The study of colonialism is incomplete without understanding the role of export agriculture, land control and plantation economy. The hidden factors behind the industrial revolution and the advent of the modern era have a dark history of racial slavery, imperial violence, and oppressive economic exploitation of natural resources to extract exceptional profits from the colony.
Colonialism was an economic prescription, a set course of augmenting European profits and markets by extracting natural resources (such as food, rubber, minerals, and lumber) and people (through slavery and indentured servitude) from colonized regions. The key facets of colonial-era agriculture were forced consolidation of land-holdings, slavery and servitude, and the increased globalization of foods, all of which modified people’s access to different varieties of food, altered people’s subsistence patterns, and entwined peasant farmers into the global capitalist economy. [
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Tobacco, Spices, scents, and silks were the core commodities of world trade for millennia. The expansionist policies of Europeans accelerated the exploration of far-off lands ranging from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, to Asia and Africa. Initially, the desired African goods were gold and ivory, but from the early 1700s, the slave trade became dominant.
Colonial-era agriculture was organized around export-oriented, cash-crop production, ushering in centuries of plantation economies to export commodity products such as Indigo, Tobacco, Banana, Sugar, Tea, Coffee, Cocoa, Cotton, Palm Oil, and Rubber. Unlike small, subsistence farms, plantations were created to grow cash crops for sale on the market. The plantation system was an early capitalist venture and proved to be profitable. Therefore, cheap labor was used.
Colonizers like Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands turned carribbean and south america into massive sugar plantations after initial indigenous declines from disease and overwork, importing Africans from the 1500s with peaks in the 1700s. In Brazil, over 4 million Africans fueled sugar, gold, coffee, and Amazon agriculture, comprising half the population around 1800. US South shifted from tobacco to cotton post-1793 gin invention, with 4 million slaves by 1860.
Post-1833 slavery abolition, British Caribbean planters imported over 1.5 million Indians from 1838 onward to replace freed Africans who refused low-wage plantation work, recruiting via promises of pay (about 1 shilling daily for men) and eventual repatriation. Chinese workers from southern provinces arrived as indentured laborers starting in the 1840s, with around 18,000 entering British colonies such as Guyana (over 15,000), Trinidad, Jamaica, and later Cuba under Spanish rule.
British colonies even recruited Portuguese from carribbean as contract laborers for sugar estates amid labor shortages. Unlike slaves, indentured labours had contract endpoints and repatriation rights (rarely exercised), yet conditions mimicked bondage with barracoons and whippings. A brief account of the history of slavery in plantation agriculture can be read here.
The emergence of export agriculture began during the protracted abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, decades before the European Scramble for Africa (the latter happened essentially between 1879 and 1903). The major products were groundnuts (peanuts) and palm oil. The former was produced for export on the coasts and estuaries of western Sudan (mainly from Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea Bissau) the latter from the forests of the Guinea coast (especially from Sierra Leone to south-eastern Nigeria and into Cameroon). The 1880s to the 1900s saw the global frenzy for wild rubber, which West Africans helped to supply, from what became French Guinea east to what is now Ghana. [
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Tea consumption took off with the industrial revolution in Britain, initially sourced from China through an East India Company monopoly. The trading of tea created a balance of payment for Britishers due to payment with silver bullion. British merchants would first buy tea in Canton (Guangzhou) on credit and would pay their debts by selling opium at auction in Calcutta. This opium was then transported to the Chinese coast aboard British ships, where it was sold to native merchants who would sell it in China. The opium trade was a precursor of the
opium wars between the British and China. When this monopoly expired amid growing unrest in China, the British imperial government in India took a strategic interest in fostering tea production in northeastern India where a semi-wild tea variety was already growing. The rights of contracted workers were subjected to many cases of abuse (death rates were high in the early years) and labor rights and conditions have continued to be an issue until today.
Under colonial-era laws, many tenant farmers in India were forced to grow some indigo on a portion of their land as a condition of their tenancy. Cash crops like indigo and opium encroached on the food crops growing area and produce was then bought by the Raj at unfairly low prices.
Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 in politics and
Nil Darpan, a Bengali play written by Dinabandhu Mitra are widespread documentation of colonial interference in agriculture.
Only in the colonial India, there were over 30 major famines from 1769–1943, like the Bengal Famine of 1770 (10 million deaths) and 1943 (3 million) - directly triggered by cash crop prioritization over food security, heavy land revenue demands, and exports amid shortages. Read LSE working paper "
Were Indian Famines 'Natural' Or 'Manmade'?".
Colonialization throughout the world has had lasting consequences on land management practices, relations between different social groups, and forms of subsistence. The colonies paradoxically had to begin importing food since cash crops generally took a majority of the available farmland, sometimes up to 80%. The governments of the occupying countries often imposed harsh new laws and taxes on the indigenous people. The large plantations drove out the small landowners and left the sharecroppers permanently in debt. These land purchases present short-term benefits to the local communities in the form of jobs and capital for rural development but destroy local social systems and displace people for their livelihood.
Similarly, “free trade” policies, such as forcing developing countries to eliminate agricultural subsidies while the US Farm Bill maintains subsidies for their own corn farmers, reproduce colonial-era practices. The expansion of the plantation system today is following the same script (
China &
Gulf Countries) as played out in the past. Private investors and governments have recently stepped-up foreign investment in farmland in the form of purchases or long-term leases of large tracks of arable land, notably in Africa.
For people who have been colonized, the most important thing is their land. When a people are taken from their land, their connection to life itself is broken. The struggle to regain that land is not just about ownership—it's about reclaiming their dignity and right to live freely. Land is where their history, culture, and spirit live, and it is the foundation on which their dreams are built.
To understand this is to understand why the fight for land is so powerful and necessary. It is the fight for bread to feed the body, and for dignity to feed the soul. —Frantz Fanon
I will be closing the article with above statement that underlines the profound connection between land, survival, and human dignity .
