The Great Leveler, page 46
In other cases, concerns about potential violence, internal or external, precipitated land reform. Anti-communism was a particularly potent motivating factor. At the end of World War II, land inequality in South Korea was high: fewer than 3 percent of rural households owned two-thirds of all land, whereas 58 percent had none. Subsequent land reform was driven by the fear that North Korean communists, who had expropriated land in their own part of Korea as early as 1946, might mobilize the local peasantry in the south. American support and a commitment to land reform by all parties that contested the first election in 1948 resulted in expropriation and redistribution on a grand scale. First, all Japanese colonial holdings were seized. In the early 1950s, private property was capped at three hectares of good cropland, excess land was transferred to peasants by seizure or sale for minimal compensation (one and half times annual rent), and rents were fixed at low levels for those who continued to work others’ land. A little more than half of all land changed hands. The redistributive effect was huge: landlords lost 80 percent of their income whereas the bottom 80 percent of rural households gained 20 percent to 30 percent. By 1956, the richest 6 percent of landowners held merely 18 percent of all land, and the share of tenants had fallen from 49 percent to 7 percent. The Gini coefficient of landownership, which had been as high as 0.72 or 0.73 in 1945, fell to the 0.30s by the 1960s. The leveling effect of land reform was amplified by the consequences of the Korean War: as most industrial and commercial properties were destroyed and hyperinflation rendered compensation worthless, the landed elite disappeared completely and a highly egalitarian society emerged that was later sustained by broad access to education. In this case, concerns about war or revolution were overtaken by actual mass mobilization war, with equalizing consequences akin to those encountered in chapter 5.8
Anxiety about revolution and actual war likewise converged in South Vietnam, which instituted land reform in 1970 at the urging of the United States: all tenanted land was to be turned over to the cultivators, who were to receive a certain amount for free; owners were compensated. The reform was implemented within three years, and the tenancy rate subsequently dropped dramatically—from 60 percent to 15 percent in the Mekong Delta, for example. In Taiwan, by contrast, general concern about war rather than war itself served as the principal agent of leveling. Evicted from the mainland by the victorious communists, in 1949 the Kuomintang government embarked on land reform as a means of shoring up local support. Its American supporters likewise urged redistribution to counter communism. Motivation was strong and institutional obstacles weak: the leadership had no obligations to local landlords, and many blamed defeat on the failure of land reform on the mainland. As in South Korea, caps were placed on individual properties, and rents were reduced. After the sale of public land to tenants, in 1953 landlords were compelled to sell excess land in return for compensation well below market prices. As a result, farm incomes rose, the share of tenants declined from 38 percent in 1950 to 15 percent ten years later, and the Gini coefficient of landownership dropped from about 0.6 to between 0.39 and 0.46 during the same interval. The Gini for overall income fell dramatically from 0.57 in 1953 to 0.33 in 1964.9
Land reform in Romania in 1921 may have been an early example of this containment strategy: it benefited poorer peasants and smallholders who received expropriated land and is sometimes thought to have been motivated by the fear that revolution might spread from the neighboring Soviet Union. Fear of communist agitation also spurred reform in Latin American countries. The “Alliance for Peace,” established by the United States in 1960 in response to Castro’s takeover of Cuba, promoted land reform and provided advice and financial support to this end. Chile was a candidate: after timid earlier steps, concerns about electoral defeat in 1964 led a right-wing and centrist coalition to embrace broader land reform with foreign support. By 1970 many large estates had been expropriated, but disbursements were moderate. Allende’s leftist government made more progress until it was brought down by a coup in 1973. Although this halted the process, by then a third of land had come to be held by smallholders, compared to a tenth only a decade earlier.10
Against a background of high inequality and rural violence in Peru throughout the 1960s, the leaders of a military coup in 1968, opposed to the country’s traditional oligarchy and trained in U.S. counterinsurgency principles, opted for land reform as a means of staving off all-out civil war. Within a few years, most large estates had been expropriated, a third of all farmland was transferred, and a fifth of the farm workforce had benefited. Breaking the power of the large landowners benefited mainly the military and middling peasants rather than the poor. Similarly motivated measures were taken in Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. In El Salvador, a junta launched land reform in 1980, one year after the outbreak of guerilla warfare, with American encouragement and financial support.11
A decade earlier, fear of revolution had also helped induce land reform in Egypt. Land had been rather (though not extremely) unevenly distributed, with the top 1 percent of landowners controlling a fifth and the richest 7 percent owning two-thirds. Tenancy rates were high and the position of tenants was poor, akin to that of laborers. In the decade leading up to Nasser’s military coup of 1952, the country had been riven by instability, witnessing a rapid succession of seventeen governments, martial law, strikes, and riots. Members of the ruling class had been targeted for assassination. The new regime launched land reform the year it took power. Just as in East Asia at the same time, the United States provided advocacy and support in order to contain communist influence. The minister of agriculture, Sayed Marei, invoked those fears in justifying reform:
We remember the days preceding the revolution of July 1952; we remember how the Egyptian village became restless as a result of dangerous agitation; we remember the events that led to bloodshed and destruction of property . . . . Would the large landowners have preferred to be left exposed to the wind blowing through this unrest, exploiting want and poverty, until it became a tempest uprooting everything . . . ?
Caps were placed on private landownership, but owners received compensation, and land recipients were required to repay the state over decades in a scheme not unlike that devised in Czarist Russia after 1861. Because these payments were much lower than previous rents had been, this arrangement worked to the peasants’ advantage. The distribution of wealth was less affected than that of income, with about a tenth of land changing hands. In Iraq, coups and Baathist rule had a greater effect, and collectivization greatly reduced inequality of landownership in the 1960s and 1970s. 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. A survey of twenty-seven reforms during the second half of the twentieth century shows that in a large majority of cases (twenty-one, or 78 percent), land inequality either remained largely unchanged or even grew over time. Cronyism might undermine peaceful land reform. In Venezuela in the 1960s, a democratically elected government redistributed a tenth of the country’s farmland—half from expropriations and half from state land—to a quarter of the landless poor. At the time, the country was transitioning from a largely agricultural economy to an urban economy based on oil exports. This allowed the government to pay generous compensation from oil revenue—indeed, so generous that landlords promoted strikes and demands for land by their workers so that they themselves could qualify for expropriation and receive compensation in excess of market levels. Reform along these lines would have done little to mitigate material inequality.13
Sometimes compensation was introduced through the back door. In the course of its expansion across the Italian peninsula, the ancient Roman Republic had confiscated large amounts of arable land from defeated enemies and converted it into public land that was either assigned to settlers or let out for rent. The latter benefited those who could afford to cultivate and invest in large tracts of land and caused public holdings to become concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. After an earlier effort to impose legal limits on access to this type of land, matters came to a head in 133 BCE when a populist reformer from within the oligarchic ruling class, Tiberius Gracchus, pushed through a redistribution program that limited each possessor to a little more than 300 acres of public land. Excess holdings were to be seized without compensation for prior investments and allocated to poor citizens. Assigned fields became inalienable to prevent the rich and powerful from buying out or otherwise displacing the newly created smallholders. Elite opposition to this reform proceeded in stages. Efforts to enhance this program by providing settlers with startup funds cost Gracchus his life at the hands of enraged oligarchs. The redistribution scheme survived its instigator by not more than four years, and in the 110s BCE, rents were abolished and all holders of public land—including those in possession of the maximum allowed amount—began to enjoy it as private property that could be sold. Thus although this program may have created a respectable number of new smallholders (equivalent to a few percent of the citizen population), its longer-term effect on the distribution of landed wealth was likely modest at best.14
In the modern Philippines, the lack of a credible threat of war or revolution allowed landlord elites to drag their feet: even as land reform remained a perennial campaign slogan, for decades, little changed. Even when a more serious attempt was made after 1988, results were modest, just as they had been in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia. In Iran in the 1970s, although most sharecroppers obtained some land through compulsory sales of excess landlord holdings, the process actually increased inequality among smallholders owing to seller favoritism coupled with compensation requirements and the lack of state support, all of which advantaged better-off peasants. The Hawaiian “Great Mahele” of 1848 is a particularly extreme example of peaceful land reform that created unfair outcomes. At that point land, which had been farmed collectively, was shared out among the king, the chiefs, and the general population. Because formal claims were necessary to establish private ownership—something many commoner households failed to make—and because the Alien Landownership Act soon permitted outsiders to acquire land, over time, most of the land not claimed by the crown fell under non-Hawaiian commercial ownership.15
Nonviolent land reform fully succeeded only in the rarest of circumstances. The distribution of common land in late eighteenth-century Spain is at best a partial example. Triggered by riots that forced King Charles III to flee Madrid in 1766—and thus not without violent impetus—it produced substantially varying results that were determined by local circumstances. Frequently only those who were able to afford farm equipment stood to gain. In some regions, the reform failed owing to a lack of funds among rural workers and to manipulative interventions by the elite. It was successful only when the upper class was either not particularly invested in landownership—as in Malaga, which was dominated by commercial elites—or when the relative scarcity of rural workers paired with abundant land limited the bargaining power of landlords, as in Guadalajara.16
In nineteenth-century Serbia, equalizing land reform was made possible by growing independence from imperial rule. The Ottomans had imposed a feudal regime that allocated land to well-connected Muslim beneficiaries. In addition, powerful Turks illicitly established quasi-private property claims by encroaching on Serbian peasants. The local rural population was compelled to pay high rents and render labor services. After uprisings from 1804 onward ushered in a transitional period of dual rule—Serbian autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty—that lasted from 1815 to 1830, illegal property claims were rescinded and feudal landlords and land rents came under pressure. Settlements in the early 1830s ordered most Turks to leave Serbia within a few years after selling their land to locals. Feudalism was abolished, and Serbs acquired private rights in land. Some of the land ceded by departing Turks was distributed to smallholders. Remaining large landowners were required to sell the cultivators’ houses and a certain amount of farmland to the peasants who worked their estates. As a result, large landholdings almost completely disappeared and landownership became extremely widespread: by 1900, 91.6 percent of Serbian households owned houses and other real estate. In this case, inequality was reduced at the expense of a “foreign” elite that was forced out of its traditional position of privilege. Land reforms that targeted former colonial or other captured elite holdings similarly occurred in a whole series of other countries.17
Genuinely peaceful reform often appears to have required some form of foreign control that checked the power of local elites. It worked in Puerto Rico in the late 1940s—and even there it was an outgrowth of equalizing reforms in the United States that had been driven by the Great Depression and World War II and coincided with top-down land reform in Japan under American occupation. Colonial rule was also instrumental in Irish land reform. In the late 1870s, the so-called “Land War,” agitation for fair rents and tenant protection from eviction, involved organized resistance in the form of strikes and boycotts but only very little actual violence. The British Parliament addressed these grievances in a series of acts that regulated rents and provided for loans at fixed interest for tenants who wanted to purchase land from willing landlords. In 1903, the Wyndham Act finally bought peace as the government agreed to cover, out of state revenue, a 12 percent premium between compensation offered by tenants and the asking prices of landlords, thereby subsidizing the privatization of smallholdings. This allowed smallholders to take control of more than half of all Irish farmland by the time of independence in the early 1920s.18
The search for land reforms that were both peaceful and effective has not been particularly successful. The most redistributive interventions were made possible by—often violent—revolution and civil war, as in Revolutionary France, Mexico, Russia, China, Vietnam, Bolivia, Cuba, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia, as well as by other forms of violent agitation, as in Zimbabwe. In other cases, equalizing land reform was the result of war that led to foreign occupation (in Japan, Central Europe, and, to some extent, in North and South Korea after World War II), the threat of war (in early medieval Japan, Prussia, and Taiwan), other war-related disturbances (in Guatemala), concerns of about revolution (in Chile, Peru, Egypt, and Sri Lanka), or a combination of such concerns and actual war (in South Korea and South Vietnam). According to the most recent survey, no fewer than 87 percent of all major land reforms undertaken outside Latin America between 1900 and 2010 took place in the wake of a world war, decolonization, communist takeover, or the threat of communist agitation.19
Peaceful reform might benefit the rich, as in Hawai’i and Venezuela, or be implemented at arm’s length, as in Ireland and Puerto Rico. Evidence for autonomous land reform that unfolded peacefully and resulted in significant leveling is in short supply. This finding is not surprising: in societies at a level of development that made land reform a desideratum, elite resistance was always likely to block or water down redistributive policies unless violent shocks or the threat of violence encouraged more substantive concessions. This helps explain the apparent lack of nonviolent land reforms characterized by high “floors” (the size of new smallholdings) and low “ceilings” (the caps placed on landlord properties).20
This picture does not change if we look farther back into the more distant past. Nominally ambitious land redistribution schemes are repeatedly attested as a feature of state-building, as in the Warring States and Sui and Tang dynasties of China, and in the context of rulers’ struggle to roll back elite wealth, as in Han China: I have already referred to them in earlier chapters. In ancient Greece, land reform and cognate measures, most notably debt relief, were commonly associated with violent coups. Reports extend across several centuries, from the archaic to the Hellenistic periods. When in the seventh century BCE Kypselos, the first tyrant of Corinth, killed or expelled the members of a rival clan, he may have seized its land for redistribution. Around the same time or a little later, Theagenes in the neighboring polis of Megara slaughtered the herds of the rich, which had been put to pasture on the fields of the poor. During a subsequent spell of radical democracy, the wealthy were exiled and their assets seized; the poor were said to have entered the homes of the affluent to extort free meals or engage in violence. Lenders were ordered to repay interest on debt, although there is no sign of outright debt cancellation. In 280 BCE, one Apollodorus seized power in the city of Kassandreia with the help of slaves and manufacturing workers. He is said to have confiscated “the property of the rich and redivided it among the poor and raised the pay of soldiers,” a state of affairs that lasted only four years. In a similar context, Klearchos became tyrant of Heraclea Pontica in 364 BCE touting a program of land redistribution and debt cancellation.21
