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Well, in Feudal system you don't really own the land. You can tax the peasants farming it in exchange for military services for the state. But for example you can't parcel it to small farms and sell those for their owners to keep, or anything like that. You can't use the land as your own capital, with all the financial potential of an asset.

I'd love to hear counterexamples, but that's the general gist of it in the large scale I think.

Land ownership is not a silver bullet but in general smart parcelling policies have made nations wealthier. So basically, most wealthy states today at some point in their history have issued a parcelling policy that has distributed land ownership among farms. This has made the economic basis more vibrant and more durable. And, probably also affected the evolution of their political institutions to be more inclusive.

For example, see the parcelling in my country Finland (which was Sweden at the time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Partition_(Sweden) and earlier in British enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure




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