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1 results

  • 4 - Beyond Agency

  • Elijah Doro, Universitetet i Agder, Norway
  • Book:
    Plunder for Profit
    Published online:
    06 April 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023, pp 165-197

  • Summary

    This chapter 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 focusses on the changing agricultural commodity value chains, cash crop asymmetries and global market forces to explain colonial responses to peasant production and peasant agency. The chapter argues 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’. Furthermore, the chapter highlights the structural constraints on ‘agency’ and explores how cash crop asymmetries helped structure agrarian encounters and power relations in colonial Africa.