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Abstract
This article examines two distant workspaces of cocoa: plantations in São Tomé, a small Portuguese colonial island in the African Gulf of Guinea, and a British chocolate factory. In line with commodity-centered histories, it focuses on the diversity of labor systems, with different levels of coercion, working simultaneously to make cocoa and chocolate available to consumers in the industrial cities of Europe and North America. But this article adds to that literature by embracing the challenge of thinking with materials and the ways they produced specific social worlds. Cocoa and chocolate are understood as "thick things" whose physical attributes allowed or restricted different operations and uses and whose characteristics promoted or obstructed particular labor forms and allowed for the stabilization of different modes of rule. When we take the material properties of cocoa seriously, it is possible to see how mass chocolate production was a technological and scientific enterprise conceived to cope with the constraints of cocoa itself, with profound consequences for the labor forms on the plantation and the factory. Materials bound plantation laborers and chocolate scientists to specific technological, economic and political relations and demanded huge investments and much labor to create alternative ones.

The first months of 1909 were troubled times in the equatorial Atlantic island of São Tomé. In mid-March, after a long controversy opposing British chocolate manufacturers and Portuguese cocoa planters, the firms Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree decided to boycott São Tomé's "slave-grown cocoa". To cope with the consequences of the embargo planters turned to the colonial government. Asking for the state's assistance was a common practice. Even if the island's economy had been driven by private investment, the state had always supported the plantations by regulating the market, facilitating access to land and, most significantly, by enforcing labor-recruiting policies. Estate owners were, once again, demanding Portuguese diplomacy to work on their behalf to legitimize plantation labor practices. But labor was not the only problem they had to face. In April, planters issued another call for help. This time they requested agronomic science to deal with an unknown disease that affected cocoa trees, which, according to them, "had already produced great economic damage". ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Taking a multidisciplinary and global approach, this edited book examines the dynamic role of plantations as productive, socio-political and ecological forms throughout imperial and post-colonial worlds spanning multiple and broad temporalities. Showcasing an expansive range of case studies across different geographies, the collection sheds light on the heterogeneity of plantations and offers insights into the afterlives, spectres and remnants of systems that have been analysed as schemes of production, extraction and authority. Focusing on the expansion of plantation systems throughout various political-economic and ecological projects, and across the modern (and post-modern) period, allows the authors to move beyond analyses that often deal with individual empires through human-centered lenses. The contributors explore resistance to the mechanisms of extraction and control that plantations and their afterlives demanded, shedding light on their excesses, contradictions, failures and deviations. Offering a comprehensive treatment of global plantations, this book provides valuable reading for researchers with an interest in the socio-political and environmental effects of colonialism and imperialism in their various guises. Chapters 1, 8 and 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

Local Agenda 21 (LA21) emerged 23 years ago as a voluntary policy innovation for local governments aiming at sustainability and has now completed its lifecycle. We aim at a second look at LA21 from the standpoint of the institutional and innovation diffusion theories and with Portugal as case study. Results show a three moment lifecycle for LA21, each with distinct diffusion patterns. The Dawn, stymied by lack of regional and national leadership, was likely fuelled by a learning mechanism. It lasted 10 years and involved a mere 1% of the potential adopters. The Zenith took place when other countries had already come full circle. During this phase 27% of the local governments became active and both coercion and competition stand out as relevant engines. Twilight, most probably powered through coercion, competition and imitation mechanisms, took LA21 to a steady state with an additional 19% of local governments enrolling. Since then LA21 has shown departures in several different directions, including oblivion. We speculate, based on preliminary data that, although most LA21 are no longer active, a durable setting was created that promotes further innovation and public participation. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion