Cotton Colonialism And Social History In Sub Saharan Africa

This interdisciplinary collection brings together recent scholarship on the social history of agrarian change in Africa. It provides an important entry into the lived experiences of millions of Africans who cultivated cotton, often under duress, during the colonial period. The social history of cotton in Africa thus provides an opportunity to take a constant in the changing worlds of colonialism - cotton - and to explore a range of African experiences historically and geographically.

A comprehensive study of recent African history, examining the political, social, and economic effects of colonialism.

This book explores the lives of Mozambique's cotton producers-their pain and suffering, their coping strategies, their struggles to survive.

This interdisciplinary collection brings together some of the newest scholarship on the social history of agrarian change in Africa. It provides an important entry into the lived experiences of millions of Africans who cultivated cotton, often under duress, during the colonial period. The social history of cotton in Africa thus provides an opportunity to take a constant in the changing worlds of colonialism - cotton - and to explore the range of African experiences historically and geographically. By linking cotton and colonialism in this way, these eleven case studies open up new comparisons between different colonial agricultural policies, different labor regimes, and different forms of African response to colonial economic policies. This study of cotton in colonial Africa highlights both the way industrial capitalism sought to call forth tropical raw materials and the ways this colonial project was shaped by the dynamic local processes of production, exchange, social reproduction, and rural resistance.

A major new approach to the study of the social and economic history of colonial French West Africa, this book traces French efforts to establish a cotton export economy in the French Soudan from the early nineteenth century through the end of World War II. By showing how a regionally based local economy successfully withstood the pressure from European capitalist markets and colonial aspirations, the book sheds new light on various generally accepted assumptions about the character of colonial economies and their integration into global export markets. It thus challenges the notion that colonial political, military, and elite intellectual hegemony translated directly or easily into regional economic hegemony. In making this argument, the book points to inherent weaknesses in the usual view of the colonial state, notably the failure to recognize sufficiently the enduring power of local processes - or local currents of culture and practice - to withstand empire and ultimately shape the experience of colonialism.

In this volume, case studies reveal that farm women in Africa, Asia and Latin America are rapidly becoming more than subsistence producers. It explores the societal and domestic changes brought about as women move to positions as wage labourers, contract growers and farm owners.

This book examines the economic and business history of Sudan, placing Sudan into the wider context of the impact of imperialism on economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. From the 1870s onwards British interest(s) in Sudan began to intensify, a consequence of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the overseas expansion of British business activities associated with the Scramble for Africa and the renewal of imperial impulses in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mollan shows the gradual economic embrace of imperialism in the years before 1899; the impact of imperialism on the economic development of colonial Sudan to 1956; and then the post-colonial economic legacy of imperialism into the 1970s. This text highlights how state-centred economic activity was developed in cooperation with British international business. Founded on an economic model that was debt-driven, capital intensive, and cash-crop oriented–the colonial economy of Sudan was centred on cotton growing. This model locked Sudan into a particular developmental path that, in turn, contributed to the nature and timing of decolonization, and the consequent structures of dependency in the post-colonial era.

A comprehensive study of recent African history, examining the political, social, and economic effects of colonialism.