There’s a grand old Irish phrase – ní neart go cur le chéile – there is no strength without unity.
It speaks to our collective nature, the idea that we are not meant to exist in isolation but as part of something greater. And yet, if there’s one thing history has distorted beyond recognition, it’s our relationship with the land.
Somewhere along the way, we swallowed a great lie: that land is property, a commodity to be owned, bought, and sold. That it exists for profit rather than for people.
That we control the land, rather than belonging to it.
This is not how it was always understood. Indigenous cultures across the world knew – know – that land is not something you can own, not in the way we’ve been conditioned to think.
The land is a living thing, and we are simply passing through.
But history, particularly the colonial history of the British Empire, tells a different story: one where land became currency, where dispossession became policy, and where people were severed from the very thing that sustained them.
A Legacy of Taking: The British Empire’s Land Grabs
Long before Britain started reaching across the seas to claim territories, it had already perfected the art of land theft at home. The process of enclosure in England – where common land was seized, fenced off, and repurposed for profit – set the template for everything that followed.
Peasants who had lived and farmed in balance with the land for generations found themselves pushed out, funnelled into factories, their survival now tethered to wage labour.
What began in Britain was then exported – brutally – to Ireland, India, Africa, North America, and beyond.
Everywhere the British Empire went, the pattern was the same:
- Claim the land – as if it were theirs to take.
- Displace the people – who had lived there for centuries.
- Restructure society – so that land served empire, not those who depended on it.
Ireland, of course, was the Empire’s first great experiment in this kind of theft.
Ireland. The First Colony, The First Land Grab
The Irish have an old and intimate relationship with land. Before British rule, land in Ireland wasn’t owned in the modern sense but held in trust, passed down through generations under the Brehon Laws.
These laws – egalitarian and sophisticated – were wiped out when the Tudor and Stuart monarchs decided that Ireland would be more useful if its land were controlled by English hands.
The Plantations saw vast tracts of Irish land confiscated, carved up, and handed to English and Scottish settlers, forcing the native Irish to the margins. This was no accident. It was a system designed to break Irish society, to dismantle its independence.
By the time of the Great Famine, the land was no longer in the hands of those who depended on it. Tenant farmers, stripped of ownership, rented their own homeland from absentee landlords who demanded payment even as the potato blight devastated crops.
While a million people starved, food grown in Ireland was exported to England—because land was no longer about survival. It was about profit.
From North America to India: The Global Pattern of Displacement
What happened in Ireland was repeated across the Empire. In North America, British settlers arrived with the same entitlement, viewing the land as empty despite the thriving Indigenous civilisations that had lived there for thousands of years. Treaties were signed and broken with the same ease. Land was stolen, carved up, and “tamed” under the logic that land only belonged to those who could exploit it.
In India, the British transformed an agrarian society into an economic machine for the Empire.
Farmers were forced to abandon food crops in favour of cotton and opium, cash crops that benefited British industry while leaving Indian communities vulnerable to famine.
The Bengal Famine of 1943, in which millions died, was not a natural disaster. It was the result of British policies that turned land into a revenue-generating tool rather than a means of sustenance.
In Africa, land became corporate. The British South Africa Company, under Cecil Rhodes, didn’t just claim land – it ran entire territories as private estates. The 1913 Natives Land Act in South Africa legally restricted Black South Africans to 7% of the land, entrenching economic and racial inequality that would later form the foundation of apartheid.
In Australia and New Zealand, the doctrine of terra nullius—land belonging to no one—was used to justify the displacement and genocide of Aboriginal and Māori peoples. Land that had been stewarded for generations was simply declared vacant, then occupied.
The Lie of the Land: A False Sense of Ownership
The legacy of these land grabs is still with us. We see it in the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a few, in the housing crises that grip modern cities, in the way food systems prioritise profit over people. In many former colonies, the descendants of colonial-era elites still own vast tracts of land, while those who were dispossessed remain landless.
Even here, in Ireland, where land hunger was once a defining national wound, we see the echoes.
House prices soar, rural communities struggle, and land continues to be treated as an asset rather than a birthright.
The Modern Misconception: “But There Are Too Many of Us Now”
The moment you say we belong to the land, not the other way around, the modern mind jumps to the logistical nightmare of it all.
“That’s a lovely idea,” they’ll say, “but there are eight billion of us now, and most of us live in cities. We can’t all go back to living off the land.”
And they’re right—there’s no rewinding history, no grand return to a mythical past where every human has a patch of land to till. But that was never the point. The issue isn’t where we live, but how we relate to the places we inhabit.
Are people in cities not still dependent on the land? On the soil that grows our food, on the water that sustains us, on the ecosystems that make human life possible.
The real misconception isn’t that urban life has cut us off from nature – it’s that we ever could be.
Every high-rise apartment, every motorway, every supermarket shelf is built on a foundation of land.
The mistake was thinking we could separate ourselves from it without consequence.
The challenge now is not to abandon cities but to rebuild our relationship with the land, even from within them—to stop seeing it as a resource to be consumed and start recognising it as something we are still intrinsically part of, whether we like it or not.
But perhaps the greatest lie is this: that we can own land in the first place. That land exists for human control, that it is something to be conquered rather than lived with.
Because the truth is simpler, older, and much harder to accept:
We belong to the land. The land does not belong to us.
The sooner we remember that, the better.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The story of land theft is not just a history lesson. It’s a roadmap of how we got here—and how we might find our way back. The growing movements for Indigenous land rights, sustainable farming, and environmental justice all point to the same thing: we need to rethink our relationship with the land.
Not as something we own, but as something we owe.
Owe care.
Owe respect.
Owe stewardship for those who come after us.
Because land is not an asset to be bought and sold. It is a legacy, a responsibility. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that the land will always outlast the people who claim to own it.
It’s time we learned to live accordingly.
Domesticky 
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