Twentieth Century Land Settlement Schemes

Roy Jones, Alexandre M.A. Diniz, Roy Jones, Alexandre M.A. Diniz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367585266
• eBook ISBN: 9781351684316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Land settlement schemes, sponsored by national governments and businesses, such as the Ford Corporation and the Hudson's Bay Company, took place in locations as diverse as the Canadian Prairies, the Dutch polders, and the Amazonian rainforests. This novel contribution evaluates a diverse range of these initiatives.

By 1900, any land that remained available for agricultural settlement was often far from the settlers' homes and located in challenging physical environments. Over the course of the twentieth century, governments, corporations and frequently desperate individuals sought out new places to settle across the globe from Alberta to Papua New Guinea. This book offers vivid reports of the difficulties faced by many of these settlers, including the experiences of East European Jewish refugees, New Zealand soldier settlers and urban families from Yorkshire.

This book considers how and why these settlement schemes succeeded, found other pathways to sustainability or succumbed to failure and even oblivion. In doing so, the book indicates pathways for the achievement of more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable forms of human settlement in marginal areas. This engaging collection will be of interest to individuals in the fields of historical geography, environmental history and development studies.

1 Introduction: the lives and legacies of twentieth century land settlement schemes

Roy Jones

Alexandre M. A. Diniz

Introduction

This volume had its genesis in a presentation by one of the editors (Diniz) at a colloquium of the International Geographical Union's Commission on the Sustainability of Rural Systems at the University of Nagoya in 2013. Diniz described the relative failures of the Nova Amazonia land settlement scheme in Roraima Province, Brazil, at the turn of the present century. Notwithstanding the considerable differences in time, space, environment and culture between them, the nature of and the reasons for the failure of the Nova Amazonia project resonated strongly with Jones' knowledge of the much earlier, but equally unsuccessful, Group Settlement scheme in the South West region of Western Australia in the 1920s. These resonances led us to collaborate with three other scholars who were familiar with either the Nova Amazonia (Lacerda) or the Group Settlement (Brayshay and Selwood) schemes to develop a comparative presentation on the two projects for the Commission's 2014 colloquium in Sibiu, Romania, and a subsequent publication on this topic (Jones et al. 2015).

In our publication, we sought to place the fates of these two schemes in both their historical and sustainability contexts, not only to conform to the remit of the Commission but also because the localities where Group Settlement had proved to be such a notable failure (Gabbedy 1988; Brayshay and Selwood 2002) have, decades later, enjoyed considerable success as high-amenity viticultural, touristic and retirement venues (Selwood et al. 1996; Argent et al. 2014). In producing this paper, we had assembled a group of five authors, most of them historical geographers, from four continents (Australasia, Europe, North America and South America), and it was this assembly of collective experience that encouraged us to pursue the issue of the nature and implications of twentieth century land settlement schemes further. More specifically, it was the prospect of, on the one hand, extending this comparative study to further twentieth century land settlement schemes with differing origins, commencement dates and environmental, cultural and political contexts and, on the other, considering the fates, and therefore the sustainability, of a range of such schemes that increasingly engaged our interest. We are grateful to the diverse and dispersed collection of colleagues who have worked with us to create this volume.

The lives of land settlement schemes in the twentieth century

Both agriculture and livestock domestication have taken place over several millennia and in numerous locations across the globe (Ladizinsky 1998). But while, in earlier times, numerous civilisations, from the Mayans to the Dutch, have engaged in major land reclamation and/or development schemes within their own territories, the largest and most long-range land settlement schemes in human history have taken place more recently in the period since the onset of European colonial expansion and the rise of settler societies (Belich 2009). As Belich notes, these movements have given rise to massive expansions in the world's agricultural areas from the prairies to the steppes and the pampas, even though these successes have been accompanied by a number of spectacular and sometimes heroic failures, such as the Darien Scheme in Central America in the seventeenth century (Prebble 2000) and the expansion of farming north of “Goyder's Line” in South Australia in the late nineteenth century (Meinig 1962).

In this volume, we seek to demonstrate that it is possible to consider the land settlement schemes of the twentieth century as a distinct(ive) subset of this long historical process for a range of reasons. In environmental terms, most parts of the earth's land surface that were readily accessible and of high agricultural or pastoral potential had already been settled and developed by 1900. In the course of the twentieth century, transport and communication technologies were being revolutionised in ways that increasingly allowed even the most perishable of agricultural products, from New Zealand lamb to Chilean grapes, to be transported to or, more importantly in the context of this volume, from the ends of the earth. These developments allowed governments and corporations to extend their reach either through imperial connections, as was the case at the beginning of the twentieth century or, certainly by its end, through global supply chains and increasingly globalised business and financial networks.

These developments provided the physical and human contexts within which the land settlement schemes of the twentieth century were played out. Any land that was newly brought into production after 1900 was likely to be far from the markets for its produce and, in many cases, far from the homes of those who first settled it. It was also likely to be environmentally challenging and of relatively limited agricultural potential. Furthermore, these lands were being developed when technological advances were being made rapidly, generating constant changes in the methods of agriculture and animal husbandry; when competition for markets was becoming global; and when political and economic instability was widespread. Those who participated in twentieth century land settlement schemes were therefore vulnerable to a variety of threats including ecological disasters on their environmentally marginal land, market shifts in a liberalising and globalising economy and policy shifts, either by volatile imperial or national governments or by agile corporations seeking to benefit shareholders in the global core rather than agricultural producers at the periphery. For these reasons, we contend that those who involved themselves in twentieth century land settlement schemes faced a mix of challenges and problems that were often different from, but were not necessarily of lesser magnitude, than those faced by the frequently mythologised “pioneers” (Hirst 1978; Stannage 1985; Urgo 1995) of earlier centuries. In discussing these challenges and problems in this volume, in no way do we seek to discount or to minimise the challenges and problems of those, characteristically Indigenous, peoples whose lives were disrupted and whose lands were dispossessed in pursuit of these settlement schemes. Rather, just as volumes such as Laidlaw and Lester (2015) seek to trace the losses, disruptions and survivals of Indigenous populations in the face of settler colonialism, so do we seek to trace the successes, failures and survivals of the settlement schemes and those who participated in them.

The legacies of twentieth century land settlement schemes

As indicated earlier, twentieth century land settlement schemes were characteristically commenced in remote and environmentally challenging locations and were seen as being capable of growing to maturity in extremely dynamic technological, economic, social and political circumstances that, in the event, often rendered the guidelines, or even the rationales, for undertaking such ventures obsolete. For example, in 1905, Western Australia's Royal Commission on Immigration decreed that, “all considerable areas of agricultural land must have a fifteen-mile (24-kilometre) rail service” (Western Australia 1905, p. xxii). This was seen as the maximum distance over which a farmer, using a horse and cart, could be reasonably expected to transport grain or to travel for basic supplies. By the 1920s, the state government had created a relatively dense network of railway lines, townsites and wheat bins across Western Australia's expanding wheat belt (Glynn 1975). By the late twentieth century, a combination of motorised transport, highly mechanised agriculture, rural depopulation and neoliberal economics had rendered most of the rail services and rural service centres, and even many of the wheat bins, surplus to requirements (Jones and Buckley 2017), a process that has been replicated not only in the Australian broad-acre farming regions but also in the Canadian Prairies and many other areas of recent agricultural settlement across the globe.

This example illustrates why a study of the legacies of twentieth century land settlement schemes is a valuable, if not a necessary, corollary of a study of these schemes' lives. Whether or not such schemes were initially or eventually successful, the environments, economies and societies in the areas in which they were established will only be sustainable in the modern world if they can successfully adapt, and continue to adapt, to a wide range of rapidly changing circumstances. The nature, or even the existence, of their legacies will inevitably be diverse. Failure, in some cases, will lead to complete abandonment, as in the case of the farms to the north of Goyder's Line in Meinig's classic study. Initial success or failure may both be followed by the development of completely different agricultural bases from those upon which an agricultural area was first founded. Furthermore, some areas that were initially settled for agricultural purposes may come to depend, to varying extents, on non-farming activities as they progress towards post-productivist futures (Holmes 2002; Almstedt 2013).

Issues of legacy and sustainability will inevitably loom larger in the investigations of those schemes that, today, have a history of several generations of success, failure and/or change. However, many of the case studies included here describe relatively recent, or even current, extensions of the world's agricultural frontier so, before turning to a description of the case studies included in this volume, we include a brief consideration of this complex and, on occasion, contested concept.

Twentieth century land settlement schemes as final frontiers

In our initial submission to the publishers, the proposed title of our work began with the term “Final Frontiers” (albeit followed by a question mark). While we now agree with those reviewers and members of the publishing staff who expressed their reservations about our use of this term, we did not include these words merely as an attention-grabbing device. We sought not only to emphasise the spatial peripherality and the environmental and economic marginality of many of the twentieth century's land settlement schemes, but also to raise the question of whether agriculture and even livestock farming were approaching their spatial limits between 1900 and 2000. What we sought to interrogate was a phenomenon very different from that of the closing of the frontier, as identified by the US census in 1890 (Nash 1980), which perhaps is a convenient date for the purposes of this volume. Rather, we wished, in large part through the case studies assembled here, to consider the extent to which the twentieth century could be seen as a period during which the contribution of areal expansion to the growth of agricultural production came to be of considerably less significance on a global scale, but also as a period when frontier activity continued in a range of dynamic and challenging contexts. For this reason, we preface the regional case studies of land settlement schemes with a chapter reviewing the literature on and theories of frontiers to provide some background information on the processes at work in the regions under consideration in this volume.

Twentieth century land settlement schemes: the case studies

The settlement schemes described in the following case studies cannot present a comprehensive view of the multitude of land development schemes that were instigated over the course of the previous century. The purpose of this collection is rather to depict a range of schemes that differ in age, location, environment, type of protagonist and purpose and to consider them from a range of economic, political and cultural viewpoints, not so much to demonstrate their variety but rather to ask whether, within their diversity, any common elements that have contributed to their initial success, subsequent failure or eventual reorientation can be discerned. In addition, and drawing on the questions raised in our earlier group settlement and Nova Amazonia comparison, we also look for any evidence of lessons learned from earlier land settlement scheme shortcomings that could, or even shoul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: the lives and legacies of twentieth century land settlement schemes
• 2 Conceptualizing the frontier
• 3 Policy mobilities and land settlement schemes: the emergence of homesteading in Western Australia
• 4 Jewish farm settlements and the Jewish Colonization Association in Western Canada
• 5 Soldier settlement and the expansion and contraction of the bush frontier in New Zealand during the 1920s
• 6 Western Australia's interwar group settlement scheme, a case study of the Leeds Group, 1923–1938
• 7 The Hudson's Bay Company's sponsored agricultural settlement at Vermilion, Alberta, Canada
• 8 Fordland and Belterra yesterday and today: lessons from failed projects of the Amazon
• 9 Physical and social engineering in the Dutch polders: the case of the Noordoostpolder
• 10 The elusive dream of “development” on the agricultural land settlement schemes in Papua New Guinea
• 11 The complexities of the Brazilian Amazon frontier and its most recent chapter: soybean expansion in Roraima
• 12 Conclusion: relatively recent rural settlement schemes – representations, realities and results
• Index