Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on landscape history and on the recent past of agricultural landscapes. It discusses the relationship between gender role differentiation and control of the irrigation system in Marakwet, Kenya. The book focuses on the local cultural meaning of landesque capital and explores how inequalities are socially constructed and embedded in social relationships that make investments possible. It extends the relational and historical character of the concept to inequalities and accumulation in regional and world systems. The book analyzes encompassing landscape histories in which landesque investments are part of more general and highly contingent social, cultural, political, economic, and ecological contexts. Past anthropogenic environmental change cannot be interpreted only as the result of human influence in general, but must be understood more specifically as the result of different forms of social organization, of exchange and power relations.