Plunder for Profit
A Socio-environmental History of Tobacco Farming in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe

Examines the history of tobacco farming in Zimbabwe to illuminate debates on landscapes, people and political economy.

Elijah Doro (Author)

9781009096256, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 5 June 2025

331 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.7 cm, 0.49 kg

'Elijah Doro explores the socio-ecological impacts of tobacco production through a historical perspective. This monograph makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of literature on tobacco and agrarian change in Zimbabwe. While previous contributions have demonstrated the inextricable link between the state and capital in appropriating wealth and squeezing the peasantry, this monograph takes these discussions a step further by exploring the relationship between tobacco production, health, nature and the environment in Zimbabwe. It achieves this through an extensive critical analysis of the history of tobacco production and highlighting its environmental and health consequences on the people.' Freedom Mazwi, The Journal of Development Studies

Exploring over a century of Zimbabwe's colonial and post-colonial history, Elijah Doro investigates the murky and noxious history of that powerful crop: tobacco. In a compelling narrative that debunks previous histories glorifying tobacco farming, Doro reveals the indelible marks that tobacco left on landscapes, communities, and people. Demonstrating that the history of tobacco farming is inseparable from that of colonial encounter, Doro outlines how tobacco became an institutionalised culture of production, which was linked to state power and natural ecosystems, and driven by a pernicious heritage of unbridled plunder. With the destruction of landscapes, the negative impacts of the export trade and the growing tobacco epidemic in Zimbabwe, tobacco farming has a long and varied legacy in southern African and across the world. Connecting the local to the global, and the environmental to the social, this book illuminates our understandings of environmental history, colonialism and sustainability.

Introduction
1. Global perspectives and local narratives: a socio-environmental history of pioneer tobacco farming in Southern Rhodesia, 1893–1945
2. The post-war tobacco boom and the development of conservationism in Southern Rhodesia, 1947–1960
3. A silenced spring? Exploring Africa's 'Rachel Carson moment': A socio-environmental history of the pesticides in tobacco production in Southern Rhodesia, 1945–1980
4. Beyond agency: The African peasantry, the state and tobacco in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1980
5. 'The threat of soil erosion is far more permanent than the threat of sanctions': The unilateral declaration of independence, war, and ecological change in tobacco farming landscapes in Southern Rhodesia, 1960–1980
6. Tobacco control discourses and the tobacco industry in Southern Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, 1953–2020
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: The environment [RN], Tobacco industry [KNDF1], African history [HBJH]