37–42° N
Source: Updated after Weaver (2003: 89) (reprinted with permission).
Many of the overseas investments during this period went into only six commodities – sugar, palm oil, rubber, bananas, tea, and food staples, all of which should play an important role in the production of agrarian landscapes up to the present. Sugar and palm oil even received “a new life” (Byerlee 2013: 23) as agrofuel inputs. Except for food staples (and wool), all these commodities were usually produced on plantations or large-scale estates, as these were amenable to economies of scale and vertically integrated production, thus making such operations attractive to scale-hungry financiers. In contrast, food staples such as grains, dairy or meat and wool were largely produced by family farms, particular in the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and eastern and southern Africa. These would buy land from colonial governments or companies. Some argue that it was only more recently that financial investors would target food crops directly because of advancements in crop/animal husbandry, technologies and farm management and the increasing consolidation of farms in different parts of the world (Byerlee 2013). But a closer look reveals that even these petty colonialists had often tight links to (high) finance, connecting metropolitan credit, land speculation and enclosure (Weaver 2003: 194). With the advancement of credit, mortgage, farm insurance and agricultural futures schemes (Martin & Clapp 2015), these became enmeshed in “giant chain[s] of debt-obligations” (Graeber 2011: 347) and contractual entitlements.
This can be vividly illustrated using the example of Aotearoa New Zealand, where “[f]rom early times farmers insisted on securing the freehold of their land, which alone created demands for heavy doses of capital” (Pryde 1987: 6-1). Just 45 years later, after James Cook as the first European had landed in Aotearoa (as the local Māori tribes would call it), the first cattle were brought to the country in 1814, once the colonizers had realized that “the local climate allowed for year-round pasture growth and that wool, meat and dairy produce could be produced in New Zealand with very few resources” (Wynyard 2016: 63). As elsewhere, the sporadic trading activities backed by merchant capital soon gave way to more direct forms of colonization, spearheaded by large colonial companies and a few land-hungry individuals. Even though these forces were not always successful in their agricultural ventures (Fairweather 1985), they were still quite effective in dispossessing the autochthone Māori populations through a mixture of purchase, theft, fraud and coercion. Millions of acres of land, particularly in the South Island (Wynyard 2016), were thus appropriated. Early settlers would engage in speculative runholding practices, whereby livestock herds, often financed by loans from overseas or larger runholders, would be moved around. After the colonial government signed the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) with local Māori tribes, the leasing of Māori land became illegal, as the Crown was given “a complete pre-emptive right to all land purchases” (Fairweather 1985: 441) in order to “shield” Māori lands “from unscrupulous land jobbers” (Wynyard 2016: 76). Runholders therefore became a crucial force in pushing for the autonomy of the colony, so that they could establish full property rights over the best lands. The squatting mode of production increasingly reached spatial limits in the years to come, which led to the emergence of larger ranching estates (Fairweather 1985). Contrary to the runholding, with its links to more short-term-oriented sources of finance, domestic and overseas alike, estates had tight financial connections to private persons and investment trusts in both England (London) and Scotland (Edinburgh).1 One of these companies
