From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

The contributions to this collection use the tools of agrarian political economy to explore the rapid growth and complex dynamics of large-scale land deals in recent years, with a special focus on the implications of big land deals for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. The first part of this introductory essay examines the implications of this agrarian political economy perspective. First we explore the continuities and contrasts between historical and contemporary land grabs, before examining the core underlying debate around large- versus small-scale farming futures. Next, we unpack the diverse contexts and causes of land grabbing today, highlighting six overlapping mechanisms. The following section turns to assessing the crisis narratives that frame the justifications for land deals, and the flaws in the argument around there being excess, empty or idle land available. Next the paper turns to an examination of the impacts of land deals, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion at play, before looking at patterns of resistance and constructions of alternatives. The final section introduces the papers in the collection.

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The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals

Over the past several years, the convergence of global crises in food, energy, finance, and the environment has driven a dramatic revaluation of land ownership. Powerful transnational and national ...

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Towards a better understanding of global land grabbing: an editorial introduction

‘Land grab’ has become a catch-all phrase to refer to the current explosion of (trans)national commercial land transactions mainly revolving around the production and export of food, animal feed, biofuels, timber and minerals. Two key dimensions of the current land grab – namely, the politics of changes in land use and property relations change (and the links between them) – are not sufficiently explored in the current literature.We attempt to address this gap by offering a preliminary analysis through an analytical approach that suggests some typologies as a step towards a fuller and better understanding of the politics of global land grabbing.

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Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis

Land grabbing has gained momentum in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past decade The phenomenon has taken different forms and character as compared to processes that occur in other regions of the world, especially Africa It puts into question some of the assumptions in the emerging literature on land grabbing, suggesting these are too food-centered/too food crisis-centered, too land-centred, too centred on new global food regime players – China, South Korea, Gulf States and India – and too centred on Africa There are four key mechanisms through which land grabbing in Latin American and the Caribbean has been carried out: food security initiatives, energy/fuel security ventures, other climate change mitigation strategies, and recent demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital The hallmark of land grabbing in the region is its intra-regional character: the key investors are (Trans-)Latin American companies, often in alliance with international capital and the central state Initia

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Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean

Contemporary large-scale land deals are widely understood as involving the expulsion of people who, in turn, struggle instinctively to resist dispossession This is certainly true in many instances Yet this chain of events evidently does not always occur: large-scale land deals do not always result in people losing the land, and many of those who face expulsion do not necessarily respond with the kind of resistance often expected of them Indeed, much evidence shows that the nature of and responses to big land deals can (and do) vary across and within ‘local communities’ Taking off analytically from a relatively narrow selection of cases, the expulsion–resistance scenario is too often assumed rather than demonstrated, thereby leaving many inconvenient facts undetected and unexplained This suggests a need to step back and problematise the variable and uneven responses ‘from below’ to land grabbing, both within and between communities This paper offers an initial exploration into why poor people 

Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions ‘From Below’

Recent large-scale land acquisitions for agricultural production (including biofuels), popularly known as 'land grabbing', have attracted headline attention. Water as both a target and driver of this phenomenon has been largely ignored despite the interconnectedness of water and land. This special issue aims to fill this gap and to widen and deepen the lens beyond the confines of the literature’s still limited focus on agriculture-driven resource grabbing. The articles in this collection demonstrate that the fluid nature of water and its hydrologic complexity often obscure how water grabbing takes place and what the associated impacts on the environment and diverse social groups are. The fluid properties of water interact with the 'slippery' nature of the grabbing processes: unequal power relations; fuzziness between legality and illegality and formal and informal rights; unclear administrative boundaries and jurisdictions, and fragmented negotiation processes. All these factors combined with the powerful material, discursive and symbolic characteristics of water make 'water grabbing' a site for conflict with potential drastic impacts on the current and future uses and benefits of water, rights as well as changes in tenure relations

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Introduction to the Special Issue: Water Grabbing? Focus on the (Re)appropriation of Finite Water Resources

The past decades have seen the emergence of a \"corporate social responsibility agenda\" in response to public and activist criticism of \"the impact of transnational corporations (TNCs) in developing countries and on the environment.\"' This agenda has emerged against the backdrop of shifting perceptions of how the market, the state, and civil society function and ought to function.2 One prominent version of this agenda has been the World Bank's advocacy of \"good governance\" as a \"persuasive ethical power that allows for [corporate] self-regulation, making it possible for governments to intervene less intrusively and more efficiently in society.\"3 Voluntary adherence by corporations to good business practices and ethical behavior is a cornerstone of this advocacy, and its most recent incarnation arises in the arena of rural development, focusing on access to land and taking the form of proposals for a Code of Conduct for land deals.

https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1096&context=yhrdlj

Jennifer C. Franco

Papers

Global Land Grabbing and Trajectories of Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis

Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean

Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions ‘From Below’

Introduction to the Special Issue: Water Grabbing? Focus on the (Re)appropriation of Finite Water Resources

From Threat to Opportunity? Problems with the Idea of a "Code of Conduct" for Land- Grabbing