Across Melanesia, the ways in which people connect to land are being transformed by processes of modernization—globalization, the building of states and nations, practices and imaginaries of development, the legacies of colonialism, and the complexities of postcolonial encounters. Melanesian peoples are becoming landowners, Stead argues, both in the sense that these processes of change compel forms of property relations, and in the sense that “landowner” and “custom landowner” become identities to be wielded against the encroachment of both state and capital. In places where customary forms of land tenure have long been dominant, deeply intertwined with senses of self and relationships with others, land now becomes a crucible upon which social relations, power, and culture are reconfigured and reimagined. Employing a multi-sited ethnographic approach, Becoming Landowners explores these transformations to land and life as they unfold across two Melanesian countries. The chapters move between coasts and inland mountain ranges, between urban centers and rural villages, telling the stories of people and places who are always situated and particular but who also share powerful commonalities of experience. These include a subsistence-based community shaped by the legacies of colonialism and occupation in remote Timor-Leste, villagers in Papua New Guinea resisting a mining operation and the government agents supporting it, an urban East Timorese settlement resisting eviction by the nation-state its residents hoped would represent them in the post-independence era, and people and groups in both countries who are struggling for, with, and sometimes against the formal codification of their claims to land and place. In each of these instances, customary and modern forms of connection to land are propelled into complex and dynamic configurations, theorized here in an innovative way as entanglements of custom and modernity. Moving between multiple sites, scales, and forms of collectivity, Becoming Landowners reveals entanglements as spaces of deep ambivalence. Here, structures of power are destabilized in ways that can lend themselves to the diminishing of local autonomy in the face of the state and capital. At the same time, the destabilization of power also creates new possibilities for the reassertion of that autonomy, and of the customary forms of connection to land in which it is grounded.

The exodus of millions of African Americans from the rural South is a central theme of black life and liberation in the twentieth century. A Mind to Stay offers a counterpoint to the narrative of the Great Migration. Sydney Nathans tells the rare story of people who moved from being enslaved to becoming owners of the very land they had worked in bondage, and who have held on to it from emancipation through the Civil Rights era. The story began in 1844, when North Carolina planter Paul Cameron bought 1,600 acres near Greensboro, Alabama, and sent out 114 enslaved people to cultivate cotton and enlarge his fortune. In the 1870s, he sold the plantation to emancipated black families who worked there. Drawing on thousands of letters from the planter and on interviews with descendants of those who bought the land, Nathans unravels how and why the planter’s former laborers purchased the site of their enslavement, kept its name as Cameron Place, and defended their homeland against challengers from the Jim Crow era to the present day. Through the prism of a single plantation and the destiny of black families that dwelt on it for over a century and a half, A Mind to Stay brings to life a vivid cast of characters and illuminates the changing meaning of land and landowning to successive generations of rural African Americans. Those who remained fought to make their lives fully free—for themselves, for their neighbors, and for those who might someday return.

From the bestselling author Simon Winchester, a human history of land around the world: who mapped it, owned it, stole it, cared for it, fought for it and gave it back.

Farmland tenure shapes many farm decisions, including those related to production, conservation, and succession planning. The relatively advanced age of many farmers raises questions abut land ownership, especially how land will be transferred to the next generation of agricultural landowners and operators. This study provides a descriptive baseline analysis of land ownership and then focuses on more detailed aspects of land tenure, including non-operator landlords, rental agreements, the acquisition and transfer of land, and how decisionmaking is shared by landlords and their tenants. The report is designed to support broad discussions related to agricultural land ownership and to provide a starting point for more detailed statistical analysis. Figures and tables. This is a print on demand report.

A Land Remembered has become Florida's favorite novel. Now this Student Edition in two volumes makes this rich, rugged story of the American pioneer spirit more accessible to young readers. Patrick Smith tells of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family battling the hardships of the frontier. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias and Emma MacIvey arrive in the Florida wilderness with their son, Zech, to start a new life, and ends in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that his wealth has not been worth the cost to the land. Between is a sweeping story rich in Florida history with a cast of memorable characters who battle wild animals, rustlers, Confederate deserters, mosquitoes, starvation, hurricanes, and freezes to carve a kingdom out of the Florida swamp. In this volume, meet young Zech MacIvey, who learns to ride like the wind through the Florida scrub on Ishmael, his marshtackie horse, his dogs, Nip and Tuck, at this side. His parents, Tobias and Emma, scratch a living from the land, gathering wild cows from the swamp and herding them across the state to market. Zech learns the ways of the land from the Seminoles, with whom his life becomes entwined as he grows into manhood. Next in series > > See all of the books in this series