I’m reading Open Veins of Latin America, and it boggles my mind much destruction came from forced labor cultivation of cane sugar in Brazil and Cuba among other places.
Monocrop cultivation of sugar absolutely destroyed the lands of these two countries. The soil, once rich and firm, could no longer grow other crops as in the past. Rain would sweep much of this soil and create mudslides since it would simply lie fallow after it died.
It made me wonder what other crops are grown in most recent years, but which came from foreign lands. How did it affect the people? What crops originally grew in those lands and what impact did it have on development?
by gomi-panda
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How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney
Neo-Colonialism by Kwame Nkrumah
The Divide by Jason Hickel
It doesn’t delve completely into it, especially the long term impact, but in For All the Tea in China by Sarah Rose, it explores the British use of corporate espionage and undermining the economic and political stability of China to extract and steal tea plants and the processing of it to break that country’s monopoly on tea and the the use of India as a means to plant, cultivate and process tea so they could then control all elements of production and trade of it for their own access and benefit. Basically Britain needed to colonize and control India to establish its tea plantations, which hadn’t been grown there before.
Dude, I can’t believe you requested this. I think I may have the perfect book for you. It covers *the exact* topics you mention. Don’t let the title throw you off, it’s a 10/10. I could not put it down.
*The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization* –Peter Zeihan