This is the first of two chapters to take a closer look at Sub-Saharan Africa, which is both the world’s least-industrialized and ethnically most-diverse continent. I start here with an examination of Somalia and Uganda, which are both states which have seen low levels of industrialization and an increase in ethnic fractionalization in recent decades. In Somalia the lack of formal sector job creation in the 1970s and 1980s contributed both to the collapse of the state along clan lines and a shift by which Somalia has gone from being considered one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Africa to one of the most diverse, as the salience of clan identity has risen in order to allow citizens to gain access to land and livelihoods. In Uganda a failure to create structural transformation has led to increased competition for land, leading individuals to utilize their often newly formed ethnic identities to claim ownership and title over rural land. I provide evidence from a variety of local land conflicts that revolve around ethnicity, as well as ongoing debates around both the listing of ’indigenous communities’ in Uganda’s constitution and the creation of new districts.

This introductory chapter is a headland to the larger field of the history of English georgic writing. It is set aside for a general survey of English georgic viewed through the contexts of agrarian history in the British Isles and of non-literary agricultural writing published over the last five centuries. The aim is to draw out some historical patterns and to fill in some of the literary gaps between chapters. It begins with three contemporary snapshots of British writers demonstrating some of the formal resources the georgic tradition can afford today. Six further sections survey about a century of georgic writing each.