during the rise of financial landowners in the United Kingdom, Doreen Massey and Alejandrina Catalano (
1978: 161) concluded that “landownership is undergoing a further change”, and agricultural production was becoming “yet more ‘adapted’ to the capitalist mode of production, and … [was] doing so under the direction of banking capital”. Contrary to the radical political economy analyses of the time, however, this book will show that assetization is not as straightforward as imagined and promised by those tasked with it. Such an insight can be generated only when finance, and the people who work on it, are followed on their journey into farming, rather than letting deductive assumptions be made about them from above. Data could provide some orientation here, but the journey quickly ends in muddy waters, as the next chapter shows.
