Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa
Edited by Richard Roberts, Stanford University, Allen Isaacman, University of Minnesota
ISBN 978-0-435-08968-9 / 0-435-08968-4 / 1995 / 314pp / Paperback
Imprint: Heinemann
Availability: This title is out of print.
Grade Level: College
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The collaboration of Isaacman and Roberts is a fruitful one; their introduction is broad and impressive, and it launches a discussion of cotton production at the continental level that seems both new and substantial.... Indeed, the collection presents the issue of cotton production as a metaphor for the whole colonial experience in Africa.
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.
—Patrick Manning, Northeastern University
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 collection 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.
Africans experienced cotton colonialism through the interior architecture of the societies in which they lived. But these very societies were undergoing rapid change as wives and husbands, fathers and sons responded to the opportunities and constraints associated with colonial conquest. These chapters explore the ways in which cotton production and marketing affected gender relations, food security, and the environment, intensifying contemporary struggles over custom, meaning, power, and property. The intensity of these contests is critical to understanding the social dynamics of the cotton revolution in the twentieth century.
Contents:
1. Introduction Part 1: Cotton Policies and African Realities 2. "Note on Cotton and Climate," Philip W. Porter 3. "The Cotton Campaign in Northern Nigeria, 1902 1914," Jan Hogendorn 4. "Persistence of Precolonial Patterns of Production: Cotton in German Togoland," Donna Maier 5. "Cotton and Colonial Order in Sudan: The Gezira Scheme," Victoria Bernal 6. "The Portuguese Colonial Cotton Regime in Angola and Mozambique, 1946-1974," Anne Pitcher Part 2: Struggles Over Labor/Struggles Over Markets 7. "Forced Cotton Cultivation in Northern Mozambique," Allen Isaacman and Arlindo Chilundo 8. "Peasants and the Struggle for Labor in Cotton Regimes of the Rufiji Basin (Tanzania), 1890 1918," Thaddeus Sunseri 9. "Forced Cotton Cultivation and Social Control in the Belgian Congo," Osumaka Likaka 10. "Cotton, Peasants, and the Colonial State in the French Soudan, 1924 1932," Richard Roberts Part 3: Cotton, Food Security, and Reproduction of Rural Communities 11. "The Uncaptured Corvee: Cotton in Cote d'Ivoire, 1912-1946," Thomas J. Bassett 12. "Rice and Cotton, Ritual and Resistance in Colonial Tanganyika, 1920-1940," Jamie Monson 13. "The Conflict Between Cotton and Food in Colonial Malawi," Elias Mandala.
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The collaboration of Isaacman and Roberts is a fruitful one; their introduction is broad and impressive, and it launches a discussion of cotton production at the continental level that seems both new and substantial.... Indeed, the collection presents the issue of cotton...”
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