secondly, India is a land-​ scarce country (the land-​labour ratio is very low), so the major problem in Indian agriculture is extreme land fragmentation, not land concentration. Indeed, the largely futile efforts to carry out redistributive land reform in India diverted energy which would have been better spent in strengthening tenancy rights, and promoting education and health care. 10. Most states in India failed miserably in promoting education and health but there were some outstanding exceptions such as Kerala and Himachal Pradesh. This shows the importance of government focus and attention for successful social outcomes.


pages: 516 words: 159,734

War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR by John Dower

anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, Scientific racism, seminal paper, South China Sea, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway

To the extent possible, trade within the bloc would take the form of barter. The basic policy toward the farming populations throughout the bloc would simply be to encourage them to work hard. There were no immediate plans, it was indicated, to “reform management” in the agrarian sector–presumedly meaning there were no plans for land reform, or the breaking down of the Western colonial plantations.61 Naturally, there would be gradations within the bloc–critical “semiperipheral” areas, as it were. As the civilian planners saw it, the “core region” of the Co-Prosperity Sphere for a long while to come would remain the Japanese home islands plus Manchukuo, along with North China and Mongolia, with genuine “self-sufficiency” only gradually coming to embrace Central and South China, Southeast Asia, and India.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

As Mixin Pei argues, “If economic success does not end one-party rule in China, corruption probably will.” Pei, “The Chinese Communist Party,” Foreign Policy, September–October 2005, 46. 51. Albert Keidel, “China’s Social Unrest: The Story Behind the Stories,” Carnegie Endowment Policy Brief no. 48, September 2006. 52. For a historical narrative of previous land-reform efforts, see Yuan-Tsung Chen, The Dragon’s Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (New York: Penguin, 1981). 53. A Political Reform Office was created in the 1980s, including frequent consultations with business experts and foreign-trained lawyers. See Mixin Pei, “Political Reform in China: Leadership Differences and Convergence,” paper presented at the conference on Chinese Leadership, Politics and Policy, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 2, 2005. 54.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

What made the difference? First, the United States and its allies (notably Britain in Malaysia) were able to provide credible security guarantees to governments following military interventions. Secondly, post-conflict reforms created secure institutional foundations for growth, a perfect example being the 1946 land reform in Japan, which swept away the remnants of feudalism and substantially equalized property-ownership (something the Meiji reformers had omitted to do). Thirdly, the increasingly open global economic order upheld by the United States very much benefited these Asian countries. Finally, they used various forms of state direction to ensure that savings were channelled into export industries, of which the key first-stage sector was, of course, textiles.


Barcelona by Damien Simonis

Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land reform, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, retail therapy, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Within days of the formation of Spain’s Second Republic in 1931, leftist Catalan nationalists of the ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya), led by Francesc Macià and Lluís Companys, proclaimed Catalonia a republic within an imaginary ‘Iberian Federation’. Madrid pressured them into accepting unitary Spanish statehood, but after the leftist Popular Front victory in the February 1936 national elections, Catalonia briefly won genuine autonomy. Companys, its president, carried out land reforms and planned an alternative Barcelona Olympics to the official 1936 games in Nazi Berlin. But things were racing out of control. The left and the right across Spain were shaping up for a showdown. Return to beginning of chapter THE CIVIL WAR On 17 July 1936, an army uprising in Morocco kick-started the Spanish Civil War.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Interestingly, for example, these days most rural land-owning households in India get a majority of their income from something other than agriculture. But land ownership is still valuable because it comes with the assurance that if all else fails, they can grow their own living. This has the consequence that areas with a large fraction of small-holders tend to find it difficult to industrialize. This is partly due to the design of land reform; when the poor are given land rights, it is often inheritable but not saleable. But there is also a strong resistance to sell among the farmers themselves. In the Indian state of West Bengal, when the communists came to power after winning the 1977 elections, their first priority was to give the tenant farmers permanent rights on the land they tilled.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Wartime destruction had been immense, including the terrible atomic bomb blasts that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan had lost 80% of its ships, a third of its industrial machinery, and almost a quarter of its land-based transport.5 The Americans allowed the emperor to stay on the throne but purged the military and introduced a pacifist constitution. Land reforms were introduced to boost small tenants, at the expense of big landowners, and greater rights were given to women.6 Proposals to break up the conglomerates (zaibatsu) were watered down, while plans to dismantle the nation’s factories were also ditched. The economy struggled for a while, with prices rising 13-fold in the three years after the war.7 But the economy was given a boost by the Korean War of 1950–53, when its factories supplied the American forces with equipment.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

FitzGerald, whose mother had been Adlai Stevenson’s longtime mistress, reported from Vietnam beginning in 1966, when she was twenty-six. (Stevenson had died of a heart attack the year before, while walking down the streets of London with FitzGerald’s mother.)45 “Young men from RAND and Simulmatics bounded about the countryside in Land Rovers studying ‘upward mobility among village elites’ or ‘the interrelationship of land reform with peasant political motivation,” she wrote in Fire in the Lake, her prizewinning book about the war. FitzGerald found that she was able to get Vietnamese peasants to talk to her because they figured she couldn’t possibly have been a secret agent, partly because she was a woman and partly because she didn’t arrive in a military jeep.


Lonely Planet Southern Italy by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Google Earth, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, post-work, Skype, starchitect, urban decay, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The Byzantines were eager to use Sicily as a launching pad to retake of the lands owned by the combined forces of Arabs, Berbers and Spanish Muslims, collectively known as the Saracens, but their dreams were not to be realised. In AD 827 the Saracen army landed at Mazara del Vallo, in Sicily. Palermo fell in AD 831, followed by Syracuse in AD 878. Under the Saracens, churches were converted to mosques and Arabic was implemented as the common language. At the same time, much-needed land reforms were made and trade, agriculture and mining were fostered. New crops were introduced, including citrus trees, date palms and sugar cane, and a system of water supply and irrigation was developed. Palermo was chosen as the capital of the new emirate and over the next 200 years it became one of the most splendid cities in the Arab world.


pages: 3,292 words: 537,795

Lonely Planet China (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Shawn Low

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, birth tourism , carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, country house hotel, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, G4S, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, young professional

With the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Tibet entered a period of de facto independence that was to last until 1950. In this year a resurgent communist China invaded Tibet, claiming it was ‘liberating’ over one million Tibetans from feudal serfdom and bringing it back into the fold of the motherland. Increasing popular unrest in response to Chinese land reform resulted in a full-blown revolt in 1959, which was crushed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Amid popular rumours of a Chinese plot to kidnap him, the Dalai Lama fled to India. He was followed by an exodus of 80,000 of Tibet’s best and brightest, who now represent the Tibetan government-in-exile from Dharamsala, India.

They undertook important guerrilla campaigns against the Japanese across northern and eastern China, but the really key changes were taking place in the bleak, dusty hill country centred on the small town of Yan’an, capital of the CCP’s largest stronghold. The ‘Yan’an way’ that developed in those years solidified many CCP policies: land reform involving redistribution of land to the peasants, lower taxes, a self-sufficient economy, ideological education and, underpinning it all, the CCP’s military force, the Red Army. By the end of the war with Japan, the communist areas had expanded massively, with some 900,000 troops in the Red Army, and party membership at a new high of 1.2 million.

He took with him China’s gold reserves and the remains of his air force and navy, and set up the Republic of China (ROC), naming his new capital Taipei (Taibei). Ding Ling’s novel The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River (1948) gives a graphic account of the violence, as well as the joy, that greeted land reform (ie redistribution) in China in the early 1950s. Mao’s China Mao’s China desired, above all, to exercise ideological control over its population. It called itself ‘New China’, with the idea that the whole citizenry, down to the remotest peasants, should find a role in the new politics and society.


pages: 1,181 words: 163,692

Lonely Planet Wales (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, Brexit referendum, car-free, carbon footprint, country house hotel, Downton Abbey, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, period drama, sensible shoes, trade route, urban renewal

Reform & the Depression By the second half of the 19th century, coal had superseded iron and the population of Wales exploded. In 1867 industrial workers and small tenant farmers were given the right to vote and elections in 1868 were a turning point for Wales. Henry Richard was elected as Liberal MP for Merthyr Tydfil, and brought ideas of land reform and native language to parliament for the first time. The Secret Ballot Act of 1872 and the Reform Act of 1884 broadened suffrage and gave a voice to the rising tide of resentment over the hardships of the valleys and the payment of tithes (taxes) to the church. In 1900 Merthyr Tydfil returned James Keir Hardie as Wales' first Labour MP.


pages: 579 words: 164,339

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

With a Cold War between world capitalism and world communism incubating, the United States was too preoccupied with a sinking situation in Korea to worry about a Central American backwater. Had Costa Rica happened five years later, post–Korean War, Figueres’s fate might have been that of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, whom the CIA removed in 1954 before his land reforms could expropriate United Fruit Company banana plantations—or that of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, ousted in 1953, also by the CIA, for nationalizing Iran’s oil industry. By then, Figueres had long since nationalized Costa Rican banks, enfranchised women and black voters, extended health services, and guaranteed higher education throughout the country.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

Tobacco, we will see, would also play a starring role in the history of corporate rights, as tobacco companies and their allies would prove to be among the most ardent proponents of constitutional protections for corporations. Back in the Jamestown era, however, commercial tobacco was in its infancy and the colonists’ choice to focus on this crop displeased the Virginia Company board, which had wanted the development of even more profitable commodities. Still, the land reform was an unquestioned success, encouraging new settlers to come and enticing new investors for subsequent rounds of financing.21 One of the instigators of the company’s reforms was Sir Edwin Sandys. The son of the archbishop of York and a leading member of King James’s opposition in Parliament, Sandys had been an investor in the Virginia Company from early on and an active member of the board of directors.


pages: 423 words: 126,375

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor, Donald Kagan, Frederick Kagan

Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, HESCO bastion, indoor plumbing, land reform, no-fly zone, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

We would often continue the discussion after the meeting over a lunch of roast lamb, boiled rice, hummus, tabbouleh, and other delicious Arabic dishes. One result of the collapse of Ottoman rule after World War I was the lessening of the strength and political relevance of tribe- and clan-based social structures throughout Iraq. British colonial authorities promoted tribal sheiks as allies, but the spread of land reform, increasing urbanization, and nationalist political movements gradually undermined their strength and influence throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. After the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein recognized the authority of tribal leaders to regulate local affairs in return for pledges of loyalty.


Lonely Planet Nicaragua (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Greg Benchwick

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, land reform, liberation theology, Multics, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, traveling salesman

The early days of Ortega’s presidency were a flurry of activity, with Nicaragua’s energy crisis seemingly solved via a deal with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and Ortega pledging to maintain good relations with the USA while at the same time courting closer ties with US archrival Iran. But as the Ortega government found its feet, there was no sign of radical land reforms or wave of nationalizations that the business sector had dreaded and some die-hard FSLN supporters had hoped for. Ortega for the most part followed the economic course set by the previous government and continued to honor Nicaragua’s international financial obligations. The first test for Nicaraguan democracy under the new Ortega government surfaced in 2008, with countrywide municipal elections.


pages: 670 words: 169,815

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, Etonian, illegal immigration, imperial preference, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, sceptred isle, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

As early as 1924, there had been labour unrest at the state silk factory in Srinagar, where 5,000 people worked, of whom an overwhelming majority were Muslim. When the Viceroy, Lord Reading, visited Srinagar in October 1924 he was presented with a memorandum signed by many prominent members of the Kashmiri Muslim community calling for an increase in the number of Muslims employed in the state service, for improvements in Muslim education and for land reform.30 The Hindu basis of the state was reflected in its laws. Gulab Singh, the founder of the Hindu state of Jammu and Kashmir, had been a devout Hindu who, as his biographer observed, reserved ‘very brutal punishments’ for those accused of ‘cow killing’, who would have their noses and ears cut off.31 Cow killing even in the 1930s and 1940s was illegal in Kashmir.


pages: 519 words: 160,846

One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution by Nancy Stout

back-to-the-land, disinformation, land reform, Mason jar, union organizing, urban planning

The Medina house is referred to as the first point of entrance, but there was a large house, farther west on the mountain’s slope, belonging to a rancher, known as the second point of entrance, or the Santa Claritan’s house. Most important meetings with outsiders took place at this large bungalow; the cease-fire negotiations with Neugart and the land reform laws were signed here after the war. Even after the war, Fidel protected details concerning the Comandancia La Plata from common knowledge, and only very special visitors or members of Column 1 would go there. BETO PESANT WAS KILLED IN ACTION on August 8. He’d been at Celia’s side during the nerve-racking days as they waited for the Granma to arrive; he’d steered her home, to Manzanillo, after she escaped from La Rosa, the bar in Campechuela.


pages: 407

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Hoxha publicly maintained that the rebellion was instigated by foreigners and would result in yet another foreign occupation of Albania. In that sense, the anti-communist propaganda spread by the CIA and SIS was flawed. It served only to alienate the masses who had fought against Nazi occupation and had since achieved substantial social progress, including land reform.120 To make matters worse, SIS and the CIA failed to understand that the tribal politics, which had served the West well in the war, hampered a sense of national identity to which they were now appealing. Worse still, a large proportion of the local population were illiterate, making propaganda leaflets futile.121 The Yugoslavs argued that SIS and CIA attempts to infiltrate émigrés to lay the groundwork for resistance had unambiguously failed.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

That brought an abrupt end to what one Republican congressman, protesting the decision, accurately described as “about the only successful anti-communist step we have taken in Asia.”90 Looking back on the twentieth century, the critical difference between nations that made the jump from poverty to prosperity and those that fell short may well have been the distribution of landownership: nations comprised of homesteaders fared better than nations comprised of plantations.91 East Asia’s most prosperous societies, Japan and South Korea and Taiwan, all ripped apart the holdings of large landowners and distributed the pieces among the masses. Those that left landholdings largely intact, like Thailand and Malaysia — and the nations of Latin America — did not achieve comparable growth. The immediate virtue of land reform was job creation. More hands can always be employed on a farm. By the mid-1960s, an acre of Taiwanese farmland produced eight times more food than an acre of U.S. farmland.92 In the longer term, the redistribution of land had two important consequences for Taiwan’s development. First, it created a broad base of consumers — and petty capitalists.


pages: 595 words: 162,258

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt

British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, digital map, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, land reform, late capitalism, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Republic of Letters, side project, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

As I blustered apologies and explanations, the two walked me along the path and the man typed in a code to open the electronic gates and restore me to the map’s yellow streak. Back on the road, I was confused. Had I been right to apologise? Or did the electric gates and angry guard-dog contravene Scotland’s Land Reform Act of 2003, which enshrines the right to universal access to the land? I am still not sure. But it strikes me now that one of the reasons I find Ordnance Survey maps so seductive is the promise they seem to offer of the unfettered freedom to wander across the British landscape. Although maps also have the important function of demarcating where one cannot go, those as detailed as the Ordnance Survey’s allow one to stray from the road and improvise routes at will, without a set itinerary.


pages: 709 words: 191,147

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Like the long-standing British practice of colonizing the poor, the Virginians sought to quell dissent, raise taxes, and lure the less fortunate west. This policy did little to alter the class structure. In the end, it worked against poor families. Without ready cash to buy the land, they became renters, trapped again as tenants instead of becoming independent landowners.15 Public education accompanied land reforms. In bill no. 79, for the “General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson laid out a proposal for different levels of preparation: primary schools for all boys and girls, and grammar schools for more capable males at the public expense. For the second tier, he called for twenty young “geniusses” to be drawn from the lower class of each county.


Lonely Planet Colombia (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Tom Masters, Kevin Raub

airport security, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Downton Abbey, El Camino Real, Francisco Pizarro, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, land reform, low cost airline, off-the-grid, race to the bottom, sustainable-tourism, urban sprawl

The Birth of the FARC & Paramilitaries While the new National Front helped ease partisan tensions between Conservatives and Liberals, new conflicts were widening between wealthy landowners and the rural mestizo and indigenous underclass, two-thirds of whom lived in poverty by the end of La Violencia. Splinter leftist groups began emerging, calling for land reform. Colombian politics hasn't been the same since. Much of what happened has been documented by international human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch. New communist enclaves in the Sumapáz area, south of Bogotá, worried the Colombian government so much that its military bombed the area in May 1964.


The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, language acquisition, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Sinatra Doctrine, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Transnistria

The next few days will show where things are heading, but the Russian leadership is obviously inclined toward the extreme choice—full independence for the republic.”29 While Gorbachev was left in the dark about what to expect from Yeltsin’s impending speech, Yeltsin called Bush on October 25 to inform him about the coming major turn in Russian policy, “following the tradition between us in talking about very important matters.” He said, “I will announce substantial economic plans and programs and say that we are ready to go quickly to free up prices, all at the same time, privatization, financial and land reform. All this will be done during the next four to five months, maybe six months. It will be a one-time effort. It will increase inflation and lower living standards. But I have a popular mandate and am ready to do this. We’ll have results by next year.” Yeltsin offered to send his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, to Washington to explain the Russian reform plan, and Bush expressed interest in meeting him.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

The occupation radically remade Japan, turning it into “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of people from totalitarian military rule,” in MacArthur’s telling. The emperor was demoted from an infallible deity to an affable public figure who attended baseball games. A massive land reform campaign dispossessed many absentee landlords. Hundreds of millions of new textbooks were printed to train Japanese students in democratic ways. Public health authorities vaccinated the whole Japanese population—all eighty million—twice for smallpox (the largest vaccination campaign in history to that point) and dusted some fifty million with DDT.


pages: 559 words: 178,279

The Cold War: Stories From the Big Freeze by Bridget Kendall

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, white flight

Elsewhere in North Korea, before the war broke out, Sohn Dong Hun wanted to go to university, but he says the regime forbade it as his family was too middle-class. My family was not rich, but we did live comfortably on a medium-sized farm in Bukcheong, and we had a separate farm growing fruit. After liberation in 1945, Kim Il Sung entered the North, the land reforms were initiated, and our family land was all taken from us. I graduated in 1949, and upon my graduation I earned my licence as a state veterinarian. I was placed at the national veterinary research centre in Pyongyang. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, I was working at the research facility.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

But the most important ones were related to the lack of sufficient social power and agenda setting to propagate ideas of full economic and social equality. It did not help that Black Americans were not given a full chance for economic empowerment. As a leading antislavery politician of the era, Congressman George Washington Julian, observed in March 1864, when proposing land reform for the South, “Of what avail would be an act of Congress totally abolishing slavery, or an amendment of the Constitution forever prohibiting it, if the old agricultural basis of aristocratic power shall remain? Real liberty must ever be an outlaw where one man only in three hundred or five hundred is an owner of the soil.”


Lonely Planet Kenya by Lonely Planet

affirmative action, Airbnb, Beryl Markham, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, DIY culture, Kibera, land reform, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, out of africa, place-making, spice trade, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Odinga won the province by promising, in effect, a form of limited federation, which remains a hope of many Mombasan politicians who consider the coast culturally, economically and religiously distinct enough to warrant some form of self-governance. Mombasa's outlawed separatist movement, known as the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC), listed grievances from land reform issues to economic marginalisation among reasons when it called for voters to boycott Kenya's 2013 presidential election. Nairobi imprisoned several of its key members over the years, and was jarred by its slogan, 'Pwani si Kenya' ('The coast is not Kenya'). Still, it continues to operate. Mombasa's tensions were exacerbated in October 2013, when radical Muslim cleric Sheikh Ibrahim Rogo was killed by gunmen in the city.


Bali & Lombok Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, first-past-the-post, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Skype, spice trade, sustainable-tourism

In Bali, the events had an added local significance as the main national political organisations, the Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI, Nationalist Party) and the PKI, crystallised existing differences between traditionalists, who wanted to maintain the old caste system, and radicals, who saw the caste system as repressive and were urging land reform. After the failed coup, religious traditionalists in Bali led the witch-hunt for the 'godless communists'. Eventually, the military stepped in to control the anticommunist purge, but no one in Bali was untouched by the killings, estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000 out of a population of about two million, a percentage many times higher than on Java.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The earliest exemplar of that change was Chile, but it was not primarily the advice that Milton Freidman’s “Chicago Boys” proffered to Pinochet that determined Chile’s subsequent neoliberal path. Rather, the Pinochet government used the political space provided after its murderous counterrevolutionary coup to take advantage of Allende’s land reforms and nationalizations to ensure that the traditional networks of landlords and capitalists did not reconstitute themselves in the ways that had previously impeded the development of Chilean capitalism. Trade liberalization and privatizations were combined with state support to transcend the economy’s dependence on mining and heavy industry and expand export-oriented production in non-traditional agriculture, fisheries, and related manufacturing.


Nepal Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land reform, load shedding, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, traffic fines

The initial Maoist forces were armed with little more than ancient muskets and khukuri s (Ghurkha knives) but they quickly obtained guns looted from police stations, homemade explosives and automatic weapons, all bankrolled by robbery and extortion and aided by an open border with India. Initial police heavy-handedness fuelled a cycle of violence and retribution that only succeeded in alienating the local people. Political disenfranchisement, rural poverty, resentment against the caste system, issues of land reform and a lack of faith in the squabbling and self-interested politicians of distant Kathmandu swelled the ranks of the Maoists, who at their peak numbered 15,000 fighters, with a further militia of 50,000. Attacks spread to almost every one of Nepal’s 75 districts, including Kathmandu. At their peak Maoists effectively controlled around 40% of the country, including two protected areas in the far west and several of Nepal’s main trekking routes (for years trekkers in the Annapurna region were forced to hand over ‘donations’ to Maoist gangs).


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

You drug pushers, hold-­up men, and do-­nothings, you better go out, because I’d kill you. I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay and fatten the fishes there.’18 Since then, Amnesty International reports that thousands have been murdered by police, killed without trial, in his controversial anti-­drug campaign. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez promised wealth redistribution, land reform, and using state oil revenues to subsidize living standards, but the country experienced drastic economic decline.19 Under his successor, President Nicolás Maduro, faced with a falling petro-­dollar and a humanitarian crisis, the country slid into outright authoritarian rule in 2017, when the Supreme Court suspended the powers of the National Assembly, triggering widespread protests, mass detentions, and a rising death toll.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Gesell (1862–1930) was a theoretical economist as well as a social activist, whose major work, The Natural Economic Order (originally published in 1906, 2007 cited here) contained long and detailed sections on “free” money, or as he put it, “money as it should be.” Gesell published several other writings on the subject, including Currency Reform as a Bridge to the Social State (1891) (Gesell 1951) and The Nationalization of Money (Gesell 1892), as well as founding a monthly periodical, Geld-und Bodenreform (Monetary and Land Reform) in 1900. He defined free money as “an instrument of exchange and nothing else,” whose sole test of usefulness was the “degree of security, rapidity and cheapness with which goods are exchanged.” Good money, as Gesell understood it, should secure, accelerate, and cheapen the exchange of goods. By contrast, the introduction of the gold standard to Germany had been a “disaster” because it had “overimproved” money, considering it only from the point of view of its holder.


pages: 416 words: 204,183

The Rough Guide to Florence & the Best of Tuscany by Tim Jepson, Jonathan Buckley, Rough Guides

air freight, Bonfire of the Vanities, car-free, classic study, housing crisis, land reform, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

For all their learning, Ficino and the rest produced nothing to equal the originality of medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus. 357 Postwar Tuscany CONTEXTS | History 358 Tuscany is a prosperous and conservative region that in the past has tended to elect right-of-centre members of parliament. On a local level, however, left-wing support is high, partly as a consequence of the Italian communist party’s record in the war and subsequent work on land reform. The communists were effectively excluded from national government by the machinations of the now-defunct Christian Democrat party (which, like the old Socialist party, was undone by the corruption scandals of the early 1990s), but the newer left-leaning parties that have emerged over the past couple of decades have projected themselves as the grassroots opposition to the centralization and corruption of Roman politics.


pages: 913 words: 219,078

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

Money was losing acceptability as a voucher for tomorrow’s goods; inflation was destroying its value. “It is now obvious,” Clayton wrote, “that we grossly underestimated the destruction to the European economy by the war. We understood the physical destruction,” but failed to understand how “economic dislocation[,] nationalization of industries, drastic land reform, severance of long-standing commercial ties, [and] disappearance of private commercial firms through death or loss of capital” would destroy the productive apparatus. Capitalism, Clayton was sure, was the source of Europe’s former economic strength, and reviving it was essential to preventing “social and political disintegration.”53 Large-scale aid, Clayton said, was necessary “to save Europe from starvation and chaos.”


The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East by Andrew Scott Cooper

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Boycotts of Israel, energy security, falling living standards, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

“Book Review—Majestic Failure: The Fall of the Shah by Marvin Zonis.” Political Science Quarterly 107, no. 1 (Spring 1992). Ravenal, Earl C. “The Nixon Doctrine and Our Asian Commitments.” Foreign Affairs 49, 2 (January 1971). Richards, Helmut. “America’s Shah, Shahanshah’s Iran.” MERIP Reports, No. 40 (September 1975). ———. “Land Reform and Agribusiness in Iran.” MERIP Reports, No. 43 (December 1975). Ricks, Thomas. “U.S. Military Missions to Iran, 1943–78: The Political Economy of Military Assistance.” Iranian Studies 12, no. 3/4 (Summer-Autumn, 1979). Rostow, Dankwart A. “Who Won the Yom Kippur and Oil Wars?” Foreign Policy 17 (Winter 1974–75).


pages: 897 words: 210,566

Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo Dallaire, Brent Beardsley

airport security, colonial rule, disinformation, failed state, global village, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, land reform, risk/return, Ronald Reagan

t we sat down, he dived right in, addressing the situation of longOctober coup. He told me that many of these refugees had fled to the se havens of schools and church missions to elude armed mobs e' no 0 mobs. He said that the Rwandan refugees inside Uganda were facing filar, although less extreme, pressures from their impatient Ugandan W Recent land reforms had given squatters title to the land that the refill had occupied for close to thirty years, and the refugees were being f 1 The Shadow Force 155 leaders within the RPF were truing to stem the flow but it was hard to do. After all, the RPF had fought refugees could return to their of the plight of the refugees, he lost some of his cusdug deep into his own experience to emphasize or At times he would get up and walk around restbed growing up in a refugee camp in Uganda, always tolerated but never really accepted as an of anger as he relived his struggle to mainand dignity against the crushing defeatism In his case, he devoted himself to selftold me how he had fought to help rid Uganda of Obote by joining the NRA, training in Tanzania, Uganda under the current president, Yoweri ;though Kagame was a highly regarded officer, he told bla he to was rise to wand his an. full potential in the NRA because he NRA had accepted Tutsi refugees such as Kagame in had fought for Museveni because they believed that d Obote and installed Museveni, he would treat them ~SCnse of the large Tutsi refugee population that had put i had had to form alliances with other tribes and p y g g reminded of a tale the RPF liaison officer, told Brent to describe the Tutsi ex in equals.


pages: 807 words: 225,326

Werner Herzog - a Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations With Paul Cronin by Paul Cronin

Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, classic study, Dr. Strangelove, Francisco Pizarro, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, out of africa, Pier Paolo Pasolini

“We aren’t going to pull out the equipment for at least two days,” I said, and asked them to walk around, touching the walls and feeling the smooth surfaces, which is how I had experienced the fortress myself when I first encountered it as a teenager. Peru was governed by a military dictatorship at the time we made Aguirre, but a left-wing one that had nationalised various industries and instituted a vast land-reform programme. President Juan Velasco Alvarado was of Native Indian descent and controlled a regime very different to those of people like Stroessner in Paraguay and Pinochet in Chile. We weren’t offered much assistance by the Peruvian government, though the army supplied us with an amphibian aircraft and established a radio station, which meant we could be in contact with the nearest big city, providing the electricity didn’t fail.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

However, while I suspect that this ecological variation played some role, remember that many other social, economic, and ecological conditions besides those associated with paddy rice or irrigation favor intensive kinship. Often, the primary driver of intensive kinship derives from warfare between communities, as we saw in Ilahita. 22.  Baker, 1979. Also following the Church’s MFP, China initiated land reforms that sought to break down and redistribute the corporate holdings of patrilineal clans (Greif and Tabellini, 2015). The 1980 law set the minimum age for women to marry at 20 years (“The marriage law of the people’s Republic of China [1980],” 1984). Of course, there are important differences between the medieval Church and China in the 20th century.


pages: 723 words: 211,892

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

On August 8, 1955, having been in Mexico a little over a month, Fidel Castro put pen to paper and wrote “Manifesto No. 1 to the People of Cuba.” A long, wordy document, it summarized the goals of the revolution in fifteen points that included the classic progressive goals of past Cuban revolutions. The first was land reform, outlawing latifundio (very large landholdings) and distributing land among peasants. Others included confiscation of the assets of embezzlers from past Cuban administrations, nationalization of public services (such as electricity and telephone utilities), expansion of public education, and the restoration of workers’ rights undone by Batista.


pages: 669 words: 226,737

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

Marxist historians and those who belonged to the anti-Marxist school of John R. Commons were equally baffled by the Knights of Labor, with its old-fashioned enthusiasm for "cooperation" and its notorious lack of enthusiasm for strikes. They were equally unable to account for the nineteenth-century labor movement's interest in currency reform, land reform, religion, and temperance, except as evidence of workers' unfortunate susceptibility to middle-class ideologies. Everywhere they looked, they found signs of a backward-looking mentality, confusingly mixed with revolutionary militancy. The Commons school wondered why the development of trade unionism had been so tardy; Marxists, why trade unionism, once achieved, had not given way in turn to a proper class consciousness in the form of socialism.


The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common by Alan Greenspan

addicted to oil, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, equity premium, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, information security, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, oil shock, open economy, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, pets.com, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Many, perhaps most, such leaders have come out of the military. They do not effectively argue for the conceptual superiority of populism over free markets. They do not embrace Marx's intellectual formalism. Their economic message is simple rhetoric spiced with words like "exploitation," "justice," and "land reform," not "GDP" or "productivity." To peasants tilling the soil of others, redistribution of land is a cherished goal. Populist leaders never address the potential downside, which can be devastating. Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe since 1987, promised and delivered to his followers the confiscated land of white settlers.


pages: 736 words: 233,366

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Mozambique also soon descended into civil war, while revolutionary forces turned Guinea-Bissau into a one-party state that took violent revenge against former supporters of the colonial regime. Across Africa hundreds of thousands of Portuguese colonial settlers fled, leaving behind all that they had owned, returning home to add to the burdens of Portugal’s struggling economy. Land reforms, already set in place, started to reverse the expropriations that had taken place after the revolution and bring an end to the inefficient collective farms. But in 1977–8, amid continuing unrest, high unemployment and heavy state indebtedness, with average per-capita income little over half of the average in the European Community countries, Portugal was forced to seek financial aid from the International Monetary Fund.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

Both qualities came from his command of the subject and depth of his conviction.”103 Clayton’s May 27 memo presented a strong case. He opened by drawing an important distinction between “the physical destruction” of Europe, which Americans had understood, and “the effects of economic dislocation on production—nationalization of industries, drastic land reform, severance of long-standing commercial ties, disappearance of private commercial firms through death or loss of capital.” As a result, “we grossly underestimated the destruction to the European economy by war….” “The political position,” he continued, “reflects the economic.” Countries lurched from crisis to crisis as people starved, and farmers fed grain to cattle instead of selling it.


The Rough Guide to Wales by Rough Guides

back-to-the-land, country house hotel, land reform, mass immigration, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, trade route

CT INDUSTRIAL WORKERS AND SMALL TENANT FARMERS GOT THE VOTE lNALLY GIVING A STRONG WORKING CLASS ELEMENT TO THE ELECTORATE AND SEEING (ENRY 2ICHARD ELECTED AS ,IBERAL -0 FOR -ERTHYR 4YDlL THE FOLLOWING YEAR THE lRST 7ELSH MEMBER OF WHAT SOON BECAME THE DOMINANT POLITICAL FORCE "RINGING THE IDEAS OF .ONCON FORMITY TO 0ARLIAMENT FOR THE lRST TIME HE SPOKE ELOQUENTLY ON LAND REFORM DISESTABLISHMENT AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE 7ELSH LANGUAGE 4HE 3ECRET "ALLOT !CT AND 2EFORM !CT ENFRANCHISING FARM LABOUR ERS FURTHER FREED UP THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM AND GAVE WORKING PEOPLE THE CHANCE TO AIR THEIR RESENTMENT OF TITHES EXTRACTED BY A #HURCH THAT DIDNT REPRESENT THEIR RELIGIOUS VIEWS !


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

During those years, the foresight of existing landowners is likely to lead them to neglect to maintain the property as well as they did when they expected to reap the long-term benefits of investing time and money in weeding, draining, fencing and otherwise caring for the land. By the time the land actually reaches the poor, it may be much poorer land. As one development economist put it, land reform can be “a bad joke played on those who can least afford to laugh.”{525} The political popularity of threatening to confiscate the property of rich foreigners—whether land, factories, railroads or whatever—has led many Third World leaders to make such threats, even when they were too fearful of the economic consequences to actually carry out these threats.


Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan; Richard Holbrooke; Casey Hampton

Albert Einstein, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, facts on the ground, financial independence, Ida Tarbell, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois

(“Do you want to create four Alsace-Lorraines?”) Before the Supreme Council could decide what to do, the revolution in Hungary broke out, adding the stigma of Bolshevism to the beleaguered country.12 Károlyi’s government had been under attack from the right, which bitterly resented attempts at land reform, and the left, which felt it was not going far enough. The peacemakers did little to help. Where Austria received 288,000 tons of food and clothing for relief in the first six months of 1919, Hungary got only 635 tons. “Our difficulties,” Károlyi recalled bitterly in exile, “were multiplied a thousand times by the ill-will and inefficiency of the different foreign missions in Budapest.”


The Rough Guide to Sri Lanka by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, British Empire, citizen journalism, clean water, country house hotel, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, land reform, self-driving car, spice trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

The interminable yo-yoing between parties and policies thus continued, with Mrs Bandaranaike reversing the policies of the UNP and resuming her old aims of restricting private enterprise and increasing nationalization of key industries, while introducing policies aimed at reducing social inequality via an ambitious programme of land reform. Her government also ditched a further memento of the island’s colonial past by changing its name from Ceylon to Sri Lanka. Though these measures appeased the island’s underprivileged, they did nothing to address basic economic problems such as the mounting trade deficit. The country’s youth, impatient for radical change, expressed their discontent through the extreme left-wing and anti-Tamil JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front).


pages: 972 words: 259,764

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

An important difference was that North Vietnam was adjacent to the People’s Republic of China, which provided copious weapons and training to the Vietminh and later the Vietcong, whereas the Philippine insurrectos, fighting on islands whose approaches were dominated by the U.S. Navy, had no real outside support. The insurrectos also lacked leaders of the caliber of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap; Aguinaldo made no attempt to win over the bulk of the population by pushing for social and land reforms, as the Vietcong would later do, because such revolutionary steps would have alienated his upper-class supporters. By the time the conflict had mostly ended, in 1902, the United States had lost 4,234 dead and 2,818 wounded. Some 200,000 Filipino civilians died as a result of disease and mistreatment from both sides.


pages: 965 words: 267,053

A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, business cycle, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the market place, éminence grise

The revisionist programme demanded a ‘systematic colonisation régime to be charged with the positive task of creating the conditions necessary for a Jewish mass colonisation’.* No other Zionist party would have disagreed with the demand that the entire complex of Jewish immigration should be entrusted to the sole competence of the Zionist Organisation. Another demand called for a thorough land reform to be carried out, with the object of establishing a land reserve for colonisation, to include all lands not under permanent cultivation both west and east of the Jordan, subject to satisfactory compensation being paid to the present owners. The revisionists proposed the floating of a big international loan to finance mass immigration and settlement.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

A new narrative had emerged in the USSR following the defeat of Germany – one where Stalin’s role in the genesis of the war as Hitler’s ally was quietly forgotten, and replaced with a story of triumph and of destiny being fulfilled.30 The Revolution of 1917 had failed to deliver the global transformation anticipated by Marx and his disciples; thirty years later, however, it seemed that the time had come for Communism to sweep across the world and dominate Asia just as Islam had done in the seventh century. It had already begun to diffuse through China, where the promises of equality, of justice and above all of land reform brought support for the Communist party and enabled it to drive government forces back and eventually off the mainland altogether. Similar patterns were starting to be seen elsewhere, as left-wing parties began to attract increasing support in Europe and in the United States. Many were persuaded by an ideal that promised a harmony in sharp contrast to the horrors of a war that had culminated in two atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – including some who had worked on the nuclear programme – and were disillusioned by the fact that two titanic struggles between European nations in little more than three decades had wrought devastating results across the world.


pages: 893 words: 282,706

The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time by Hunter S. Thompson

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, buy low sell high, complexity theory, computer age, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Francisco Pizarro, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, job automation, land reform, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl

The Ecuadorian press, pointing out the Communists certainly didn't tell the Indians the U.N. officials were "Communist agents," called the incident "a tragic consequence of the rivalry between the extreme left and the extreme right to win Indian support." This incident and many others like it were blamed on conservative elements opposed to land reform or any other change in the status quo. The example of Bolivia has shown that once the Indian begins voting, he has little common cause with large landowning or industrial interests. Thus the best hope for the status quo is to keep the Indian ignorant, sick, poverty-stricken, and politically impotent.


pages: 964 words: 296,182

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, fixed income, invention of the sewing machine, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, means of production, New Journalism, New Urbanism, night-watchman state, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, unemployed young men, wage slave

The trade unionists were happy to collaborate with those who supported reform, with ‘advanced liberals’ like Miall. The trade unionists approved of arbitration, where possible, supporting strikes only where they were necessary. So far as there was a more visceral form of class hostility, it was directed against the landed aristocracy. 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 union leaders with whom Karl had to deal in the International – George Odger, George Howell, William Cremer, Robert Applegarth, Thomas Mottershead, John Hales and others – all belonged to a particular generation.


pages: 1,117 words: 305,620

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamond, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

All quotations of Madobe are from the author’s interview. 222 “The Ambassador told Sharif”: US diplomatic cable 07NAIROBI5403, from Ambassador Michael Ranneberger, US Embassy Nairobi, “Sheikh Sharif and the Future Role of the Islamic Courts Moderates,” January 2, 2007, released by WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/01/07NAIROBI5403.html. 222 “preferable to co-opt”: US diplomatic cable 07ADDISABABA311, from Ambassador Donald Yamamoto, US Embassy Addis Ababa, “PM Meles Highlights Land Reform as Key to Clan Reconciliation and Political Stability in Somalia,” February 1, 2007, released by WikiLeaks, http://wikileaks.org/cable/2007/02/07ADDISABABA311.html. 222 escaped from Somalia to Kenya: Jeffrey Gettleman, “Somali Islamists’ No. Two Leader Surrenders in Kenyan Capital,” New York Times, January 23, 2007. 222 “working with the CIA”: Author interview, Ali Mohamed Gedi, June 2011. 222 In Yemen: “Somali Islamist Travels to Yemen,” BBC.co.uk, February 8, 2007. 222 “at least 150”: Human Rights Watch, “Why Am I Still Here?


pages: 1,072 words: 297,437

Africa: A Biography of the Continent by John Reader

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, clean water, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, illegal immigration, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, surplus humans, the market place, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The royal authority of Haile Selassie and his feudal-style state was swept away by the army-led coup of September 1974 and replaced by a communist-inspired regime which soon proved to be no less repressive than its predecessor. With the simplistic confidence of a new broom, the new rulers denigrated and outlawed many aspects of the old social order – including religion. Some aspects of reform were welcomed – even merited (especially land reform) – but the denigration of religion was a step too far. As the ugly nature of the new regime was revealed, church attendances soared, respect for the authority of the priests rose, and religion provided a network of shared belief through which dissent and opposition could spread and consolidate.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Diem again and again blocked the elections requested by the Vietminh, and with American money and arms his government became more and more firmly established. As the Pentagon Papers put it: “South Viet Nam was essentially the creation of the United States.” The Diem regime became increasingly unpopular. Diem was a Catholic, and most Vietnamese were Buddhists; Diem was close to the landlords, and this was a country of peasants. His pretenses at land reform left things basically as they were. He replaced locally selected provincial chiefs with his own men, appointed in Saigon; by 1962, 88 percent of these provincial chiefs were military men. Diem imprisoned more and more Vietnamese who criticized the regime for corruption, for lack of reform. Opposition grew quickly in the countryside, where Diem’s apparatus could not reach well, and around 1958 guerrilla activities began against the regime.


Hawaii by Jeff Campbell

airport security, big-box store, California gold rush, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, company town, creative destruction, Drosophila, Easter island, G4S, haute couture, land reform, lateral thinking, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence

However, none of this sat well with US patriots who, but a generation before, had fought a revolution to prove that representative government and private property were the sine qua non of civilization. So, in 1840, Kauikeaouli promulgated Hawaii’s first constitution, which established a constitutional monarchy with limited citizen representation. Given an inch, foreigners pressed for a mile, and in 1848, Kauikeaouli followed this with a revolutionary land reform act that was known as the Great Mahele (the great division). * * * For a century, the trip to Moloka’i’s Kalaupapa Peninsula wasn’t an adventure but a death sentence. In The Colony (2006), John Tayman tells this incredible story with dignity, compassion and unflinching honesty. * * * This act took Hawaii and divided it three ways: into crown lands (owned by the kings and their heirs), chief lands (ali’i holdings within traditional ahupua’a), and government lands (to be held for the general public).


Hawaii Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, bike sharing, British Empire, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Easter island, Food sovereignty, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, Kula ring, land reform, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, Silicon Valley, tech billionaire

Born and raised in Hawaiʻi after Western contact, King Kamehameha III (Kauikeaouli) struggled to retain traditional Hawaiian society while developing a political system better suited to foreign, frequently American tastes. In 1840 Kauikeaouli promulgated Hawaiʻi's first constitution, which established a constitutional monarchy with limited citizen representation. Given an inch, foreigners pressed for a mile, so Kauikeaouli followed up with a series of revolutionary land reform acts beginning with the Great Mahele (Great Division) of 1848. It was hoped the Great Mahele would create a nation of small freeholder farmers, but instead it was a disaster – for Hawaiians, at least. Confusion reigned over boundaries and surveys. Unused to the concept of private land and sometimes unable to pay the necessary tax, many Hawaiians simply failed to follow through on the paperwork to claim titles to the land they had lived on for generations.


pages: 1,327 words: 360,897

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Many peasants were alienated by the volunteer workers, who on occasion appeared somewhat proud, if not arrogant, in their moral superiority. The movement also became identified to a degree with the National Congress since the government had actually endorsed Gramdan programme as a way of promoting its own more modest land reforms. As the movement began to founder in the early 1970s, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), an ex-socialist Party leader who had joined Sarvodaya in 1954, began to exert a dominant influence. On joining, he had argued that the way forward was ‘to create and develop socialist living through the voluntary endeavour of the people rather than seek to establish socialism by use of the power of the State’.34 He now began calling however for the ‘politicalization’ of the movement and the use of Gandhi’s more aggressive form of non-violent struggle which involved active resistance to the State.


pages: 1,194 words: 371,889

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

active measures, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, God and Mammon, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

As Hamilton noted in his diary: ‘He has the whole weight of Ireland on his shoulders, and in the Cabinet he stands between the two fires of the right and the left wing.’14 At the Cabinet meeting next day the Grand Old Man pulled a new trick out of his conjuror’s bag. To reassure the Whigs, he agreed to suspend Habeas Corpus. This would give the government power to arrest the known troublemakers without the need to bring evidence against them in court. To reassure the Radicals, Gladstone threw all his energy into brewing up a new kind of land reform (a ‘double x’ brew, he called it)15 to be embodied in a new Land Bill. A further comfort for the Radicals was the formal decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. This was a reversal of Disraeli’s forward policy of previous years, but the great Whig landowners approved. They had no more love for expensive imperialist adventures than the rest of the party.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

In tiny San Joaquin, however, the cowboys, their families, and the local Indians were entirely dependent on the “benevolence” of the Brazilian ranch owners and on the food and supplies that returning steamships brought to their remote town. In 1952 a revolution had brought the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario to power. The land reform party stripped old Bolivian and Brazilian oligarchies of vast tracts of land, and the people of San Joaquin suddenly found themselves property owners. Unwilling to buy back from the local people the cattle they once owned, the Brazilians and their steamships left, never to return; and the villagers found themselves isolated, impoverished, and facing severe malnutrition unless they could grow crops to supplement the all too abundant supply of beef.


Lonely Planet Ireland by Lonely Planet

bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, G4S, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, land reform, reserve currency, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, young professional

The Irish in America by Michael Coffey takes up the history of the Famine where many histories leave off: the turbulent experiences of Irish immigrants in the USA. The Uncrowned King of Ireland Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91) was the other great 19th-century statesman. Like O'Connell, he too was a powerful orator, but the primary focus of his artful attentions was land reform, particularly the reduction of rents and the improvement of working conditions (conveniently referred to as the 'Three Fs': fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure). Parnell championed the activities of the Land League, which instigated the strategy of 'boycotting' (named after one particularly unpleasant agent called Charles Boycott) tenants, agents and landlords who didn't adhere to the Land League's aims: these people were treated like lepers by the local population.


pages: 1,230 words: 357,848

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

banking crisis, book value, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business logic, California gold rush, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, financial independence, flying shuttle, full employment, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of the steam engine, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, Monroe Doctrine, price stability, railway mania, Republic of Letters, strikebreaker, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, work culture , Works Progress Administration

“Father said this morning,” Andy wrote Uncle Lauder in the spring of 1852, “to be sure and tell you that the greatest Reform of the age has just taken place here.” He was referring to the Homestead Act, which passed the House of Representatives that year, but would not become the law of the land for another ten years. “He does not take very much interest in politics here [compared to British politics],” Andy confessed to his uncle, “but that Land Reform has really excited him, he is in great glee about it.” A year later, in another letter to Uncle Lauder, Andrew wrote that “Father is in good health and has about $70 of cloth which he intends to sell as soon as the good weather sets in. His letter is not yet commenced but he promises fair yet to write soon—in the meantime he sends you all his very best respects.


pages: 1,445 words: 469,426

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Cardenas was, in fact, the most radical of any of the Mexican Presidents. "His leftist inclinations make him the bugbear of capitalism," the British minister said of him in 1938, "but all things considered it is to be regretted that there are not more men of his calibre in Mexican life." Cardenas aggressively pushed land reform, education, and an expensive program of public works. Labor unions became far more powerful during his presidency. He publicly identified himself with the masses and incessantly toured the country, often arriving unannounced to listen to the complaints of the peasants. To Cardenas, a fervent nationalist as well as a political radical, the foreign oil industry in Mexico was a painful and sore presence.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Raffles took the trouble, unusually, to learn basic Malay; he also took a serious interest in the history and culture of the lands where he had been sent, and realized that new opportunities now existed for the British in the Far East, which would take the East India Company some way beyond its current obsession with relations with Indian princes, and might even bring the Company control of the spice trade through the East Indies, if the Dutch and their French allies could be dislodged. When Britain succeeded in gaining control of Dutch Java, Raffles found himself appointed lieutenant-governor, in 1811, but his attempts to introduce land reform failed to work, partly through lack of support. An important clue to his thinking is Raffles’s insistence that ‘Government should consider the inhabitants without reference to bare mercantile profits and to connect the sources of revenue with the general prosperity of the Colony.’5 This was a man who deeply deplored slavery, and who insisted that ‘all kinds of servitude should be abolished’.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

These divisions became increasingly fraught in the new regime, as President Amin and his commissar-behind-the-throne Taraki got to work breaking eggs: seizing land, granting civil rights to women, sending cadres of teachers into the countryside to modernize by brute force—often teaching at the literal point of a gun. The government removed green, the color of Islam, from the new national flag. Reckless land reform destabilized tightly knit rural social structures whose intricacies went back centuries—not entirely unlike what the Khmer Rouge had done in Cambodia. Their putative partners in the Kremlin looked on in dismay. They had learned of the “April Revolution” through a wire report, and had not been pleased: their relationship with the pre-Communist government had been smooth, and they had no interest in instability on their southern border.


Spain by Lonely Planet Publications, Damien Simonis

Atahualpa, business process, call centre, centre right, Colonization of Mars, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, intermodal, Islamic Golden Age, land reform, large denomination, low cost airline, megaproject, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, young professional

* * * Santa Teresa of Ávila was brought to the silver screen by the rising star of Spanish cinema, Paz Vega, in the 2006 release Teresa, Vida y Muerte (Teresa, Life and Death), directed by Ray Loriga. * * * Under Felipe’s successor, Fernando VI (Ferdinand VI; r 1746–59), the economy took an upturn thanks to a revitalised Catalonia and the Basque shipbuilding industry. But agricultural Castilla and Andalucía were left behind due to a lack of land reforms. The enlightened despot Carlos III (Charles III; r 1759–88) expelled the backward-looking Jesuits, transformed the capital Madrid, established a new road system out to the provinces and tried to improve agriculture, but food shortages still fuelled unrest among the masses. The Peninsular War Carlos IV (Charles IV; r 1788–1808) was dominated by his Italian wife, Maria Luisa of Parma, who saw to it that her favourite, the handsome royal guard Manuel Godoy, became chief minister.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

As in Poland, the DDR’s constitution arranged for the ruling communist party (SED) to work in conjunction with a number of satellite parties operating within the communists’ Front of National Unity. The first elections gave the Front a vote of 99 per cent. The Soviet occupation forces reserved important powers for themselves. The collectivization of agriculture was delayed until 1953, since the SED had only just implemented a massive land reform in favour of peasant ownership. The principal problem lay in the constant haemorrhage of escapees: for a dozen years, anyone could reach West Berlin by taking the U-bahn train from Friedrichstrasse to the Tiergarten. Over those dozen years, 1949–61, thousands of people availed themselves of the opportunity.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

It was always precarious, as rights were granted on a year-by-year basis, so at any moment a crofter could lose not only the farm but also the house they’d built on it. The economic depression of the late 19th century meant many couldn’t pay their rent. This time, however, they resisted expulsion, instead forming the Highland Land Reform Association and their own political party. Their resistance led to several of their demands being acceded to by the government, including security of tenure, fair rents and eventually the supply of land for new crofts. Crofters now have the right to purchase their farmland and recent laws have abolished the feudal system, which created so much misery


The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

When the alderman ventured to write him again on the subject, Moses declined to continue the correspondence. In 1930, Moses, as head of the Metropolitan Park Conference, had led the fight to persuade the city to preserve parts of its fast-disappearing woodland in Queens and Staten Island by purchasing huge tracts for park land. Reformers had cheered him for that accomplishment; it had preserved open space—beautiful, wooded open space—for the city forever. But now Moses was filling that space with baseball diamonds and football fields and tennis courts—and the land for them could be cleared only by cutting down trees. And Moses was filling other parks with playgrounds and stadia and parking fields and handball courts.