Land use in Laeral

Land use in Laeral refers to the history and practices of the use of land by humans in Laeral. This encompasses periods of Rén Laeralite land tenure, land appropriation by Arrivée settlers during the colonial and First Allied Provinces periods, land reform during Laeral's Republican Era, and increased urbanization and agricultural consolidation from the mid-20th century to the modern day. Scholars have used the history of land use in Laeral to explore topics ranging from sociology and race relations to sectionalism and economic and political development.

History

This section is excerpted from Noël Lavoie-Zhao's chapter "Land Use in Laeral: An Introduction", in the academic anthology Pure Earth, Dirty Hands: Contrasting Narratives of Dispossession, Reclamation, and Stewardship in Laeralian Land Tenure (Salaun University Press, 2014). Since 2010, Dr. Lavoie-Zhao has been the Anatole Marchand Professor of History at Althea City University.

Colonial Era

An anti-slavery engraving depicting dozens of enslaved people being forcibly brought to a plantation in Laeral's Riverlands region, circa 1830. The central figure, being manhandled by an overseer, recalls his family's farewell.

During the colonial era, determining possession of agricultural land, particularly in the fertile Eastern Riverlands, Althea, and the Beuvron River Valley, was a central function of government. After the 1807 DeBarre Line was created, marking off the initial bounds of Arrivée settlement, land west of the line was declared property of the ducal government to apportion as it saw fit. Mass land auctions throughout the early 1800s saw gentlemen speculators as the chief beneficiaries. The most fertile land, often irrigated by centuries-old channels and the site of continuous farming for millennia, was parceled into large plantation domains owned by individual highborn households, operated for profit through the production of wheat, tobacco, rice, indigo, tea, or other crops. Laws against "squatting" and "vagrancy," leveled against Rén families who sought to remain on their land, carried the sentence of compulsory service as agricultural laborers on the local plantation. The penalty for taking up arms against the state was also often serfdom, often for entire villages or regions, and so by 1845, the dawn of the Laeralian War of Independence, an estimated 900,000 Rén and Metice people were enslaved on plantations. Slavery in the colonial Laeralian context, however, was not an inherited status, although it was a racialized one: those born to enslaved laborers were born free, but Arrivée were never enslaved.

Perhaps 60% of land area—primarily that which had been cleared and was suitable for large-scale agriculture—was parcelled out between plantations. Much of the remaining land, particularly that which was less hospitable for farming, was owned by small farmers, Rén, Arrivée, and Metice alike. Villages served as a site for cross-racial social interactions: marketplaces, smiths, inns, and the like fostered growing linguistic and cultural exchange. This included the emergence of Laeralian Creole, a polyglot mixture of French and Mandarin which would persist among the largely illiterate population until the standardization of language in the Republican era. The taboo against miscegenation was also transgressed more often at the village level, particularly between transient laborers who had migrated away from the growing expanse of plantation land. It was these villages which were rightfully called, if not the cradle of the war of independence, at least its nursery.

Corvée forced laborers in the Xianhai peninsula clearing a road in the aftermath of a landslide.

For free and enslaved Rén alike, the chief interaction with the colonial state was through corvée, forced state labor for a period of one month each year. Instituted as a means of conducting labor-intensive infrastructure upkeep and construction, corvée occurred on a rotating basis based on birth month, so as to minimize disruption to the harvest; for this reason, the colonial state's register of births are a treasure trove for modern historians and genealogists. The construction of roads was a constant preoccupation of the colonial state, seeing as they were essential for transport of goods and movement of soldiers outside of the navigable waterways (the few railroads built in Laeral during the colonial era, totaling less than 120 kilometers, were built exclusively with Arrivée labor). Typical corvée duties included excavating roads after flooding and mudslides, paving roads, and breaking ground for new roads, although in certain locales corvée labor also built government buildings and waystations. Corvée labor was widely despised: it was backbreaking, all-day work for which any rural Rén man between the ages of 15 and 35 would typically be relocated to a work camp and separated from their families for a four week period annually. Payment was nominal and conditions at work camps poor, with strict discipline enforced at the end of a whip or truncheon.

Cities, chief among them Althea, St. Clair, Marist, and Lyrene, offered the greatest opportunities for social mobility. Going to sea or joining a fisherman's crew was one avenue of escape: on the open seas, few cared the complexion of a man's skin as long as his arms were suited for hauling nets or whaling. The cities saw the emergence of the Laeralian middle class, typically merchants or artisans producing goods for consumption by the nobility. The ducal court was well known for its patronage of the arts and its fondness for fine cuisine, while the seasonal migration between Althea and Marist established by Duke Armand meant that thriving artisan communities sprung up in both cities. Factories were established in limited numbers in urban centers (with the exception of Althea, where strict urban beautification regulations forestalled the erection of smokestacks), including textile mills and brick and steel foundries, typically with the patronage of an interested consortium or individual member of the nobility. Migrants from surrounding rural areas were often the only ones willing to accept factories' beastly conditions; the phenomenon of rural migration to the city spurred the creation of Rén fraternal organizations and women's support circles as well as the first labor unions, inspired by examples from abroad. Regardless, by 1848 industrialization had touched the lives of only a bare amount of the Laeralian people. The majority of the population would remain rural and impoverished, as peasant freeholders, sharecroppers, slaves, or migrant workers, until well after the War of Independence.

First Allied Provinces

The Laeralian War of Independence would upset patterns of land use in the ruralities. The plantation estates had been the sight of great bloodshed during the war, as the formerly enslaved took vengeance on their captors, and the vast majority of the Arrivée nobility had fled northward to what would become the rump state of High Fells. On some plantations, the Rén enslaved workforce had taken up subsistence farming, while other estates lay fallow for lack of hands to cultivate them. Military pronouncements during the war, such as General G. E. Lematre's Field Order 18, had established a precedent that land tenants and the formerly enslaved were to be permitted to stay on this land.

This precedent, however, was not followed by the revolutionary government following the war. Faced with an inability to print enough money to provide back pay to soldiers of the Free Army, many of whom had withstood months of delayed pay, the provisional government's Act No. 14 ("A law on landholdings and tenancy") ordered plantation land seized, appraised, and turned over to Free Army veterans in lieu of cash payments. For most veterans, the choice was simple: between cash payments in the rapidly-depreciating Laeralian mark or a tract of land of proven productivity, most Free Army men took the opportunity to achieve land ownership. Based on name analysis, an estimated 30% of the roughly 28,000 Free Army veterans who received land were Rén.

Arrivée sharecroppers harvesting wheat under supervision, in an 1857 painting by Auguste de Lemartine, famed for his depictions of agrarian life.

This act of land redistribution transformed Laeralian society by massively enlarging the class of economically self-sufficient peasantry. The newly created landed peasantry, nearly all eligible to vote under franchise restrictions of the time, were a powerful interest group lauded in popular culture and political writings as the backbone of the nation. The rosy image of a nation of salt-of-the-earth independent farmers, however, was deeply flawed. The landed farmer class was never more than a large minority of Laeralites; the majority of peasants remained sharecroppers for these landed farmers or squatters on undesirable land, farming continually for survival.

As immigration and natural population growth swelled the population to over 10 million Laeralites, competition for land pushed Laeral's boundaries westward. At this juncture, it's appropriate to consider the nature of the Laeralian frontier during the 1860s and 70s.

During the colonial era, the DeBarre Line, seen on maps at slightly west of the Beuvron River, had defined the theoretical westward borders of government control. The line had been proclaimed during the reign of Duke Armand, and shaped patterns of population settlement despite existing only on paper. Through a series of treaties with the squabbling Minjian kingdoms and satrapies west of the line, the colonial government in Althea maintained relative peace on the frontier. However, following independence, Laeralian public opinion massively favored the legalization of westward expansion, rooted in mythicized and anti-Minjian conceptions of the frontier as a land of rich agricultural land suffering under weak and brutish rule.

Provincial militias hoping to secure territory advanced westward, carrying out a mission termed by historians as "subnational colonialism" — provincial militias, backed by the provincial government and the backing of provincial elites, seized territory by force of arms in brief campaigns often lasting only weeks, only to subsequently seek their fait accompli recognized by the national government. These feats of territorial acquisition sparked a lucrative industry in adventurers, both Laeralian and foreign-born, traveling from province to province offering their services to provincial governments in lucrative territorial-acquisition operations. By and large, these expeditions were successful in sparking short and victorious conflicts, with rare exceptions where canny Rén leaders took advantage of Laeralian overconfidence to defeat provincial militia forces and secure the status quo ante bellum.