Africa is a massive continent. One could fit all of Western and Eastern Europe (including the UK), India, Japan and China, and the United States into the continent, and still have space left. Africa, of course, has far fewer people. In 2021 an estimated 1.4 billion people lived on the African continent. The combined number for those other countries was a startling 3.7 billion people.

This makes Africa a land-abundant continent. In other words, Africa has a low labour-to-land ratio – there are about 46 people for every square kilometre in Africa as compared to 150 people, on average, in those other regions. The numbers for China (153), Western Europe (174) and India (464) are much higher.

This high land–labour ratio is not a new phenomenon. Africa has historically also had an abundance of land relative to the number of people who can work it. As we will see in this chapter, it has shaped the types of production systems and institutions that developed on the continent.

The equity issue economists spend most of their time on is the current distribution of income and whether that distribution is becoming more unequal through time. Mainstream economists strongly disagree about these matters. Some want substantial increases in income tax for the highest earners; others think substantial increases would hurt economic growth in the medium to long term as lower after-tax income makes potential innovators more risk-averse while other high-paid workers decide to retire earlier. It is striking that almost no economists bring up a right to the fruits of one’s labor and fair compensation for one’s innovative ideas. Jefferson, on the left, Hamilton, on the right, and all the principal founders in between were strong believers in property rights. All the arguments about fairness, economic growth, and deserts are considered at length.

Economists agree about some equity matters. For example, they think the general public does not understand the actual incidence of taxes. Taxing unemployment insurance sounds regressive, but with our progressive income tax it actually hurts most those with above-average income. Raising business taxes sounds progressive, but labor and consumers pay a substantial part of this tax.

Chapter 8 focuses on major advances in data acquisition and modeling of soil chemical weathering - at both the humid and the very dry end of the Earth’s climatic spectrum. The behavior of elements in aqueous solutions is examined in more detail. The now widely used mass balance method of calculating elemental gains and losses by comparison with an immobile index element is introduced and discussed. The concept of weathering fronts, and ways to understand what creates them and the rates at which they move through soils, is introduced - a relatively new concept from geoscientists who focus on soil geochemical processes and their rates.

Frontiers became increasingly central to colonial spatial sciences as the nineteenth century progressed. Examining surveyors’ activities in the field along with the material processes by which maps were produced and circulated, this chapter analyses three broad junctures of frontier surveying based on distinct techniques of seeing and representing space. Route surveys of the 1820s to 1840s mostly gave way to triangulation from the 1850s on, and trigonometrical survey parties increasingly ventured into frontier regions from the later 1860s. By this later period, surveyors and ‘men of science’ in metropole and colony alike deemed comprehending frontier locales a key goal of imperial science. Agents of empire considered these regions as providing unparalleled opportunities, but also substantial challenges to established modes of spatial knowledge and representation. The chapter shows how this ambiguity reached a peculiar resolution, as many surveyors and geographers came to celebrate and to uphold the elusive quality of India’s frontiers.