Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality, by Mariana P. Candido
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: There is a long-standing belief in Africanist historiography that, whereas European societies had long-established regimes of landed property, pre-colonial African societies prioritised rights over people. This was, so the argument goes, because low population densities in Africa made resource extraction through land ownership difficult, leading rulers to accumulate wealth and power by controlling people, especially through slavery, with land generally being managed collectively. Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola challenges this argument. In the Angolan case, as Mariana Candido shows, the argument has roots in colonial anthropological and legal theories that made a point of denying that Africans had any understanding of property rights, usually for the purpose of excluding them from private land ownership under colonial rule. Contrary to these theories, the book reveals that Africans in Angola, influenced by Portuguese colonial expansion in the nineteenth century, adopted new legal mechanisms to secure individual ownership of land, property and enslaved people.
Source: The English Historical Review
DOI: 10.1093/ehr/ceaf008
Author: Jelmer Vos
Institution: University of Glasgow
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4407207186