ABSTRACT
A Sub-Saharan perspective brings two basic elements to the comparative discussion of the historical interrelations between “ethno-national” consciousness and rights in land. One is that most of the region, for most of its history, has been land-abundant in the economic sense that at any given time the expansion of output was constrained by a lack of effective demand, or of labor and capital, but not of cultivable land. There are qualifications to this generalization, as we shall see. But both the fact of land abundance, and its rapid dwindling during most of the twentieth century, have had major implications for African histories of territorial sovereignty and landed property, state formation, and ethnicity. The other basic element is Africa’s reputation, externally and to some extent internally, as the part of the world where states are weakest and ethnicity strongest (meaning by “ethnicity” the sense of collective identity as defined by common descent, origin, or heritage – real or alleged). Land abundance itself has made it harder to establish effective monopolies of power over given territories.
