Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization

<I>Class Meets Land</I> reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over land as a catalyst for assembling the global financial constellation. Narrating the close-knit histories of industrial land, industrial elites, and the working class, the authors offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a “lived” process: the outcome of a relentless, socially embodied historical unfolding, in which shifts in land’s material, economic, and symbolic roles impact both local everyday lives and global capital flows.

Book details

• Author: Dr. Maria Kaika; Luca Ruggiero
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Edition: 1st Edition
• eText ISBN: 9780520410091
• Print ISBN: 9780520410077
• Format: Reflowable Layout
• Language: en
• Copyright: 2025