Land Wars: The Story of China's Agrarian Revolution explores how Mao's narrative of rural revolution became a reality, at great human cost.

Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian reform—arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia’s 1952 revolution. Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants embraced the nationalist slogan of “land for those who work it” and rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities proclaimed instead “land to its original owners” and sought to link the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part, embraced the principle of “land for those who improve it” to protect at least portions of their former properties from expropriation. Carmen Soliz combines analysis of governmental policies and national discourse with everyday local actors’ struggles and interactions with the state to draw out the deep connections between land and people as a material reality and as the object of political contention in the period surrounding the revolution.

A Revolution for Our Rights is a critical reassessment of the causes and significance of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. Historians have tended to view the revolution as the result of class-based movements that accompanied the rise of peasant leagues, mineworker unions, and reformist political projects in the 1930s. Laura Gotkowitz argues that the revolution had deeper roots in the indigenous struggles for land and justice that swept through Bolivia during the first half of the twentieth century. Challenging conventional wisdom, she demonstrates that rural indigenous activists fundamentally reshaped the military populist projects of the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing, she chronicles a hidden rural revolution—before the revolution of 1952—that fused appeals for equality with demands for a radical reconfiguration of political power, landholding, and rights. Gotkowitz combines an emphasis on national political debates and congresses with a sharply focused analysis of Indian communities and large estates in the department of Cochabamba. The fragmented nature of Cochabamba’s Indian communities and the pioneering significance of its peasant unions make it a propitious vantage point for exploring contests over competing visions of the nation, justice, and rights. Scrutinizing state authorities’ efforts to impose the law in what was considered a lawless countryside, Gotkowitz shows how, time and again, indigenous activists shrewdly exploited the ambiguous status of the state’s pro-Indian laws to press their demands for land and justice. Bolivian indigenous and social movements have captured worldwide attention during the past several years. By describing indigenous mobilization in the decades preceding the revolution of 1952, A Revolution for Our Rights illuminates a crucial chapter in the long history behind present-day struggles in Bolivia and contributes to an understanding of indigenous politics in modern Latin America more broadly.

Carried out by the government of the shah between 1962 and 1971, the Iranian land reform was one of the most ambitious such undertakings in modern Middle Eastern history. Yet, beneath apparent statistical success, the actual accomplishments of the program, in terms of positive benefits for the peasantry, were negligible. Later, the resulting widespread discontent of thousands of Iranian villagers would contribute to the shah's downfall. In the first major study of the effects of this widely publicized program, Eric Hooglund's analysis demonstrates that the primary motives behind the land reform were political. Attempting to supplant the near-absolute authority of the landlord class over the countryside, the central government hoped to extend its own authority throughout rural Iran. While the Pahlavi government accomplished this goal, its failure to implement effective structural reform proved to be a long-term liability. Hooglund, who conducted field research in rural Iran throughout the 1970s and who witnessed the unfolding of the revolution from a small village, provides a careful description of the development of the land reform and of its effects on the main groups involved: landlords, peasants, local officials, merchants, and brokers. He shows how the continuing poverty in the countryside forced the migration of thousands of peasants to the cities, resulting in serious shortages of agricultural workers and an oversupply of unskilled urban labor. When the shah's government was faced with mass opposition in the cities in 1978, not only did a disillusioned rural population fail to support the regime, but thousands of villagers participated in the protests that hastened the collapse of the monarchy.

"In Land and Liberty, Thomas Humphrey recounts the story of the Hudson Valley land riots from the 1750s through the 1790s. He examines the social dimensions of the conflict, from individual landlord-tenant relations to cross-cultural alliances, in the context of colonial structure and Revolutionary politics. Humphrey offers a multilayered explanation of why inhabitants of the Hudson Valley resorted to extreme tactics - and why they achieved mixed results."--BOOK JACKET.

A bold new history of the origins and aftermath of the Texas Revolution, revealing how Indians, Mexicans, and Americans battled for survival in one of the continent’s most diverse regions The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land, historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved. This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America.

'Blue Revolution upturns some environmental applecarts - not for the hell of it, but so we can manage our environment better.' Fred Pearce, New Scientist This updated and revised edition of The Blue Revolution provides further evidence of the need to integrate land management decision-making into the process of integrated water resources management. It presents the key issues involved in finding the balance between the competing demands for land and water: for food and other forms of economic production, for sustaining livelihoods, and for conservation, amenity, recreation and the requirements of the environment. It also advocates the means and methodologies for addressing them. A new chapter, 'Policies, Power and Perversity,' describes the perverse outcomes that can result from present, often myth-based, land and water policies which do not consider these land and water interactions. New research and case studies involving ILWRM concepts are presented for the Panama Canal catchments and in relation to afforestation proposals for the UK Midlands.