Hello and welcome to Navarra FM. My name is Eleanor Penny.

What to you defines the last 150 years of human history. Maybe it's the

First World War, maybe it's the Second World War, maybe it's the Cold War, maybe it's the

collapse of the British Empire and the rise of the United States as a global superpower. Maybe it's the transformations of globalization

and technology. Maybe it's the beginnings of the climate crisis as we know it today.

According to one writer and historian, we should be telling a different story, one that spans

and encompasses this defining and tumultuous time.

A story where, in the end, everything comes back to land.

In the book The Long Land War, author Joe Gouldy traces the history of struggles

over land occupancy and ownership, as industrial capitalism heated up

and colonialism violently reorganised the world.

It's a history that takes in Irish tenants organising against their absentee landlords,

beaver and Cree people in Canada mapping their indigenous territories,

the followers of Vinoba Baha'i

redistributing their land to the poor in the early years of Indian independence and the United

Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Across the years, the questions of who controls the land and who has the right to live there are some of the most fundamental questions in politics.

I sat down with Joe Goldie to talk about the history of land occupancy struggles and what they tell us about how the modern world was made.

Joe is an associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University in Texas,

and she's the author of works including The History Manifesto, Roads to Power,

The Dangerous Art of Text Mining and Paper Machines.

We talked about squatters, rebels, cartographers, rent strikers, pilgrims and the makers of history.

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