"How Land Shaped Political Order In The West"

From Palladium Magazine:

The word “husbandry” conjures images of a pastoral past, images of farmers and their families picking the year’s bountiful harvest. It hearkens back to a simpler time, to a pre-modern and eternal age. For all its compelling and lasting presence in our subconscious, however, husbandry has been mostly expelled from the modern world, and that expulsion has left a gap in our understanding of politics.

The Nile Delta, and the the fertile crescent at large, has been continuously farmed for 11,000 years. It is hard to find a better example of a sustainable, immemorial economic activity. While cruise ships often ply the waters of the Nile, they have to thread alongside the feluccas, a single masted vessel used by the inhabitants of the villages along the river. Life in those villages has not been significantly altered by the passage of time; the rhythm of life is dictated by the floodings of the Nile. Eleven millennia of sameness, a thought which upon reflection is incapable of being grasped by the modern mind.

As my flight was landing at the Macau International airport, I could spy sections of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge through the window, which stretches 34 kilometers and links the two banks of the Pearl River Delta. Another laurel of the PRC’s Promethean infrastructure development efforts, the bridge is a symbol of the unimaginable change this ancient region has experienced. Inhabited since the 5th millennium BC, the Pearl River Delta has been permanently altered in the past 30 years. An acquaintance of mine in the real estate industry once told me about his first trip to Shenzhen in the early days of the SEZ: “It was a tiny, backwater fishing village. It was hard to even catch a taxi. I thought it was insane for anyone to try and set up a factory there.”

In 1980, Shenzhen had 30,000 souls. Today, it is home to 12 million people. The fishermen and villagers of the region have become Armani clad businessmen and professionals blabbering in singsong Cantonese into their iPhones. All this within our lifetime.

Thirty years was enough to completely uproot 7,000 years of continuity.

The Pearl River is one of the most polluted rivers in China; its water quality is worse than the lowest national water quality standard and is entirely undrinkable. Industrial and household discharge have turned it into a light brown podge more like mud than water. Its dirtiness has become an inescapable fixture. Sitting down at a café at the quaint Portuguese waterfront village of Coloane in the south west of Macau, the distinct stench coming from the water has made a permanent mark on my memory. A visit to the Pearl River Delta region drives home the point argued by some geologists that we have entered the Anthropocene, a geological epoch marked by the alterations made by man upon what was once thought as the unalterable elements of nature. It is no wonder that the apparatchiks manning the ship of the Chinese state count degradation of the natural habitats and geological features as a primary threat to the political stability of the PRC.

The effects of the establishment of the SEZ in the 1980s by the previous generation of Chinese statesmen have been passed down to the new and highly competent technocrats of the Chinese Communist Party. Through this generational transfer of political responsibility, a deep knowledge of the value and purpose of land has also been communicated. In a country rocked by agrarian land reforms and the establishments of SEZs, there is deep-seated appreciation of the importance of land.
It’s something that is not as emphasized in the West. As we drive forward clamoring the advent of the post-industrial and digital age, we have relegated the ownership and management of land to the list of secondary concerns, far more preoccupied by healthcare, education, equity, and immigration.
But historically, the administration and ownership of land, the spatial dimension of politics, is key to political power and stability.

I will not attempt to write a full history of land, even less a brief one, but I can drive home the far-reaching ordering effect of land allocation and ownership on society. The condition of society is deeply affected by the management of the land it sits upon.

Let’s examine several historical examples across different cultures to clarify just how critical land management is to the organization of society and how technology changes the dictates of land:

Achaemenid Persia
As one of the most innovative empires in human history, the Achaemenid Empire can be credited for the creation and dissemination of what we traditionally associate with state power, including but not limited to bimetallic coinage and a relevant taxation system to exploit it, postal service, governorship, and extensive record keeping. Stretching from India to the Balkans, the empire was a well-oiled machine for most of its two centuries of existence, finally succumbing to Alexander the Great in 330 BC.

As a large and multi-ethnic empire, the Achaemenids developed a peculiar system of land ownership. They had three kinds of land ownership: royal land, land owned by temples and religious institutions, and private land. As Muhammad A. Dandamayev from the Oriental Institute of St. Petersburg writes in his Iranians in Achaemenid Babylonia:

[A]rchaeological evidence shows that in most areas of Mesopotamia, the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid periods mark the beginning of ‘a long phase of general growth, the resettlement and cultivation: of long-abandoned territory’. In the fifth century B.C, there was much cheap land, but water was costly. Oppenheim has shown that in Achaemenid Babylonia there appeared ‘new installations, new techniques, better utilization of the available water’. […] The land was divided into allotments and given to Persian nobles, to collectives of soldiers, and to officials who were not farmers themselves and therefore turned their land over to the other persons to cultivate. […] The king also owned many large canals, which his managers leased out for high prices. In the neighborhood of Nippur, the royal canals were rented by the Murasu house who, in their turn, leased them to groups of small landowners.

This passage is particularly revealing of what would account as state ownership of land and its administration. The state investment into the construction of canals and irrigation systems shows how central technological development was to a more fruitful and sustainable exploitation of land in a region where water is still, to this day, scarce. The mention of the distribution of royal land to soldiers is another interesting aspect of the Achaemenid system of land exploitation, since we know that the army was composed of various ethnicities from all over the empire, effectively tying the interests of the elements of society capable of perpetrating violence to that of the royal house. The foresight of the state administrators who understood that imperial power rested on the diligent management of public land, and sought to invest in technologies to improve its output, enabled the establishment and expansion of the Achaemenid Empire.

There are numerous aspects of land ownership in the Achaemenid Empire which significantly resemble our own, namely the commercial bonds between sublessor and sublessee. We know from the historical record that the most of the royal treasury funds did not derive from the direct exploitation of royal lands, but from taxation of economic output from all lands, whether royal, religious, or private. This arrangement of land ownership meant that the state required an effective way of collecting taxes, leading to the creation of bimetallic coinage. Satraps, regional governors, were in charge of collecting taxes and applied taxation according to potential economic output. The governors of Egypt mostly levied taxes in kind, as the region functioned as a granary of the empire, whereas regions where significant trade took place necessitated a larger share of the taxes to be levied in coin. A feature of the rapid expansion of cultivable land was the necessity of vaster amounts of laborers to till the land.

The Achaemenids were able to solve this problem by taking advantage of the large multi-ethnic nature of the empire, whereas workers were brought from neighboring regions and given wages, in addition to food and board being covered by employers. The necessity to direct labor and goods across enormous distances led the construction of the “Royal Highway” and the establishment of the postal service.

Gracchi Land Reforms
The previous example of the Achaemenid Empire shows how an entire society can be organized in a stable manner by diligent administration of land. Rome of the 2nd century BC can provide an example of the opposite. Scullard gives a good summary of the situation in his work From Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome 133 BC to AD 68:...

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