Apartheid

4. Land
187
Land dispossession and confiscation can be described as gross human rights
violations, because land is not only a contributor to economic development, but also to
cultural and personal development, whereby individuals and groups acquire a sense of identity
and belonging. 383 Land segregation (through confiscation) is a necessary and sufficient
condition for racial segregation and difference, as it is the physical parameter which divides
people.
During the last 5,000 years, agriculture has been a continuously shrinking part of the
economy of civilized society. Metallurgy, the manufacture of consumer goods other than
food, war, tourism, money laundering, improvements in transport, energy transformation
systems, communications technologies and a host of other developments have taken turns in
becoming the mainstay of economies, progressively shrinking the role of agriculture to below
5 per cent of the current GDPs of industrialized countries. Lately, we have been using new
terms to describe the societies we live in, e.g. ‘industrialized’, ‘atomic’, ‘information’
societies, all the while forgetting that our food, the real bottom line of society, still comes
from agriculture. Not until we produce most of our food synthetically in factories will we in
fact move out of agricultural society in this physical sense and into a truly industrial or
otherwise post-agricultural society.
A glance out of the window of an airliner at normal cruising altitude will also quickly
remind us that we do still live in agricultural societies. Apart from providing us with almost
all the food we need and consume, agriculture also still takes up more space than any other
man-made invention or activity. In this sense, agriculture and the question of who owns the
land takes on added significance, beyond the mere statistics of economists. The Lebensraum
(space to live), which often motivates and often becomes an excuse for genocide and ethnic
cleansing, is yet another aspect of land that is not recognized enough in recent economics,
even in political economics. 384 Land expropriation is also a gross human rights violation
because it can and in many cases does make the dispossessed starve and suffer severely in
other ways.
In all three regions that I chose to study here, land was lost by the natives as a result of
the occupier being more advanced militarily. The forms that the conquests took on the ground,
however, vary from case to case and over time.
4.1. ‘Clearing’ Land and Facilities for the Immigrants
All of Egypt simply became ‘crown land’, i.e. personal property of the Ptolemaic
kings and queens, although the economic aspect of land was more complicated than that. With
a mercantilist system – an ultimately state-controlled economy with many additional
characteristics of a market economy – Ptolemaic Egypt’s main mode of exploitation was
fiscal. In an initial, radical land reform, the king handed out farmland to Greek soldiers, who
in turn usually became landlords to the in situ Egyptian tenants or serfs, who were then forced
to pay land-rent to the landlords and taxes to the state. Not unlike European serfs centuries
later, many Egyptian workers were prohibited from travelling anywhere, at least during some
parts of the year. The Ptolemies also used mercenaries, many of them Jews, in their armed
forces and gave them grants of land, as well. 385
In many instances, the land was probably not taken in a formal sense from the
Egyptians, but from the previous Persian occupiers. We know, however, that the capital,
383 Cf. Lester 1996: 8ff.
384 Löwstedt 1995: 77-80
385 Koch 1993: 488; Bowman 1996 (1986): 123; Clauss 2003: 72; Billows: Kings and Colonists: Aspects of
Macedonian Imperialism, 1995: 169ff; Hölbl calls Ptolemaic Egypt ‘the first known example of true state
mercantilism’, Hölbl 2001 (1994): 28. Clauss 2003: 70-72, however, calls the Ptolemaic system a ‘plan
economy’ due to its state monopolies on numerous branches of production and trade.