Land Dispossession and Global Crisis: Introduction to the Special Section on Land Rights in the World-System

Abstract

Economy of the World-System section of the American Sociological Association. The theme of the conference was Land Rights in the World-System. The thought-provoking and wellresearched papers that were presented at the conference stimulated a lively debate and exchange of ideas that encoura ged us to publish a selection of these papers that linked globalization, capital accumulation, and land rights as a special section in this issue of JWSR. From a world-historical standpoint, the history of capitalism begins with the transformation of land rights. In one sense, the modern concept of land rights denotes the establishment of bourgeois land rights in the countryside (leading to export-led commercial agriculture) and in the city (as “real estate”). Of course, from the perspective of/within the modern world- system, it is easy to take these forms of property rights for granted and as everexisting. But this would be missing the massive social transformations that involved centuries of struggles for and against the establishment of bourgeois property rights in land and its usage. While the forms that this transformation took were complex and varied across time and space of the modern world-system, we can distinguish five of its salient features: (1) the transformation of a complex system of customary rights to land usage to legal and written titles to land ownership, (2) the transformation of the concept of property from jurisdiction over ambiguously defined areas to concretely defined (and enclosed) physical spaces, (3) the rationalization of the use of such demarcated landed property as a form of capital and at the service of “primitive” and expanded capital accumulation, (4) the increasing privatization of the earth’s surface through dispossession and displacement of peasants and Indigenous populations, and (5) destruction of nonmarket access to food and self-sustenance and creation of a (mobile) global proletariat that is massively concentrated at the urban centers of the world economy (and often living a life under a regime of “forced underconsumption”) (Araghi 2010a). The complex global history of this process o f commodification of land rights can be divided into four historical periods: primitive accumulation, colonialism, developmentalism, and globalization.