This study explored Mozambique's rise from 1945 to 1975 to become the world's largest combined producer of raw and processed cashew nuts, contributing around 40 per cent of global production in the peak years of the early 1970s. It emphasized four points regarding the cashew economy. First, there is much more to the cashew economy than simply the exportation of raw and processed nuts to global markets. The household, gift and informal components of cashew food and drink are fundamental and under-appreciated. Second, women play an essential role throughout the value chain in the cashew economy, and their roles are eclipsed if analysts do not explicitly probe gender relations. Third, prices and wages matter a great deal, but analysts pay insufficient attention to the value producers and workers actually receive when their product or labour is commoditized. Finally, the choices men and women make to grow, eat, give, distill, brew or sell cashew nuts and apples, and their decisions about whether to seek work and stay working at cashew shelling factories are complex and strongly shaped by the broader context of their lives.

Mozambique's experience with cashew production and processing over the four decades since independence has drawn international attention. Analysts seek to explain how and why the country slid from global dominance in the 1970s to the present position of producing around 2 per cent of global cashew exports. Many scholars, including those already cited, cover those changes in great detail. The epilogue briefly sketches the main lines of change, and assesses the extent to which contemporary analysts overcome or replicate the challenges identified above for the colonial era literature. I do not know how the narrators experienced the industry's fluctuations after the close of our project. Most of them probably had the same experiences as described by Nazneen Kanji and her colleagues below. They lost their jobs and dispersed.

The changes since independence fall roughly into four periods. The first period is the era of Frelimo's centralized economic control, with nationalized industries and government sponsored labour organization. By the 1980s the national economy was increasingly hobbled by the growing insurgency. The second period is the run up to and aftermath of the 1992 Rome Peace Accord that ended the insurgency and established the preconditions for rebuilding of infrastructure and resumption of trade and agriculture.