1 - Landlord abolition and the rural order: Egypt, India

Summary

By strengthening the principle of private property where it was weakest, i.e. at the base of the social pyramid, the reforms have created a huge class of strong opponents of the class war ideology

Charan Singh, Indian politician, 1958

The future agrarian pattern should be that of cooperative joint farming, in which land will be pooled for joint cultivation

Indian National Congress Resolution, Nagpur 1959

As the twentieth century comes to its end, we can already be fairly certain that extensive passages in the histories which will be written about it will be devoted to its three World Wars, two hot and one cold; to the slump, the long boom, and the recession; to the proliferation of new states, the huge growth in population, the immense technological revolution, and, we must hope, to all the underdevelopment which has gone along with this. No doubt a great deal will be said too about the rise, expansion, maintenance and then sudden collapse of Soviet Communism. What, however, may very well not be given sufficient attention is the plethora of socialist inspired ventures especially in the huge rural societies of Asia and Mrica in the third quarter of the twentieth century, even though arguably these affected even more of our common humanity than Soviet Communism ever did.

The essential story here runs something like this. Up until around the middle of the twentieth century, at a time when western colonial rule was still very widely prevalent, the rural areas of a considerable number of Asian and Mrican countries were still dominated by aristocratic landlord families; by people, that is, that owned 200 acres, 2000 acres, 20,000 acres, and sometimes even considerably more, under whom large numbers of peasants lived and worked as tenants, labourers and sharecroppers. At mid century, with some notable exceptions, such as in the Philippines, besides the ending of western colonial rule, this large landlordism was almost everywhere abolished. In the aftermath there was a whole series of attempts between about 1950 and 1975-80 to create within the heavily populated rural societies of these countries essentially egalitarian rural regimes.