Comparing Apples, Oranges, and Cotton: Environmental Histories of the Global Plantation

277 Pages·2014·13.03 MB·English

by  Frank Uekötter (Editor)

Comparing Apples, Oranges, and Cotton
Frank Uekötter is a Reader in Environmental Humanities at the University of
Birmingham.
Frank Uekötter (ed.)
Comparing Apples,
Oranges, and Cotton
Environmental Histories of the Global Plantation
Campus Verlag
Frankfurt/New York
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Contents
Rise, Fall, and Permanence. Issues in the Environmental History of
the Global Plantation
Frank Uekötter ............................................. 7
Plantations, Agroecology, Environmental Thought, and the
American South
Mart A. Stewart ........................................... 27
Cotton’s Metropolis: Memphis and Plantation Development in the
Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1920
Jeannie M. Whayne ........................................ 49
Ephemeral Plantations: The Rise and Fall of Liberian Coffee,
1870–1900
Stuart McCook ............................................ 85
Between “Wild Tropics” and “Civilization”: Guatemalan Coffee
Plantations as Seen by German Immigrants
Christiane Berth .......................................... 113
Divide and Cultivate: Plantations, Militarism and Environment in
Portuguese Timor, 1860–1975
Chris Shepherd and Andrew McWilliam ........................ 139
Pines, Pests and Fires: Large Scale Plantation Forestry in
New Zealand, 1897–1955
Michael Roche ........................................... 167
6 Table of Contents
How Nature Works: Business, Ecology, and Rubber Plantations in
Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919–1939
Michitake Aso ........................................... 195
Apple Orchards in Southern Brazil: An Environmental History
Jó Klanovicz ............................................. 221
Plantations and the Rise of a Society in São Tomé and Príncipe
Marina Padrão Temudo .................................... 239
Notes on Authors ........................................ 261
Index .................................................. 263
Rise, Fall, and Permanence. Issues in the
Environmental History of the Global
Plantation
Frank Uekötter
Orange juice has long emerged as a staple in the American diet. It receives
almost universal acclaim for its fresh taste and its health benefits, with con-
sumption reaching across divisions of class, race, region, and gender. Florida
has dominated production ever since orange growers discovered juice as an
outlet for surplus production in the early twentieth century. The state of
Florida established a Department of Citrus in 1935. The industry took off
after the patenting of a method to produce frozen concentrated orange juice
in 1948, and corporate America entered the ring: Coca-Cola bought the
Minute Maid brand in 1960 while Pepsi acquired Tropicana in 1998. The
Florida legislature declared orange juice the official state beverage in 1967.1
It may soon be over. A disease called citrus greening is wreacking havoc
to an ever growing number of orange groves all over the peninsula. Caused
by a bacterium, it spread through the Asian citrus psyllid, an invasive species
that was first found in Florida in 1998. Citrus greening makes trees loose fo-
liage and causes fruit to turn bitter and drop from trees before they are ripe,
effectively rendering orange trees unproductive. No known cure exists for
the disease, and attempts to curb the bug’s spread have met with mixed suc-
cess at best. The epidemic follows on the heels of a canker epidemic that cut
Florida citrus production by roughly one third. After a campaign that cost
$ 600 million and included felling 12.7 million citrus trees (about ten per-
cent of Florida’s commercial acreage), the U.S. Department of Agriculture
found that the fight against canker was lost and cancelled its eradication ef-
forts in 2006. In short, a tiny insect is currently pushing a nine billion dollar
industry into oblivion.2
1 Alissa Hamilton, Squeezed. What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2009); http://www.flheritage.com/facts/symbols/symbol.
cfm?id=14 (retrieved May 27, 2013).
2 Susan E. Halbert, Keremane L. Manjunath, “Asian Citrus Psyllids (Sternorrhyncha: Psyl-
lidae) and Greening Disease of Citrus: A Literature Review and Assessment of Risk in
8 Frank Uekötter
The story of citrus greening mirrors the paradox of the modern planta-
tion: the combination of permanence and notorious instability. In essence,
plantation history offers a deeply ambiguous narrative—a global success
stor y full of crushing defeats. On the one hand, plantations are a cornerstone
of global food production in the modern era. They have supplied societies
all over the world with a cornucopia of cheap products and will continue
to do so for the foreseeable future. Western consumers can barely imagine a
life without oranges, apples, coffee and other plantation products, and for
good reasons: they never had to worry about them throughout their entire
lives. On the other hand, plantations are constantly under threat, and many
plantation systems go through cycles of boom and bust. A whole host of fac-
tors can jeopardize or terminate a plantation project, and no one knows in
advance whether things will work out.
Of course, the environment was not the only source of trouble for planta-
tion systems. Labor was a key issue, particularly since plantation economies
hinged on slavery into the nineteenth century. The sugar industry in Brazil
and the Caribbean, arguably the archetype of the modern plantation, is the
best-known example.3 Competition is another factor. Florida’s citrus indus-
try is not only under siege from nasty diseases but also from real estate de-
velopers and cheaper producers abroad: Brazil passed Florida as the world’s
leading producer of oranges some three decades ago.4 However, environ-
mental problems have galvanized attention long before environmentalism
became a global force towards the end of the twentieth century. Soil fertility
and erosion were subject to intensive debates. Pests and diseases inspired
fears and frantic eradication efforts. They also inspired popular culture: the
boll weevil—another tiny insect that ate its way through the Cotton South
around 1900—left a mark not only on U.S. plantations but also in blues
music.5
Florida,” Florida Entomologist 87 (2004): 330–353; Erik Stokstad, “New Disease Endan-
gers Florida’s Already-Suffering Citrus Trees,” Science 312 (2006): 523–524.
3 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York:
Viking, 1985); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Essays in
Atlantic History (2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
4 Hamilton, Squeezed, 213.
5 James C. Giesen, Boll Weevil Blues. Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South (Chi-
cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 95.
Rise, Fall, and Permanence 9
Scholarly Traditions
Historians have discussed the role of environmental factors in plantation his-
tory long before the rise of environmental history as a distinct scholarly field
in the 1970s and 1980s. In U.S. history, the boll weevil routinely figured as
the nemesis of the Old South and the main culprit for the problems of the
rural South in the first half of the twentieth century, thus distracting atten-
tion from other issues such as land ownership patterns or white supremacy.6
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew take pride in their role in the transfer
of rubber seeds from Brazil to Southeast Asia, where plantations soon out-
competed rubber tapping in the Amazon rain forest.7 In 1926, Avery Craven
published a book with the speaking title Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the
Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860.8
It attests to the Eurocentrism of historical scholarship that these early
publications did not inspire a self-conscious field of study, and this volume
bears the mark of a scholarly tradition that sees Europe’s role in plantation
history as primarily that of a consumer. In spite of the editor’s best efforts,
this volume does not include an article on a plantation in Europe. That is
certainly not due to a lack of suitable topics. Huge orchards produce Euro-
pean apples and oranges, vineyards bear the hallmarks of a plantation down
to a devastating phylloxera epidemic in the late nineteenth century, and a
single Bavarian region, the Hallertau, grows a quarter of the global supply
of hop.9 However, most Europeans think of plantations as an entity “some-
where else”, an understanding that is perfectly in line with the word’s origin.
Mart Stewart’s article reminds us that the plantation entered the English
vocabulary with the sixteenth-century conquest of Ireland, designating what
one would nowadays call settler colonization.
Looking into the environmental dimension of plantations thus follows a
scholar tradition, but it is a tradition that is diverse, scattered, and widely un-
explored.10 It is also an ambiguous legacy for the discipline of environmental
6 Giesen, Boll Weevil Blues, xii.
7 Ray Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2nd edition, Kew: Kew
Publishing, 2007), 231–3.
8 Avery Odelle Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and
Maryland, 1606–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1926. Reprints 1965 and 2006).
9 Christoph Pinzl, Die Hopfenregion. Hopfenanbau in der Hallertau—Eine Kulturgeschichte
(Wolnzach: Deutsches Hopfenmuseum, 2002), 8.
10 Scholars of historiography have mostly ignored this tradition, leaving the door wide open
for a study on what one might call “environmental history before environmental history”.