In 1974, one of the most extensive land reform programmes in history returned the land from the Ethiopian aristocracy to the people who tilled it. Overseeing this land reform was an inspiring but humble figure, Zegeye Asfaw, Oromo and Ethiopian. In this 2012 interview Zegeye tells the story of his life, of the struggle for land reform, and of the personal cost of that struggle for himself and others. The interview informs our understanding of current issues, and provides a very accessible introduction to recent Ethiopian history. "It tackles the tensions between the North and South of Ethiopia; it throws light on the student movements that shaped the politics of the last fifty years; and it provides insights from inside the governments of three very different regimes. Most of all, it is a story of the land itself."

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

An ambitious comparative study of regime consolidation in the 'revolutionary' People's Republic of China and 'conservative' Taiwan in the early 1950s.

This ambitious and engaging new account of independent India's struggle to overcome famine and malnutrition in the twentieth century traces Indian nation-building through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens. Siegel explains the historical origins of contemporary India's hunger and malnutrition epidemic, showing how food and sustenance moved to the center of nationalist thought in the final years of colonial rule. Independent India's politicians made promises of sustenance and then qualified them by asking citizens to share the burden of feeding a new and hungry state. Foregrounding debates over land, markets, and new technologies, Hungry Nation interrogates how citizens and politicians contested the meanings of nation-building and citizenship through food, and how these contestations receded in the wake of the Green Revolution. Drawing upon meticulous archival research, this is the story of how Indians challenged meanings of welfare and citizenship across class, caste, region, and gender in a new nation-state.

'Land to the Tiller' has long been a rallying cry of radical agrarian movements. The slogan evokes the image of crude red flags in the hands of peasants confronting landlords and police in the classic conflict over distribution of the land and its product. That image is one aspect of the reality in South Asia; but the issue of agrarian reform is simultaneously less dramatic and more profound than its popular image. At stake is the transformation of the basic structure, the political economy, of agrarian society. Marx noted that the 'innermost secrets' of a society are revealed in its production relations; in the relations of men and women to the land are embedded relations of power, security, wealth, opportunity, and standing in rural South Asia.

This open access book offers unique in-depth, comprehensive, and comparative analyses of the motivations, context, and outcomes of recent land reforms in Africa. Whereas a considerable number of land reforms have been carried out by African governments since the 1990s, no systematic analysis on their meaning has so far been conducted. In the age of land reform, Africa has seen drastic rural changes. Analysing the relationship between those reforms and change, the chapters in this book reveal not only their socio-economic outcomes, such as accelerated marketisation of land, but also their political outcomes, which have often been contrasting. Countries such as Rwanda and Mozambique have utilised land reform to strengthen state control over land, but other countries, such as Ghana and Zambia, have seen the rise in power of traditional chiefs in managing the land. The comparative perspective of this book clarifies new features of African social changes, which are carefully investigated by area experts. Providing new perspectives on recent land reform, this book will have a considerable impact on scholars as well as policymakers.