We are a collective of historians of Africa and Latin America who study land politics in societies fundamentally shaped by slavery and the plantation’s legacies. Our collaborative project combines historical research and ambitious pedagogical innovations to address an urgent societal issue: deteriorating land access among poor and smallholding rural populations in the Global South in the midst of a climate crisis.

We believe that the Humanities, and historical approaches in particular, are uniquely positioned to offer new ways of thinking about land dispossession, rural inequalities, and environmental sustainability.  They allow us to examine dispossession in the long term, exploring how present-day expulsion from the land is rooted in racist socio-economic structures dating back to slavery and colonialism. Present-day solutions to rural poverty that do not take account of that past could therefore only have superficial impact. A humanistic approach to land dispossession also allows us to see alternative modes of community-building and property ownership that emerged from below that more quantitative social scientific approaches have ignored.