Capitalism, Land and Water: A World History: 1848 to the present

The choice of how we allocate land and water shapes famine, drought, war, homelessness and poverty. Over the centuries, utopians and empires have looked to very different systems of allocation, from village communalism to plantation systems to state provision of infrastructure to free-market systems. While an economist or political scientist might study these regimes through abstraction, the historian dives into the social context of different systems, reading government documents, social protests, as well as architecture, maps, and the landscape itself, as an archive that testifies as to the nature of consent, participation, and resistance in a political system.