Tamana: a Study of a Reef Island Community

<p>This thesis is an exploration of the factors which give the tiny reef island of Tamana, in what is today the nation of Kiribati, its particular character. The research falls into three main sections. The first reviews the available documentary sources in order to build up an understanding of the settlement of the region by Micronesian peoples, the character of the island environment they encountered and the economy and society that developed. The changes resulting from the expansion of western capitalism into the region are then described. This material provides the context for the contemporary household-based study presented in the second section. This presents the findings of twelve month's field study of sixteen Tamana households. It considers household structure and, organisation, access to resources, patterns of tine allocation as well as the character of the subsistence and cash economies, their relationship to each other and the extent to which the household economy has become incorporated into the market economy of the outside world. The third section draws both sets of material together to consider issues of change and development and the likely future character of Tamana. The initial settlement of Tamana by Micronesian people led to some environmental modification and the introduction of new plant species. However, the system that evolved could be considered an autarkic man/environment system where a fluctuating balance between man and resources was maintained through drought-associated mortality. With the arrival of the whalers, traders, missionaries and colonial officials Tamana ceased to operate as an isolated entity and the changes which ensued resulted in the external relationships, through trade, employment and aid becoming increasingly important in determining the character of economic life on Tamana. In several important respects the process of incorporation into the market economy evident on Tamana differs from that encounted in other subsistence economies subject to similar influences. Colonial policy, in recognition of the high population densities and, obviously limited resources, discouraged the establishment of a plantation economy. The limiting atoll environment restricted the choice of cash crops to the coconut which was already an important element in the vegetation and whose productivity could be maintained with little intensification of labour inputs. The subsistence economy thus was able to maintain its vitality and enabled the islanders to oscillate between the subsistence and market economy as market conditions dictated. This is reinforced by the fact that some 45 percent of household income comes from outside the village economy through remittances and gifts, thus underlining the significance of Tamana as a "straddled economy" where the household depends on local production and wages earned in employment in either the phosphate workings or urban employment away from the island. For these reasons the commitment to the cash economy on Tamana is not strong. Because of the heavy emphasis of government spending on welfare and service spending and the emergence of a large, aid-dependent bureaucracy at the administrative centre on Tarawa, the aspirations of most Tamana peoples are towards wage employment which implies migration to the urban centre as an alternative to rural life. Unless these trends are rectified rural outmigration can be expected, to increase.</p>

Tamana: a Study of a Reef Island Community

<p>This thesis is an exploration of the factors which give the tiny reef island of Tamana, in what is today the nation of Kiribati, its particular character. The research falls into three main sections. The first reviews the available documentary sources in order to build up an understanding of the settlement of the region by Micronesian peoples, the character of the island environment they encountered and the economy and society that developed. The changes resulting from the expansion of western capitalism into the region are then described. This material provides the context for the contemporary household-based study presented in the second section. This presents the findings of twelve month's field study of sixteen Tamana households. It considers household structure and, organisation, access to resources, patterns of tine allocation as well as the character of the subsistence and cash economies, their relationship to each other and the extent to which the household economy has become incorporated into the market economy of the outside world. The third section draws both sets of material together to consider issues of change and development and the likely future character of Tamana. The initial settlement of Tamana by Micronesian people led to some environmental modification and the introduction of new plant species. However, the system that evolved could be considered an autarkic man/environment system where a fluctuating balance between man and resources was maintained through drought-associated mortality. With the arrival of the whalers, traders, missionaries and colonial officials Tamana ceased to operate as an isolated entity and the changes which ensued resulted in the external relationships, through trade, employment and aid becoming increasingly important in determining the character of economic life on Tamana. In several important respects the process of incorporation into the market economy evident on Tamana differs from that encounted in other subsistence economies subject to similar influences. Colonial policy, in recognition of the high population densities and, obviously limited resources, discouraged the establishment of a plantation economy. The limiting atoll environment restricted the choice of cash crops to the coconut which was already an important element in the vegetation and whose productivity could be maintained with little intensification of labour inputs. The subsistence economy thus was able to maintain its vitality and enabled the islanders to oscillate between the subsistence and market economy as market conditions dictated. This is reinforced by the fact that some 45 percent of household income comes from outside the village economy through remittances and gifts, thus underlining the significance of Tamana as a "straddled economy" where the household depends on local production and wages earned in employment in either the phosphate workings or urban employment away from the island. For these reasons the commitment to the cash economy on Tamana is not strong. Because of the heavy emphasis of government spending on welfare and service spending and the emergence of a large, aid-dependent bureaucracy at the administrative centre on Tarawa, the aspirations of most Tamana peoples are towards wage employment which implies migration to the urban centre as an alternative to rural life. Unless these trends are rectified rural outmigration can be expected, to increase.</p>

Runaway Slaves and the Aftermath of Slavery on the Swahili Coast

Along the East African coast, marronage increased in the 19th century as a consequence of the intensification of the slave trade and the development of a plantation economy based on slave labor. Research on the fugitive slaves on the Swahili coast has been conducted since the 1980s and has mainly highlighted the ambivalent relationship (between rejection and belonging) of maroons with the dominant coastal culture—that of the slave owners, shaped in particular by Islam and urbanity. This article goes beyond the existing interpretations by showing that the aftermath of slavery often consisted of a range of options, less static than those described so far and less focused on opting either into or out of coastal culture. Relying on a case study in present-day Kenya and drawing from European written sources and interviews, I examine what happened to escaped slaves in the Witu region, where a Swahili city-state was founded in 1862. Their history is examined through a spatial analysis and the modalities of their economic and social participation in regional dynamics, showing that no single cultural influence was hegemonic in this region.

Caribbean Economic Thought: Advances, Retreat, Current Challenges

The reflections provided in this article were presented in the 4th Sam Moyo Memorial Lecture, delivered at the SMAIAS/ASN Summer School in January 2021. The article focuses on the critical tradition of economic knowledge and thought about the socio-economic development of the Caribbean, which began in the last decades of the colonial era. The advances made through the early Independence period were concerned with the problems of individual countries and the region as a whole. The objective was to improve the material economic welfare of the broad masses of Caribbean people while generating the requisite economic growth to sustain an improvement in the general conditions of life. From the thought of W. Arthur Lewis to the Plantation Economy theorists and subsequent critiques, a rich critical tradition emerged, only to be displaced by the onset of the debt crisis and neoliberalism. This article reviews the main elements of this critical tradition, its advances, and retreats, as well as the new challenges presented to it today.

The persistent conditions of plantation economy and the fraught spaces of encounter in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana

This article examines how social and economic structures of historic plantation development manage to persist over time and to rearticulate over space. In the early 1900s, the historic plantation sugar economy in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana, suddenly collapsed. Despite efforts by local elites to seize this moment to finally launch a diversified industrial development path, the parish nevertheless sank again into a new cycle of plantation domination and dependency. The dominating sugar sector was broken up only to be rapidly replaced by a vast new monopoly—in, of all things, systematized fur production—whose land tenure and labor regime nearly replicated that of the earlier plantation estates. I examine this folding-over-anew of the plantation, from sugar to fur, in two ways that contribute to recent growing literature on persistent plantation geographies. First, I draw upon theories of Caribbean underdevelopment to identify three persistent conditions of plantation economy. Upon the collapse of sugar in St Bernard, the conditions of estate-based land monopoly, racialized extra-economic labor coercion, and external market/primary commodity dependency constrained the possibility of structural transformation and rearticulated in a new commodity regime based in fur. Second, I turn to consider the experience of workers bound up in the new fur economy who were not, in the main, the debt-bound black workers from the old sugar plantations but a racially and spatially marginal group known as isleños. I draw on a unique set wry folk ballads that isleños maintained as part of local oral tradition to examine the voices of trappers themselves as they negotiated the rearticulating structures of the neo-plantation regime. Thinking with McKittrick's concept of plantation “spaces of encounter,” I find these neo-estate workers forged fraught spaces of discursive and material autonomy that at times resisted, and at times reproduced, the ongoing plantation regime.

South Atlantic Creole Archipelagos

In 2020 Cabo Verde (1557 sq. miles) and São Tomé and Príncipe (621 sq. miles) had a resident population of 556,857 and 210,240 respectively. Both archipelagos were uninhabited when they were settled by Portuguese colonists and African slaves in the second half of the 15th century. The coexistence of Europeans and Africans resulted in the emergence of Creole societies. Due to their differences in geographic position and climate, they developed unequally in economic terms. Santiago, the first of the Cabo Verde Islands to be settled, became a commercial hub for the slave trade from the Upper Guinea coast. São Tomé was also engaged in the slave trade, but in the 16th century established the first tropical plantation economy based on sugar and slave labor. In the 17th century, both archipelagos were affected by economic and demographic decline. Economic recovery did not occur before the mid-19th century. The British established a coal supply station for transatlantic steam shipping in São Vicente, while, enabled by the introduction of coffee and cocoa, the Portuguese reestablished the plantation economy in São Tomé and Príncipe. After the abolition of slavery in 1875 the workforce was composed of contract workers from Angola, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique. As a result, São Tomé and Príncipe became marked by immigration for almost a century. In contrast, pushed by famines and misery, a massive emigration from Cabo Verde began in the 19th century, a feature that has marked the archipelago’s society and identity until the early 21st century. The first anticolonial groups in exile appeared in the late 1950s. An armed liberation struggle in the islands was not possible; however, a group of Cabo Verdeans participated in the armed struggle in Portuguese Guinea. Most prominent among them was Amílcar Cabral (b. 1924–d. 1973). After independence in 1975 the two countries became socialist one-party regimes. In 1990 both archipelagos introduced multiparty democracies with semipresidential regimes. Creole communities also developed in the Gulf of Guinea islands of Bioko (779 square miles) and Annobón (6.5 sq. miles), which belonged to Portugal until 1778 when they became part of Spanish Guinea which subsequently, in 1968, gained independence as Equatorial Guinea. In the 16th century the uninhabited island of Annobón was settled by the Portuguese with African slaves. As a result, the island’s early-21st-century 5,300 inhabitants speak a Portuguese-based Creole, Fá d’Ambó. Bioko (Fernando Po), was the only Gulf of Guinea Island with a native population, the Bubi, and therefore the Portuguese never colonized this island. From 1827–1843 the British navy maintained an antislaving station called Port Clarence (modern Malabo) in Fernando Po. The British recruited workers from Freetown in Sierra Leone, which was the beginning of the development of the Fernandinos, a local Creole community that speaks an English-based Creole language known as Pichi, which is closely related to Krio in Sierra Leone. Currently, there are still about thirty Fernandino families, comprising some 350 people; however, Pichi is spoken by an estimated 150,000 people, since it also became Bioko’s lingua franca spoken by the Bubi majority.

Performance of the Plantation Sector During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study explores the impact that COVID-19 and its preventive measures would have on the plantation sector, covering four important crops—tea, coffee, rubber and cardamom. The study traces the channels through which the pandemic and the lockdown measures would impact the sector. These channels are the disruptions in seasonal operations, in factor and resource supplies; transport, storage and processing; marketing and sales; and demand conditions. These disruptions get manifested in price, quantity and revenue. These are estimated for the four crops separately. The total unrealised revenue due to the lockdown is estimated to be ₹38.4364 billion for the lockdown period from 24 March to 31 May 2020. This does not include the losses that are to be incurred due to the demand decline, supply chain disruptions and price fall that is to be manifested in future. This massive economic disaster is bound to have a severe impact on the plantation economy, especially the small growers and the labourers. Urgent measures need to be taken up to arrest the losses and revive the sector. Yet there is very little in the ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ package that would help tide over this economic crisis. Immediate measures aimed at demand rejuvenation, arrest of price fall, restarting of plantation operations and restoring of supply chains is called for. The vantage point of the commodity boards must be exploited to reach out to the stakeholders. JEL classification: M38, Q11, Q13, R11