Comparing Apples, Oranges, and Cotton : Environmental Histories of the Global Plantation

Worldwide, plantations are key economic institutions of the modern era. From an environmental perspective, they are also the settings for some of the most powerful, consequential, and frequently destructive modes of production ever to have existed. This volume assembles essays on commodities as diverse as coffee, cotton, rubber, apples, oranges, and tobacco, to provide an overview of plantation systems from Latin America to New Zealand that exposes the many dimensions of environmental history incorporated in these robust institutions. The global history of plantation systems not only highlights the great institutional resilience of our modern monocultures, but also the price that humans and environments have paid for them.-- Provided by Publisher Title Page 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Rise, Fall, and Permanence. Issues in the Environmental History of the Global Plantation • Frank Uekötter 8 Plantations, Agroecology, Environmental Thought, and the American South • Mart A. Stewart 28 Cotton’s Metropolis: Memphis and Plantation Development in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1920 • Jeannie M. Whayne 50 Ephemeral Plantations: The Rise and Fall of Liberian Coffee, 1870–1900 • Stuart McCook 86 Between “Wild Tropics” and “Civilization”: Guatemalan Coffee Plantations as Seen by German Immigrants • Christiane Berth 114 Divide and Cultivate: Plantations, Militarism and Environment in Portuguese Timor, 1860–1975 • Chris Shepherd and Andrew McWilliam 140 Pines, Pests and Fires: Large Scale Plantation Forestry in New Zealand, 1897–1955 • Michael Roche 168 How Nature Works: Business, Ecology, and Rubber Plantations in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1939 • Michitake Aso 196 Apple Orchards in Southern Brazil: An Environmental History • Jó Klanovicz 222 Plantations and the Rise of a Society in São Tomé and Príncipe • Marina Padrão Temudo 240 Notes on Authors 262 Index 264 Plantagen sind eine Schlüsselinstitution der Moderne. Zugleich sind sie auch in ökologischer Hinsicht eines der folgenreichsten Produktionsregime überhaupt. Im globalen Ausgriff versammelt der Band Beiträge zu so unterschiedlichen Produkten wie Kaffee, Kautschuk, Baumwolle und Äpfeln. Dabei geht es gleichermaßen um Einblicke in unterschiedliche Plantagensysteme – von Lateinamerika bis Neuseeland – wie um exemplarische Einsichten in die vielfältigen Dimensionen der Umweltgeschichte der Plantage. Die Aufsätze dokumentieren die bemerkenswerte Beharrungskraft moderner Monokulturen – aber auch den Preis, den Menschen und Umwelten dafür zahlen müssen. Worldwide, plantations are key economic institutions of the modern era. This book includes essays on commodities as diverse as coffee, cotton, rubber, oranges, and tobacco, to offer an overview of plantation systems from Latin America to New Zealand that exposes the many dimensions of environmental history incorporated in these institutions.