Mapping Global Agricultural History
Year: 2010
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: It is increasingly recognised that early developments in land use had implications for the global climatic system. Especially following the seminal article by Ruddiman addressing the role of early land cover for the climate, reconstructions of past land use has become an important field in of the rapidly growing field of climate and global change studies. 1 Ruddiman, proposed that the Neolithic revolution as well agricultural expansion well before the industrial revolution impacted on the emissions of green house gases and the global climate system. Rammankutty and Foley estimated global land cover changes for the period 1700 to 1992 and Klein Goldewijk has built up the HYDE data base for the same period. For the last millennium a reconstruction along the same lines has recently been published by Julia Pongratz and co-workers. 2 These reconstructions differ in slightly in their methods, but when it comes to reconstructions of agricultural lands, they can be broadly categorised as backprojections from the 20th century using historical population estimates. This method tends to overemphasise European and colonial agriculture and reflect to a large degree Eurocentric assumptions, rather than historical knowledge. Pongratz reconstructions show no agriculture in North America and in the Amazon before Columbus and very little agriculture in West Africa. Historical geographers have been slow in responding to this new demand for a global synthesis. No attempt has yet been made to express the present knowledge of global agrarian history in maps. Only for the Americas has such a synthesis been achieved. Based on the works by Doolittle, Denevan and Turner and Whitmore, the popular science author Charles C Mann has summarised the evidence of preColumbian land use in a map. Though chronologically diffuse this map shows the power of summarising existing knowledge in a way that communicates with the global land cover science, which needs spatially well defined data. At the same time Mann asks the grand questions of macrohistory: were population figures in America at the level of European before Columbus? 3 Also for Sub-saharan Africa a growing research frontier looks into the precolonial farming systems. 4 A small international project has been set up to answer to these challenges on a global scale. The project is a cooperation between US and Swedish geographers and historians. 5 It aims at global reconstructions of agricultural systems for AD 1000, AD
Source: DiVA (Stockholm University)
Author: Mats Widgren
Language: English
Subfield: Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W585990885