The story of how African farmers, African-American scientists, and British businessmen struggled to turn colonial Africa into a major cotton exporter. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, demand for raw cotton in Europe, Asia, and America outstripped production as African Americans migrated away from Southern cotton fields. Consequently, industrialists in Europe turned to Africa for new sources of cotton. This volume documents the efforts by British financiers and colonial officials, along with some African-American allies, to bring the American model of cotton production to colonial Africa. In a narrative featuring a host of characters -- including British entrepreneurs, African kings, and African-American scientists -- author Jonathan Robins weaves together events in Africa, Britain, and the AmericanSouth. Robins chronicles the origins, failings, and eventual evolution of Britain's colonial cotton project, revealing the global forces and actors that moved and transformed the international cotton industry. JonathanE. Robins is assistant professor of global history at Michigan Technological University.

Oil palms are ubiquitous--grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows, sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment. By telling the story of the oil palm across multiple centuries and continents, Robins demonstrates how the fruits of an African palm tree became a key commodity in the story of global capitalism, beginning in the eras of slavery and imperialism, persisting through decolonization, and stretching to the present day.