Commoning Across Worlds

For millennia, communities have depended on commons—lands, waters, woodlands, grasslands, fisheries, and wetlands—and commoning, the practices and customs associated with managing and using these resources, in both rural and urban worlds. Far from being open-access places or idealized utopias, commons have historically been resources claimed, governed, and negotiated through the commoning practices of the collectives that drew direct sustenance from them.

Commoning Across Worlds uncovers a variety of historical commons and their associated forms of commoning across a wide range of environments. Through case studies spanning Qing China, late medieval Castile, Ottoman Turkey, the Inka and colonial Andes, early modern Sweden, nineteenth-century southeastern Africa, and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, contributors reveal how societies past and present have built, maintained, and contested distinctive relationships to nature and place—transforming and sustaining terrestrial and watery environments by turning them into landscapes of community in which ecological stewardship, labor, and social belonging are mutually constituted. Combining a place-based approach with insights from history, archaeology, and ecology, their essays invite scholars and the public to recognize the commons as an enduring, culturally contingent, and value-laden space—one with enormous vitality and urgent relevance for shaping sustainable futures.