Michael Albertus, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (2025)

This is not exactly a bad book. I learned some interesting facts about parts of the world that I don't know well. For example, I learned that many dictatorships in Latin America made efforts to redistribute land from the wealthy to the poor. I learned that the Aboriginal movement in Australia has been much more successful than the Native American movement in the US. Down under, Aborigines now lay claim to more than half the land, albeit in remote and desert-y places. Also, I hadn't realized how widely the US promoted land reform after World War II. In this connection, Albertus makes some helpful distinctions between different kinds of land reform: collective (the Soviet Union, for example), communal (many Latin American countries), and tiller (as in land to the tiller, those who are already working it). Nonetheless, this is an extremely disappointing book, certainly one of the worst we've read in our Zoom book club. I came to the book with very high expectations. The title and subtitle suggested a bold, big history and big theory work. Albertus's position as a 40-year old full professor of political science at the University of Chicago suggested a scholar of great promise. Finally, the blurbs came from a who's who of eminent thinkers - Piketty, Acemoglu, Ziblatt, and Fukuyama. Measured against these great expectations, the book was a complete dud. Let's start with two of Albertus's key concepts - land power and the Great Reshuffle. Albertus fails to carefully explicate what land power is, exactly. Rather, he simply invokes the term, over and over. Once in a while he acknowledges that things like property rights and a functioning legal system matter to land power. But it would seem that property rights matter above all when it comes to economic development; they matter less, or perhaps not at all, when it comes to traditional, collectively used land. Albertus wants to honor traditional land uses, but never bothers to provide a theoretical framework that encompasses both them and the goal of economic development. Besides this major lacuna, Albertus vastly exaggerates the significance of land, again without much justification. He repeatedly suggests that land power (whatever it may be) is decisive, "determining the fate of societies." But does it really? Aren't there today whole societies that are doing pretty well without advantageous land holdings? One thinks of Japan or the Netherlands. And what about the biggest land power of all, Russia? Albertus suggests that control of land is key to uplifting the fortunes of downtrodden groups. But many immigrant groups to the US and elsewhere (Jews, East Asians, Nigerians, etc.) have done quite well for themselves not by dint of land holding. In short, while I don't want to suggest that land does not matter, it behoves Albertus to compare its importance to that of other things, like education and culture. The Great Reshuffle is another damp squib that Albertus trots out repeatedly. The ostensible Great Reshuffle commences with European land grabs all over the world, though Albertus equivocates whether this starts in 1492 or only in the 19th century. (He designates this "settler reforms.") But then it also includes the attempts, whether in collective, communal, or tiller form (in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, etc.), to spread land more equally. What's the rationale for lumping settler colonialism - conquest - together with these reform efforts? Albertus's big history, such as it is, is unrecognizable to me. In order to legitimate the idea of a single, early modern or modern Great Reshuffle, he must ignore the continuous history of land reshuffles plural since farmers began to displace hunter-gatherers, if not since homo sapiens displaced neanderthals, denisovans, Indonesian hobbits, etc. In general, there's very little argumentation here. For example, he distinguishes between land reforms that have failed and those that have succeeded, at least partially. But he never explores what explains the difference. Instead we have, along with his repeated recourse to mantra-like terms, only basic (and often redundantly told) narratives of his case studies.