Land Reform

Changing who owns farmland and on what terms, whether by breaking up large estates, redistributing land to the people who work it, or converting private holdings into collective or state farms. The pattern runs from the Irish Land Acts beginning in 1870, through the wave of redistribution across newly independent Eastern and Central European states after the First World War, to the Homestead Act's distribution of the American public domain and, at the other end of the spectrum, the Soviet Union's forced collectivization of individual peasant holdings into state-run collectives. Postwar land reform in occupied Japan is one of the field's standard examples of reform credited with raising both agricultural output and rural purchasing power.