African Husbandman: William Allan

The African Husbandman helped a generation of scholars and officials to appreciate that Africans' agricultural practices were both more complex and more malleable than was often thought. Allan's work also pioneered research methods that wedded ethnographic and ecological fieldwork in ways that demonstrated the inextricable links between social arrangements, environmental conditions, and land use patterns. If certain facets of Allan's analysis have now come under scrutiny, his general tenet that to improve agricultural prospects in Africa one first has to understand it from the cultivators' point of view has only been strengthened with time. As long as there are individuals struggling to make sense of African agricultural productivity, The African Husbandman will remain a classic.