Instructor: Dr. Adriana Chira 

We currently live in the most intensive land grab in human history. The phenomenon has been accompanied by a crisis in housing access, inter-ethnic conflicts, population displacement, environmental refugees, high commodity prices, and the looming threat of famines. Africa and Latin America are at the center of this phenomenon. But large-scale land grabs are far from being a new phenomenon. This course explores histories of land grabbing tracing them back to European colonialism in these regions, while also focusing on oppositional mobilizations to property concentration. In the process, and by drawing on interdisciplinary tools, we will consider the meaning that land has held beyond economic or market value for various people involved in conflicts over it: land as a source of political sovereignty, as a religious space, as landscape, as a repository of community memory and culture, as a mechanism for political empowerment and for state development. 

Book List: 

Catherine Boone, Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014) 

Tessa Murphy, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) 

Mariana Candido, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality (Cambridge University Press, 2022) 

Case Watkins, Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia’s Dende Coast (Cambridge University Press, 2021) 

Assan Sarr, Islam, Power and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin: The Politics of Land Control, 1790-1940 (The University of Rochester Press, 2016) 

Gareth Austin, Land, Labor, and Capital in Ghana: From Slave to Free Labor in Asante 1807-1956 (University of Rochester Press, 2005) 

Francois Manchuelle, Willing Migrants: Soninke Labor Diasporas, 1848-1960 (Ohio University Press, 1997) 

Sara Berry, Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power, and the Past in Asante, 1896-1996 (Heinemann, 2001) 

Gregg Mittman, Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia (The New Press, 2021) 

Tom Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Duke University Press, 2010) 

Tianna Paschel, Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil (Princeton, 2018)