Italian matron speaks out about overpopulation

Reasonable questions. Where to start? I'm a land-use planning and population sociologist, so I tend to notice these things. I have been writing a book on a subject which leads me to study traditional land tenures, changes during colonisation, and revolutions in Britain and on the continent. I'm not inclined to preview my entire book here, of course, so you will have to be satisfied or dissatisfied with a few info-grabs and refs. Citizenship was originally membership of a community and was defined by land-rights. In a subsistence community, any child born without land would die. There were rules to limit the production or survival of children beyond the capacity of land to provide. Until a few decades into the 20th Century in Australia no-one who did not own land could vote. And British and British colonial women's ability to inherit or own land was compromised between the 11th C and the 1920s - coinciding with their not being able to vote. The Roman Empire started off with about 2% of people citizens and finished up (for a variety of reasons) with about 9% citizens. Citizenship was defined by right to own land, and, not always, right to vote as well. (Women couldn't vote, for instance, but they could own land). Most people in the empire were tenants, serfs or slaves, and could not bequeath their land to their children, only their [lowly] status. You might say that the French revolution was an enlarging of the Roman model rights to all people born to a polity. (More further down.) Note that medieval systems of land-ownership were different from private ownership, but most people were still excluded from dominion over land. God actually owned all the land and the king was his real-estate agent, and he let lords dominate parcels of land and the people on it into perpetuity, and bequeath this, in return for services in time of war. The serfs were the people who provided the means for this system, but they were chattels with some basic rights, like horses. The 1381 Peasants' Revolt, with Wat Tyler and 60,000 landless peasants, in England was a demand for land. Anyone without land was obliged by law to work for anyone with land. People demanded land as their right and as the basis on which to refuse to work for the incumbent landed. (This was after a lot of land became available following the black plague but nobles got the king to make sure that lots of people remained dispossessed and obliged to work for them.) Unfortunately Tyler and his supporters were massacred. The Puritan revolution associated with Cromwell was fought on two levels. The bourgeois who had benefited from Henry VIII's repossession then selling off of the monasteries (which the bourgeoisie had purchased with bullion circulating from South America) wanted more power in parliament. They ultimately beheaded Charles 1 in 1649. However, the Modern Army, led by Cromwell, relied in large part on common soldiers who thought they were fighting for land-rights and voting rights. Famously they were done out of these, even though Cromwell had led them in a massacre against the Irish among others, whose land was divided up for speculators. (Another good reason to revolt). Among the English soldiers were Diggers and Levellers. Both these groups wanted land-rights and voting rights. The Diggers wanted a return to common land and cooperative living. They quoted from the Wat Tyler revolt 261 years prior. The Levellers tended to be land-owners already but landowners who did not have parliamentary representation. None of these people got what they wanted, but Cromwell used them up. Here is a quote from a typical document of the time: Leveller Colonel Rainborough wrote to Cromwell's son-in-law, General Ireton, "For really I think that the poorest he that is in England that a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sur, I thinkt's clear, that every man that is to live under a government out first by his own consent to put himself under that government… I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no, that should doubt of these things." General Ireton replied as follows: "… no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom … that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom'. When pressed, he added this: "All the main thing that I speak for, is because I would have an eye to property. I hope we do not come to contend for victory – but let every man consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property. For here is the case of the most fundamental part of the constitution of the kingdom, which if you take away, you take all by that." "If you admit any man that hath a breath and being, a majority of the Commons might be elected who had no local and permanent interest. … Why may not those men vote against all property?… Show me what you will stop at; wherein you will fence any man in a property by this rule.", E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Pelican, England, 1968. With regard to the French Revolution: Once again, only people with land were citizens with political rights. There were still a lot of serfs in France and those who had bought out their lords, were still saddled with taxes and charges and duties, yet no representation. They fought for these reasons. (Note that the right to inherit and bequeath is fundamental to property rights.) Here is a translation from a document about the situation of the French on the Eve of the Revolution, which I translated from F.A Aulard, La révolution francaise et le régime féodal, Paris, 1919: “They paid tithes [taxes] to the lord. They were not allowed to marry except between serfs of the same lord. They could not have inheritors beyond those in the same community. They could not get rid of their contract of serfdom except to serfs from the same lord In the custom of Nivernais, they could not inherit from each other if during more than one year they had not had the same dwelling. In Burgundy custom, they could no longer inherit from each other, even if they had constantly occupied the same premises, if it could be proved that they no longer lived ‘by a common fire, bread and salt’. Some were ‘under pursuit’. That is to say that they could be pursued by the lord for payment of tithes they owed him, wherever they went to live Serfs could cease to be serfs by unswearing themselves, which [also] meant renouncing the [land], furniture, [tools, buildings which they had inherited from their parents] within the lord’s landholding.” The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was the original document of the first days of the Revolution, precised property as a fundamental right in the 2nd and the 17th article. Article 2: The aim of every political association is the defense of man's natural and imprescriptible rights. These are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression. (Article 2 - Le but de toute association politique est la conservation des droits naturels et imprescriptibles de l’homme. Ces droits sont la liberté, la propriété, la sûreté et la résistance à l’oppression.) Article 17: Property, in as much as it is an inviolate and sacred right, no-one may be deprived of it, unless there is a public necessity, legally constituted, which necessitates it, on condition that there first be paid a fair indemnity. (Article 17 - La propriété étant un droit inviolable et sacré, nul ne peut en être privé, si ce n’est lorsque la nécessité publique, légalement constatée, l’exige évidemment, et sous la condition d’une juste et préalable indemnité.) The French Revolution enlarged citizenship/the right to own and inherit property to all those born in France instead of to just a few families. Women and men could inherit equally. The Napoleonic Code codified this (although it disallowed management of their land by women if there was a man around. Repealed only in the late 20th C.) With regard to the Fijians. As Pacific Islanders they practised Pacific Islander land-tenure - i.e. they did not buy or sell land, although they could lease it. Unlike their treatment of many islanders, the British rulers showed some pity and allowed the Fijians to keep their land-tenure system, as they also allowed the Cook Islanders and a few others. This meant that the Indians and other immigrants who had been imported by the colonisers to provide larger quantities of cheap labour, were unable to buy and sell land. (Many sources, but here is one: "Tenure", in The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society, ed. M. Rapaport, "Tenure": Exerpts from Chapter 17, www.cba.hawaii.edu/pbcp/pdf%20Pac%20studies/tenure.pdf) This meant that Fiji did not get sold off and alienated from the control of the Fijians. For this reason Fijians have land and self-government. It is unfortunate for the Indian Fijians that they do not have land-rights, but, if they did, the island-land would soon be bought and sold internationally and there would be a lot of dispossessed Fijians, just like the Aborigines of Australia and so many other islands in the Pacific. Here is a revealing document about the mentality that imported mass labour to the Islands of the Pacific for colonial purposes and the impact this had. "Depopulation is a distressing reality in most of the islands despite the fact that labour for tropical agriculture is so urgently required; and Asiatics have had to be imported in large numbers. The future development of the islands will demand much labour, but here are the facts about declining populations. In 1870 it was estimated that Polynesia contained 690,000 native people. In 1930 there were about 200,000, but 145,000 Asiatics and 37,000 whites had come in. Melanesia was computed to have three million natives, but recently numbered scarcely one million. Micronesia declined from 273,000 to less than 90,000. In fifty years two-thirds of the native population have disappeared." Gordon L.Wood, The Pacific Basin, OUP, 1930 The struggles in Fiji always boil down to land rights and the Murdoch press keeps getting thrown out of Fiji. My guess (but not my knowledge) is that the Murdoch press infuriates the Fijians because it is always going on about 'democracy' but it is also a big advocate of land-privatisation and just happens to do a lot of business in international land sales. I don't agree with the Murdoch Press's notion of democracy. If I were a Fijian, I would hold onto my land-rights above all else. That is what is at stake if the Fijians 'embrace' "our" version of 'democracy'. You can also read about the struggle to retain communal land-rights in Papua New Guinea, against the constant propaganda from World Bank economists to privatise land and sell it off in Jim Fingleton (Ed.), "Privatising Land in the Pacific, A defence of customary tenures,” June 2005, https://www.tai.org.au/file.php?file=DP80.pdf. I cannot say that I have studied every revolution but I would be most surprised if there were one that did not boil down to struggles between landless and land-monopolists. Communist revolutions are typically about land-rights, with the notion of returning to common-land, but on a huge scale. I guess you could say that the US revolution was about no taxation without representation, but if we were to investigate this, would we also find that representation was only available to those who had land? (I'm not sure here, although I am sure that US citizens have few remaining real rights through citizenship. They have to buy power - health care, land, housing, education etc. Australia is of course going that way too. Land-rights have been commuted to more abstract and less secure rights, such as right to work, right to unemployment benefits - which we now see disappearing - in Anglophone post industrial democracies. And our right to vote has been very watered down, hasn't it, since the media broker the election candidature. In France and Continental Europe (and Britain since 2008) citizens have the right to shelter which the state is obliged to provide. So do immigrants as long as they are legally present in a country. Sheila Newman, population sociologist home page