By Ian Werther in News — 13 Mar 2026

New book by Michael Albertus links land ownership to global power and inequality.

Land Power, a book by Michael Albertus, traces how land ownership has long shaped power and inequality across civilizations. Focusing on roughly the last 200 years, it highlights a global realignment in who controls land and how that control translates into economic, social, and political influence.

The author argues that land is the starting point of power: owning land allows control over the means of production, enables wealth accumulation, and anchors social hierarchy and political sway. This linkage, he says, helps explain why land issues repeatedly determine a country’s development path.

Albertus surveys a sequence of upheavals—colonization, revolutions, wars, and land reforms—that shifted land into new hands and reconfigured national power structures. He describes these shifts as a set of deliberate, consequential transfers that helped rewrite how states function.

Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
For much of human history, most of the world’s land was wilderness: forests, grasslands and shrubbery dominated its landscapes. Over the last few centuries, this has changed dramatically: wild habitats have been squeezed out by turning it into agricultural land.
If we rewind 1000 years, it is estimated that only 4 million square kilometers – less than 4% of the world’s ice-free and non-barren land area was used for farming.
In the visualization we see the breakdown of global land area today. 10% of the world is covered by glaciers, and a further 19% is barren land – deserts, dry salt flats, beaches, sand dunes, and exposed rocks.1 This leaves what we call ‘habitable land’. Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture.
This leaves only 37% for forests; 11% as shrubs and grasslands; 1% as freshwater coverage; and the remaining 1% – a much smaller share than many suspect – is built-up urban area which includes cities, towns, villages, roads and other human infrastructure.
There is also a highly unequal distribution of land use between livestock and crops for human consumption. If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for animal feed, livestock accounts for 77% of global farming land. While livestock takes up most of the world’s agricultural land it only produces 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of total protein.
The expansion of agriculture has been one of humanity’s largest impacts on the environment. It has transformed habitats and is one of the greatest pressures for biodiversity: of the 28,000 species evaluated to be threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List, agriculture is listed as a threat for 24,000 of them.4 But we also know that we can reduce these impacts – both through dietary changes, by substituting some meat with plant-based alternatives and through technology advances. Crop yields have increased significantly in recent decades, meaning we have spared a lot of land from agricultural production: globally, to produce the same amount of crops as in 1961, we need only 30% of the farmland.

With solutions from both consumers and producers, we have an important opportunity to restore some of this farmland back to forests and natural habitats. — Representative image for context; not directly related to the specific event in this article. License: CC BY 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In the Americas, for example, European settlers treated vast tracts as vacant and displaced Indigenous peoples, while slavery underpinned land development. Landownership by early settlers subsequently concentrated political and economic power in white communities, illustrating how land distribution can entrench hierarchy.

The book notes similar land-dispossession patterns elsewhere: Indigenous Australians, Black South Africans, Indigenous peoples in North America, and Palestinians are cited as groups pushed off land, underscoring a shared dynamic of land-driven inequality across regions.

Land use distribution in Tót-Morácz village, Vas County (now Moravske Toplice, Slovenia) in 1860. The chart was created from the land use sheet of the Franciscan cadaster survey showing the different categories of land use in hectares and their percentages. — Representative image for context; not directly related to the specific event in this article. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

On reform, Albertus highlights how Korea, Taiwan, and Japan pursued agrarian reforms that redistributed land from large landlords to peasants, promoting a relatively even distribution. This shift helped empower rural households, boosting education and enabling the broader industrialization that fueled East Asian growth. By contrast, on the Korean peninsula, North Korea collectivized land, while South Korea distributed small plots to tenants for a price; the different approaches led to divergent development trajectories for agriculture and the economy.

The author warns that land power is not confined to the past. Climate change is squeezing arable land and demand for minerals is rising, which could rekindle global land grabs. He cites examples such as discussions around annexing Greenland and ongoing resource-ownership disputes in parts of South America to illustrate that land remains a potent instrument of power.

For U.S. readers, the work matters beyond Korea because land politics intersect with global supply chains, energy and mineral markets, and national security. Understanding how land ownership has shaped or distorted development helps explain contemporary geopolitical flashpoints, the resilience of certain value chains, and the policy choices that influence international stability.

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