My research in the Rockefeller Archive Center is part of a larger project, tentatively titled,“Land as the Object of Development in Turkey, 1945-1980,” that examines contests over land reform as a central site of statecraft, population management, and modernization, where competing visions of agricultural development, upheld by leftist intellectuals, populist politicians, and American experts, were implemented or stalled over the decades. The larger project examines how different approaches to rural development, rooted in the country’s political economy, class configurations, and nationalist project, provided both the motivation for and alternatives to “adopting” rural development models urged by American advisors. 1

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, US military planners and agricultural experts took with them the notion that land reform would curb a revolutionary peasantry and replace it with an entrepreneurial class of landowners across the “Asian defense perimeter,” to Japan, Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and ultimately Vietnam. 2 Yet, it was increasingly the “technical” model of land reform, rather than the redistributionist one, that prevailed in the projects of policymakers and experts. While American agencies and private organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, were at first tolerant observers of programs like the ejido system in interwar Mexico, which seized private estates and distributed them to millions of landless peasants, they increasingly pushed for an industrialized version of agricultural reform. The Ford Foundation’s community development projects in India were replaced with Green Revolution technologies, as rural programs began to concentrate on seed types, yields, mechanization, and increasing rates of agricultural productivity. 3 Massive projects, such as dams and TVA-style development spread across Afghanistan, Iran, Jordan, and others, while land reform in Vietnam was redefined as resettlement projects and the Strategic Hamlet Program of 1962. 4 The consolidation of land became the rule, as fragmentation was identified as an obstacle to efficiency.