Book contents
- Plunder for Profit
- African Studies Series
- Plunder for Profit
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on Currency, Units and Weight
- Introduction
- 1 Global Perspectives and Local Narratives
- 2 The Post-War Tobacco Boom and the Development of Conservationism in Southern Rhodesia, 1947–1960
- 3 A Silenced Spring? Exploring Africa’s ‘Rachel Carson Moment’
- 4 Beyond Agency
- 5 ‘The Threat of Soil Erosion Is Far More Permanent Than the Threat of Sanctions’
- 6 Tobacco-Control Discourses and the Tobacco Industry in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, 1953–2020
- Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- African Studies Series
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2023
- Plunder for Profit
- African Studies Series
- Plunder for Profit
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on Currency, Units and Weight
- Introduction
- 1 Global Perspectives and Local Narratives
- 2 The Post-War Tobacco Boom and the Development of Conservationism in Southern Rhodesia, 1947–1960
- 3 A Silenced Spring? Exploring Africa’s ‘Rachel Carson Moment’
- 4 Beyond Agency
- 5 ‘The Threat of Soil Erosion Is Far More Permanent Than the Threat of Sanctions’
- 6 Tobacco-Control Discourses and the Tobacco Industry in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, 1953–2020
- Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- African Studies Series
Summary
Confronting the harmful social and environmental legacy of tobacco and its use is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century. Yet, this challenge, though contemporary and requiring present interventions calls for holistic and transcendental insights into how the ‘tobacco epidemic’ is part of the globalisation and institutionalisation of cultures of production, cultivation, marketing and consumption of the crop across historical time. The tobacco epidemic is a historically constructed leviathan linking various centres of power and institutions of governance to big tobacco in a grand profit-making scheme, exploitation and plunder of human bodies, ecologies and landscapes for private gain and profit. The stranglehold that the tobacco industry wields today over progressive tobacco-control regimes and attempts to limit tobacco’s harm is a heritage of this complex relationship between the industry, the state and tobacco farmers forged across more than a century from ‘jungle tobacco farms’ in colonial America and colonial Africa to more organised production systems during the mid to late twentieth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Plunder for ProfitA Socio-Environmental History of Tobacco Farming in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, pp. 264 - 272Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023