This paper examines African peasant tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia from 1900 to 1980, from the cusp of colonialism to its end. It analyses shifting state policy towards African tobacco producers, the concomitant impact on peasant economies, accumulation patterns and the rural physical landscape and peasant responses. It focuses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries, and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. We argue that the symbolic value of each agricultural commodity, in entrenching the hierarchy of power relations and the institutionalisation of white control, mediated colonial responses to peasant production and concomitantly ‘peasant agency’. We use this case study to highlight the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and to explore how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa. The paper uses archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspapers, and journals from the Tobacco Research Board (TRB).

For a region purportedly a backwater of South African environmental history at the close of the twentieth century,1 the Cape has moved rapidly toward centre stage at the start of the new millennium. It now boasts a wealth of literature in international journals and last year saw the publication of the first book-length environmental histories of the region, with the promise of still more to come, not least from a strong crop of recently or nearly completed doctoral dissertations in academies round the north Atlantic rim.2 The Cape owes this distinction to being the oldest region of British missionary and imperial endeavour in the subcontinent, guaranteeing extensive archives in the northern hemisphere and explaining both the bias in the current scholarship towards the pre-1910 period and lack of a comparable scholarship on any other part of southern Africa.3 This anomalous florescence can also be read for likely future trends in a national historiography otherwise unanimously deemed moribund if not actually in decline for the past decade.4 What it reveals are two contending trajectories: the first a shift away from political economy to the history of ideas and the other a fidelity to the late twentieth-century radical social history tradition and its core theme of the social relations of production.

The battle over who controls Warri has been underway for several generations. The most violent eruption of this struggle occurred between 1997 and 1999. This article traces the history of this struggle to the colonial period, during a time of administrative restructuring called reorganization, which began in 1928. Contrary to the recent popular and scholarly understanding of the Warri crisis as an outcome of crude oil politics, I argue that British colonial state intervention set in motion a deadly, ethnicized struggle over political and material resources, which has only been exacerbated by the zero-sum politics of the crude oil economy.

This article examines state-society encounters in imperial Ethiopia through histories of exploitation and compromise. Focusing on the western province of Qellem, the article investigates Ethiopia's engagement with local rights claims over time, illustrating how the state was imagined, negotiated, and partially legitimated. The inherent incoherence within imperial state structures is traced back to the survival of nodes of indigenous power within territories conquered in the late nineteenth century. Peasant representatives, local elites, and Amhara governors and soldier-colonists engaged with the state to turn it to their benefit, or limit its excesses. Episodes of rebellion, withdrawal, and court arbitration punctuated a cycle of negotiation within which the role of the intermediary was key. Qellem experienced a state-making exercise that was contemporaneous with, and comparable to, the formation of European colonial states elsewhere on the continent. As such, this article provides a radical challenge to dominant historiographical perspectives on imperial Ethiopia.

Those who have studied the history of the Tijaniyya as a whole, are struck by the warlike character of the Umari branch which was so different from that of the other branches of the order in North West Africa and the Senegal. Hajj Umar's career as a religious warrior seems to have been shaped by two important influences: (1) the doctrines of the Tijaniyya, and (2) the ideas of Uthaman Danfodio and his son Muhammad Bello.