A paper by Mats Widgren:
Precolonial African agricultural history is notoriously under-researched and the research that actually exists is poorly synthesized. As an effect of that it is still possible to publish research aiming to explain the growth or lack of growth in precolonial Africa without much consideration of the actual development of farming on the continent during the precolonial period. Whether environmental constraints (Gallup and Sachs 2000) or institutional failure (Acemoglu and Robinson 2010) are advanced as explanations for Africa’s present poverty, such claims are often made either without any references at all to African agricultural history or with only anecdotal evidence. But crops, agricultural technology, agrarian landscapes, farming systems and the social organization of farming changed in Africa over time, as 2 elsewhere in the world. This paper presents evidence for six different regional cases of agricultural intensification in the period 1500 to 1800. It is based on a project aimed at producing a series of maps covering the last millennium in which the known agricultural history of the world is made spatially explicit (Widgren 2010b). Three cross-sections in time are chosen.
- 1000: a time when African and American polities and landscapes were distinctly different from those of the late fifteenth century
- 1500: or more precisely 1491, on the eve of European oceanic expansion and before the Columbian exchange
- 1800: before the nineteenth-century wave of globalization that drew large parts of the global south into commercial agriculture.
The project was inspired by the work done by historical geographers in the U.S. on the pre-Columbian agriculture in North and South America. The three syntheses on the cultivated landscapes of different regions of the Americas (Doolittle 2000, Denevan 2001, Whitmore and Turner 2001) formed a model for our work. In the dissemination of these syntheses to a broader audience Charles Mann also later showed that it was possible to summarize the knowledge in map form (Mann 2005)...[more]