Conflicts over land and territory will likely proliferate as the accelerating climate crisis collides with rising geopolitical tensions. The International Organization for Migration has estimated that between now and 2050, as many as a billion people will be displaced from their homes by the effects of climate change. This is already happening. In many parts of Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, unprecedented peaks of heat, prolonged droughts, more violent storms, and sea-level rise are pushing regions to the limit of ecological viability.

In Europe and North America, media coverage of “climate migrants” encourages the idea that people will move in large numbers to the world’s wealthiest countries. But doors are closing in an era of racialized hostility to migration. The overwhelming majority of people who are forced to leave their homes because of heat, aridity, or deluge will move within the borders of the countries where they live, almost all of them in the so-called global South. Their ability to sustain themselves will depend on access to land.

The political scientist Michael Albertus’s capacious and illuminating Land Power shows that the distribution of land ownership explains a great deal about where wealth and power reside in the world today. At the heart of Albertus’s story is what he calls “the Great Reshuffle”: a planet-spanning redistribution of land that began roughly 200 years ago, driven by the expansion of modern states and empires. During this period, the earth’s human population grew from one billion to eight billion. In many places for the first time, land became scarce and coveted. Its seizure and redistribution locked in patterns of racial domination, gender inequality, and environmental harm—what Albertus considers “the world’s greatest social ills.” But his account is far from fatalistic. As long as states learn from past failures, they can redistribute land in ways that avoid calamities and empower and uplift their citizens.

Societies have been “reshuffling” land for a very long time, at least since the last Ice Age, nearly 12,000 years ago. As one review of the evidence points out, scholars can trace a global “succession of land system regime shifts” back 3,000 years or more, with evidence from every continent of increased land clearance, the domestication of plants and animals, and more extensive cultivation. But the scale and intensity of land use underwent a marked change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leading to an increase in human population, the emergence of new elites enriched by trade and manufacturing, and an expansion in the capacity of states to control land and extract resources. These developments are what Albertus labels the Great Reshuffle. “Our lives today,” he writes, “are determined by the choices that were made when the land shifted hands during the Great Reshuffle.”

What changes catalyzed the transformation of this long-term process into the Great Reshuffle? Here, Albertus relies on a familiar narrative of modernity in which Europe looms large. The French Revolution, in his account, was the “turning point in human history.” Its leaders sanctioned the mass appropriation of lands from the nobility and their distribution to smaller farmers and the urban bourgeoisie. The revolution—and counterrevolutions across Europe—would speed the formation of nation-states in the nineteenth century. European nation-states made new claims on their subjects and their territory, which led to both the greater democratization of access to land and a rise in landlessness among the least powerful in society. Nation-states, he says, “firmed up their borders, established a monopoly on the use of force, and raised standing armies and centralized bureaucracies.”

Albertus’s account neglects the fact that imperial states and kingdoms in Asia did much the same during this period. A generation of scholarship in global history has demonstrated parallel and often comparable trajectories of intensified land use around the early modern world. The Mughal Empire’s hunger for land taxes, for instance, drove an assault on eastern India’s forests in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which redistributed land to pioneer cultivators willing to undertake that work of settlement. Similar incentives simultaneously drew Russian farmers to the forests in the steppes of Central Asia and Chinese settlers to what is now Sichuan Province during the same centuries—land grants, tax relief, and the prospect of land security. To “exhaust the land” was the........

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