The Role of Agricultural and Environmental History in East African Developmental Discourse

The past, or the perception of the past, plays a pivotal role in the formation of modern policies on land-use, since the rhetoric of conservation favours the protection of ‘ancient’ or ‘pristine’ landscapes, whilst the focus on economic or environmental sustainability has led to the endorsement of apparently long-lived ‘indigenous’ practices, especially where these appear to have permitted extended periods of cultivation whilst conserving local soil, water, and forest resources. Focusing on examples of locally developed intensive agriculture from Kenya and northern Tanzania, this chapter aims to highlight how the history of landscape management in these areas—although still poorly understood—continues to be cited within developmental and conservationist debates. It will outline how a combination of archaeological, historical, and palaeoenvironmental research might be employed to produce a more complete understanding of these agronomies, and argues that work of this kind is essential to qualify the historical assumptions that have been used to justify external intervention. The invocation of historical arguments in support of either economic intervention or wildlife conservation is not a recent phenomenon, but the critical appraisal of such arguments has gained momentum over the last two to three decades. It is by no means a coincidence that this is also the period that has seen a rise in interest in the precepts of ‘historical ecology’ (e.g. Balée 2006; Crumley 1994) and in resilience theory (e.g. Walker et al. 2004), both of which emphasize the need to study social, economic, and environmental factors from a long-term historical perspective in order to fully understand the relationships between them in any given place or time, and both stress the importance of seeing modern landscapes and resource exploitation strategies as legacies of former periods of land-use. More recently, a resurgence in interest in world systems theory—itself formerly influential on developmental thinking via dependency theory (e.g. Frank 1969)—raises similar themes through the notion that most if not all local economies have been influenced by their interaction with broader webs of trade relations at regional and global scales for several centuries (e.g. Hornberg and Crumley 2007).