di Giovanni TONOLO

Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea, N. 52, 4|2022

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REVIEW: Jonathan E. ROBINS, Oil Palm: A Global History, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2021, 432 pp.

The two main fields of reference of Jonathon Robins’ new book, Oil palm: a global history, are immediately revealed in its title: the history of commodities and global history. This work fits within the historiographical genre famously inaugurated by Sydney W. Mintz in 1985. It is not by chance that Robins, associate professor of History at the Michigan Technological University, investigated the history of another commodity, cotton (in the British Empire), before dealing with palm oil. Furthermore, the title indicates that the main character of the book is not the commodity itself but the tree producing it. In sum, it tells «the story of how humans used and lived with oil palms». Surely this choice is also due to the fact that the oil palm tree, differently from the cotton plant for example, gives birth to more than one commodity: indeed, palm kernel oil played almost as fundamental a role in the globalization of palm products as the much more renowned palm oil (palm wine, on the other hand, never developed an appeal outside of African domestic markets). […]

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L’autore

Giovanni Tonolo is a PhD researcher at the History department of the European University Institute (Florence). He graduated at both the Scuola Normale and the Università di Pisa. His dissertation deals with the history of palm oil development in Dahomey/Bénin in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on its social and environmental outcomes. In 2020 he was a doctorant visiteur at the department of history and archaeology of the Université d’Abomey-Calavi.

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Per citare questo articolo

TONOLO, Giovanni, «REVIEW: Jonathan E. ROBINS, Oil Palm: A Global History, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2021, 432 pp.», Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea, N. 52, 4|2022

URL: <http://www.studistorici.com/2022/12/29/tonolo_numero_52/>

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Licenze

«REVIEW: Jonathan E. ROBINS, Oil Palm: A Global History, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2021, 432 pp.» by Giovanni Tonolo / Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione – Condividi allo stesso modo 4.0 Unported.

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