The environment has been leveraged as a tool of control in conflict settings throughout human history. Capturing or enclosing and controlling the resources needed for everyday needs and livelihoods has been a feature of most conflicts. Understanding how this happens and what the implications are for the environment in conflict is critical to addressing environmental and conflict issues. This chapter lays out how this has unfolded in many contexts and highlights critical nuances for different environmental mediums and across space and time.

Growing environmental instability around the globe has the potential to contribute to the onset of violent conflict. However, there is rarely a clear, direct causal pathway between environmental change and conflict because these interactions are always mediated by institutions – social norms, governance, and policy. How the environment can be a potential trigger for conflict is a critical part of the environment-conflict nexus. This chapter explores the broad literature on the topic, drawing out where there is more and less consensus and what the implications are for understanding the environment in conflict.

Chapter 2 tells the story of how ethnicity came to be known in Kenya through territory, providing an overview of the history of ethnic territorial boundary drawing from its inception with the first colonial administration, to today. The principal motivation for the earliest hard boundaries between purportedly homogenous ethnic groups was to free up land for white settlement and capital accumulation. After independence, the administrative boundaries of provinces and districts were deliberately retained, and ethnic patterns of land settlement were engineered. With multi-party elections in the 1990s, these established ‘ethnic territories’ motivated electoral gerrymandering, the most significant postcolonial driver of ethnic territorialisation. All these practices cemented a profound connection between land, boundaries, identity, rights, power, and security. I show how the 2010 constitution worked within this paradigm, too, but in novel ways that moved toward vagueness to manage the inflammatory, grievance-based politics tethered to boundary drawing in Kenya. In doing so, I show how ethnic territorial population concentration today is less certain than commonly imagined.

Grounded in comparative politics, this chapter presents new theory in comparative political economy: First, it argues that, in the context of technological transition, a legal system that facilitates reassignment of property rights, making certain rights less secure, plays an important and under-theorized role in promoting economic development. It focuses on China’s technological transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one to highlight the relationship between technology change, reassignment of land rights, and transformative economic growth. The chapter reinterprets England’s post–Glorious-Revolution reassignment of land rights, using enclosure, estate, turnpike, and other parliamentary acts, in light of China’s rise. It also identifies the problem of state misallocation of land resources in the Chinese case. Second, it argues that the authoritarian state also invests in the formal legal system in order to manage conflict over changes in land rights and to legitimate the state. It revisits England’s eighteenth-century use of law, including the Riot Act and Black Act, to contain protest over dispossession and compares it to China’s embrace of authoritarian legality to repress conflict. The chapter defines liberal and illiberal law in both form and content and locates the analysis in the context of the law-and-development movement.

Chapter 2 uses official data and primary documents to examine land as a factor of production and the legal status of land in China’s political economy. It highlights how insecure property rights and incomplete markets for land diverge from the liberal economic model. As codified in law, the state generates rents through its ability to take land from the rural sector at below-market prices to sell into the urban real estate and industrial sectors at higher and lower prices, respectively. This pattern is reminiscent of the planned economy and enacts urban bias. Local governments rely on land for revenue, as a tool of industry policy, and for capital mobilization through local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Informality persists in the form of illegal land conversion and “small property rights” in urban villages and elsewhere. Beyond the analysis of land law at the rural-urban interface, the chapter also analyzes land rights within the rural and urban sectors, respectively. Within the agricultural sector, reforms have improved the property rights of rural households to arable land, but limits on rights and sources of insecurity remain. Urban households have been the beneficiaries of housing reforms, giving them a vested interest in resisting property taxes.

This concluding chapter puts land at the heart of the “China model,” linking legal, fiscal, financial, and political features of the system to explain the roots of China’s contemporary economic challenges, including the real estate crisis, land-backed debt, and abortive property tax initiative. It also extends the theory beyond the Chinese case in three ways. First, it revisits the paradigmatic case of post–Glorious Revolution England in light of China’s experience, suggesting that, in the context of technological change, property rights over land were less secure and governance less democratic in the early eighteenth century than presented in some of the development literature. Second, it examines the relationship between the ease or difficulty of using law to reassign land rights and promotion of transformative economic growth in the case of contemporary India. These comparisons point to the significance of regime type—authoritarian vs. democratic. Regime type shapes the ease with which the state can reassign land rights and how the state manages the conflict that results from the redefinition of property rights. Third, the chapter examines the redefinition of property rights over personal data as a driver of growth in the new information economy as well as a new source of conflict.

Ireland’s two bloodiest centuries began with Henry VIII’s break with Rome and culminated in the brutal and unforgiving conquest of the entire island. Now, Anglo-Normans became ‘Old English’, faithful to Rome making common cause with the Gaelic-Irish. The ‘New English’ and later, Scottish, settled Leix, Offaly and Munster in the sixteenth century, Ulster and (under Cromwell) everywhere, in the seventeenth. Resistance was strong and sometimes, as in the Nine Years War, 1594–1603, and the Catholic Confederacy of the 1640s during England’s Civil War, almost successful. Ireland was later the sideshow of a larger European conflict, when several nationalities fought in the Williamite wars of the 1690s.

There were some Irish conversions to the Church of Ireland (i.e. the official Protestant church), but the continental-trained clergy of the Catholic Reformation defied persecution to keep Catholicism the majority religion. Protestants were a majority only in the north-east. However, the majority ownership of land in the country as a whole moved from Catholic to Protestant.

The shiring of Ireland was completed, transport and communication was improved, cities grew, trade remained lively. Irish remained the majority language, and a flowering of Irish-language scholarship preserved old texts and created new ones.

The last decades witnessed important developments in our understanding of Ptolemaic Egypt. Traditionally seen as a highly centralised state exercising close control over the economy, it is now clear that the king was part of a broader coalition with the primary aim of raising stable revenues. Recent work on land tenure and taxation furthermore challenges the idea of a ‘royal economy’. This book tackles the other major pillar of this model: the so-called state monopolies in industry and trade. Ill-defined and anachronistic, it has been a problematic concept from its inception in the early twentieth century, yet it remains in wide use. Inspired by the famous ‘Revenue Laws’ papyrus, it evokes a centrally planned state economy. The book offers a deconstruction of these ideas and provides the first full assessment of the actual organisation of the sectors involved. The institutions are analysed within the framework of New Institutional Economics, including an analysis of their effect on economic performance. The study takes full account of both the Greek and the Demotic Egyptian sources. The Ptolemaic institutions are, moreover, contextualised within Greek and Egyptian fiscal history.

The Conclusion recaps the conceptual themes of the book, emphasising the need for scholars to renew their focus upon the intertwined nature of kinship, class, and capital not only in the empirical study of capitalism on the African continent, but in anthropology where the study of kinship has veered away from questions of inheritance and property since the 1980s, a subject to which it is only now returning. It recaptures the book’s emphasis on the erosion of moral economies under conditions of land’s commodification, and the way this shapes the pauperisation of junior kin.

The Introduction sets the scene for the book’s chapters and analysis. On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Profoundly shaped by Kenya’s colonial history, Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households while the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions over their meagre plots, with consequences for class futures. Land sale by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. The Introduction sets out how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, and how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Within this context, the Introduction sets out the book’s exploration of how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.

Chapter 1 introduces the region of Kiambu in detail, establishing the stakes of moral debate over wealth amongst men in the region. While an older generation preaches the labour ideology (the notion that hard work will bring success) that allowed them to prosper in the aftermath of independence, it has been undermined by dwindling land holdings and opportunities for ‘off-farm income’, creating a crisis of hopelessness as young men wonder if they will ever reach the ‘level’ of their elders. Framing the study of masculine destitution to follow, the chapter discusses the legacies of the ‘Kenya Debate’, a regional debate in political economy about the relative prosperity of Kenya’s peasantry after independence. It argues for a processual, non-static approach to economic change in central Kenya, allowing us to see how class divides have been opened across generations due to population pressure on land. Its subdivision within families exerts stronger pressure on young family members who find themselves in the situation of being virtual paupers – land poor and ‘hustling’ for cash.

Chapter 3 shows how older men, established patriarchs, wrestle with the temptation to sell their land and live lives of ‘fun’, abandoning their obligations to pass on wealth to future generations. Speaking to a rich regional literature on fatherhood and provider masculinity, it unveils a local politics of masculine responsibility, focusing on the question of land sale and fatherly obligation. Adult men from the Ituura neighbourhood who work for wages in the informal economy to support their families are shown to condemn other ‘bad’ men who sell their family land to live ‘comfortable’ lives of short-term consumption. The discourses of self-styled moral men valorise their self-disciplined control of a desire to consume wealth against the grain of immorality they perceive in the neighbourhood and beyond, especially by retaining their ancestral land. Complicating these heroic narratives of economic striving, the chapter explores the life circumstances that force land sale, as well as a growing cynicism amongst working-aged men towards the obligations of patrilineal kinship.

Chapter 6 shows how the history of land reform in central Kenya, dating back to the late colonial period, has shaped a situation of scarcity in which access to land, and contestation over it, has become highly gendered. Engaging with regional literature on land, kinship, and economic change, it discusses the micro-politics of ‘intimate exclusion’ that plays out in inheritance disputes, with young men trying to exclude their sisters from inheriting precious land. Meanwhile, older men try to argue for their daughters’ ability to inherit, citing wider legal change and the rising rates of divorce. The chapter discusses the intimate politics of envy and competition, exploring ‘zero-sum’ family disputes over wealth, demonstrating the moral arguments for ‘inclusion’ that are made by senior men, and attempts to control and mitigate greed-fuelled conflicts in the future through fair distribution.

Abstract: This chapter argues that the state of nature brings into focus colonial imaginaries of land and identity. It also contends that these colonial imaginaries have come to shape the modern West more broadly.

Chapter 5 considers the legal definition of ownership and possession and how they were acquired and protected. Possession was important in that someone who had physical control of something, for example, a farm, could use the land and enjoy its fruits even though the property was formally owned by another. Having possession of an object brought significant benefits since it was an important step to proving and acquiring ownership by usucapio (that is, having it in your possession for at least two years in the case of immovables, one year for movables). The acquisition and distribution of land was part of the history of the republic, and the management of land, the designation of boundaries, the establishment of jurisdiction, and the resolution of disputes through the legal process remained important. We then consider the role of law in arranging farm tenancy and negotiating leases, and the position of urban landlords and tenants.

Chapter 3 considers the nature of provincial government, the role and legal responsibilities of governors, both legati Augusti and proconsuls, the management of Rome’s assets through the census and by direct intervention, for example, in managing the benefits and dangers of rivers. We look at the constitutions of municipia, and the nature of their laws and regulations, and Rome’s supervision of the infrastructure of local towns, and the consequences for local people. In the administration of justice there was a melding of local legal practice and Roman law. Did the Romans have an idea of what constituted fair and efficient government and how far did they achieve it? The evidence shows good intentions on the part of emperors and governors, but also many abuses, especially from the presence of soldiers, and problems in obtaining legal redress.

The chapter offers provisional compass points for navigating new modes of writing by 21st-century Australian poets in light of a world of overdevelopment, environmental crises and extinctions. The compass points include: modes of anxiety and grief involved with poetic form, and material forms emerging in combination with agencies, matter and forces. Inflection points include the shared becoming of humans and non-humans. The chapter includes a discussion of ecopoetic literary journals, as well as anthologies that have gathered and showcased ecopoetry, radical writing of land, and environmental protest poetry. It includes analyses of poetry by writers such as Judith Beveridge, Louise Crisp, Coral Hull, John Kinsella, Peter Minter and Mark Tredinnick.