Plantations have been the privileged tool of colonial rule and extraction in Mozambique for more than one hundred years despite never having delivered sustained economic or social benefits. Drawing on extensive archival and qualitative contemporary research, The Plantation Ideal offers new insights into plantation economies, histories, and landscapes. Wendy Wolford tells the story of how the largely failed pursuit of plantation production 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 Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Global Development at Cornell University. She is 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.
"Wendy Wolford continues her brilliant explorations of the agrarian question in the Lusophone world by taking on the complex afterlives of the plantation, draped as it is in the history of slavery, empire, and dispossession in Mozambique. Why, she asks, does the plantation retain its appeal? Why is it such a powerful narcotic constantly sought out by states, capital, NGOs, communities of expertise, and local communities despite its poor economic record? The Plantation Ideal offers a compelling set of answers. Lucid, conceptually rich, and historically informed, this book is a triumph."—Michael Watts, Class of 1963 Professor of Geography Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
"Myths of discovery, plantation-based cornucopia, and expert-driven improvement underwrote empire, and they continue to sustain grandiose national development schemes. In this erudite and provocative book, Wolford explains why these myths don't die and the havoc they wreak for people caught in their embrace."—Tania Li, coauthor of Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone
"Wolford's brilliant work deepens and expands the scholarship on plantations, plantation ideals, and the plantationocene. In this engaging and original book, she shows us that plantations never left—not in physical geographical space nor in the imaginations of thinkers driving the idea of limitless economic growth."—Saturnino M. Borras Jr., coauthor of Essential Concepts of Land Politics: An A–Z Guide
"The Plantation Ideal provides a deeply researched account of the roots, trajectory, and contemporary implications of the 'plantation ideal' in Mozambique. Its story is both familiar and unusual, and it brings Mozambique's history and political economy more fully into debates over plantations, extractivism, science and technology, and the legacies of colonialism. Highly recommended."—Derek Hall, author of Land
"Wolford's text is a vivid exploration of one of colonial agronomy's most enduring legacies: the plantation approach to tropical agriculture. Set in Mozambique, The Plantation Ideal deftly shows readers how a deeply flawed paradigm keeps being reinvented as a vital tool for capitalist extraction in the tropics, from the age of Portuguese exploration to contemporary land investments. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this book is a must-read for anyone seeking to better understand the political economy of agrarian change in southern Africa and the Global South more broadly."—William G. Moseley, author of Decolonizing African Agriculture: Food Security, Agroecology and the Need for Radical Transformation
"Brilliant and riveting, The Plantation Ideal considers the plantation not merely as a system of agricultural production, but also as an ideology—a fresh and original approach to understanding why development projects continue to promote plantation agriculture. Demonstrating through careful historical analysis that plantation schemes are a key cause of rural impoverishment rather than a solution, Wolford goes beyond critique to offer an alternative path to rural development based in her own impressive ethnographic fieldwork. A remarkable achievement that marks a significant advance in scholarship."—Gail Hollander, author of Raising Cane in the 'Glades: The Global Sugar Trade and the Transformation of Florida
302 pp.6 x 9Illus: 1 map, 8 figures, 5 tables
9780520416864$29.95|£25.00Paper
Nov 2025