"Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty": Peasant Resistance to Forced Cotton Production in Mozambique, 1938-1961

Isaacman, Allen; Stephen, Michael; Adam, Yussuf; Homen, Maria Joao; Macamo, Eugenio; Pililao, Augustinho

doi:10.2307/218197

Cited by 38 publications

(35 citation statements)

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“…The effects of export crop cultivation on livelihoods in British colonial Africa has been discussed previously (Austin 2014). Although the production of export crops in British Africa was certainly not free from abuses and coercion, it contrasts favourably with the extractive and coercive practices in French (Tadei 2013), Belgian (Frankema & Buelens 2013) and Portuguese Africa (Isaacman 1980), where export crop cultivation went hand in hand with price controls, extensive forced labour regimes and heavy direct and indirect taxes.…”

Section: The Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Shocks Cash Crops and Resilience: Evidence from Colonial Tropical Africa

Papaioannou

Haas

2015

SSRN Journal

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Abstract:A rapidly growing body of research examines how weather variability, anomalies and shocks influence economic and societal outcomes. This study investigates the effects of weather shocks on African smallholder farmers in British colonial Africa and intervenes in the debate on the mediating effect of cash crops on resilience to shocks. We employ a dual research strategy, involving both qualitative and econometric analysis. We analyse original primary evidence retrieved from annual administrative records and construct a panel dataset of 151 districts across West, South-central and East Africa in the Interwar Era (1920)(1921)(1922)(1923)(1924)(1925)(1926)(1927)(1928)(1929)(1930)(1931)(1932)(1933)(1934)(1935)(1936)(1937)(1938)(1939). Our findings are twofold. First, we qualitatively expose a range of mechanisms leading from drought and excessive rainfall to harvest failure and social upheaval. We then test the link econometrically and find a robust U-shaped relation between rainfall deviation and social upheaval, proxied by annual imprisonment. Second, we review a long-standing and unsettled debate on the impact of cash crop cultivation on farmers' resilience to environmental shocks and find that cash crop districts experienced lower levels of social tension and distress in years of extreme rainfall variability.

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Section: The Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Shocks Cash Crops and Resilience: Evidence from Colonial Tropical Africa

Papaioannou

Haas

2015

SSRN Journal

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“…12 Isaacman argued that in stressing the devastating effects of commodity production on African communities, Marxist scholarship on cotton production in Mozambique reduced all cotton growers to victims, neglecting the ways in which they coped with and struggled against the cotton regime. 13 We reduced history, that is to say, to the logic of capital.…”

Section: Agency As Strategy: the Dislocation Of Classmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…59 Similarly, Isaacman, who has with Mozambican colleagues done extensive research on resistance to forced cotton cultivation, found that producers rarely openly refused to plant cotton. 60 Most cases of boycott took place when cotton was introduced in a particular area. The most militant of these was at Buzi in 1947.…”

Section: Resisting Shibalo and Forced Croppingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Proletarianisation, Agency and Changing Rural Livelihoods: Forced Labour and Resistance in Colonial Mozambique

O'Laughlin¹

2002

Journal of Southern African Studies

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In current analytical approaches to rural poverty in southern Africa, the concept of changing livelihoods stands in an inverse relation to the concept of proletarianisation. The more we see the term livelihoods, the less we see proletarianisation. This shift reflects criticism of Marxist work on proletarianisation for its teleology -confusing irreversibility with inevitability -and for its functionalism -not recognising the agency of the poor, including the struggles of people not to be proletarianised. It also reflects, however, the current ascendancy of methodological individualism in development studies. This paper argues that much is lost when the description of livelihoods becomes an alternative to class analysis rather than its complement, and when agency is reduced to individual strategising.It argues that the multiplicity and variation of rural lives in Mozambique today are the outcome of a historical process of proletarianisation grounded in recourse to forced labour by capitalist enterprises and the colonial state. It shows how both forced labour and resistance to it shaped the ways labour and agricultural commodity markets worked and developed. The concept of changing livelihoods helps us to us to document the processes of commoditisation that underlie both the contingency of proletarianisation and its irreversibility. It thus also helps us to understand why the struggles of rural people against forced labour and forced cropping often brought them more tightly into a world where wagelabour was done or hired. If we become so enmeshed in documenting the complexity of multiple livelihoods and individual creativity that we can no longer see broad patterns of class struggle in historical change, then the concept of livelihoods becomes an ideological mask rather than a useful working tool. CONTENTS

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“…Recent oral research among cultivators who had been subjected to Portuguese cotton tribute demands during the last decades of colonial rule in Mozambique reveals the widespread adoption of additional forms of everyday protest. The adulteration of cotton shipped to government warehouses, the cooking of cotton seeds before planting in order to convince government officials that certain areas were unsuitable for cotton cultivation, the clandestine cultivation of food crops on fields designated for cotton, late planting, and laxity about weeding cotton fields were among the techniques adopted to frustrate Portuguese tribute demands [Isaacman, 1980].…”

Section: The Protest Of Denial I: Everyday Peasant Resistance From Wimentioning

confidence: 99%

From footdragging to flight: The evasive history of peasant avoidance protest in south and South‐East Asia

Adas

1986

Journal of Peasant Studies

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"Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty": Peasant Resistance to Forced Cotton Production in Mozambique, 1938-1961

Cited by 38 publications

References 0 publications

Climate Shocks Cash Crops and Resilience: Evidence from Colonial Tropical Africa

Climate Shocks Cash Crops and Resilience: Evidence from Colonial Tropical Africa

Proletarianisation, Agency and Changing Rural Livelihoods: Forced Labour and Resistance in Colonial Mozambique

From footdragging to flight: The evasive history of peasant avoidance protest in south and South‐East Asia

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