A01=Richard P. Tucker
agriculture
american history
Author_Richard P. Tucker
bananas
beef
biodiversity
caribbean
Category=NHK
Category=RNC
central america
civilization
coffee
commerce
commodities
conservation
cultivation
ecology
environment
environmental history
environmental impact
environmentalism
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forest
free trade
land speculation
latin american history
monocrops
nonfiction
pacific
plantations
rubber
south america
southeast asia
sugar
timber
trade
transnational history
tropical crops
tropical lands
tropical ports
tropics
west africa
white mans burden
Product details
- ISBN 9780520220874
- Weight: 1043g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In the late 1800s, American entrepreneurs became participants in the 400-year history of European economic and ecological hegemony in the tropics. Beginning as buyers in the tropical ports of the Atlantic and Pacific, they evolved into land speculators, controlling and managing the areas where tropical crops were grown for carefully fostered consumer markets at home. As corporate agro-industry emerged, the speculators took direct control of the ecological destinies of many tropical lands. Supported by the U.S. government's diplomatic and military protection, they migrated and built private empires in the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and West Africa. Yankee investors and plantation managers mobilized engineers, agronomists, and loggers to undertake what they called the 'Conquest of the Tropics', claiming to bring civilization to benighted people and cultivation to unproductive nature. In competitive cooperation with local landed and political elites, they not only cleared natural forests but also displaced multicrop tribal and peasant lands with monocrop export plantations rooted in private property regimes.
This book is a rich history of the transformation of the tropics in modern times, pointing ultimately to the declining biodiversity that has resulted from the domestication of widely varied natural systems. Richard P. Tucker graphically illustrates his study with six major crops, each a virtual empire in itself - sugar, bananas, coffee, rubber, beef, and timber. He concludes that as long as corporate-dominated free trade is ascendant, paying little heed to its long-term ecological consequences, the health of the tropical world is gravely endangered.
Richard P. Tucker is Professor of Asian and Environmental History at Oakland University, and Adjunct Professor of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan. He is coeditor of Global Deforestation and the Nineteenth-Century World Economy (1983),World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century (1987), and other books.
