Moving Crops and the Scales of History

Bray, Freddie; Hahn, Barbara; Lourdusamy, John Bosco; Saraiva, Tiago

doi:10.12987/9780300268423

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…São Tomé, a small island in the Gulf of Guinea and a former Portuguese colony, is an exemplary place to analyze the development of plantation "cropscapes" (Bray et al 2023). In São Tomé, these cropscapes emerged around sugar in the sixteenth century, evolved with coffee in the 1850s and consolidated with cocoa from the 1880s onwards (Caldeira 2011;Nascimento 1992;Neves 1989;Seibert 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

Macedo

2024

Journal of Ethnobiology

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São Tomé, a small island in the Gulf of Guinea and a former Portuguese colony, is an exemplary place to analyze the development of plantation “cropscapes.” These cropscapes emerged around sugar in the sixteenth century, evolved with coffee in the 1850s and consolidated with cocoa from the 1880s onwards. While is impossible to ignore the monocultural nature of São Tomé plantations and the centrality of specific plants for these plantation ecologies, there were other human/plant assemblages, that sustained, subverted or ran parallel to plantation goals of production, profit and power. This article zooms into cannabis to explore different relations between plantation working peoples and plantation environments, between suffering, healing, and violence, between labor, pleasure, and power. It will examine how cannabis was part and parcel of the lives of peoples from Angola recruited to São Tomé and, consequently, of the island's plantation worlds in the late nineteenth century. It will also discuss how colonial discourses on cannabis obscured and silenced the presence of this plant in contemporary plantation histories, regardless of its traces in the archive. Cannabis histories are in fact important ones: they counter imperial master narratives by showing how, even under conditions of exploitation, laboring communities and plants co-produced spaces of autonomy, care and leisure.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

Macedo

2024

Journal of Ethnobiology

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“…That waste was in part processed into useful chemical products such as organohalogens. 1 By the 1970s all corners of the planet had been touched by novel articial, toxic chemicals in air and water. For the rst time in 4000 million years all organisms on Earth are exposed to larger or smaller amounts of organohalogens that have been, and are articially produced in large volumes for their useful properties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The historiography of monitoring the environment and the related computational and quantication efforts to do so is an active eld of research. 1,2 The description and understanding of the extent to which monitoring and quantication have occurred in all parts of the world for millennia interacting on a global scale is in itself a historical process. What is thought today about the history of science, technology and culture disputes and undermines forms of hegemony that dominated the eld from the 19th century.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global monitoring of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in biota, water and sediments: its role in screening for unregulated POPs, in compiling time trends of regulated POPs under the Stockholm Convention (SC) and their relevance for biodiversity in a changing climate

Guardans

2024

Environ. Sci.: Adv.

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Exotic, traditional and hybrid landscapes: The subtle history of the Iberian Peninsula maize between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’

Gomes,

González Remuiñán,

Freire

2023

Plants People Planet

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Societal Impact StatementMaize is the world's second most important agricultural crop. The cereal was unknown to Europeans before the end of the 15th century, but since its arrival in Europe, it has changed agriculture, food and landscapes. Terraces where maize was cultivated in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula contributed to the formation of local cultures and identities. The history of maize and maize landscape are mementos that help to recover traditional practices, fostering identities, and are crucial for the successful implementation of sustainable policies to provide prosperous futures.Summary Maize (Zea mays L.) in the Iberian Peninsula embodies a history of landscape changes where the concepts of ‘exotic’, ‘traditional’ and ‘hybrid’ help to understand the engagements between landscape, farmers, agronomists (since the 19th and 20th centuries) and seeds. Today, landscapes reveal biophysical and ecological changes that reflect a panoply of intentions. A multitude of agents, and their interactions, acted upon those territories over time. Using historical sources from the leading institutions dedicated to agricultural research in the Iberian Peninsula, this paper aims to (1) contribute to a better understanding of the maize landscape and culture in the Iberian Peninsula and (2) interrogate how landscape changes (and the landscape history of maize) can frame local or regional heritage and identities reflecting customs or ways of life. The analysis unveils networks of knowledge, agricultural technologies and seed exchange. Politicians, economists, engineers, agronomists, farmers, governmental officials and agricultural industries planned and transformed traditional rural practices into modern and industrialised ones. Experts and politicians, willing to improve agricultural practices and seeds, using hybrid seeds or building new irrigation systems, led to deep social and landscape changes, allowing maize to cover territories far away from its traditional domains. Moreover, despite farmers' resistance, hybrid maize substituted landraces, eroding agrobiodiversity. Nowadays, the south and east regions of the Iberian Peninsula are the main producers of maize (hybrid), whereas in the Northwest maize is an occasional crop, being replaced by vineyards for economic reasons.

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Moving Crops and the Scales of History

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

Global monitoring of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in biota, water and sediments: its role in screening for unregulated POPs, in compiling time trends of regulated POPs under the Stockholm Convention (SC) and their relevance for biodiversity in a changing climate

Exotic, traditional and hybrid landscapes: The subtle history of the Iberian Peninsula maize between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’

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