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- Title
Standard Cocoa.
- Authors
MACEDO, MARTA
- Abstract
In the early 1900s, an obscure Portuguese colony in the equatorial Atlantic rose as the world's leading cocoa producer. Cocoa from the island of Sao Tome was grown on large plantations with indentured labor and high technological inputs. This technoscientific system, to control both plants and people, became the model for making an industry-suited cocoa, and the material evidence of the moral and economic virtues of the colonial plantation. Experts played a crucial role in building and putting into circulation such a system. Sao Tome's cocoa expertise, along with its labor and racial relations, landscape patterns, and imperial imaginaries, contributed to the colonization of other African territories, namely the German Cameroons. This article agues that commodities and their technological histories can help bring to light the transnational and transcolonial features that are embedded at the core of empire building.
- Subjects
SAO Tome &; Principe; COCOA industry; PLANTATIONS; HISTORY of West Africa, 1884-1960; HISTORY of imperialism; AGRICULTURAL technology; TURN of the century (19th-20th century); HISTORY
- Publication
Technology & Culture, 2016, Vol 57, Issue 3, p557
- ISSN
0040-165X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/tech.2016.0071