Abstract: Studies of land use and of landscapes as expressions of human activities, in space and time, are gaining increasing attention in a variety of disciplines. This focus has relevance both for our understanding of society, culture, and nature, and for research on food security, land cover change, and biodiversity. The idea behind this special issue is to show that a regional historical approach to land cover changes provides an analytical field that can bridge the gap between local case studies and generalized macro-scale overviews. To reach the goal of a truly regional and historical political ecology, this volume gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars with in-depth knowledge of human-environmental relationships and political economy in northeastern Tanzania. The contributions cover a number of common themes that emphasize history and spatial interactions in one region. All the articles go beyond the focus on economic determinants of land-use, so common in the literature. They also show how social institutions and cultural models, both at local and regional levels influence trajectories of changing human-environment relationships.