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American politicians and bureaucrats struggled to reach a consensus about how to respond. On the one hand, despite the longstanding legal right of Americans to claim homesteads, the mandatory redistribution of other people’s private property was decidedly un-American. On the other hand, Washington’s more liberal foreign policy specialists argued that land reform was necessary to make Asian societies fairer and – in the context of an incipient Cold War – less susceptible to the rising tide of communism. (There was no significant body of empirical evidence, as of 1945, to show that land reform would inevitably lead to faster economic growth.) The tensions between the property rights camp and those who viewed land reform as the key to stabilising US allies in Asia were never resolved; this led to a see-sawing of policy for several years, followed by a retreat from support for redistribution despite its manifest successes.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
Around 10,000 BC, before the transition to agriculture, earth was home to about 5–8 million nomadic foragers. By the first century AD, only 1–2 million foragers remained (mainly in Australia, America and Africa), but their numbers were dwarfed by the world’s 250 million farmers.1...
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
In truth, neither the narrative of oppression and exploitation nor that of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ completely matches the facts. The European empires did so many different things on such a large scale, that you can find plenty of examples to support whatever you want to say about them. You think that these empires were evil monstrosities that spread death, oppression and injustice around the world? You could easily fill an encyclopedia with their crimes. You want to argue that they in fact improved the conditions of their subjects with new medicines, better economic conditions and greater security? You could fill another encyclopedia with their achievements. Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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