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The mortgaging of land is not just economic and legal but also social and cultural. Here, anthropologists, historians, and economists explore origins, variations, and meanings of the land mortgage, and the risks to homes and livelihoods. Combining findings from archives, printed records, and live ethnography, the book describes the changing and problematic assumptions surrounding mortgage. It shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. 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.
“The topic is original, and the breadth and scope are very impressive. The intended historical depth and the geographical reach makes the book interesting for a very wide audience. Rodima-Taylor and Shipton have an eye for the institutional tidal wave as well as its counter-currents and imaginative variations over time and space, as they unpack the history of modernity through the mortgage.” • Christian Lund, University of Copenhagen
“Land and the Mortgage is an outstanding collection that offers timely comparative and historical analysis of mortgage lending from a human economy perspective. Distinguished anthropologists, historians, economists, and legal scholars focus on the sociality of debt and the embeddedness of mortgage lending in sociopolitical relations. Ranging across continents and millennia, this engaging volume will be essential reading for any study of financialization processes, land titling, credit practices, debt relations, and the cultural history and political economy of land.” • Angelique Haugerud, Rutgers University
Daivi Rodima-Taylor is Researcher and Lecturer at the African Studies Center of the Pardee School of Global Studies of Boston University. She has conducted longitudinal field research in East Africa, and co-edited special issues of numerous journals. Her work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Keith Hart
Introduction. Land, Finance, Technology: Perspectives on Mortgage Lending
Daivi Rodima-Taylor
PART I: SITUATING LAND MORTGAGE IN TIME AND SPACE
Chapter 1. The Glittering Mortgage, the Vanishing Farm: Enticement, Entrustment, Entrapment
Parker Shipton
Chapter 2. A Brief Legal and Social History of Mortgage
David J. Seipp
Chapter 3. Land Tenure: From Fiscal Origins to Financialization
Michael Hudson
Part II: Mortgage as Cultural Export: Land, Family, and the State
Chapter 4. Inheriting Debt: Legal Pluralism, Family Politics, and the Meaning of Wealth in Ghana
Sara Berry
Chapter 5. Tales of Mortgage, Risk, and Taxation in Rural Senegal
Kristine Juul
Chapter 6. Signs of Trouble: Land, Loans, and Investments in Post-Conflict Northern Uganda
Mette Lind Kusk and Lotte Meinert
Part III: Old Rules and New Twists: Reinventing and Resisting Land Financialization
Chapter 7. Reinventing Land Mortgage in Post-Socialist Europe: The Romanian Case
Stefan Dorondel, Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Marioara Rusu
Chapter 8. Distressed Publics: Circumventing the Mortgage from South Africa to Ireland
Nate Coben and Melissa K. Wrapp
Chapter 9. Governing the Old City: Land Records, Digitization, and Liquidity in Lahore
Tariq Rahman
Part IV: Coming Full Circle: Hopes, Ideologies, and Life on the Ground
Chapter 10. Mortgage Credit as an Instrument of Economic Growth in Colonial Massachusetts, 1642-1777
Winifred B. Rothenberg
Chapter 11. When Land Takes Wing: The Concentration of Holdings and the Human-Animal Dimension
Parker Shipton
Conclusion: Envoi
Parker Shipton
Index