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.