Part front matter for Part I Decolonizing; or, the Rome Consensus and the Peasant Origins of World Government

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Global, diffuse, but palpable nevertheless, the problem of displacement became geographically restructured by world empires. Indigenous peoples in Ireland, India, and elsewhere were subjected to rules governing who could own property and how. Native populations were kept in an endless cycle of poverty, near starvation, by these laws. As territory after territory rebelled, Western intellectuals thought they recognized a pattern: peasants were rebelling, demanding that those who tilled the land should own it.

Intellectuals across Europe and North American theorized that peasants would revolt around the globe unless land were redistributed fairly, creating a culture of opportunity for all. The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck’s best-selling novel published in 1931, captures the seriousness of the generation working on global land problems over the decades that followed. The book’s abundant details of rural peasant life reflect conversations with Buck’s then husband, John Lossing Buck, who would later become one of the world’s authorities on land redistribution. In its vivid examination of the constraints that kept one family impoverished, the book offered readers in the West a portrait of the grinding poverty that left a hard-working family of farmers close to starvation. The grim scenarios that Pearl sketched suggested, in between the lines, the reality of the limits that constrained farmers around the world, who could do little to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, so deep were the structures of the poverty in which they labored. Pearl did not describe the remedy, but the details of her novel hinted at it: the Chinese peasant needed roads, technology, and capital. The full theory Pearl alluded to would be published six years later in the form of a monograph by her husband with the title Land Utilization in China (1937). His ideas would shortly be taken up at the FAO, where he became chief of the Land and Water Use Branch. Lossing’s ideas, as well as Pearl’s, formed part of the new Rome Consensus, where Westerners and post-colonial intellectuals collaborated in devising theories for combating poverty in the developing world.

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Part front matter for Part I Decolonizing; or, the Rome Consensus and the Peasant Origins of World Government

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