The Plantation Ideal

Despite never having delivered sustained economic or social benefits, plantations have been the privileged tool of extraction and development in Mozambique for more than one hundred years. Drawing on extensive archival and qualitative contemporary research, The Plantation Ideal explores ProSavana, the 2009 trilateral megaproject between Brazil, Japan, and Mozambique, which was intended to reorganize rural land and labor for the benefit of large-scale commodity production. Offering new insights into plantation economies, histories, and landscapes, Wendy Wolford tells the story of how the largely failed pursuit of a plantation ideal 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.