ABSTRACT
In most historical analyses of the colonial impact on indigenous rural societies there has been until recently an almost exclusive preoccupation with arable systems. The startling neglect of the non-arable landscape has been unfortunate since, in many societies, the ability to exploit marginal, non-arable land and forest has been critical to survival and the capacity to do so has become steadily more constrained as resources have been devoted to commodity production. Colonial rule has been particularly important in this respect. Colonialism and its successor states have brought about a transformation in the nature of the tenurial relationships between people, forest and other non-arable land. This has involved, in essence, a transition away from locally evolved man – land relations towards direct private property status or to direct state control. These changes have often involved a growing exploitation of the landscape for commodity production and a corresponding erosion in customary controls and common property rights or conventions. 1 The ecological transition has largely, although by no means exclusively, followed upon the spread of a European capitalist system over the globe with the corresponding penetration of a Western economic process beyond as well as within the colonial context. 2
