Gago, Maria Do Mar (Author)
Universidade de Lisboa
Physical Details: 322 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation explores the engagement of scientists with Robusta coffee and their role in the making of the late Portuguese empire. It analyses how this coffee species indigenous to Angola entered the agenda of botanists and agronomists, and was transformed into a global commodity sustaining much of the Portugal imperial endeavour. By detailing scientists’ knowledge making practices, this dissertation intends to contribute to a better understanding of the relation between science and colonial states in Africa, and to gain a firm grasp on the historical dynamics that shaped Angolan coffee as crop and commodity. The first part accompanies the emergence of the Department of Agriculture of Angola (1898-1939) and the second part follows the rise and consolidation of the Coffee Export Board (1936-1961). This investigation uses mainly, though not entirely, reports and correspondence produced by scientists. Coffee cultivation has been presented in the historiography of colonial Angola as a paradigmatic case of retrograde imperial rule, and the coercion and violence of European controlled plantations relying on forced African labour as main reasons for the economic success of coffee. This dissertation uses the lens of scientists to offer an alternative picture pointing at the actual forests where the plant was cultivated, and where also Africans were growing their own coffee. Moreover, it unveils a hidden imperial strategy aimed at modernizing both European and African coffee production systems. The key to this neglected history is how scientists engaged with Angolan coffee: not as coffee in general, but as a specific type of coffee, Robusta coffee. This little taxonomic detail, for historians just a technicality, has important implications in terms of historical insight. This dissertation argues that the environmental and technopolitical histories of Angolan Robusta reveal the robustness of the imperial project aiming at transforming Angola in one of the world’s largest coffee producers.
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