People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800-1990 / Edition 1

by James C. McCann

Overview

For more than two thousand years, Ethiopia's ox-plow agricultural system was the most efficient and innovative in Africa, but has been afflicted in the recent past by a series of crises: famine, declining productivity, and losses in biodiversity. James C. McCann analyzes the last two hundred years of agricultural history in Ethiopia to determine whether the ox-plow agricultural system has adapted to population growth, new crops, and the challenges of a modern political economy based in urban centers.
This agricultural history is set in the context of the larger environmental and landscape history of Ethiopia, showing how farmers have integrated crops, tools, and labor with natural cycles of rainfall and soil fertility, as well as with the social vagaries of changing political systems. McCann traces characteristic features of Ethiopian farming, such as the single-tine scratch plow, which has retained a remarkably consistent design over two millennia, and a crop repertoire that is among the most genetically diverse in the world.
People of the Plow provides detailed documentation of Ethiopian agricultural practices since the early nineteenth century by examining travel narratives, early agricultural surveys, photographs and engravings, modern farming systems research, and the testimony of farmers themselves, collected during McCann's five years of fieldwork. He then traces the ways those practices have evolved in the twentieth century in response to population growth, urban markets, and the presence of new technologies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299146146
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	07/15/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

James C. McCann is associate professor of history and director of the African Studies Center at Boston University. He is the author of From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia: A Rural History, 1900-1935 and has worked with many international aid and agricultural organizations on issues of agriculture and land use in northeastern Africa.

Table of Contents

	Illustrations	vii
	Maps	ix
	Tables	xi
	Transliteration	xiii
	Preface	xv
	Prologue: Farms, Agriculture, and History	3
Part I.	The Plow and the Land
1.	The Salubrious Highlands: A Historical Setting	23
2.	The Ox-Plow Complex: an Ecological Revolution	39
3.	Farms in the Agrarian Polity: Historical Trends in Population, Farm Resources, and Specialized Agriculture, 1800-1916	84
Part II.	The Plow and Ethiopian Historical Landscapes
4.	From Royal Fields to Marginal Lands: Agriculture in Ankober, Shawa, 1840-1990	109
5.	The Plow in the Forest: Agriculture, Population, and Maize Monoculture in Gera	147
6.	Addis Ababa's Kitchen: Food, Forage, and Intensification in a Closed Ox-Plow Economy, Ada 1800-1990	191
7.	Conclusion: People of the Plow, People of the City	239
	Epilogue	262
Appendix A	Crop Names	267
Appendix B	Glossary of Agricultural Terms	269
	Bibliography	271
	Index	292

Editorial Reviews

"Those interested in the history of one of the centers of crop origin and genetic diversity will find this book an invaluable reference."--Brhane Gebrekidan, Virginia Tech

From the Publisher

After hearing the complex and fertile stories by farmers in Ethiopia while working there for Oxfam America, McCann has collected more stories, combined them with facts and figures and the generative models so popular with social scientists, and presented a narrative that describes and explains changes in an environmental, social, and technical process over the past 200 years. Among the features are drawings from the 19th century and photographs of the same sites today, illustrating changes in the environment and land use. Includes glossaries without pronunciation. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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