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t h r e e . Toward a Global System of Property Rights in Land john f. richards Since the late fifteenth century, the global landscape has been transformed by human action.1 Land, formerly abundant in most parts of the world, has become relatively scarce and valuable as human numbers have increased twelvefold (from 0.5 to 6 billion people). Land use for agriculture, pastoralism, resource extraction, industrial production, commerce, and human settlement has become more specialized and capital-intensive. Intensified land use, in conjunction with the discovery and use of fossil-fuel energy, has caused massive changes in the natural environment . The total standing biomass in the world today is considerably less than it was in 1500, and biodiversity has been much reduced in each region of the world. Overthepastsixcenturies,humanshaveraisedtheirknowledge,control,anduseof the world’s lands to an unprecedented level. By the late 1990s, every hectare of the world’s land surface was known, recorded, demarcated, mapped, and claimed as part of the territory of a particular nation-state (or of a consortium of states, as in Antarctica). Cascading technical advances in astronomy, navigation, mathematics, geography,andcartography,aswellasdramaticimprovementsintransportation,have made possible unprecedented territorial control and access. Today’s world is truly a unified and largely inhabited unit divided into precisely measured tracts of land. Over the past few centuries, every human society has moved toward a similar regime of rights in landed property. Bewilderingly complex, particularized, local systems of property rights in land have been altered, transformed, or replaced by simplified, more uniform sets of rules in a remarkably similar fashion across all 54 p r o p e r t y r i g h t s i n l a n d . 55 world regions. Paradoxically, however, these converging property rules have helped to establish more precise, exact, nuanced, and complex rights over individual parcels of land. This trend reflects the intensifying manipulation and use of smaller and smaller units of land, within land markets of increasing transparency and efficiency. How do we detect and analyze the processes and structural changes that have produced these converging property-rights regimes? My approach here is to look for similar large-scale processes of change over longer periods.2 In this effort, I seek to detect similarities across comparative cases rather than to identify differences . This essay examines three massive changes in land use and property rights over the past six centuries: first, the displacement or extinction of indigenous peoples and the consequent obliteration of localized property-rights regimes; second, the erosion of community property rights in land exercised by peasants in agrarian societies; and third, as part of the massive process of global urbanization in the past two centuries, the struggle of an ever more compressed and ever-growing urban lower class for stable property rights in urban land. Although the last change began later than the others, all three processes proceed simultaneously today. THE CENTRALIZING STATE Early modern and modern states have been the principal agents of intensified human land use and land management. Intensifying land use is essential to state centralization and modernization. Today all land areas are ultimately claimed as property by a nation-state (or sometimes more than one). Each state does its best to demarcate and defend its national boundaries, which are located precisely on maps and on the ground.3 Behind these lines, each state exercises territorial strategies to control its national land area. Some portion, often quite large, remains under active ownership and management by official agencies. In most nation-states, the remaining land is relinquished to the active ownership of private individual or corporate landowners. Part of the nation-state’s credibility rests with its guarantee of predictable and stable private property rights in land. The modern state, as ultimate owner, can and does take private property by right of eminent domain, usually with compensation, for public purposes such as constructing highways and creating artificial lakes. In times of emergency or crisis, states act ruthlessly to seize land for purposes of national defense and survival. However, confidence in private property depends upon assurances that the state will not arbitrarily or needlessly seize lands. The state itself must be constrained by rules and statutes that guarantee land ownership. The state’s assertion of complete property rights over all land within its boundaries isanessentialaspectof modernnationalism,nationalidentity,andthenation-state.The growth of nationalism has been coterminous with growth in state control over land. Construction of a national territory is vital to national identity...

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