The Dictionary of Human Geography (16 page)

Boserup thesis
Classical political econo mists, and Malthus and Ricardo in particular, developed in the early stages of demographic transition in Europe a macroeconomic the ory of the relations between population growth and agriculture. Ricardo (1817) distinguished between intensive and extensive agricultural expansion: extensive expansion presumed the extension of cultivation into new lands that were marginal and therefore subject to dimin ishing returns to labour and capital, whereas intensive expansion enhanced the output of existing lands through the application of better weeding, fertilizer, drainage and so on, which was also subject to diminishing returns to labour and capital. Ricardo, like Malthus (1803), assumed that population growth in creases would be arrested by a decline in real wages, by increases in rents and by per capita food decline. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There is a third form of intensification that rests upon the deployment of the increasing labour force to crop farmland more frequently (i.e. to increase the cropping intensity or to reduce the fallow). The reduction of the period of fallow (the period of non cultivation or re covery in which the land is allowed to regen erate its fertility and soil capacities) was a major way in which European agriculture increased its output during periods of popula tion growth, as observed at the time when Ricardo and Malthus were writing. Fallowing does not imply poorer or more distant land, but as the fallow length is reduced greater capital and labour inputs are required to pre vent the gradual decline of crop yields and the loss of fodder for animals. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Esther Boserup (1965, 1981) made fallow reduction a central plank of her important work on agrarian intensification. While fallow reduction is also likely to yield diminishing returns, these are more than compensated for by the additions to total output conferred by increased cropping frequency. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the eighth century the two field system predominated in Western Europe, but by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the three field system had come to displace its two field counterpart in high density regions (see fieLd system). By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the fallow had begun to disappear entirely. Boserup (1965) saw this fallowing reduction as the central theme in agrarian his tory and the centrepiece around which the Malthusian debates over overpopulation and famine ultimately turned (cf. maLthusian modeL). In her view, output per person hour is highest in the long fallow systems for ex ample, the shifting or swiddening systems of the humid tropical forest zone, in which di verse polycropping of plots for one or two seasons is then followed by a fallow of 15 25 years (depending on local ecological circum stances: cf. shifting cultivation) and population growth is the stimulus both for reduction in fallow and the innovations asso ciated with intensified land use. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Boserup envisaged a progressive series of fal low reductions driven by the pressure of popu lation (and the threat of exceeding the carrying capacity). Long fallow systems that are technologically simple (associated only with the digging stick and the axe) are displaced by bush fallow (6 10 year fallow) and short fallowing (2 3 year fallow) in which the plough is a prerequisite. Annual, and finally multiple, cropping appear as responses to con tinued population pressure. Across this pro gression of intensification is a reduction in output per person hour, but a vast increase in total output. The shift to annual and multiple cropping also requires substantially new forms of skill and investment, however, which typic ally demand state organized forms of invest ment and surplus mobilization. Boserup saw much of Africa and Latin America as occupy ing an early position in a linear model of in tensification in which output could be expanded by fallow reduction. The ?Boserup thesis? refers to the relationship between popu lation growth and agrarian intensification, measured through fallow reduction and a de creasing output per person hour. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Implicit in the Boserup thesis, although she did not develop these implications, is the changing role of land tenure, the increasing capitalization of the land and more complex forms of state society interaction. Indeed, Boserup?s work has been taken up by a num ber of archaeologists and anthropologists, who have charted patterns of state formation and social development in terms of agrarian intensification. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Boserup?s anti Malthusian theory lays itself open to all manner of charges, including a non linear form of techno demographic deter minism and a general lack of attention to the ecological limits of intensification (Grigg, 1980; cf. teleology). It is not at all clear how or whether Boserup?s thesis can be ap plied to market economies. Indeed, her thesis does not seem to be much help, for example, in the English case: in its essentials, the agri cultural technology of the eighteenth century (the Norfolk four course rotation) had been available since the Middle Ages, and although the eighteenth century was a period of popu lation growth, the previous period of sustained demographic growth from the mid sixteenth century had witnessed no intensification as such (Overton, 1996: see agricultural revo lution). Processes of intensification are nat urally on the historical record and the reduction of fallowing in the third world whether driven by demographic growth or not has been and continues to be documen ted (see Guyer, 1997). But intensification is a socially, culturally and politically complex process. To the extent that fallow reduction (NEW PARAGRAPH) involves someone working harder and differ ently, the question of who works, when and for what return (a question played out in terms of age, gender and class in the peasant house hold) is not posed by Boserup. Here, newer work on household dynamics has more to offer (Carney and Watts, 1990). mw (NEW PARAGRAPH)
boundary
At once a geographical marker and a geographical maker of regulative author ity in social relations. As markers of authority, boundaries range considerably in scale, signi ficance and social stability. From international boundaries that mark the borders between nation states to the barbed wire boundaries that mark the perimeters of export processing zones, to the racially, religiously and/or sexu ally exclusive boundaries that still mark the privileged places of decision making occupied by straight, white, Christian, men of property in America, boundaries take many different forms. But whether boundaries are the prod uct of international conventions, economic expedience or cultural conservativism, a key point highlighted in the work of geographers is that boundaries are also geographically constitutive makers as well as markers of regu lative power relations. In other words, inter national boundary lines actively operate to create and consolidate the global norms of nation state territoriality and the national identities forged under the resulting aegis of state sovereignty (Paasi, 1996). Barbed wire fences around export processing zones serve directly to carve off such spaces from wider political geographies of civil interaction, labour organization and democratic oversight, thereby depriving workers inside of numerous citizenship rights (Klein, 2002). And the invis ible but often impenetrable boundaries referred to by terms such as the ?glass ceiling? also clearly help enable and enforce spaces of privileged authority (Berg, 2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Nevertheless, not all boundaries create their regulative effects through binary ?us them? partitions. In many cases of state boundary drawing inside modern nation states includ ing the boundaries drawn to delineate elect oral districts, schools districts, police districts, public health districts and so on the act of inscribing a boundary on a map and enforcing it with routinized bureaucratic state actions on the ground helps create the larger singular effect we call ?the state?. As Timothy Mitchell (NEW PARAGRAPH) has argued, following Foucault, state effects can thereby be said to emerge through the everyday acts of spatial organization created by government. This is also no doubt (NEW PARAGRAPH) why the publishers of a book such as Seeing like a state (Scott, J.C., 1998b) saw fit to put an everyday image of a distinctly right angled turn in a road on the cover, an apparently arbitrary turn, presumably produced by some jurisdictional boundary marked on a state map. But since a scholar such as Mitchell argues vis a vis traditional state theories (including the highly anthropomorphized and sovereigntist kind advanced by Scott), the lesson of such geographical boundary making is not that there is a king like state whose boundary drawing is a sign of top down state dominance. Rather, the point is that along with all the state practices that the boundaries enable, the pro cess of boundary drawing is itself a disciplinary dynamic that helps consolidate the authority of the state. Mitchell applies this argument most directly to theorizing the emergence of nation state power, but it can equally be argued to apply to sub national and transnational forms of state making too (Sparke, 2005). Once examined in such venues as courtrooms and free trade tribunals, boundary drawing can also be seen as a highly contested mediation process through which the power relations of everyday social life, and the power relations of government themselves begin to reappear as if divided by a stark state/sociETY boundary. However, as work by geographers on every thing from electoral gerrymandering (Forest, (NEW PARAGRAPH) to community policing (Herbert, 2006) shows, the concept of such a clear cut state/ society boundary is better reinterpreted as a site of fraught political geographical struggles, struggles which in the very process of blurring the abstract state society distinction often end up creating new jurisdictional boundary lines on the ground. ms (NEW PARAGRAPH)
Brenner thesis
A thesis proposed by histo rian Robert Brenner (1976) as a contribution to a running debate within primarily Marxist scholarship about the transition from feudal ism to capitalism. Brenner emphasized the ways in which class, and more specifically property relations, served as a ?prime mover? of economic change. His basic premise is that the relationship between landlord and tenant was exploitative and depended on ?non economic compulsion?. Thus relations of pro duction in thirteenth and fourteenth century England were dominated by the institution of serfdom, which was buttressed by the manorial system and the common law that excluded serfs from access to royal courts (which were reserved for those who were legally free). Hence lords could act arbitrarily in their dealings with their unfree tenants. The power of this exploitative relationship provided a ready explanation for low and declining prod uctivity within the peasant sector before the Black Death, which in this analysis has little if anything to do with a population resource im balance as proposed in the postan thesis. Not only was this relationship inimical to the main tenance of effective husbandry within the peas antry, but it also led to a build up of tenants on the land, since it curtailed the migration of serfs to areas where their labour could be more effectively deployed. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The struggle between lords and peasants had different outcomes in different regions, which Brenner argues accounts for macro geographical variations in the move towards agrarian capitaLism in europe: in England lords were the victors, since tenants never gained absolute property rights, whereas in France peasants were far more successful. Brenner contends that landlord capacity was diminished in the period of demographic de pression after the Black Death, but that when population growth resumed in the sixteenth century, lords who still retained their power were able to evict peasant producers and install entrepreneurial tenants who farmed larger holdings with the increasing use of wage labourers. In this way, Brenner explains how agrarian capitalism emerged earlier in England than in the rest of Europe. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The thesis has been subject to considerable debate in history and historicaL geography (Aston and Philpin, 1985). Many now claim that serfdom did not operate in the manner proposed by Brenner, since custom gave un free tenants much protection from market forces and, indeed, benefited this group in (NEW PARAGRAPH) the period of price and rent inflation in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (Hatcher, 1981; Kanzaka, 2002; Campbell, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Furthermore, English customary law may have been greatly influenced by the com mon law to the extent that lords were in no position to operate their courts arbitrarily to their advantage (Razi and Smith, 1996b). While Brenner purports to treat the landlord tenant relationship as an endogenous com ponent, he is reluctant to admit the impact of exogenous forces associated with demographic change driven by epidemiological movements that have little to do with human agency (Hatcher and Bailey, 2001). Others have ar gued that changes in the distribution of land and the stimulus of land markets came as much from within the tenantry as it did from landlord initiatives (Glennie, 1988; Hoyle, 1990; Smith, 1998b). Likewise, it has been claimed that middling sized owner occupied farms were the principal source of an early modern agricuLturaL revoLution (Allen, 1992). Even within Marxist circles, there are those who would stress the emergence of a worLd system in which international trade and colonial expansion served to advantage England and its near neighbour Holland, lead ing to the emergence of large urban centres, which in turn stimulated demand for food stuffs and the move towards capitalist farm ing. Such arguments have loomed large in the writings of Pomeranz (2001), who also stresses the importance of access to the ?ghost acres? of the americas as fundamental to English economic success. rms (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Aston and Philpin (1985); Brenner (1976). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
cadastral mapping
A system of surveying and recording the boundaries, structures and salient features of land parcels in order to confirm ownership, support the buying and selling of land, promote the assessment and taxation of landed property, and delin eate the territorial privileges of tenants and others assigned limited rights. In addition to its traditional role in the commodification of land, a modern multi purpose cadastre provides an efficient framework for urban and regional planning, land use regulation, and the management of publicly and privately owned infrastructure such as sewers and distribution pipelines for water and natural gas (National Research Council Panel on a Multipurpose Cadastre, 1983). Where data sharing arrangements and a common plane coordinate system permit, a geographic information system can readily integrate land record data with street address informa tion, terrain data, census results, and environ mental and natural hazards data, including flood zone boundaries. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Allied with notions of private property, cadastral maps are among the oldest carto graphic forms (see cartography, history of), in use at least as early as 2300 bce, when the Babylonians described land boundaries and structures on clay tablets (Kain and Baigent, 1992, p. 1). The Egyptians and the Greeks were less inclined to map property surveys than the Romans, who used maps to tax private holdings and differentiate them from state lands. The collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth cen tury ad temporarily ended property mapping in Europe, but Renaissance capitalism revived the map as a management tool for private estates and precipitated the development of intricate state cadastres during the enlightenment. Cadastral mapping was essential to European colonization of the New World, where land grants and orderly settlement depended on map based land registration (see cornNiaLism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cadastral mapping has an important role in the third worLd, where comprehensive land record systems can promote land reform by validating traditional holdings, minimizing boundary disputes, promoting conservation of natuRAl resources, and reducing land frag mentation, which can undermine agricultural productivity. However promising, cadastral reform easily fails if poorly planned or not fully implemented (Ballantyne, Bristow et al., 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) In the more developed world, online cadas tres have heightened the innate conflict between personal privacy and open access to public records (Monmonier, 2003). Public access to cadastral information is a fundamental right in the USA and other countries in which local officials base evaluations of taxable real prop erty on the parcel descriptions and sale prices of nearby or similar properties. Without access, citizens cannot judge the fairness of their assessments and present an informed challenge to an inequitable evaluation. By making transaction data far more readily available, the internet has undermined the expectation of privacy among buyers reluctant to disclose their purchase price. Even so, bene fits clearly trump injuries insofar as ready disclosure promotes a more knowledgeable real property market and arguably fairer tax assessments. mm (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Jeffres (2003); Kain and Baigent (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)