Contemporay debates about Muslim slavery occur in a context of fierce polemics between Islam and other belief systems. While Islamic groups had an ambivalent and generally muted impact on the legal repudiation of slavery, a growing religious commitment to abolition was essential if legislation was to be enforced in the twentieth century. Drawing on examples from the whole 'abode' of Islam, from the Philipines to Senegal and from the Caucasus to South Africa, Gervase Clarence-Smith ranges across the history of Islam, paying particular attention to the period from the late 18th century to the...

Emphasizing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this volume brings together scholars from nine countries who study coffee markets and societies over the last five centuries in fourteen countries, on four continents, and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The chapters analyze the creation and function of commodity, labor, and financial markets; the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in the formation of coffee societies; the interaction between technology and ecology; and the impact of colonial powers, nationalist regimes, and the forces of the world economy in the forging...

First Published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Cocoa and Chocolate,1765-1914 focuses on the period from the Seven Years War, to the First World War, when a surge of economic liberalism and globalisation should have helped cocoa producers to overcome rural poverty, just as wool transformed the economy of Australia, and tea that of Japan. The addition of new forms of chocolate to Western diets in the late nineteenth century led to a great cocoa boom, and yet economic development remained elusive, despite cocoa producers having certain advantages in the commodity lottery faced by exporters of raw materials. The commodity chain, from sowing a...

The livelihood of Third World farmers conflicts with saving the remaining tropical forests. The advantages of growing cocoa in cleared primary forest drive from the fertility of virgin soils and low concentrations of weeds, pests and diseases. The consequent emergence of new 'pioneer fronts' has also been affected by cheap labour, relative commodity prices, pests and diseases, credit resources, entrepreneurship, information, physical infrastructures, and government policies. The dynamism of smallholdings and competitive private marketing over estates and marketing boards is demonstrated.