Land and the Mortgage Book Now Published
The BU ASC Working Group on Land Mortgage is pleased to report that the new book, Land and the Mortgage: History, Culture, Belonging, co-edited by Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Parker Shipton, was published in February 2022 by Berghahn Books.
The mortgaging of land, a risky practice usually treated as just an economic and legal contract, has needed a broader set of perspectives for a fuller, more humanist understanding. This edited collection fills that gap, examining mortgaging as a social and cultural phenomenon to show its origins, variation, and effects on human lives and communities. Here anthropologists, historians, and economists together explore archival, printed, and ethnographic evidence about mortgage. The book shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. Tracing origins of land titling, pledging, and the mortgage in periods over millennia, the book explores effects of colonial policies, state impositions, and locally rooted understandings of mortgage lending and borrowing. The outcomes of mortgage in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America challenge economic development orthodoxies, calling for a human-centered exploration of this age-old institution.
Please see below for blog articles by some of the authors of the edited volume:
“Beyond Binaries: The Social Organization of Land Mortgage in the Global South,” by Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Stefan Dorondel
“Distressed Publics: Circumventing the Mortgage from South Africa to Ireland,” by Nate Coben and Melissa K. Wrapp
“Mortgage, Risk, and Taxation in Rural Senegal,” by Kristine Juul
“The World Bank, the Old City, and Liquid Land,” by Tariq Rahman