The Plantation Ideal: Landscapes of Extraction in Mozambique Volume 18

Plantations have been the privileged tool of colonial rule and extraction in Mozambique for more than one hundred years despite never having delivered sustained economic or social benefits. Drawing on extensive archival and qualitative contemporary research, The Plantation Ideal offers new insights into plantation economies, histories, and landscapes. Wendy Wolford tells the story of how the largely failed pursuit of plantation production has shaped agricultural science, government rule, life on the land, and community development in Mozambique from the harshest years of Portuguese colonization to the present.

Wendy Wolford is the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Global Development at Cornell University. She is the author of This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil, coauthor of To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil, and coeditor of several books, including Governing Global Land Deals and The Social Lives of Land.