Landesque Capital ― The Historical Ecology of Enduring Landscape Modifications

This book is the first comprehensive, global treatment of landesque capital, a widespread concept used to understand anthropogenic landscapes that serve important economic, social, and ritual purposes. Spanning the disciplines of anthropology, human ecology, geography, archaeology, and history, chapters combine theoretical rigor with in-depth empirical studies of major landscape modifications from ancient to contemporary times. They assess not only degradation but also the social, political, and economic institutions and contexts that make sustainability possible. Offering tightly edited, original contributions from leading scholars, this book will have a lasting influence on the study long-term human-environment relations in the human and natural sciences.

N. Thomas Hakansson is Professor of Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. He has done extensive field and archival research on the emergence and maintenance of irrigation and permanent agriculture in pre-colonial and colonial Kenya and Tanzania. Mats Widgren is Professor of Geography at Stockholm University. He has researched landscape history from a social science perspective in Sweden, Botswana, Kenya, South Africa, and in a global context. He is co-author of Islands of Intensive Agriculture (Ohio University Press 2004)