For precise schedule of offerings see department catalog during pre-enrollment week each semester.

This course surveys a multi-disciplinary literature on land tenure and law in Africa. Often said to be abundant and underutilized because of larger shortages of labor, poor soils, or limited technology, African land has played an important part in the development or larger frameworks used to understand Africa’s distinct past and current economic weakness relative to other parts of the world. Jack Goody famously connected the purported abundance of African land to the importance of slavery on the African continent. Unlike in the history of Eurasia, political domination and legal regimes in Africa focused, Goody argued, on control over people rather than land. Likewise, the abundance and relatively low productive value of land tended to prevent the emergence of property regimes that would have led to class stratification. Much of what we know about more contemporary Africa suggests that land is very important. Control over land has been at the center of many ‘ethnic’ conflicts and instances of mass violence. One might even say that the dichotomy between purported autochthones and allochthons, first-comers and latecomers, organizes space and power across much of the continent today. How do we tell histories of these issues that are both attentive to the larger frameworks but based in empirical details from particular sites? What kinds of institutions existed to manage land and regulate conflict? How have these institutions, and the way they have been understood, changed over time? What was the role of colonialism on land tenure systems and rights? How has land become such a sensitive touchstone for conflict in many parts of post-colonial Africa? We will examine some of the classic works on land tenure and law in Africa, as well as more contemporary work which focuses on land in institutional ways as an approach to property, power, gender, migration, economic productivity, and conflict and violence. In the last part of the course, we will look at several important case studies in which land is important to on-going conflicts. The course is organized as a seminar that will meet once a week. Students will submit a response paper each week before class evaluating the arguments, methods, and epistemological value of the historical knowledge claims made in the weekly readings. These response papers should be approximately 500 words in length (although they can be longer). The lowest grade of the response papers will be disregarded Each student will co-lead discussion twice in the course of the semester (which will be evaluated as part of the participation grade). Students taking the course as a HIS280 will also produce a 20-page historiographical/methodological paper at the end of the semester. Students taking the course as a HIS285 will not be expected to complete the readings (and response papers) for the final four weeks of the course. Instead of an historiographical/methodological paper, they will be expected to produce a 30-page research paper at the end of the semester.

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