The Politics of Development Metrics and Measurement: Impact Evaluations in Fairtrade‐certified Plantation Agriculture

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 1531-1553
Author(s):  
Angus Lyall ◽  
Elizabeth Havice
Keyword(s):  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
Metrics And Measurement

Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation. By J. William Harris. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xii, 454. $45.00.

2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1143
Author(s):  
William H. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Boll Weevil ◽  
Cotton Production ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
The American South ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
Intensive Work

In Deep Souths, J. William Harris looks at three distinct regions in the American South from Reconstruction through the Great Depression. The regions are similar in that they all had majority black populations before the Civil War, with economies dominated by slave plantation agriculture. However, the economies of these regions diverged once the war was over. The Georgia sea-island culture of long-staple cotton and rice collapsed in the late 1800s, as the extremely labor-intensive work of maintaining ditches and dams could not survive a free-labor regime. The eastern Piedmont of Georgia made the conversion from plantation agriculture to sharecropping and expanded cotton production until 1920. But low cotton prices and the boll weevil crippled this economy by the beginning of the Depression. The Mississippi Delta, on the other hand, witnessed a major capital expansion as the swampy wilderness of antebellum times was converted into the South's premier cotton production center.

Plantation Agriculture in the Tropics

2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred E. Hartemink
Keyword(s):  
Carbon Sequestration ◽  
Soil Erosion ◽  
Soil Fertility ◽  
Cover Crops ◽  
Fertility Decline ◽  
Crop Yields ◽  
Perennial Crops ◽  
Tropical Countries ◽  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
National Economies

Plantation agriculture is more than 400 years old and contributes to the regional and national economies in many tropical countries. This paper reviews some of the main environmental issues related to plantation agriculture with perennial crops, including soil erosion, soil fertility decline, pollution, carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Soil erosion and soil fertility decline are of concern in some areas, but in most plantations these are being checked by cover crops and inorganic fertilizer applications. Few studies have been conducted on the issue of carbon sequestration under perennial plantation cropping. Reductions in deforestation yield much greater benefits for a reduction in CO2 emissions than expanding plantation agriculture. The biggest threat to biodiversity is the loss of habitat through expansion of the plantation area. Despite the environmental problems and concerns, this review has shown that crop yields of most perennial crops have increased over time due to improved crop husbandry including high-yielding cultivars and improved soil management. It is likely that more attention will be given to the environmental aspects of plantation cropping due to the increasing environmental awareness in tropical countries.

Learning Slavery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lyman Bushman
Keyword(s):  
White Women ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
White Children ◽  
Housing Management ◽  
Running Away ◽  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
The Revolution

Plantation agriculture created a culture in which commanding a slave became a mark of distinction. Large owners left a slave to each of their children as one of the accoutrements of a respectable lady or gentleman. White children of necessity had to learn to be masters and their black companions to be slaves. Much of this learning occurred through the stories of black-white relationships which slaves told each other. The stories formed a body of black literature which was passed along with other skills like singing and playing. White masters had to learn to provide supplies for their workforce—food, clothing, housing. Management of a large plantation called for the skills of a quartermaster. Whites, furthermore, even white women, had to learn to demand and to punish. As they grew, black children had to decide if they were to seek to be trusted by their masters or take a chance on resistance. Resistance could involve little more than slacking off work when not under the master’s gaze. Or it could mean running away. During the Revolution, black families that were seemingly quiescent took the chance on joining the British forces and ran away. Blacks concealed their true feelings in hiding places in their minds.

The Nature of the South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lyman Bushman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Temperature Gradient ◽  
Growing Season ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
Southern Colonies

Plantation agriculture in the western hemisphere extended from Brazil northward through the Caribbean to the northern boundary of Maryland. This geography created a line in North America noted by seventeenth-century imperial economists. The southern colonies produced crops needed in the home land making the South far more valuable to the empire than the North. Plantation agriculture stopped at the Maryland-Pennsylvania border because the climate made slavery impractical north of that line. Only farmers who produced valuable exports could afford the price of slaves. Tobacco, though it could be grown in the North, was not commercially feasible there. The growing season had to be long enough to get a crop in the ground while also planting corn for subsistence, allow the tobacco to mature, and harvest it before the first frost. Tobacco was practical within the zone of the 180-day growing season whose isotherm outlines the areas where slavery flourished. Within this zone, the ground could be worked all but a month or two in winter, giving slaves plenty to do. Cattle could also forage for themselves, reducing the need for hay. Southern farmers could devote themselves to provisions and market crops, increasing their wealth substantially compared to the North where haying occupied much of the summer. Differing agro-systems developed along a temperature gradient running from North to South with contrasting crops and labor systems attached to each.

scholarly journals Cultivating Plantations and Subjects in East Timor: A Genealogy

2013 ◽  
Vol 169 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 326-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Shepherd ◽  
Andrew McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
East Timor ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Racial Discourse ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Cash Crops ◽  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
Portuguese Colonialism

Abstract This article traces the emergence and institutionalization of plantation systems and cash crops in East Timor over two centuries. It examines the continuities, ruptures and shifting politics across successive plantation styles and political regimes, from Portuguese colonialism through Indonesian occupation to post-colonial independence. In following plantation agriculture from its origins to the present, the article explores how plantation subjects have been formed successively through racial discourse, repressive discipline, technical authority and neoliberal market policies. We argue that plantation politics have been instrumental in reproducing the class distinctions that remain evident in East Timor today.

Deep History, Deep South

2018 ◽  
pp. 245-286
Author(s):  
Cameron B. Strang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Deep South ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
Cotton Trade

During the 1830s, slavery shaped the practice, patronage, and application of geology in America. Plantation slavery—and the labor, patronage, and networks it provided—enabled collections and observations that defined the Gulf South’s geohistory while emerging geotheories inspired new means of justifying and furthering slavery. Slavery allowed Charles and Sarah Tait to offer patronage and recognition to northeastern naturalists, excavate and package the fossils needed to characterize the Gulf South’s geohistory, and circulate specimens and data through the networks built around the cotton trade. Rush Nutt drew on uniformitarian geotheory to legitimate African American slavery and proposed new geo-engineering techniques that would encourage the expansion of plantation agriculture. These case studies suggest some of the ways that slavery and science strengthened each other in the early United States.

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