Overview

In Dissimilar Coffee Frontiers Sven Van Melkebeke compares the divergent development of coffee production in eastern Congo and western Rwanda during the colonial period. The Lake Kivu region offers a remarkable case-study to investigate diversity in economic development. In Rwanda, on the eastern side of the lake, coffee was mainly cultivated by smallholder families, while in the Congo, on the western side of the lake, European plantations were the dominant mode of production. Making use of a wide array of largely untapped archival sources, Sven Van Melkebeke convincingly succeeds in moving the manuscript beyond a case-study of colonizers to a more nuanced history of interaction and in presenting an innovative new social history of labor and land processes.

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' [...] His comparative approach in two territories government is innovative in how he notes how the economic regime of each region affected each other. [...] Van Melkebeke convincingly does describe how material conditions (access to land, the role of private businesses and colonial state policies, the role of African elites) can explain the divergence between African producers dominating in Rwanda compared to European-controlled plantations in the Belgian Congo. [...] This study is a valuable addition to the neglected economic history of the Great Lakes region in Central Africa that is well situated in the larger literature on colonial cash crop agriculture in colonial Africa'. Jeremy Rich, Marywood University, in International Journal of African Historical Studies 54, No. 1 (2021), pp. 117-118

Author Information

Sven Van Melkebeke, Ph.D. (2017), Ghent University, is a postdoctoral fellow affiliated to the Department of History at that university. He has published articles and book chapters on various commodity frontiers (coffee, rubber, cotton).

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