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World Development

Plantations (PLANTAT)

It is common to distinguish between smallholder farms and plantations. As Osterhammel defined:

„Two diametrically opposed forms of entreprise, the farm household and the plantation were and still are the most efficient bases of the agrarian export economy. The farm household cultivates its own and/or rented land with family members and perhaps a small number of paid workers. The plantation is a large-scale enterprise, often remotely situated. Its construction requires substantial capital investments in land, machines, and plants and is kept in operation by often incompetent wage laborers under the direction of a foreign management. Plantation are often owned by foreign stock corporations, which also manages the processing and marketing of the products. The plantation is more ‘capitalist’ without being a priori a more ‘rational’ form of enterprise than the market-oriented farm household.” (Osterhammel 1997: 76)

We followed this definitions, but coded not only the typical large-scale, foreign owned rubber, sugar, coffee etc. plantations as such, but also the large cattle, tobacco, corn etc. farms in Africa (including the French vineyards in North Africa), which were usually owned by permanent resident families (of European descent), produced also for local/regional markets and employed many workers, but in smaller proportion to the total expenditure (cf. ibid. 77f). Special cases are concessions allowing private companies the exploitation of wild-growing resources as timber or wild rubber. In both the French and the Belgian Congo, these companies used forced labor to collect rubber, and the impact of this system was similar to the impact of large-scale plantations. However, the central buying of wild-growing resources collected by individual gatherers has a different impact and is thus not considered as a form of plantation.

Historical datasets as the International Historical Statistics 1750-2005 provide data for most important cash crops including plantation products but do not allow to quantify the significance of the plantation economy in the countries of our sample. In almost all colonies, setting up some kinds of plantations has been tried, often unsuccessfully. Therefore, we code the presence of some small, isolated plantations as zero. Beyond that, we again apply a very simple distinction between countries with plantation economies of moderate and with significant size. The latter does not necessarily mean that they dominate the economy, in many countries a significant plantation economy co-existed with the smallholder agriculture.

  • 0 = no or a some small, isolated plantations / not applicable
  • 1 = plantation economy of moderate size (regarding areas occupied and share of total export)
  • 2 = plantation economy of significant size (regarding areas occupied and share of total export)

We identify the following regions/countries as having a significant legacy of a colonial plantation economy:

  • in sub-Saharan Africa: South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Mozambique, Angola, Kenya, Cameroon, Zaire
  • in North Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt
  • in South Asia: Sri Lanka
  • in Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines
  • in Oceania: Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu

These are 24 cases out of 83 (29%); 19 cases (23%) had a plantation economy of moderate size. A plantation economy usually developed in areas that were colonially dominated for a long time (correlation with COLYEARS), in which significant investment in infrastructure was done and in which mining took place (correlation with INVEST, GOLD, MINING). Investment concentration was high, a social transformation was related (work immigration, missionary activities), and decolonization was usually a difficult and violent process (see 'Descriptive Statistics'). There are no statistical significant differences between the regions (sub-Saharan Africa / Asia, North Africa) and British/French colonies.