Oil Boom: Agriculture, Chemistry, and the Rise of Global Plant Fat Industries, ca. 1850–1920

Robins, Jonathan E.

doi:10.1353/jwh.2018.0033

Cited by 14 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…During the early years of its trade to Britain, Europeans did not consider palm oil a foodstuff. Used to bland oils, they thought its taste, color, and odor were too strong (Robins 2018). Yet its emerging popularity for making soap meant that the palm oil trade expanded from a negligible 112 tons per year exported from West Africa to Britain in 1807, to 11,000–14,000 tons per year in the 1830s 16 .…”

Section: Marketing Elaeismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite these failures, the palm oil trade from West Africa to Britain would again expand to over 87,000 tons per year by 1911, when it began to be used in the tin plate industry to prevent oxidation, and the palm kernels became a valued cattle cake after their oil had been extracted (Hartley 1988: 12–13). Only in 1902 did it start to be used in margarine, when the development of hydrogenation unexpectedly enabled producers to strip the oil of its taste and smell (Robins 2018: 329). By the 1930s it was a key food for Europeans (ibid.…”

Section: Marketing Elaeismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cultivating “Care”: Colonial Botany and the Moral Lives of Oil Palm at the Twentieth Century’s Turn

Rudge

2022

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This paper draws on archival research to trace the techniques used by scientists and government officials involved with palm oil at the turn of the twentieth century. For them, mundane practices of “carefulness” were paramount as they worked on collecting, identifying, marketing, and improving the oil palm. But they also applied this so-called care to people: care of the oil palm was thought to presuppose care of the “native,” providing a correction for what were seen as “careless” local manners of cultivation. Colonial techniques of care thus sought to encompass both plants and peoples within contemporary liberal rhetorics of efficiency and moral improvement. This embodies how scientific and political care can interlink through their undersides of control, exploitation, and domination, which remain obscured by narratives of care themselves. Examining these links between commodity histories and scientific techniques is therefore essential for understanding environmental and social concerns regarding oil palm plantations today. An awareness of the afterlives of colonial discourses might encourage a more critical “care” in response to these issues today, challenging taken-for-granted notions of the benefits of corporate care.

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Section: Marketing Elaeismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Marketing Elaeismentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultivating “Care”: Colonial Botany and the Moral Lives of Oil Palm at the Twentieth Century’s Turn

Rudge

2022

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Palm Oil Diaspora

Watkins

2021

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Behind the social and environmental destruction of modern palm oil production lies a long and complex history of landscapes, cultures, and economies linking Africa and its diaspora in the Atlantic World. Case Watkins traces palm oil from its prehistoric emergence in western Africa to biodiverse groves and cultures in Northeast Brazil, and finally the plantation monocultures plundering contemporary rainforest communities. Drawing on ethnography, landscape interpretation, archives, travelers' accounts, and geospatial analysis, Watkins examines human-environmental relations too often overlooked in histories and geographies of the African diaspora, and uncovers a range of formative contributions of people and ecologies of African descent to the societies and environments of the (post)colonial Americas. Bridging literatures on Black geographies, Afro-Brazilian and Atlantic studies, political ecology, and decolonial theory and praxis, this study connects diverse concepts and disciplines to analyze and appreciate the power, complexity, and potentials of Bahia's Afro-Brazilian palm oil economy.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

2021

Palm Oil Diaspora

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Oil Boom: Agriculture, Chemistry, and the Rise of Global Plant Fat Industries, ca. 1850–1920

Cited by 14 publications

References 81 publications

Cultivating “Care”: Colonial Botany and the Moral Lives of Oil Palm at the Twentieth Century’s Turn

Cultivating “Care”: Colonial Botany and the Moral Lives of Oil Palm at the Twentieth Century’s Turn

Palm Oil Diaspora

Preface and Acknowledgments

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