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When Mexico declared independence in September 1821, Chiapas, along with the rest of Central America, joined the new nation. Then, in 1823, precipitated by the collapse of Iturbide's Mexican Empire, the other former Central American provinces broke away to form the Central American Union. Chiapas, though, chose permanent annexation to the Mexican republic the following year. This chapter is organized as follows. The first section reviews the historiography of other regions of Mexico and Central America during these years in order better to understand the way that history and geography may have influenced political and agrarian relations in Chiapas during the half-century after independence. The second section looks at politics and state-building in Chiapas between 1824 and 1855, focusing on the relationship between regional elites in the central valley and the central highlands, national governments, and Indian communities. The third section provides an overview of commercial agriculture, population, and labour, and analyzes the agrarian laws which were passed in the state in the post-independence period. The fourth section examines the process of land privatization in different regions of Chiapas and the relationship between the alienation of public and communal lands and the spread of agrarian servitude — both labour tenancy (known as baldiaje) and debt peonage. The fifth section addresses the question of why, despite the growing dispossession of communal land, no peasant rebellion emerged in Chiapas during these years, while the next section examines the Labour Tenancy Law of 1849, a short-lived attempt to regulate baldiaje and limit the role of servile labour in commercial agriculture. Finally, the last section looks at the impact in Chiapas of the laws of the Reform and civil conflict between liberals and conservatives in the period 1855–67, and highlights the way in which local political factionalism contributed to Chiapas's Caste War of 1869–70.

This chapter analyses rural opposition to land privatization in the post-Soviet transition era that draws explicit parallels with the resistance by Russian peasants to early twentieth-century government programmes of land reform. It focuses on the failure of the effort to extend the policy of privatization to farmland, and the collapse of marketed output from the agricultural sector's large koholz units.

This chapter considers the agrarian question in Chiapas during the Porfiriato. First, it examines the geographical and financial restrictions faced by rural producers in the state. Second, it analyses quantitative data regarding demography, rural property, investment, output, and labour. Third, it scrutinizes the impact of land legislation and land privatization on rural social relations and agrarian structure. Finally, it addresses historiographical questions regarding the social impact of Porfirian agrarian policy in Chiapas and its role in the Revolution of 1910–20.

Moving from the polis down to its subdivisions, the author looks into landed property managed by the Kleisthenic tribes and the demes. The tribes, an artificial and relatively new institution, were not endowed with vast swaths of land, at least not before the acquisition of Oropos in 335. On the contrary, the demes, acting as mini-poleis, were heavily involved in land administration from their inception. Many deme landholdings were sacred and supported deme cults in a fashion well known at the polis level. Other lands, however, lacked a sacred character. This distinction gives the author the opportunity to examine the structure of the budgets of the Attic demes. Towards the end of the Classical period, Athens initiated a project of land privatization, the so-called Rationes Centesimarum, using the demes as her main selling agents. By depriving the demes of some of their assets, this program arguably undermined the territoriality of many a rural deme.

This chapter examines the process by which land privatization came to exist in Hawai'i. It considers historic changes that affected all of Hawaiian society in the broader context of the history of Hawai'i, along with their repercussions in Hā'ena. In order to elucidate how Hawaiians viewed these changes, the chapter explores the terminology used by Euro-Americans to describe Hawaiian society and compares it to language used by aboriginal people to describe themselves. These terms include maka'āinana, hoa'āina, ali'i, konohiki, and mō'ī. The chapter concludes by analyzing the changing relationships, rights, and responsibilities of landlords and tenants as well as the change from traditional, communal use of 'āina to ownership of land as private property.

The fifth chapter examines the commission’s optimistic yet ambivalent portrayal—in illustrations, maps, and texts—of New Granada’s struggling mid-century economy, including its natural resources, industries, and workers. The commission was an economic project that aimed to stimulate capitalist modernization via immigration, investment, infrastructure, and exports. No real roads linked the country’s disparate centers of production, yet an export boom in gold, tobacco, and hats augured well for the commission’s dreams of progress. Women were depicted alongside men as productive workers. Codazzi, moreover, was not satisfied with simply representing the landscape and inhabitants; he also tried to effect material transformation. He advocated coercive labor regimes, road building, railroads, land privatization, and clearing forests. In Panama, then part of New Granada, he accompanied doomed European expeditions in search of a canal route. He personally surveyed an indigenous landholding for privatization and supervised the initial excavation for a road that, like most of his economic endeavors, ended up going nowhere. The liberal economic model advocated by the commission proved contradictory and difficult to implement. Few European immigrants arrived; tobacco and hat exports declined; and the dream of export-based capitalist progress was deferred until the coffee boom at the end of the century.

Chapter 3 considers how women who had never viewed body weight as a matter of personal control were learning to diet. I illustrate how public health outreach projects directed at the “crisis” of obesity were teaching people to move and exercise not only for the good of their own health but also for the health of their country. I analyze reactions to the preponderance of deeply gendered messages that framed dieting as a moral responsibility to highlight the new forms of sociality produced by concern for dietary self-care. Finally, I suggest that the concept of possession—rather than individualization—more accurately describes the dietary transitions underway in Guatemala today.