Some of the earliest surviving written words describe a land dispute in ancient Sumeria, a testament to the importance of land and who owns it in human history. Economist reporter Mike Bird argues in his book The Land Trap that the the scarcity, immobility, and permanence of land has made it a unique and integral part of political economy since those earliest clay tablets were created. The titular land trap he identifies is that the economic and financial power of land can unlock tremendous prosperity but also create intractable social and political problems for those governing it if not managed properly.

Singapore receives strong marks from him based on the government’s ability to use the world’s oldest asset to create stable prosperity and avoid the speculative bubbles that plagued Japan in the latter half of the 20th century and have emerged in China more recently. They accomplished this by separating ownership from tenure through a law that allowed the government to buy out prior owners at below market rates on the argument that rewarding land owners for publicly financed developments that raised its value does not build sustainable prosperity. Instead, the government embarked on a social housing project that enables long term tenancy without the accumulation of large land holdings as have cropped up in Hong Kong and China or the land price bubble that has dragged down Japan’s economic growth since it popped.

His description of the “confiscatory” but ultimately productive seizure of land in Singapore stands in stark contrast to his lack of interest in how the American revolutionaries went about displacing North America’s indigenous inhabitants. By his telling, colonists could see the opportunities presented by the land itself and fought the British to exploit it albeit in “sometimes violent” ways against native peoples. Then we flash forward a century where the likes of Henry George put forward land taxation as the “frontier” was closing with literally no discussion of the process by which the transfer of ownership took place.

His error is a typical in histories of America’s shift from colonial rebellion to settler expansion: the concern for white settler interests at the expense of others and the rather lofty terms used to describe what was in reality a violent process of genocidal dispossession:

Land speculation was much more than a moneymaking scheme. The egalitarian and prosperous world the colonists had pioneered, and by extension the American concepts of freedom that had emerged, only really worked if the residents had high levels of land ownership.

He can hardly be singled out for this selective history, but it is glaring nonetheless given that Native scholars like Vine Deloria have long ago published ample evidence of the violence and duplicity that shaped this “American concept of freedom”. Writers like J Sakai or CLR James could hardly quibble with Bird’s assertion about land’s importance to the story of America’s founding or its present day wealth. They or anyone who’s read them would just have the good sense to recognize it was “egalitarian” in only a very limited (i.e. racist) sense.

There are many questions I thought about while reading mainly because I realized eventually he had no intent on considering them. What is the value of land that might be restored to the control of native people based on treaties abrogated by the US? What role might land play in calculating reparations owed to Black people for the brutality of chattel slavery? How much present day wealth of white Americans today can be traced back to this disposession? What role might reforming land ownership play in forging a more just future? Unfortunately, the only discussion of the present day implications is a lament over the cost of building housing in northern California. Talk about a closed frontier!

For a book all about land, there’s little coverage of how European empires or their American descendants expanded across the world. In his telling, the wealth accumulated by European colonies throughout the middle of the second millenium was not extracted but produced through some regime of land tenure that goes almost entirely unexamined until the colonial powers leave. The only exception is his positive view of the land policy that Singapore inherited from their British forefathers. One is left to wonder what happened in all those other lands upon which the sun never set.

Instead of a new history of land around the world, Bird stretches a detailed examination of land policies in Asia into a far grander theory of land through the ages without delving deep enough into other areas to render it convincing.

The land trap : a new history of the world’s oldest asset / Mike Bird. -Penguin (2025)