Chapter Six
Seen from the high-definition cameras in the satellites used by Google Earth, the mountains of Sarawak that sprawl across the northern third of the island of Borneo make a lumpy, chaotic jumble. It is easy to understand why the indigenous inhabitants used to believe the land was formed when its creator idly crumpled it up like paper and dropped it into the ocean. What the cameras cannot show is that the gigantic range was until the 1980s still shrouded by dense tropical forest almost down to the coastal plain. When I went there in 1982, the trees covered more than 70 percent of Sarawak, providing a habitat for orangutans and proboscis monkeys, and a home for more than 150,000 native inhabitants, among them as many as 100,000 Iban.
The Iban were admired for their enterprise and good looks, and notorious for having been headhunters. The shock of waking up in the dark light of predawn on my first morning in an Iban longhouse deep in the jungle remains vivid: hanging a few feet above me were what looked first like three globes, then hollow soccer balls, a few blinks more and they became ivory carvings, then finally unmistakably three human skulls.
Although the practice was supposed to have ended early in the twentieth century, Japanese soldiers became a target in the Second World War, and in the 1960s, when Communist insurgents from Indonesia crossed the border, Iban scouts working with British Special Forces repeatedly took the heads of enemies they killed. Their motive was simple: a severed head possessed incredible sex appeal. It gave any headhunter such potent celebrity, every woman desired him—in 1945 a Sarawak newspaper commented disapprovingly on the way “the girls change into little furies of excitement when a fresh [Japanese] head is brought in”—and even more importantly the earth itself responded by producing richer crops.
Iban legends explained why fertility was associated with a severed head. Epic songs chanted by professional bards—I heard one that lasted for three days and two nights—described in mythic terms how the Iban and their gods invaded Sarawak, coming down its main rivers in the early nineteenth century. By killing the existing inhabitants, the Kayan and Kenyah, the Iban were able to acquire more land, grow more rice, and breed more children. Thus decapitation, harvests, and pregnancy became synonyms for each other, and a verse that apparently told of successful head-taking—
Behold brains ooze out along with layers of fat,
Behold lumps of flesh are strewn on the mat,
Behold hair from human heads is scattered everywhere—
could also serve as a metaphor for a bumper crop of rice.
Apart from the gory details, Iban epic verse, and indeed the ordinary tales told by storytellers to fill the dark hours before sleep, were notable for one particular feature they shared with legends from other preliterate societies. Whether describing journeys, as in Homer’s Odyssey, or the sort of territorial conflicts that ran through the fabulous twelfth-century Irish epic, the Taín Bó Cuaílnge, or the coming of social order like the Ojibwe myths about Hiawatha collected by Henry Schoolcraft in the nineteenth century, these originally oral compositions always weave the naming of specific places into the unfolding tale. Today the stories attract the most interest, rather than the geography they contain. But watching the immediate, lively reaction of Iban listeners to the names of mountains and rivers familiar to them as they heard how gods and heroes of the past traveled through Sarawak, it was plain that place and myth were inextricably entwined.
The best-known contemporary examples of this intense relationship between preliterate people and land naming are the creation songs of Australian Aboriginals. In their public form, they tell how different places, animals, and tribes received their names during the Dreaming at the beginning of time. Each feature of the local landscape is identified with a feat of myth or magic in the songs. The origin of the tribe is described and how its people came to be related to one of the totem creatures, from ants to emus, living in that particular part of the country. The private version for initiates is so minutely related to the landscape that, allegedly, dream songs can guide the singer from northern Australia through the dry interior to its southern coast three thousand miles away. The continent is supposed to be checkered with such songlines.
The association between naming and owning was critical in a famous legal victory won by Eddie Mabo, a Torres Straits Islander, in 1992, against the Australian govenment over ownership of his people’s traditional homeland. Part of his evidence consisted of the relation of people and land contained in the Islanders’ mythic songs, and the customs that they enjoined upon people living there. In a watershed decision in Australian Aboriginal land rights, the judge accepted this oral tradition as an indication that Mabo’s people had a form of property in the lands they had traditionally occupied. The judgment appeared to undermine the common law rights of Australia’s stock farmers to almost half their land, and the political backlash led to legislation overturning the ruling. Nevertheless, the principle that these epic legends incorporate a sense of ownership remains intact in other common law jurisdictions. In 2007, the Supreme Court of British Columbia delivered judgment in favor of the land claims of a hunting group in British Columbia largely on the basis of what the judge called “verbal messages from the past beyond the present generation.” In so doing, they shed a light on the relationship between preliterate cultures and the ground on which they lived.
Until the middle of the seventeenth century, the Irish could look down the green Shannon valley or across to the bare mountains of Connacht and read their features as a record of their past and their imagination. As in Sarawak and Australia, songs and poems of immense length chanted by professional bards told how these names arose. Surveying the fragments that survive in early Irish ballads and legends, the twentieth-century poet Thomas Kinsella was struck by “the continuing preoccupation [with place naming] of early and medieval Irish literature.” And he himself provided an electrifying example in his translation of the Taín Bó Cuaílnge.
Compiled in the twelfth century from earlier sources, the poem ostensibly tells the story of a cattle raid by Ulster’s warrior chief, Cuchulainn, against his neighbors. But its narrative is woven intricately around Ireland’s topography. Even the blood-boltered battle between two bulls that provides the climax of the Táin merely serves as a device to tell how different towns and rivers were named. “At that, the dun-colored bull [the Donn Cuailnge] jerked back his hoof. His leg broke, but the other bull’s horn was sent flying to the mountain nearby. It is called Sliab nAdarca, the Mountain of the Horn [in modern County Offaly], ever since. Then the bulls fought each other for a long time. Night fell upon the men of Ireland and they could only hear the uproar and fury in the darkness.”
The background to this mythic duel was a rapid growth in population and the emergence of a few dominant clans or septs in the ninth and tenth centuries, whose wealth was counted in cattle. Until then, according to the Senchus Mor or Great Book of the Law, the source-book for Brehon lawyers, also compiled in the twelfth century, no boundaries had been necessary: “there was not ditch, nor fence, nor stonewall round land . . . but [only] smooth fields.” Thus as the bulls battled across northern Ireland, they not only baptized mountains, rivers, valleys, lakes, and fields with blood and guts, but allowed the bard to claim these features for his audience. When the victorious bull tosses the loser’s loins into a river-crossing, the Taín declares “that is how the place was named Ath Luain, the Ford of the Loins [modern Athlone] . . . He [the bull] drank again at Tromma where [the loser’s] liver fell from his two horns—from which comes the name Tromma, or liver.” The gothic violence of these stories made them memorable, and with their help the entire country became a mnemonic that enabled a people to recall who they were and how the land came to be theirs.
The colonists in Massachusetts Bay discovered a similar characteristic among the remnants of the Wampanaog living there. Every place was named, and simply to say the name united the speaker to the place. The trait caught the attention of Edward Winslow, author of the 1624 Good Newes from New England, who learned the language of the Wampanaog and became the trusted friend of their sachem, or leader, Massasoit. Hills and streams were identified by their association with past events such as a battle or a famous hunt, and so important was this geographical reminder that where something extraordinary had occurred and no physical feature was prominent, the Wampanaog would commemorate the event by digging a round hole nearby so that later it would jog their memory. The holes were maintained and kept free of undergrowth, Winslow explained, because they served as “Records and Chronicles . . . by which means many things of great Antiquity are fresh in memory.”
In Virginia, John Lederer recorded a different kind of memory aid that the Chesapeake Bay Indians built into the landscape. “Where a Battel has been fought, or a Colony seated” he wrote in 1672, “they raise a small Pyramid of these stones, consisting of the number slain or transplanted.” According to the book of Joshua, the very same kind of reminder was used by the Israelites. Having escaped from Egypt and after forty years’ nomadic wandering in the desert, they crossed the Jordan in the first step toward acquiring the land of Canaan for themselves. As they went over the river, each of the twelve tribes took a stone, and “those twelve stones which they took out of Jordan, did Joshua pitch in Gilgal. And he spake unto the children of Israel, saying, When your children shall ask their father in time to come, saying, What mean these stones? Then ye shall let your children know, saying, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land.”
The oral origin of these earliest books of the Old Testament is evident in the way the book of Joshua describes how the Israelites smote, slew, and massacred the original occupants of Canaan, such as the Amorites, Hittites, Jebusites, and others. In the repetitious phrasing characteristic of oral epics in particular and folk ballads in general, what must once have been a chant or song describes their fate: “And that day Joshua took Makkedah, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof he utterly destroyed, them, and all the souls that were therein; he let none remain.” No fewer than thirty-one cities are attacked, each one is named, and each falls to Joshua in the same way: “he smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein; he let none remain.”
In reality, as is apparent elsewhere in the text, supposedly slain Canaanites survived in large enough numbers to fight and marry generations of Israelites. Nevertheless, there was a point to this mythic extermination, just as there was to the Iban’s headhunting epics: the elimination of the original occupants showed that the victorious newcomers had the right to take possession of the land. And when Joshua divides up the country between the tribes of Israel, the boundaries are denoted in a long list of place names, liberally spattered with gory details to fix them in memory. With the bloodthirsty book of Joshua as his guide, an Israelite bard might have sung himself from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
In his poem “The Gift Outright,” Robert Frost wrote of the way the land of the United States made its colonial settlers American. It did so by possession, both in the sense of being owned by them, but more powerfully by possessing them when they gave their lives for it. Imagining the unexplored West, Frost described it as “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,” adjectives that ignored the intensity of myth, magic, and memory woven round the land by the Iroquois, the Mi’kmaq, or the Ojibwe. Nevertheless, it remains true that through stories, arts, and improvements the earth does come to inhabit its inhabitants, newcomers and natives alike. For preliterate people, however, undistracted by documents and artificial records, the land was the story.
In the 1980s, the traditional Iban living high in the mountains where the rivers of Sarawak have their source still practiced what anthropologists call “slash-and-burn” agriculture, clearing a few acres of forest each year to plant rice, then moving on. But they too had a clear sense of ownership. In the longhouse where I stayed near the head of the Bangkit River, the seventeen different families spent hours animatedly discussing where each intended to clear the trees for next season’s rice. Twelve years had passed since they last farmed in that area, and secondary jungle had obliterated their fields, but adat or customary law held that those who wanted to use the same land as before had prior rights to do so.
Adat had one goal above all others, the maintenance of social harmony within the contiguous line of dwellings that made up a longhouse. It was made up of tradition, myths, religion, and the results of augury by dreams and such natural events as the flight of a bird or the call of a deer. The Iban were notable for their drive and enterprise, and the purpose of adat was not to eliminate personal ambition but to accommodate it.
The clearest example of the way this worked was when Langga, the forceful, powerfully built, thirty-year-old headman of the longhouse, decided to cultivate an untouched section of virgin forest where the trees would be harder to fell, but the soil would be more productive. To establish a claim to new ground, he needed the acceptance of both the longhouse and the jungle itself. Although they did not oppose him, the other families felt he was taking an unnecessary risk for which they feared, and some half-hoped, he might be punished by the spirits of the jungle. Aware of their attitude, Langga made it clear that he did not welcome my alien presence when he went to claim his new farm, but I was determined to witness what was by then a rare event. As it turned out, we were both rewarded.
Once Langga had marked off the land he proposed to clear, setting his family’s whetstones at the center and their boundary sticks at the perimeter, he arranged on the bare forest floor separate offerings of rice, eggs, and tobacco to Singalang Burong, the god of the earth who actually possessed it, and to Pulang Gana, the god of the harvest who oversaw its produce. Then under the heavy jungle canopy, he began to call for Singalang Burong’s blessing on his endeavors, and as he did so, a finger-thick, diamond-patterned snake detached itself from a branch and slithered toward the food, its blunt head weaving back and forth. Such an exceptional sign could not be ignored. Immediately Langga switched from invoking the god’s assistance to speaking on behalf of the god to announce that he had sent a messenger to bless his farm. “You will gain great wealth,” said the god, speaking in Langga’s voice but with extraordinary fierceness and excitement, “and you will be known through the land.” Whatever anxieties he might have had were swept aside by this wave of pride and confidence.
Social harmony was one thing, the desire to be extraordinary was another. And Iban adat always recognized both. Precepts designed to promote a harmonious society went into abeyance when someone experienced a favorable omen, had an auspicious dream, or best of all came home with a severed head. The Iban were not alone in their need to reconcile these conflicting priorities. It was central to the rules of land ownership in widely different peasant societies around the world.
Following the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867, Karl Marx turned his attention to this very question, the way that land was owned in early societies. He wanted to show that before feudalism was imposed the land was communally owned. Restricted to London by poverty and the discomfort of boils on his bottom, he commissioned his friend, the wealthy industrialist Friederich Engels, known as “dear Fred,” to investigate records of Ireland’s medieval Brehon laws held in Manchester’s public libraries in northwestern England. In November 1869, Fred wrote excitedly to Marx, “The tracts show clearly that, in Anno 1600 common ownership of land still existed in full force.”
Engels based this conclusion on the research of Sir John Davies, the English poet and attorney-general who supervised the first mass introduction of private ownership of land to Ireland in the early seventeenth century. In the five previous centuries, since Norman knights first crossed from England to invade Ireland, successive waves of English incomers had been absorbed into Irish society. The children of foreigners like the Fitzgeralds and Butlers grew up speaking Gaelic and grafted their ideas of feudal tenure onto the tribal ownership of land inherent in traditional Brehon law. Thus territory nominally held by a sept or clan such as the O’Neills in Ulster and the O’Connors around Dublin was divided into strips of land that were allocated to families within the sept according to their importance and the service they rendered. Beginning in the 1560s, however, this feudalized sept-owning structure was broken apart by the arrival of a new breed of Protestant, individual-owning English invader. The lands confiscated from the sept chiefs in Munster, Dublin, and Ulster were designated “plantations” and leased out to English and Scottish colonists who held them under English common law. It was this stage in 1603 that Davies described in his report on traditional land holdings in Ireland.
The discovery that Brehon law was apparently concerned with communal ownership inspired Marx to further research, and his “Ethnographic Notes” are filled with crosscultural comparisons with Indian, Scottish, and above all Irish landowning customs. Around the world, he found similar tendencies toward community-controlled use of the land. Through customary law, village councils, or group pressure, these societies felt able to impose rules for use of the land on the families or individuals who worked the soil. Some rules, such as limiting the number of animals that could graze common pastures, were designed to prevent its despoliation, but the most important had another purpose. The strips of arable land where wheat and corn were grown, and the pasture meadows where hay was made, and the areas of woodland where they took timber and fruit, all these were to be redistributed every few years so that each family got a fair chance to enjoy the best and worst land.
To Marx’s eye, the material not only revealed how widespread these egalitarian values were among early cultures, but how over time they were undermined to benefit the more powerful members of society. In Scotland whole clans were enslaved to serve more powerful neighbors; jumped-up Irish cattle ranchers, known as Bo-Aire or “cow lords,” grew rich “through obtaining the use of large portions of tribe-land”; low-caste Indian farmers were evicted from their land by powerful Brahmins. His prejudice was encouraged by reading Ancient Society, the groundbreaking study of Native American culture by the anthropologist Lewis Morgan.
Bewitched by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution presented in The Origin of Species in 1859, Morgan argued that all societies evolve through different stages of complexity, from savagery through barbarism to civilization. Beginning with a time when people lived in a kind of communal soup sharing land, sex, children, and goods, he theorized that first matrilinear tribal patterns emerged, then patriarchal family distinctions with an accompanying change in ownership of land toward feudal ownership. It was a thesis that Marx embraced wholeheartedly since it apparently showed communal ownership to have been a natural state overthrown in the interests of the most powerful.
Perhaps deliberately as the most secular of Jews, Marx did not include in his research the well-recorded efforts of the Israelites to construct an egalitarian state three thousand years ago. Once they had crossed the Jordan into Canaan, the land whose boundaries had been so minutely described in the book of Joshua was shared out among the families of each tribe. But, as the book of Leviticus made clear, it was understood that after time an individual might have “waxen poor, and [have] sold away some of his possession.” Nevertheless, because the earth itself belonged to Yahweh, such deals were not final—“The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” And after forty-nine years the law stipulated that all debts and sales of land were to be canceled and the right to work the ground returned to the original owners. In this way the frontierland conditions that existed at the time of conquest would also be restored.
Despite the obvious difficulties involved, the jubilee, as Leviticus described it, may have been observed in some form for several centuries after the settlement of the Israelites in about 1400 BC. The Jews’ commitment to equality must have marked out their society among the hierarchical kingdoms of the Middle East more distinctly even than their diet or often-wavering faith. Instead of reverence for kings, their social duty was to care for orphans and widows, and in the words of their most ancient writings, the Psalms, to “raise the poor from the dust, and lift the needy from the ash-heap.” But as the formerly desert people transformed themselves into settled farmers, the jubilee fell out of favor. Without redistribution, the most efficient cultivators were not only able to add to their holdings of vineyards, olive groves, pastures, and animals, but could pass them on to the next generation, consolidating their prosperity and social status.
According to the later prophets, the cause of Israel’s woes lay in its abandonment of the old egalitarian principles concerning use of the land, both the jubilee and a requirement that every seventh year the soil be left fallow for a year. When the Jews were conquered and sent to Babylon in 605 BC, Jeremiah predicted an exile of seventy years to make up for the seventy fallow sabbaths they had failed to observe, a timespan equivalent to 490 years. During the absence of the Jews from the territory they had once occupied, the soil so greedily accumulated resumed its god-owned status. “The land enjoyed its sabbath rests,” the book of Chronicles recorded; “all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfilment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah.”
The Russian Empire offered Marx a more appealing illustration of this ingrained urge to use the land fairly. Although serfdom existed in Russia until 1865, and nearly all the land was owned by the tsar and his nobles, more than half of it was actually administered by the mir or village commune to which all peasants belonged. Conditions varied hugely from the frozen forests of the north, where serfdom barely existed, to the rich black soil in the Volga and Dnieper valleys, but everywhere the power of the mir was such that, like the Irish sept, it could redistribute land not just to meet the needs of families as they grew larger or smaller, but to preserve equality, to ensure that no single family could monopolize the best soil to the detriment of others.
The evidence of communal ownership of land administered by communal government for egalitarian purposes led Marx to a momentous ideological decision in the last year of his life. After a career devoted to mapping out the iron law of economic evolution by which feudalism developed into industrialized capitalism, and capitalism inevitably collapsed through overproduction into socialist revolution leading to the establishment of the proletarian state, he decided that a country might be able to short-circuit the entire process and jump straight from communal land ownership to revolution. In the preface to the Russian translation of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1882, he wrote, “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.” This single sentence was to reverberate through history. From Marx’s guarded assurance that Communism might come about before the rural economy of Russia had been industrialized, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin drew the assurance he needed to plan both the 1917 revolution and the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, events that would set the world’s agenda for the second half of the twentieth century.
By a double irony, however, it is apparent, even from the data that Marx himself collected, that his evolutionary interpretation is simply wrong. What his research revealed, and modern anthropology confirms, was not a chronological development, with the equitable distribution of land progressively destroyed by selfish family ambition, but an uneasy equilibrium that occurred in a variety of forms in different countries, sometimes lasting for centuries.
Running through Brehon law, for example, was the assumption that some families would always try to escape redistribution, that if successful they could accumulate wealth both by employing fuidhir, or landless workers, and by making vassals of freemen by lending them cattle, and that over generations, if they could hold onto their land and their stock, a once-poor family might rise to provide the chief of the sept. The remit of Brehon lawyers was not to prevent this, but to ensure that it happened justly. As late as the eighteenth century, almost a thousand years after Irish families first began to enclose land as their own according to the Senchus Mor, a visitor to Westmeath near Dublin still found strips of ground being redistributed among different families: “The utmost care was taken by joining together in one share, plots good and bad from different quarters of the field, that the shares might be of exactly the same value.”
Marx himself noted that in his own day Allmenden or commons regulations still dictated the periodic reallocation of communal land in German cantons in Switzerland on grounds of need and fairness, even though peasants there had also owned the right to inherit and pass on use of their land for more than two hundred years. And in the Russian Empire, the mir’s policy of egalitarian redistribution took place against the constant pressure of ambitious serfs to negotiate better terms of service for the use of their horses and plows, and to acquire skills such as carpentry that could be sold for cash. Known pejoratively as iron fists or kulaki, successful serfs could employ poorer neighbors to fulfil their labor duties, while they earned more money for themselves to the point where the wealthiest were often richer than the poorest nobles. These twin tendencies survived centuries of serfdom, the shock of emancipation in 1865, and a few decades of private property, until the mir itself was wiped out, with tragic irony, by Lenin’s collectivization of Russia’s farms.
Among the Wampanaog, who not only hunted and fished but raised corn, squash, and beans, Edward Winslow insisted “Every Sachem knoweth how far the bounds and limits of his own Country extendeth, and that is his own proper inheritance; out of that if any of his men desire land to set their corn, he giveth them as much as they can use, and sets them their bounds.” Since hunters also gave the sachem a portion of any deer they killed within those bounds, he clearly exercised some degree of overall ownership. But the families to whom he granted use of the land evidently also understood that they owned that use.
Roger Williams, perhaps the best educated of the New England colonists, who became fluent in the languages of both the Wampanaog and their more powerful neighbors the Narragansett, believed their property rights were clear enough to be recognized under English common law. “The Natives are very exact and punctuall in the bounds of their Lands,” he wrote in A Key to the Languages of America. “And I have knowne them make bargaine and sale amongst themselves for a small piece, or quantity of Ground.”
Modern anthropology confirms the intricate and infinitely variable forms of family ownership of homes and of the ground nearest them within a generally communal structure of possession. It is possible that even the five-thousand-year-old clay boundary markers from Lagash in Mesopotamia that are some of humanity’s oldest inscribed records may delineate family farms rather than tribal territories. And, Jeremiah notwithstanding, both observance and neglect of the fallow sabbath and the jubilee forgiveness almost certainly coexisted in Israel for centuries before the Babylonian captivity.
However, any form of communal land ownership requires a governing organization that operates with general consent if it is to hold the balance between personal and common interests. This remains true today. Where pasture rights are still held in common, as in crofting communities in the Scottish Highlands, the decisions of the grazing council will bind its members not only to the number of animals, but to the dates when they can be put out to grass and taken in. And in cities, the most maverick condominium owner buys into the belief that on matters such as redecoration of the building or use of the common entrance space, individual preferences must give way to the majority choice of a committee.
This was the function provided in various forms by the tribal sanhedrins of the Israelites, the manor courts of feudal England, the fine, or council, of the sept in Ireland, the mir in imperial Russia, the sachem’s meetings among the Narragansett and other Native Americans, and the longhouse discussions of the Iban. Land was not their only concern, but the earth’s role as the source of food and culture gave such questions a central, even spiritual, importance. The communal resolution of disputes over the use, transfer, and inheritance of land involved relationships with family, neighbors, and outsiders, matters that might be considered personal in a private property society. But the need for social cohesion gave the communal decision even on intimate matters such as religious belief or the marriage of children a sanction of formidable weight—exclusion from the community’s affairs. Even when no formal organization was involved, social ostracism was always a powerful weapon in a rural community, as was demonstrated in Ireland in 1880 when Captain Charles Boycott, a bullying landlord’s agent, was reduced to impotency by the refusal of the community even to talk to him. Few things divide the modern private world more completely from the past than the collegiate nature of tribal and peasant life.
The strength of this culture came from the involvement of each participant in decisions that affected everyone. Hence the long list of Wampanaog and Narragansett names that were added to deeds of sale of tribal land when the British government made formal purchase of land from the Indians mandatory in New England after 1662. But the reverse held equally true, that in the face of really determined opposition, important decisions were often deferred. As Roger Williams noted before the Wampanaog were wiped out, “The sachims . . . will not conclude of ought [agree to anything] that concerns all, either Lawes, or Subsidies, or warres, unto which people are averse, or by gentle perswasion cannot be brought.”
This was and is the Achilles’ heel of communal land ownership. The need for social cohesion made the response to change slow and disjointed. But as Marx repeatedly discovered in his research, it also rendered them vulnerable to manipulation in favor of the most powerful because membership of the ruling bodies was usually earned through social seniority or wealth. Above all, communal systems were almost defenseless against the individualized challenge of private property. The ability of paper-based structures of private property to harness the legal resources of an entire society, to direct them at a particular parcel of ground, and to offer financial rewards for success simply overwhelmed the oral, local, and conservative systems of communal land ownership that stood in their way.
In the late twentieth century, terrorist warnings from paramilitaries of the Provisional Irish Republican Army in northern Ireland that a bomb had been planted were usually authenticated with the pseudonym “P. O’Neill.” This brief signature had an ancient history. It referred back to the Irish uprising that began on October 23, 1641, with a massacre of Protestant settlers initiated by Phelim O’Neill. The date was significant because the killings marked a watershed in Ireland’s history.
Unlike the previous five hundred years of English incursion into Irish affairs, the spread of plantations owned as private, inheritable property posed a threat to the very identity of traditional Ireland. The effects were felt most acutely in the O’Neills’ territory of Ulster where areas of woodland once available for distribution to landless O’Neills were being claimed as private property not just by incoming settlers but by powerful leaders in the sept. The change was exacerbated by the policy of the London government, which attempted to win over potential troublemakers by confiscating communal land then returning it as personal property to the chieftain, Earl Hugh, and his relatives. When the earl and two other Ulster magnates fled in 1607, the old Brehon structure, already undermined, fell apart. Local territorial enmities sparked the 1641 rebellion as much as fear that more Protestants would shortly swell the existing plantations in Ulster and Munster.
Once the rebellion broke out, however, the killing of as many as four thousand men, women, and children of the forty thousand Protestants in the province provoked immediate retaliation against Catholics. During the next decade, atrocities on both sides left Ulster so devastated that Owen Roe O’Neill, a Catholic general, declared that it “not only looks like a desert, but like hell.” In 1649, the carnage reached a climax with the invasion of Oliver Cromwell’s army, and in the next four years the ruthless slaughter of any who resisted his forces added an estimated 167,000 victims to the toll. In the wake of the rebellion, Cromwell’s government imposed both Protestantism and private property on Ireland.
Not only was the estate of every rebel automatically forfeited, but all Catholics, and any Protestants who had not actively demonstrated loyalty to the London government, were ordered to leave their lands and relocate west of the Shannon River, the boundary that divided the province of Connacht from the rest of Ireland. Those who failed to obey were to be hanged, the choice summed up in the savage phrase that they could go “to hell or Connacht.” Although many Catholics stayed where they were, from Ulster in the north to Munster in the south, a great swath of the country was emptied of its traditional owners.
Eighty thousand of them trailed westward, crowds of refugees clutching passports and certificates that entitled them to a smallholding in Connacht. The odd scrap of paper that still survives gives individuality to the mass of wretchednes: “Ignatius Stacpole of Limerick, orphant [orphaned], aged eleven years, flaxen haire, full face, low stature; Katherine Stacpole, orphant, sister to the said Ignatius, aged eight years, flaxen haire, full face; having no substance to relieve themselves.” In their wake came William Petty’s army of surveyors, measuring out the devastated land to be owned as private property.
In 1641, the population of Ireland was thought to number about two million. Twenty years later it had been reduced by between three hundred thousand and, William Petty’s estimate, six hundred thousand people. Traveling through the heart of Ireland in 1653, Colonel Richard Lawrence, an English officer, declared that “a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and see not a living creature, either man, beast or bird.” Not even the famine years of the 1840s caused a greater proportionate loss of life.
About ten thousand colonists from Britain settled in Ireland. Some, like Petty himself, who acquired thirty thousand acres, became great landowners, and their descendants constituted the Protestant aristocracy known as the Ascendancy. Others, especially the soldiers, received nothing more than a smallholding and were gradually absorbed into the surviving Irish society. In both cases, however, they held their land under English common law that recognized a single owner whose exclusive rights would be enforced by the magistrate and, if need be, by the army.
With communal ownership disappeared the bardic schools and the land-reading Brehon law and the power of the sept. Before 1641, Catholics had owned almost two thirds of the land in Ireland, but 90 percent was in the hands of Protestants by 1659. The revolution was complete. Or appeared to be.
Anti-Catholic legislation ensured that Protestant landowners controlled the administration of government in Ireland, enforcing the law, raising taxes, and securing the peace. But they had no political power. As Petty himself objected, the Irish government was controlled from London where English landowners could directly affect its policy. Without political control to protect their property, Irish property owners could not realize the full capital value of their land or secure freedom to export their products to England. “And why should Men endeavour to get Estates, where the Legislative Power is not agreed upon; and where Tricks and Words destroy natural Right and Property?” Petty demanded. “And how should Merchants have Stock, since Trade is prohibited and fetter’d by the Statutes of England?”
By the end of the century, a more benign regime had enabled many Catholics to recover their farms, the population had bounced back to more than two million, and an uneasy peace had descended. According to Harrington’s law, political power in Ireland should have followed property, but so long as London controlled Irish affairs that necessary next step could not be taken. The religious apartheid imposed by British colonial policy provided the flashpoint of tensions, but, as the nineteenth-century famine would make tragically obvious, ownership of the land was the key to Ireland’s destiny.
From a global standpoint, the Irish settlement had a significance that stretched far beyond Britain and Ireland. It proved to be the blueprint for a way of owning the earth that, with some significant variations, would eventually displace millions of people and overwhelm hundreds of indigenous cultures from Newfoundland to New Zealand.
It is possible to regard this cataclysmic change simply as a matter of realpolitik. The land revolution that linked property interests to capital creation brought into being a modern system which archaic societies organized on half-feudal, half-tribal lines were powerless to resist. The disparity was apparent in Ireland where Cromwell and Ireton could keep a professional army in the field for four years and finance the ten-million-pound cost of the campaign with London loans, fully covered by the sale of Irish land. The history of the next two centuries would make it universally obvious that a private property society could harness resources that were not available to societies organized in other ways.
Alternatively, it could be argued on utilitarian grounds that the unhappiness of several million people should be set against the billion or more living happily on the ground once occupied by the victims, with greater freedom from want and suffering than the original inhabitants.
However, these responses are rendered inadequate by Locke’s argument that the right to an exclusive, individual ownership of land was a matter of justice that applied equally to those deprived of their land. The violence of expelling indigenous people and taking the territory that gave them identity as well as feeding them was an injustice that should invalidate the moral argument for private property.
Yet human existence has a moral value, and both the sustenance of the extra lives and the improvement of their quality that were made possible by the change in the way the earth has been owned must be entered into the balance. Throughout their history, too, the inhabitants of private property societies have claimed for themselves a degree of individual freedom unknown in other societies, and measured by our cultural yardstick, that moral autonomy has undoubted value. To the extent that the dispossessed have been able to claim a similar freedom by regaining or being compensated for what they have lost, that also meets Locke’s criterion.
The balance can never be finally struck because a changing present must always be weighed against an unchanging past. But, as even the libertarian Robert Nozick acknowledged, the need to find a moral basis for private property, and indeed for any other society, requires its history to be faced, and an argument made to justify the facts that have been created on the ground. Without that moral basis, a private property society is inherently unstable. The earliest illustration came from Ireland’s history. The latest can be seen in Sarawak.
The site of Langga’s farm some thirty years after he had been promised wealth and fame provides firsthand evidence of the result of a private property invasion. Most of that primary forest, where trees grew to the height of a cathedral, creating a home for the orangutan, the hornbill, and the Iban, had gone. In its place the sun beat down on scrubby grass, a few spindly trunks of secondary woodland, and down the valley, the long succulent green rows of a palm oil plantation. A way of life that depended on divining dreams, reading the omens, and recalling how the Iban came to inhabit their land had become a tourist attraction. If Langga’s name was known, it was because it had been attached to a vacationer’s version of the traditional longhouses that once lined the Bangkit River.
In less than a generation, one of the most rapid land revolutions in history has transformed Sarawak. Under the guidance of Abdul Taib Mahmud, who from 1981 served for thirty years simultaneously as the Malaysian state’s chief minister, finance minister, minister of planning and natural resources, and, until 2008, chairman of the Sarawak Timber Industry Development Corporation, the trees have been changed into almost half a billion cubic meters of plywood and other lumber products, a million hectares of forest have been converted into monoculture plantations growing palm oil trees, and the gigantic Bakun hydro-electric dam, the second largest in the world, will shortly drown another seven hundred square kilometers of forest, home to seven thousand indigenous Penang, Kayan, and Kenyah people, in order to provide electricity for aluminum smelters along the coast a hundred miles away.
In a peculiarly twentieth-century fashion, Taib translated political power into property—using his party’s control of the state government to secure ownership of the land itself. Government organizations took over national interests in the territory, overriding where necessary the Native Customary Rights that recognized possession by indigenous peoples, and then sold off its products, predominantly timber, oil, and natural gas, to gigantic corporations, at least four of which, according to a Bloomberg News report in 2009 “have ties to Taib or his family.” Perhaps the most significant single measure taken by Taib’s government in pushing through these sales was the decision to make surveying a government monopoly, so that any property maps drawn up by the Iban and other forest dwellers would be rendered illegal.
Unmistakable material gains have come from destroying the old way of life and privatizing public resources—living standards for most people in Sarawak have improved dramatically, the state’s economy has grown by an average of 6 percent a year for almost twenty years, and the center of the sleepy capital of Kuching has been transformed by towering concrete citadels, housing international corporations and hotels, that soar above the old fish market. But economic prosperity cannot disguise the political fragility of a system built on a family’s monopoly of power.
Missing from the privatization of Sarawak, as it was from the settlement of Ireland, is the awkward element of social justice that holds a society together. The destitution suffered by formerly land-rich, indigenous communities like the Iban compared to the fabulous wealth of Taib’s friends and relatives—four Sarawak billionaires appear on the latest Forbes rich list—is as manifestly unjust as the exile of Irish landowners to enrich William Petty and his friends. Yet in his criticism of the injustice of English government, Petty showed that he at least half-grasped the concrete importance of what was absent. The connection between social equity and political stability was supplied by his friend James Harrington.
The precedents of Anastasio Somoza’s dynasty in Nicaragua and Ferdinand Marcos’s regime in the Philippines illustrate what happens to a private property system when a family attempts to monopolize its resources. In Harrington’s terms, it must fail because too many competing property interests are created for one family to control, however extended its network of cronies.
Ultimately Sarawak’s new property owners are bound to demand a share of the political power monopolized by the Taib clan to protect their own interests. The uncertainties created by resistance to their demands will erode the security that international trade and the financial industry prize, raising the cost of doing business and diminishing profits. At some point, the resentment of the many despoiled have-nots will coincide with the ambitions of a sufficiently large number of have-not-enoughs to create a more or less viable democratic uprising. One more oligarchy attempting to govern a multiplicity of property owners will then be blown up.