Inherit the Earth

Chapter 1: 1. What Land Used to Mean

In 1925, a South African farmer named Jacob de Villiers stood on his property in the Karoo and owned something that his family had worked for three generations. The land was not particularly valuable by the standards of commodity markets or real estate speculation. It was semi-arid, unsuitable for most crops, adequate for sheep and goats if you worked it carefully and knew its seasonal rhythms. De Villiers knew those rhythms. His grandfather had learned them from Khoi herders who had occupied the same landscape centuries before. The land was mapped in his body—the location of every reliable spring, the grazing patterns that prevented overuse, the soil composition that determined which crops could survive drought years.

When de Villiers looked at his land, he did not see a financial asset awaiting appreciation. He saw a place where his children would work and where his grandchildren might do the same. He saw continuity. He saw the possibility of modest sufficiency—not wealth, but the absence of destitution. He saw identity. The land was not separate from who he was; it was a fundamental part of his answer to the question: who am I? To lose the land would have been to lose something closer to a body part than to a possession.

This way of relating to land—as livelihood, as home, as the ground of identity and community—was not unique to de Villiers or to South Africa. It was, for nearly all of human history, the universal human relationship to land. A peasant in medieval France, a rice farmer in the Mekong Delta, a herder on the Mongolian steppe, an Indigenous nation in what is now called North America: whatever separated them in language, custom, or technology, they shared a fundamental orientation. Land was where you lived. Land was what you worked. Land was where your ancestors were buried and where your descendants would be born. It was not an abstraction. It was not a financial instrument. It was not something you acquired to profit from its scarcity while remaining indifferent to its use.

The transformation from that orientation to the modern one—where land is treated as a pure financial asset, where ownership is decoupled from use, where the goal is not to live well on the land but to profit from controlling it—is not an eternal feature of human nature or economic logic. It is a specific historical development, and it is far more recent than we usually acknowledge. The mental leap required to see land primarily as a speculative commodity, as a store of value in a portfolio, as something that becomes more valuable precisely when it is kept idle and scarce: this is a habit of mind that emerged only in the last 150 to 200 years, and only among certain populations in certain places.

Understanding what happened—how the decoupling occurred, what enabled it, what it displaced—is essential to understanding the present crisis of land accumulation. We cannot grasp why billionaires are now buying millions of acres across Africa and South America, or how this has become normalized, without first understanding how radical the shift in thinking has been. We must see that the current moment is not the natural endpoint of an inevitable trajectory, but the result of specific choices, specific legal innovations, and specific ruptures in how humans understood their relationship to the earth.

The Land as Subsistence

For the majority of human history, land ownership was functionally inseparable from land use. A person or a community owned land because they needed to eat, to shelter themselves, to survive. Ownership meant the right to work the land, to reap what you sowed, to exclude others from taking what you had cultivated. But it also meant obligation. You were expected to work it. To leave good land fallow or unused while others starved would have been, in most pre-industrial societies, not a rational exercise of property rights but a moral obscenity, possibly punishable by force.

Consider the logic of medieval European land tenure. Yes, there were lords and peasants, and yes, that system was deeply unequal. But the inequality was structured around an understood reciprocity: the lord controlled the land, but the peasant had the right to work it, to feed their family from it, to pass on some form of tenure to their children. The lord owed the peasant protection. The peasant owed the lord labor and fealty. The relationship was personal, local, and bound by custom and obligation. To acquire land and then deliberately leave it unused—to hold it for speculation—would have made no sense in this framework. There was no mechanism for speculation because there was no belief that land separated from use had value.

Similarly, in Islamic law as it developed across the medieval and early modern world, there was a principle called ihya al-mawat—the revival of dead land. It held that uncultivated land could be claimed by those who would cultivate it, that land had a kind of social obligation built into it. The point was to bring it into productive use, not to fence it off. Even where land was held as private property, the concept of stewardship was embedded in law and custom. Land was yours to use, but its use was your justification for holding it.

Traditional Indigenous systems—across the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia—operated on different principles than European feudalism or Islamic tenure, but shared the fundamental assumption: land was where your people lived and worked. Ownership, in the Western legal sense, often did not apply; instead, there were systems of use rights, seasonal harvesting rights, territories within which a community had authority. But the principle was consistent: the land was valued because it sustained life. The relationship was one of belonging and responsibility, not of possession and extraction.

This was not romantic or inefficient. Across vastly different ecosystems and cultures, humans developed extraordinarily sophisticated ways of managing land sustainably. The fields of the Inca empire were maintained through centuries of careful water management and crop rotation. The savannas of Africa were managed through complex pastoral systems that prevented overgrazing. The forests of Southeast Asia were cultivated in ways that maintained biodiversity while producing food and materials. The systems were not uniform, but they shared a logic: the goal was to sustain the land's ability to sustain the people living on it. Over generations, over centuries, this logic worked. People stayed in place. Communities deepened their knowledge of the specific land they occupied. Ecosystems remained functional.

The absence of what we now call "property rights" in the modern Western sense was not a weakness of these systems. It was a feature. It prevented the kind of speculation, abandonment, and exploitation that becomes possible when land can be owned by those with no intention of using it.

The First Rupture: Land as Tradeable Commodity

The transition began in Europe, specifically in England, during a period known as the Enclosure Movement—roughly the 16th through 18th centuries, with the most dramatic changes in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Enclosure Movement was justified as an improvement, a rationalization, a way to make agriculture more efficient. What it actually did was sever the connection between land and the people who had worked it for generations.

Prior to enclosure, much of the productive land in England was held in common. Peasants had customary rights to graze animals, to harvest timber, to plant on specific plots. This system was not egalitarian—nobles owned the land, and peasants were bound to it—but it was stable. People knew where they stood. They had a livelihood. The system had maintained itself for centuries.

The enclosure movement began with the idea that if land could be fully privatized, fully enclosed, owned exclusively by individual proprietors without common rights attached, it could be made more productive. Agricultural innovation would be encouraged. Population growth could be fed. The ideology was progress, efficiency, the application of reason to replace medieval custom.

What actually happened was catastrophic for the peasantry. Peasants were expelled from the land their families had worked for generations. Common lands were seized by nobility and gentry. The rights that peasants had held for centuries—to graze animals, to gather wood, to plant—were abolished. A legal system that had previously recognized obligations embedded in land tenure was replaced with one that recognized only the rights of the legal owner, with no obligations attached.

The result was mass displacement. Millions of people lost access to the means of subsistence. Some were driven into the cities, where they became the first industrial working class. Some were displaced to colonial territories. Some starved. But the point, from the perspective of the landowners, was achieved: land became fully commodified. It could be bought and sold freely. Its value could fluctuate. Those with capital could accumulate it. And—crucially—it could be held idle without penalty. A landowner could now keep land unused, waiting for its value to appreciate, without violating any obligation or custom.

The enclosure movement was not simply a change in agricultural practice. It was a revolution in how humans were permitted to relate to land. It created, for the first time in English history, the possibility of land speculation in the modern sense: acquiring land not to use it, but to profit from its increasing scarcity.

What is remarkable is how quickly this way of thinking about land spread, and how thoroughly it replaced earlier understandings. By the 19th century, the idea that land should be enclosed, privately owned, freely tradeable, and separable from use was becoming the norm across Europe and in European colonies. It came to be seen not as a specific historical choice but as the natural or inevitable form of property relations. The fact that millions of people had lost their livelihoods in the process was treated as a regrettable but necessary cost of progress.

The economist Karl Polanyi, writing in the mid-20th century, called this transformation the creation of a "market in land"—treating land as a commodity no different from grain or cloth. But Polanyi understood that land was different. Land could not be created or destroyed by economic activity. It was not produced for the market; it simply existed. To treat it as a commodity, subject to the same logic as produced goods, required a profound ideological shift. It required severing the understanding of land from use, from livelihood, from community, from identity.

"The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism," Polanyi wrote. In other words: the "free market" in land was not a natural state that emerged when the government stayed out of it. It required active state intervention to dispossess peasants, to abolish common rights, to create legal systems that recognized only the rights of titled owners, and to use violence to enforce those new property relations against people who understood land very differently.

The Colonization of Thinking

As European colonialism expanded, this newly commodified way of thinking about land was exported globally. It was a crucial tool of colonization. In Africa, Asia, and the Americas, European colonizers encountered land systems that operated on entirely different principles. In many places, there was no concept of absolute individual ownership of land. Land was held in common, or use rights were allocated by community leaders, or land belonged to the ancestors and was held in trust for future generations. These systems were, in their own logic, fully coherent and functional.

But colonial administrators could not understand these systems as legitimate. From their perspective, if land was not formally titled, if it was not registered in a government office, if it was not subject to individual ownership, then it was effectively unclaimed. It was terra nullius—empty land. This was not an observation; it was an ideology that justified seizure.

European colonizers used the language of property rights and formalization to claim vast territories that had been inhabited and managed for centuries. They imposed title systems. They declared that only formally registered land had legal status. They created legal frameworks that made it possible to buy and sell land in ways that had never existed before. They did this in the name of progress and rationalization, but the effect was to dispossess millions of people and to bring those territories into the logic of global commodity markets.

In India, the British colonial government implemented a system called the Permanent Settlement, which converted complex webs of customary land rights into a property system of formally titled estates. Traditional holders of use rights—peasants, artisans, pastoral communities—found their customary rights erased. Meanwhile, a new class of landlords emerged who owned titles but had no traditional obligation to the land or the people on it. These landlords could now treat their estates as speculative investments, renting them out at the highest possible rate to maximize profit, with no obligation to ensure the well-being of the people who actually worked the land.

The results were famines, displacement, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of those who held titles. In Bengal in 1770, just a few years after the implementation of the new system, a famine killed an estimated 10 million people. The famine occurred not because there was no food, but because the new property system had concentrated control of land and resources in the hands of people incentivized to extract maximum value rather than ensure subsistence.

What the British did in India, other colonial powers replicated across their territories. The effect was consistent: the imposition of formal, individual, tradeable property rights in land; the displacement of existing systems of use and tenure; the creation of distance between land and the people who worked it; the opening of territories to investment and speculation; and the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a small class with no traditional obligation to the land or the communities on it.

This was not incidental to colonialism. The creation of a commodified land system was central to how colonialism worked. It allowed colonizers to claim territory that had been inhabited and managed for millennia. It allowed them to turn land into a source of profit. And crucially, it established the intellectual and legal groundwork that would later allow land to be accumulated and held speculatively by distant entities with no connection to it whatsoever.

The Second Rupture: Land Becomes Pure Finance

By the late 19th century, land had been transformed, at least in the minds of the wealthy, into something that could be freely traded. But there was still a general understanding—even among those who supported private property—that land ownership ought to be tied to some form of use or occupancy. A gentleman might own an estate; a farmer might own a farm. There was still an assumption of stewardship. Even those who supported the commodification of land usually assumed that the goal of ownership was to use the land productively, or at least to derive income from those who did.

The final step in the transformation came with the rise of financial markets and the abstraction of land into financial instruments. This process accelerated dramatically in the 20th century and has become thoroughly normalized in the 21st.

Consider the development of agricultural commodity futures markets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These markets allowed people to buy and sell futures contracts on crops—to speculate on the price of wheat or corn without ever owning a single acre of land or having any intention of producing anything. The land itself was abstracted away entirely. What mattered was the price signal. Speculation on futures could drive up the price of agricultural commodities without any corresponding increase in production, purely through financial maneuvering. In famines in the early 2000s in Africa and Asia, this dynamic played a crucial role: food prices spiked not because of scarcity of production, but because speculators were betting on scarcity, thereby creating it.

But futures markets were only the beginning. By the late 20th century, an entire apparatus had emerged that allowed land to be transformed into financial assets that bore no resemblance to physical land at all. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) allowed investors to own shares in portfolios of land and real estate without owning any land directly. Mortgage-backed securities allowed land and housing to be bundled, sliced, and sold as financial instruments to investors across the world. Pension funds and insurance companies, looking for stable, long-term returns, began investing in agricultural land and timberland as alternative assets.

The mental move here is subtle but crucial. When a pension fund buys agricultural land, it is not buying it because the fund wants to farm or to ensure food security or to steward an ecosystem. It is buying it because it expects the land to appreciate in value—either through rising rents if it is leased to farmers, or through increasing scarcity and price appreciation, or through changes in land use (converting agricultural land to residential or commercial development). The land itself is now merely a vehicle for generating returns. The land's actual use, its productivity, its ecological health, the well-being of the people who work it—none of these are the primary consideration. They matter only insofar as they affect the financial return.

This represents a qualitative shift from earlier forms of land ownership. A medieval lord owned land, but he lived on it and derived income from the peasants who worked it; there was at least a local relationship, a embedded interest in the land's function. A 19th-century industrial capitalist might buy land for speculation, but in the context of relatively limited capital available for investment and relatively limited information about distant lands, this was still bounded. A 21st-century asset manager overseeing a pension fund portfolio of 200,000 acres across four continents, which they will never visit, has no relationship to the land whatsoever beyond the financial return. The land has become purely abstract.

This is the moment we have reached: a point where land, the most concrete and specific of all resources, has been transformed into a liquid financial asset. A hectare of forest in Brazil can be owned by a Norwegian pension fund, which can sell it to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which can hedge its position with a U.S. agricultural investment firm, all without the physical land changing hands or the actual use of the land changing. The land exists as nothing but a financial abstraction.

How Ideology Became Common Sense

What is striking about this transformation is how completely it has been naturalized. Most people in wealthy countries now assume that land is property, that property can be privately owned, that private ownership means the right to do almost anything with it, and that this is simply the natural and inevitable form of human economic life. The idea that land might be held in common, that land might have obligations attached to ownership, that land should not be held idle while people starve—these ideas seem utopian or economically naive.

But this assumption is a historical construct. It is less than 200 years old in most of the world and less than 400 years old even in England, where it originated. Yet it has been made to seem inevitable, natural, grounded in human nature itself.

This naturalization has occurred through a combination of mechanisms. Legal systems have been rewritten to embody the principle of absolute private property. Textbooks on economics teach the commodification of land as an assumption, not a choice. The language we use—"real estate," "land values," "property rights"—already assumes the framework. When someone proposes that land might be regulated, that landowners might have obligations, that communities might have rights in land they inhabit: this is perceived as radical, as contrary to nature or human nature.

Meanwhile, the older ways of relating to land—as commons, as embedded in community, as inseparable from livelihood and identity—have been pushed to the margins. They persist, but often illegally. An Indigenous community in the Amazon exercising customary rights to their ancestral land can be treated as squatters if they do not have formal title recognized by the state. A farmer engaged in traditional ecological practices can be fined for violating regulations designed to maximize efficiency. A community maintaining commons can be dispersed as an obstacle to development.

The transformation has not been conscious or deliberate in any coordinated sense. No one sat down and planned it. But it has been consistent, and it has been enforced by those with power. Colonizers imposed new property systems. States protected private property with police and military. Banks and financial institutions created the instruments that allowed land to become purely abstract capital. Economists and legal scholars produced the theory that made it all seem rational and inevitable.

The result is a world in which a handful of people and institutions can own vast territories without any intention of using them, without any obligation to the land or the people on it, purely for financial gain. And this is now seen not as an aberration but as a normal exercise of property rights.

The Moment of Rupture

To understand how we arrived here, it helps to identify a crucial moment: the point at which it became possible—not just technically, but ideologically—to imagine that the primary purpose of land ownership was to profit from scarcity rather than to live on or to work the land.

This moment arrived at different times in different places. In England, it was the Enclosure Movement and the displacement of the peasantry. In colonized territories, it was the imposition of European-style property systems. But globally, it can be dated to somewhere in the 18th and 19th centuries: the period in which industrial capitalism emerged, in which vast amounts of territory were being colonized and claimed, and in which financial markets were developing the tools to make land liquid.

Before this moment, land could be owned, could be valuable, could be fought over. But its value was understood as inseparable from use. A wealthy person might own a great estate, but the assumption was that they also lived on it, that they received income from it, that it was integral to their life and identity. To acquire land with the primary intention of leaving it idle, of holding it out of production purely to profit from its scarcity, would have seemed not just economically strange but morally wrong. It would have violated the sense of what land was for.

The 19th century shattered that assumption. It became possible—and eventually normal—to own land without working it, without living on it, without deriving income from its productive use. Land could be bought and held, waiting for appreciation, with no obligation to put it to any use. If food was scarce and people starved, the fact that productive land was being held idle for speculation was no longer seen as the landowner's moral problem. That was the market's problem. The landowner was exercising their property rights.

This was a mental revolution. It required the creation of a new kind of person: someone who could own vast territory without feeling any connection to it, without assuming any obligation to it, seeing it purely as a number in a financial ledger. It required the belief that this was not merely possible but rational, perhaps even virtuous—a wise investment, an efficient allocation of capital.

The transition was not smooth or without resistance. Peasants resisted enclosure; Indigenous peoples resisted colonization and the imposition of new property systems; communities resisted the reduction of land to commodity. But the resistance was ultimately overpowered by the combination of state violence, legal change, and the sheer transformative force of industrial capitalism. Gradually, the old way of understanding land—as the ground of livelihood and identity—was pushed to the margins and relegated to the past.

What Was Lost

To understand what we have lost in this transformation, consider what was embedded in the older systems. When land was understood primarily as the place where you lived and worked, ownership meant stability. You knew where you would plant next year. Your children would know where they would live. Your community would have continuity. Ecological knowledge accumulated. Landscapes were tended because those who benefited from them were the same people who lived within them.

There was also, in many systems, a kind of justice built into land tenure. The idea that you had a right to the land you worked, that the fruits of your labor belonged to you, that you could not be arbitrarily dispossessed: these were principles that constrained exploitation. Yes, exploitation happened. Peasants paid rents, paid taxes, were subject to the will of lords. But there were limits built in. The lord did not own the peasant's soul or the peasant's labor power in absolute terms. And crucially, the lord had obligations. The system assumed reciprocity.

When land became purely a financial asset, something radically different emerged. The tie between ownership and obligation was severed. An owner had the right to the land but bore no responsibility for the land or the people on it. If it was more profitable to leave the land idle than to put it to use, that was the owner's prerogative. If it was profitable to extract everything and leave nothing, that was within the owner's rights. The land became purely extractive.

At the same time, the possibility of stability and rootedness was destroyed for billions of people. As land became valuable as a speculative asset, people without capital were pushed off the land. Peasants became workers. Pastoral communities became squatters on land their ancestors had managed for millennia. Indigenous peoples were dispossessed entirely. For those without land, the ground beneath them was no longer a source of livelihood and identity but a commodity controlled by distant owners for the generation of profit.

The ecological consequences have been profound. When land is managed by people who will live with the consequences of degradation, who plan for generations ahead, who see themselves as stewards of something inherited and to be passed on: ecological knowledge develops and is maintained. When land is managed by entities focused on quarterly returns, with no long-term stake in its health: degradation accelerates. Ancient forests are cleared. Aquifers are depleted. Monocultures replace diverse ecosystems. The incentive is to extract value as quickly as possible, and when that value is exhausted, to move on.

The food security consequences have also been profound. As land has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of those who see it purely as a financial asset, control over food production has concentrated as well. Subsistence farming has been replaced by export-oriented commodity production. Local food systems have been dismantled. Billions of people now depend on global commodity markets they cannot control for their basic survival.

The transformation from land-as-livelihood to land-as-financial-asset is one of the most consequential shifts in human history. It has reshaped the relationship between humans and the earth. It has concentrated enormous power in the hands of those with capital. It has created a world in which billions of people own nothing while a small elite owns the ground they stand on. And it has created a system in which the destruction of the ecological basis of human life is not merely permitted but financially rational.

Understanding this history is not merely academic. It is essential to understanding that the current crisis of land accumulation is not inevitable. It is the product of specific choices, specific ruptures, specific ways of thinking about land that emerged at a particular historical moment. These choices were not made by nature. They were made by humans, and they can be remade by humans. But only if we first understand what was lost and how it was lost.