Plantations in the political economy of colonial sugar production: Natal and Queensland, 1860–1914
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Abstract
Summary This essay has attempted to do two things. By examining the literature on plantation production it has tried to show its limitations for a study of capitalist agricultural production of tropical crops in colonies of white settlement. Further, by examining the broad outlines of sugar production in Natal and Queensland, it has attempted to show the inadequacy of a timeless definition of the plantation as a productive unit, and sought to place analysis of plantation agriculture not in a descriptive category of features of this type of production unit but rather in the area of the imperatives of accumulation under different constraints on production and realization of surplus.