Property Rights and Wrongs

MICHAEL ALBERTUS’ THESIS is both simple and grand: “Land is power.” From the earliest settlements of Mesopotamia to the land reforms of Communist China, Albertus insists that control of land has played a central role in intensifying economic disenfranchisement, ecological destruction, and racial and gender inequality. Too often, a minority has centralized land to plunder for resources, no matter the cost.

In Land Power, Albertus, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, calls the past two centuries of large social redistributions of land the “Great Reshuffle.” These transformations, which continue today, have taken various forms.