Peasants’ Exports and Economic Theory

For world trade the 1870s marked the beginnings of a spectacular rise in exports from tropical areas (Table 1.1). Demand for raw materials to be used in manufacturing industry came from the growing and prospering urban populations of North America and Europe, and tropical products such as palm oil, sisal, rubber and groundnuts were all essential ingredients of the industrial process in the late nineteenth century. Mineral exports, particularly gold and diamonds, foodstuffs such as coffee, tea and cocoa, all these rose rapidly prior to World War I. They were supported by new and improved forms of oceanic and internal transport, and by the special economic and political circumstances defined in the policies of imperialist expansion pursued by European governments. Now whereas much was written about the role of tropical products in Western industrial growth, it is only comparatively recently that people have come to pay much attention to the effects of these exports on the tropical economies which generated them. Before 1945, perhaps even until 1955, there were few notable works on the organisation and functioning of the export sector, and its wider repercussions on the tropical economy itself. It is in consequence of what is quite recent work by historians, economists, anthropologists and geographers, that we are now much better informed than earlier generations on the ways in which the tropical exporting economies functioned.1