Moving frontiers in Agrarian Colonisation: Latin American Histories of Land, Labour and Power (FORTHCOMING – open for advance sales)

edited by Carolina Hormaza, Georg Fischer, Philipp Wolfesberger and Olaf Kaltmeier

Moving Frontiers in Agrarian Colonisation examines the meanings of agrarian colonisation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America and its roots in the Ibero-American colonial past. The volume historicises agrarian colonisation as an ongoing process of agricultural expansion situated within enduring colonial regimes. It explores the practices and epistemologies of diverse actors involved in the making of agrarian frontiers, including European immigrants, Mennonite communities, mestizo settlers, Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants, while also highlighting the roles of governments and international organisations. Through fifteen chapters, the volume offers a fresh take on agrarian colonisation as a process that illustrates the profoundly unequal positions of different rural communities within colonial and postcolonial societies, and examines the ambivalent histories of exploitation and resistance that shaped Latin America’s rural frontiers. The conceptual introduction approaches agrarian colonisation as a more-than-human process and a point of departure for engaging tensions between decolonial and settler-colonial studies in Latin America.

This book was supported by The Centre for Inter-American Studies (CIAS) and The Centre for Brazilian and Global Affairs (CEBRAGA). It is Open Access through the funding support of The German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt; BMFTR).

Read more