Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The Long Land War tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Reviewing movements for giving reparations in land to formerly colonized people, marches to control the cost of rent for urban tenants, indigenous land movements, the machinations of development analysts, and the squatters who took matters into their own hands, the book traces the origins of modern proposals for state-engineered "land reform" from Ireland in 1881 through their assassination by the United States in 1974. The book peers into the success and failure of postcolonial programs to protect small farmers in dialogue with the United Nations, World Bank, private institutions, and grassroots movements alike. Touching on the promise and pitfalls of modern ideologies - including international bureaucracies, market ideology, nonviolent protest, and participatory democracy -- Jo Guldi provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution and offers an unflinching critique of its failures, working out the promise of politics for how we own property, govern, and adjudicate justice on a changing planet.
Synopsis
A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world The Long Land War tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Reviewing movements for giving reparations in land to formerly colonized people, marches to control the cost of rent for urban tenants, indigenous land movements, the machinations of development analysts, and the squatters who took matters into their own hands, the book traces the origins of modern proposals for state-engineered "land reform" from Ireland in 1881 through their assassination by the United States in 1974.
The book peers into the success and failure of postcolonial programs to protect small farmers in dialogue with the United Nations, World Bank, private institutions, and grassroots movements alike. Touching on the promise and pitfalls of modern ideologies--including international bureaucracies, market ideology, nonviolent protest, and participatory democracy--Jo Guldi provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution and offers an unflinching critique of its failures, working out the promise of politics for how we own property, govern, and adjudicate justice on a changing planet.
Synopsis
A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world "An epic work of breathtaking scope and moral power, The Long Land War offers the definitive account of the rise and fall of land rights around the world over the last 150 years." --Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered "land reform" policies beginning in Ireland in 1881 until U.S.-led interests and the World Bank effectively killed them off in 1974.
The Long Land War provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, information technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, she works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet.