The Evolution of Land Rights: Public Farmers and Privatization in Roman Egypt

In his classic book, Structure and Change in Economic History, Douglass North sums up the nature of the ancient Egyptian state. As religious ruler, the pharaoh was the ultimate owner of land, which was controlled mainly by temples and state officials. But when the Romans conquered Egypt in 30 BC, agrarian property rights were at a turning point. Private landowners became politically dominant and demanded secure rights. The New Institutional Economics has developed two models to explain land privatization. According to the interest-group model, property rights are the product of political negotiation and therefore they tend to benefit whatever interest group holds power. Others use a demographic model of agrarian change. Communal institutions evolve in under-populated regions as an adaptation to environmental risk. Private property rights evolve as the population grows and land becomes more scarce. North elaborates the interest-group model in his economic history but population growth still plays a crucial role, especially for the transformation of ancient economies. Since then a growing literature in the New Institutional Economics has debated the influence of political and demographic factors on agrarian property rights in modern Africa. What we need is historical evidence that allows us to study long-term economic change. Egypt is a good case study because its dry climate has preserved tens of thousands of papyrus documents from the Hellenistic, Roman, and later periods, including land surveys, tax accounts, census lists, and private contracts. My argument is that the interest-group model provides an explanation only for the proximate causes of Roman land reform in Egypt. It fails to explain the counter-trend in the under-populated Fayyum region toward communal ownership of public land. The Roman privatization of land was most successful in areas where population pressure was already high. A demographic model better explains the regional variation. This suggests that the two models work at different levels of analysis. Social and political relations better explain the immediate impetus of land reform but ecological conditions constitute basic parameters that influence long-term economic change. To make this argument I will first test the hypothesis that population growth leads to privatization by looking at the pre-Roman period. Second, I will discuss the political impetus behind Roman land reform. Third, I will consider the persistence of communal ownership in the Fayyum region and how this relates to shortages of manpower and problems with irrigation.