Sugarland

Sugarland

The Transformation of the Countryside in Communist Albania

  • Auteur: Hoxha, Artan R.
  • Éditeur: Central European University Press
  • ISBN: 9789633866177
  • Lieu de publication:  Budapest , Hungary
  • Année de publication électronique: 2023
  • Mois : Février
  • Pages: 307
  • DDC: 382/.4566412
  • Langue: Anglais

In this historical monograph on non-urban communist Albania, Artan Hoxha discusses the ambitious development project that turned a swampland into a site of sugar production after 1945. The author seeks to free the history of Albanian communism from the stereotypes that still circulate about it with stigmas of an aberration, paranoia, extreme nationalism, and xenophobia.

This micro-history of the agricultural and industrial transformation of a zone in southeastern Albania, explores a wide range of issues including modernization, development, and social, cultural, and economic policies. In addition to analyzing the collectivization of agriculture, Hoxha shows how communism affected the lives of ordinary rural people. As elsewhere in the Communist Bloc, the Albanian regime borrowed developmental projects from the past and implemented them using social mobilization and a command economy. The abundant archival resources along with interviews in the field attest to the authorities’ efforts to increase consumption and to radically transform people’s tastes. But the book argues that despite the repressive environment, people involved in the sugar project were not simply passive receivers of models from the nation's capital. The author also describes that—in defiance of Cold War bipolarity—technological requirements and social policy considerations required a degree of engagement with the broader world.

  • Cover
  • Front matter
    • Half title
    • Title page
    • Copyright page
  • Table of Contents
  • List of Illustrations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: The Making of the Sugar Scheme: Transitioning from Empire to Nation
    • The Plain of Maliq in Ottoman Times
    • Conceiving the Reclamation of the Maliq Swamp
    • The Maliq Scheme and the Quest for Nation-Buildingand Self-Sufficiency
    • Albania’s American Frontier
    • The Maliq Scheme and Fascism’s Grand Colonial Project in Albania
  • Chapter 2: The Making of Maliq’s Landscape: Modern and Stalinist
    • Maliq’s Landscape Between “Good” and “Bad” Governments
    • Uncompleted Reclamation
    • “For the Factory and Your Country”: Maliq and the Nation
    • Inscribing the Tabula Rasa: Gridding the Stalinist Landscape
  • Chapter 3: Sugar and the Communist Construction of Spatial Inequalities in Maliq
    • Sugar Production and the Communist Project of Social Transformations
    • Building and Peopling Where Once Only the Fishermen Could Go
    • Building Socialism, Spatializing Inequalities
    • Love for the Plain
  • Chapter 4: Maliq and the World
    • A Tapestry of Transnational Exchanges
    • Maliq and Its East–West Economy of Knowledge
    • Sugar Consumption and Cross-Border Exchanges
  • Chapter 5: Communism and After: From Sugar to Ruins
    • Ruins and the Angel of History
    • Building a Regional Integrated Economic Web
    • The Fall of Communism and the Unraveling of the Web
    • Maliq Today: Ruins, Marginalization and Memory
  • Epilogue
  • Bibliography
  • Index
  • Back cover

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