Outside of North America, it was relatively rare for farmers to own their land. Tenant farming and serfdom were more common in Europe/Japan. In China, as a general principle, the government itself owned all land during the Mao era.
Farmer-landowners are much more financially resilient to technological change because (generally) the same technologies which reduced the value of their labour increased the value of their property.
I suspect this difference in historic land ownership had a big impact on subsequent politics and it's something I'm looking to read more about.
now that I think of it, if farmers had already owned their farms, Mao & co wouldn't have gone through the trouble of redistributing it via Land Reform.
I might suggest that drawing boundaries around a plot of land and calling it "owned" was the beginning of politics, as it represents collective agreements and mechanisms to arrive at them. Have you dug into Elinor Ostrom's work around the tragedy of the commons being an unrealistic model given that people don't just let other people's cows overgraze? We create rules and sanctions before the resource collapses (or rather, we try to; and that attempt to prevent collapse could be called government).
Farmer-landowners are much more financially resilient to technological change because (generally) the same technologies which reduced the value of their labour increased the value of their property.
I suspect this difference in historic land ownership had a big impact on subsequent politics and it's something I'm looking to read more about.