Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (review)

This well-structured and clearly written book examines the English cocoa and chocolate industry, which has long marketed the purity of its products and its ethical, beneficent employment practices. Focusing on the firm Rowntree & Co., Ltd., Robertson problematizes the paternalistic image of the industry at large by revealing the integral, subordinate roles of women in the so-called cocoa chain between a Yoruba village in Nigeria and the city of York. Robertson draws upon company archives, municipal and national archives, published sources, and a small number of oral histories to represent the daily lives of working women in the context of global capitalism and gender and racial discrimination.

"This book begins with the romantic construction of chocolate," Robertson explains, "but will attempt to understand the actual human endeavors, and systematic exploitation, which have made such chocolate fantasies possible." (3) Accordingly, chapters 1 and 2 recount and critique nineteenth- and twentieth-century advertising by Rowntree and other firms, demonstrating how they blended imperial histories of chocolate into their own romantic, marketable narratives. Chapter 3 then uses oral histories to examine African women's experiences of cocoa farming, and Chapter 4 explains how Rowntree represented this colonial exploitation to its employees and the city of York in promoting an imperial culture of which the community was largely unselfconscious. Chapter 5 uses oral histories of female Rowntree factory workers to demonstrate the women's experiences of "gendered and raced labour in chocolate manufacture." (12)

The study articulates York's relationship not only to imperial culture, but also to colonial labor. The third chapter on African women farmers is followed by a chapter—the strongest of the book—in which Robertson uses the Rowntree in-house publication, Cocoa Works Magazine, to offer a detailed picture of the activities through which York's working class, and especially women, engaged with an imperial world. In view of the African women's lives illuminated by the preceding chapter, the reader can appreciate the company's mediation of a colonial reality of which the Rowntree employees were dimly aware, despite the fact that the African women made their work possible. There is a productive tension in the book between local cultural and social history and global labor history. Robertson's analysis would have been given more weight by a larger number of oral histories, but she deserves credit for pushing the boundaries of the local with a creative combination of historical sources.

This book is also a women's history in which the author reveals women as "active agents" who negotiated their ways between and across gendered and raced boundaries. Robertson asserts that African women "are not and never have been passive bystanders in the cocoa economy." (117) The implication that there is a prevailing perception of passivity is difficult to reconcile with fine scholarship on African women's labor history since the 1980s, such as work by Iris Berger and Elizabeth Schmidt.

In addressing the activities of women in York, the author's analysis of "minority women" tends to collapse the significant cultural differences between the three women of her case study. One woman was born to Cantonese parents in Liverpool before moving to York with her family, the second was recruited by Rowntree from Malta, and the third was born to an Asian family in Zimbabwe before moving to Uganda and ultimately migrating to England as a refugee in the 1970s. (190-93) The category of minority needs nuance, as it appears equivalent here to the category of non-white. To her credit, Robertson acknowledges that the women in question sometimes do not see the same boundaries that frame her own analysis. In referring to Asian refugees from Uganda, she states, "The Rowntree firm...had a part to play in the acceptance of refugees as workers, even as they were positioned as workers within a capitalist, racist and patriarchal system." (186) She subsequently notes that the three minority women with whom she spoke "simply did not feel that they had been subjected to racial prejudice either...