Book Review: Land and the Mortgage
Book review of Land and the Mortgage: History, Culture, Belonging, edited by Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Parker Shipton (2022)
Land and the Mortgage: History, Culture, Belonging, edited by Daivi Rodima-Taylor and Parker Shipton (2022). New York: Berghahn Books.
For anthropologists studying labor, the term “mortgage” can serve as a metaphor. Susana Narotzky and Gavin Smith’s landmark study of contemporary Spanish agricultural laborers (2006) pursue this most vividly; in their account, the laborers’ term hipoteca humana (“human mortgage”) captures a repertoire of exploitative practices used by employers, from withholding social-security payments to blacklisting outspoken workers across factories. Land and the Mortgage, however, is not about metaphors—nor is it explicitly about labor or laborers. Its ambition is one that anthropologists should celebrate: the book seeks to humanize economic processes that are often reduced to numbers. Access to land, facilitated or constrained by mortgages, emerges here as a profoundly social story shaped by kinsfolk, speculators, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, judges, real-estate developers, and aid workers. Through the lens of mortgages, the book reveals the web of relationships that these financial instruments can enable and sustain.
Although too brief for thorough contextualization, Chapters 2, 3, and 10 provide valuable insights into the relationship between mortgages and labor. David J. Seipp’s legal genealogy and Michael Hudson’s account of land tenure, which begin in medieval England and Mesopotamia, illustrate the peculiarity of premodern mortgages. Historically, securing a mortgage was not necessarily a routine step toward adulthood. According to Seipp, mortgages were often a last resort for families seeking to safeguard income-generating land, which was rarely lost completely. Even when legal authorities sided with lenders, courts of equity offered routes for repayment and the recovery of full ownership. Winifred B. Rothenberg’s in-depth analysis of wills in colonial Massachusetts traces the transition to modern financial practices, illustrating how mortgages became a tool for economic growth. However, his study reaffirms a persistent Anglophone norm: that mortgages seldom led to a permanent transfer of land. Even when borrowers failed to repay, alienating land from its owners remained challenging. Since contemporary ethnographies often depict mortgages in narratives of dispossession, these premodern accounts present challenges for historically minded anthropologists.
By the nineteenth century, dispossession had become a real possibility in much of the United States and Western Europe. “The Tramp’s Story,” of rural America’s most cherished verses, casts a mortgage as its central antagonist. It brings about “first-class ruination,” more devastating than “worm or beetle, drought or tempest.” It is the farm’s most relentless worker, sealing “up every window” against all “happiness and sunshine.” The mortgage even contributes to the narrator’s wife’s death, found “lying on that woman’s broken heart” (Carleton 1882:127–32). Parker Shipton’s chapter cites this poem and provides an emotional framework for understanding a mortgage’s life cycle. Why do people take on mortgages if they later come to dread them? For Shipton’s historical interlocutors, a mortgage was not necessarily a last resort. Even if it became a slide toward proletarianization, land purchased with a mortgage could hold the promise of capital gains only for these to later fail to be realized. In this regard, one way for an anthropologist of labor to engage with mortgages is to conceptualize them as a process that bifurcates peasants into capitalists and laborers.
A pivotal development took place when mortgages went from protecting peasants against the advance of capital to becoming a means of subjugating them to it – a process that seems to have been completed throughout the industrialized world by the late twentieth century. Yet this transformation does not take place within a static, unenterprising peasantry. Many of the individuals whose stories unfold throughout the volume actively seek opportunities beyond their personal networks and traditional sources of income, venturing into businesses such as medium-scale cattle dealerships or insurance reselling. These ambitions often generate tensions within kinship groups or across generations. Sara Berry demonstrates how communal property—formally entrusted to a manager rather than an outright owner—complicates claims to land and responsibility for its debts. Similarly, Mette Lind Kusk and Lotte Meinert show how Ugandan families have grappled—at times with axes in hand—with the consequences of individually mortgaging ancestral land. The stakes were not just the land itself, valued as a more secure asset than “paper money,” but also the web of relationships that the land sustained: who placed whom at risk, and who bore the stain of another’s default? Additionally, who has the authority to determine a plot of land’s value? And who will pay for future gains robbed by a sale in the present?
Land mortgage is new to Africa, at least in the form propagated by development economists (with whom, and against whom, much of this volume speaks). Berry’s chapter focuses on Ghana, where a tradition of land pledging preceded by centuries the introduction of mortgages and Western-inspired credit institutions. Other case studies in the volume demonstrate this intricate dialogue between old and new. In Kristine Juul’s study of Senegal, land appears to be mortgageable even when not officially owned by the tenants. This allows judges to side with the mortgagors against their creditors. Indeed, just like in premodern Europe and contemporary Uganda, legal rights are never uncontestable, though that is not to say that mortgagors always win. As Juul shows, the broadening consensus around land being mortgageable, even if not formally owned by the mortgagor, makes one liable to lose the land anyway. Creditors, especially microfinance institutions, resort to other measures – including shame – to retrieve at least some of their money back. This and other cases featured in the chapters demonstrate the fragility of indebted lives, the many contradictions of credit, and the resourcefulness (sometimes moot) needed to navigate these contradictions.
One of the volume’s most compelling chapters, by Stefan Dorondel et al., examines the re-introduction of mortgages in newly post-socialist Romania. There, mortgages come with a history, and the peasantry had long since been transformed into a laboring class. Agricultural enterprises, once collectivized villages managed by bureaucrats, were now being dismantled into market-oriented companies—a process more effectively carried out by managers than by laborers. Dorondel et al. not only trace the legal complexities of this transition—such as restoring land rights in the 1990s to owners from the 1950s, whose heirs may have disappeared, or the banks’ refusal to lend to landholders unaffiliated with a company—but the authors also explore how laborers navigated their new precarity. Their strategies ranged from stealing government property and borrowing with no intention of repaying to securing legally certified land titles in hopes of building legitimate agricultural businesses. Here, speculation and adventurism were stifled not only by mistrust among actors in key economic sectors but also by family members who refuse to sell their land.
Throughout its chapters, Land and the Mortgage illustrates how deeply ingrained the belief in land as a safeguard for the future remains—persisting even when economic realities render it untenable and burdensome. By examining mortgage-taking as both a mechanism of economic transformation and a site of conceptual instability, the volume’s contributions challenge the rigid distinctions between capitalists and laborers. While development scholars may be the authors’ primary audience, the book’s insights extend well beyond this readership, providing valuable perspectives for labor historians and economic anthropologists. Indeed, one can even hope that these excellent chapters will result in more detailed monographs in the future.
References
Carleton, Will. (1882). Farm Festivals. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Narotzky, Susana, and Gavin Smith. (2006). Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
