This image didn’t make the cut for Oil Palm: a Global History, but it’s remarkable for three reasons. First, it actually (or at least attempts to) depicts a West African person. Most Palmolive advertising pointed to a fictive Egyptian origin for palm oil, erasing West Africans from the commodity chain (see ad at bottom ofContinue reading “Palm oil and soap marketing”
Category Archives: West Africa
“A monstrous anachronism”?
Peter T. Bauer’s The Rubber Industry: a Study in Competition and Monopoly (1948) (review: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2226882) is regarded by many historians of colonial economic history as a brilliant application of neoclassical theory to the realities of agricultural development in the tropics. Bauer demonstrated that smallholders in Malaysia were more efficient in producing rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) than largeContinue reading ““A monstrous anachronism”?”
Jonathan Robins 