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Book Review
Sub-Saharan Africa
| Edmund Abaka. "Kola is God's Gift": Agricultural Production, Export Initiatives and the Kola Industry of Asante and the Gold Coast, c. 1820–1950. (Western African Studies.) Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 173. Cloth $44.95, paper $24.95.
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| In the twentieth century, cocoa occupied a crucial place in the economy and political development of Ghana. The concerns of cocoa farmers shaped both domestic and foreign policy and informed social structures and the state economy. Cocoa price fluctuations even, in several instances, helped to bring down governments. In recognition, the production and sale of cocoa from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onward has been featured in numerous scholarly studies. Yet little attention has been paid to the question of how the cocoa industry was able to materialize around the turn of the twentieth century. In this compelling study, Edmund Abaka argues that cocoa's rise was made possible by (and came at the expense of) a crop of greater significance for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: kola. |
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