When I was doing marketing for real estate agents I had a spreadsheet of quotes about land and real estate. There are a lot of them, most speaking to the value of land as an investment and as a way for an individual to obtain agency over their own financial future.

In Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t and How That Determines the Fate of Societies, Michael Albertus takes us from the founding of nation-states and the first boundaries around land to colonization and land reshuffling and then to land reforms and the efforts by many nations to right past racial and gender-driven injustices.

Mike and I talked about his research and dipped into climate change, agriculture, housing, natural resources and much more. This book gave me much to contemplate about the uses and abuses of land and why we never seem to learn the lessons of those who walked these places before we did. Land is power, it’s agency, and it’s hope. Hope that we can build a good life.

This interview was done as part of the New Books Network, a fantastic podcast platform that features dozens of author interviews with leading academics and thoughtleaders each week.

I had higher hopes for this book than the reading experience ended up giving. While I really appreciate the conceit that the author attempted to follow through with in this narrative, I struggled with the wya that he developed the point. Each chapter is full of detailed stories regarding the ways that land redistribution affected various groups of people. I found all of those fascinating and think that they could have, if better organized, led to the much larger point that Albertus attempted to make with this work. Instead, this work struggles with organization. He attempts a topical organization, mostly with how certain groups were affected by how others coopted the land from underneath them and, in some chapters, how they attempted to make it right. Although I appreciated that he told the stories of all of these different people, I think that made the focus too granular for the much larger picture that he tried to paint with the narrative.

An interesting and often thought-provoking take on the links between land and power, with a truly global scope - the author examines cases from every corner of the world, from Patagonia to the Canadian Arctic and from Australia to the RPA.

I learned a lot from this book, although it would benefit from more thorough editing - there is plenty of repetition and the style is rather dry. Still, it is worth reading to gain a fresh perspective not only on the roots of many of the world's problems, but also on possible solutions.

Thanks to the publisher, Basic Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.