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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | From Commerce to Colonisation: History of the Rubber Trade in the Kilombero Valley of Tanzania, 1890-1914 |
Author: | Monson, Jamie |
Year: | 1993 |
Periodical: | African Economic History |
Volume: | 21 |
Pages: | 113-130 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | Tanzania Germany |
Subjects: | colonialism exports rubber History and Exploration Economics and Trade Development and Technology |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3601812 |
Abstract: | The end of the 19th century in East Africa was the beginning of a new era of political, economic and social change. As 'legitimate trade' began to replace the external slave trade throughout the continent, European powers sought new products needed to fuel industrialization. A major product shipped from the East African coast from the 1890s onwards was rubber, which grew wild in parts of the interior and was brought to the coast for shipment to Europe via Zanzibar. In the Kilombero Valley of Tanzania, the rubber trade played a critical role in the transition from precolonial to colonial economic relations. The Kilombero case provides an example of the ways in which colonial interests utilized, but at the same time reoriented, existing networks of trade in East Africa. Credit was utilized by traders as a mechanism for stimulating rubber extraction. The intervention of the German colonial State, both as an enforcer of debt repayment and as tax collector, led to an intensification of pressure on local producers, for whom rubber harvesting provided an alternative to wage labour. These dual pressures on the rural population - indebtedness to merchants accompanied by colonial taxation - led to an unprecedented assault on rubber vines and trees. Although the 'rubber phase' in East African history lasted less than twenty years, the period was important because rubber represented the medium through which rural producers were drawn into the world market. Notes, ref. |