Land and the Mortgage

Daivi Rodima-Taylor is Researcher and Lecturer at the African Studies Center of the Pardee School of Global Studies of Boston University. She has conducted longitudinal field research in East Africa, and co-edited special issues of numerous journals. Her work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

“The topic is original, and the breadth and scope are very impressive. The intended historical depth and the geographical reach makes the book interesting for a very wide audience. Rodima-Taylor and Shipton have an eye for the institutional tidal wave as well as its counter-currents and imaginative variations over time and space, as they unpack the history of modernity through the mortgage.” • Christian Lund, University of Copenhagen“Land and the Mortgage is an outstanding collection that offers timely comparative and historical analysis of mortgage lending from a human economy perspective. Distinguished anthropologists, historians, economists, and legal scholars focus on the sociality of debt and the embeddedness of mortgage lending in sociopolitical relations. Ranging across continents and millennia, this engaging volume will be essential reading for any study of financialization processes, land titling, credit practices, debt relations, and the cultural history and political economy of land.” • Angelique Haugerud, Rutgers University

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsForewordKeith HartIntroduction. Land, Finance, Technology: Perspectives on Mortgage LendingDaivi Rodima-TaylorPART I: SITUATING LAND MORTGAGE IN TIME AND SPACEChapter 1. The Glittering Mortgage, the Vanishing Farm: Enticement, Entrustment, EntrapmentParker ShiptonChapter 2. A Brief Legal and Social History of MortgageDavid J. SeippChapter 3. Land Tenure: From Fiscal Origins to FinancializationMichael HudsonPart II: Mortgage as Cultural Export: Land, Family, and the StateChapter 4. Inheriting Debt: Legal Pluralism, Family Politics, and the Meaning of Wealth in GhanaSara BerryChapter 5. Tales of Mortgage, Risk, and Taxation in Rural SenegalKristine JuulChapter 6. Signs of Trouble: Land, Loans, and Investments in Post-Conflict Northern UgandaMette Lind Kusk and Lotte MeinertPart III: Old Rules and New Twists:  Reinventing and Resisting Land FinancializationChapter 7. Reinventing Land Mortgage in Post-Socialist Europe: The Romanian CaseStefan Dorondel, Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Marioara RusuChapter 8. Distressed Publics: Circumventing the Mortgage from South Africa to IrelandNate Coben and Melissa K. WrappChapter 9. Governing the Old City: Land Records, Digitization, and Liquidity in LahoreTariq RahmanPart IV: Coming Full Circle: Hopes, Ideologies, and Life on the GroundChapter 10. Mortgage Credit as an Instrument of Economic Growth in Colonial Massachusetts, 1642-1777Winifred B. RothenbergChapter 11. When Land Takes Wing: The Concentration of Holdings and the Human-Animal DimensionParker ShiptonConclusion: EnvoiParker ShiptonIndex