Coffee, Rubber, and Cotton: Cash Crops, Forced Labor, and Fascist Imperialism in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Eastern Europe
Coffee, Rubber, and Cotton: Cash Crops, Forced Labor, and Fascist Imperialism in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Eastern Europe
The fifth chapter takes coffee, rubber and cotton, three typical elements of colonial plantation stories, and delves into Italian occupation of Ethiopia, German imperial rule in Eastern Europe, and Portuguese colonialism in Northern Mozambique. These plantation schemes, which had plant breeders’ artefacts as their material basis, made massive use of forced labor to serve the imperial economy. Without ignoring the different levels of violence unleashed by the three fascisms, the text suggests that one gains significant insight into the history of fascism from treating together their empires. I take seriously Heinrich Himmler’s intention of making Auschwitz the Agriculture Experiment Station for the colonization of the East and compare the work undertaken there on a rubber ersatz with that of the Portuguese Cotton Research Center in Mozambique and its role in the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of forced workers, as well as with Italian coffee experiment stations in Ethiopia.
Keywords: Colonialism, Auschwitz, Cash Crops, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Aurélio Quintanilha, Heinrich Himmler
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
