Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina

Author: S. Max Edelson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-05-15

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0674060229

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This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry. European settlers came to South Carolina in 1670 determined to possess an abundant wilderness. Over the course of a century, they settled highly adaptive rice and indigo plantations across a vast coastal plain. Forcing slaves to turn swampy wastelands into productive fields and to channel surging waters into elaborate irrigation systems, planters initiated a stunning economic transformation. The result, Edelson reveals, was two interdependent plantation worlds. A rough rice frontier became a place of unremitting field labor. With the profits, planters made Charleston and its hinterland into a refined, diversified place to live. From urban townhouses and rural retreats, they ran multiple-plantation enterprises, looking to England for affirmation as agriculturists, gentlemen, and stakeholders in Britain's American empire. Offering a new vision of the Old South that was far from static, Edelson reveals the plantations of early South Carolina to have been dynamic instruments behind an expansive process of colonization. With a bold interdisciplinary approach, Plantation Enterprise reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.

The Modern Plantation in the Third World
The Modern Plantation in the Third World

Author: Edgar Graham

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-02-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 100384653X

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Originally published in 1984, this was the first study to define and rationalise the character and functions of the plantation in the contemporary world. The author, Edgar Graham, was uniquely placed to do this having had long experience of Unilever’s plantations in West Africa, Zaire, Malaysia and the Pacific. Writing as a pragmatist, from observed fact, his starting point was the fact that the ‘modern plantation’ bears very little resemblance to that of the past, on which most hostile accounts are still based. Two changes altered the very nature of the issue: First, the 20th Century plantation existed within an economic framework controlled by independent governments. Secondly, the rapid development in technology has revolutionised most aspects of plantation production. The result, it is argued, is that the modern plantation offers host governments the option of using this as the most efficient way of utilising available factors of production to provide a maximum social return. Exemplified by case studies, this study presents a powerful argument for the continue use of the plantation system when properly applied to a variety of tropical crops.

African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania
African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania

Author: Priya Lal

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-12

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1107104521

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Drawing on a wide range of oral and written sources, this book tells the story of Tanzania's socialist experiment: the ujamaa villagization initiative of 1967-75. Inaugurated shortly after independence, ujamaa ('familyhood' in Swahili) both invoked established socialist themes and departed from the existing global repertoire of development policy, seeking to reorganize the Tanzanian countryside into communal villages to achieve national development. Priya Lal investigates how Tanzanian leaders and rural people creatively envisioned ujamaa and documents how villagization unfolded on the ground, without affixing the project to a trajectory of inevitable failure. By forging an empirically rich and conceptually nuanced account of ujamaa, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation building and development, and expands our understanding of the 1960s and 70s world.