Land-sharking

The main object in making Colonists pay for their land, instead of the Government giving it to them, is to prevent what is called the land-sharking system.

Land-sharking was not, however, limited to persons whose sole object in life was money-making, as several missionaries, Mr. Wentworth, an eminent Sydney lawyer, and the British Resident, were to be found among them.

In the old land-sharking days the European could not acquire land from a Native until it was shown that the Native had enough land for himself and his family; but the Government had bought the last acre, and also the interest of the children.

Speculation and its abuses intensified, including practices such as land-sharking, a staple of Westerns, in which unscrupulous frontier agents sold land warrants to farmers on credit, often at very high interest rates.

Through the Church Missionary Society in London, the Colonial Office heard of the increasing pace of Māori conversion to Christianity and justifications for missionary land purchases, including that some were on trust for Māori to protect them from European land-sharking.

"The landlords there" (Ireland), says Spenser, "most shamefully rack their rents;" so that our present generateion of rack-renters, land-jobbing companies, as well as land-sharking individuals, have a long prescription for their legalized system of plunder.

Due to the real estate bubble of the 1980s, for example, the Yakuza entered into the business of land-sharking. The goal of this type of extortion was to force landowners or lease holders to sell or give up their lease, respectively, so as to allow larger real estate developments on that land.

In Tokyo fifteen years ago, land-sharking of that kind had been rampant, though not always easy to detect.

Organised criminal operations range from illegal protection and extortion rackets and the trafficking and/or smuggling of illicit drugs, cigarettes, humans, firearms and wildlife to cybercribe, oil theft, illegal mineral mining, land-sharking, counterfeiting and maritime piracy (Costa 2010; UNODC 2010).