Colonial Rent

David Smiley

[Reprinted from Progress, January-February 2006]

The strategy of colonial occupation has always been to seize title or, where that is unclear, to proclaim sovereignty, in order to extract rent from the indigenous population, or to clear that population into a progressively smaller and less productive land area to create a labour force, or both.

In Ireland, Elizabethan settlers evicted the locals, leading to an ethnic uprising eventually crushed by Cromwell's ethnic cleansing and the seizure of Ireland's best land for his soldiers. The huge wealth shifts in the form of rent transfers were then held in place by laws against indigenous land ownership or entry to the professions. Then, Malthus's population law, Ricardo's rent law, and a crop failure, pushed the indigenous population below subsistence. One million died and descendents of the two million who emigrated then supported what they saw as freedom fighters and what the English saw as terrorists. There seems to be little, in the agitations of Parnell and O'Connor for Home Rule, in Partition, and in all the subsequent problems in Northern Ireland, which cannot be explained by the land expropriations by the English.

In Latin America, and in Africa culminating in Apartheid, the objective was to secure a supply of cheap labour by forcing populations off their land. Attempts at land reform in Latin America continue to be crushed by powerful local interests, with considerable help from the CIA. In Africa, land reform has been, for the most part, a transfer of rents from one monopolistic institution to another.

In what is usually referred to as Palestine, Israeli land occupations, a form of neo-colonialism supported by the USA, are thought to have raised unemployment there above 50 percent and reduced incomes to around $600 per annum. As always, objectors to this process are labelled freedom fighters or terrorists, depending on who writes their histories.