Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: John Nott, "Between Feast Famine: Food, Health, and the History of Ghana's Long Twentieth Century" (UCL Press, 2025)
Description: Ghana’s twentieth century was one of dramatic political, economic, and environmental change. Sparked initially by the impositions of colonial rule, these transformations had significant, if rarely uniform, repercussions for the determinants of good and bad nutrition. All across this new and uneven polity, food production, domestic reproduction, gender relations, and food cultures underwent radical and rapid change. This volatile national history was matched only by the scientific instability of nutritional medicine during these same years.
Moving between the dry Northern savannah, the mineral-rich and food-secure Southern rainforest, and the youthful, ever-expanding cities, John Nott's Between Feast and...