IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/agspub/v11y2022i3p287-307.html

Bringing the Vegetables Back In: The Unruly Dynamics of Postwar Market Gardening in British Colonial Hong Kong

Author

Listed:
  • Sze Chung Chow

Abstract

The Vegetable Marketing Organization (VMO) historically has long been a focal point of the study of the postwar boom of local agriculture in Hong Kong for two reasons. First, it centralized/monopolized the city’s vegetable wholesaling by eradicating all traditional marketing channels; second, its semiofficial status allowed it to accumulate a set of useful statistics on the production and circulation of local fresh produces. This article draws on fieldwork on local market gardeners and studies of colonial marketing institutions to argue that official statistics are rather inadequate to grasp the dynamics of local agriculture. A study of the so-called “dawn markets†and the vegetative dimension of the plants that lie outside the official system is necessary. It also suggests that dawn markets were not any residue from the pre-VMO era, but an “unruly twin†of the post-World War II colonial Hong Kong’s governmentality.

Suggested Citation

  • Sze Chung Chow, 2022. "Bringing the Vegetables Back In: The Unruly Dynamics of Postwar Market Gardening in British Colonial Hong Kong," Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South, vol. 11(3), pages 287-307, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:agspub:v:11:y:2022:i:3:p:287-307
    DOI: 10.1177/22779760221133679
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/22779760221133679
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/22779760221133679?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bauer, P. T., 1954. "Origins of the Statutory Export Monopolies of British West Africa1," Business History Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 28(3), pages 197-213, September.
    2. Rasmussen, Mattias Borg & Lund, Christian, 2018. "Reconfiguring Frontier Spaces: The territorialization of resource control," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 388-399.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Chiarella, Cristina & Rufin, Philippe & Abeygunawardane, Dilini & Bey, Adia & Lisboa, Sá Nogueira & Zavale, Helder & Meyfroidt, Patrick, 2024. "Impacts of large-scale forestry investments on neighboring small-scale agriculture in northern Mozambique," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 145(C).
    2. Mariska JM Bottema & Simon R Bush & Peter Oosterveer, 2021. "Territories of state-led aquaculture risk management: Thailand’s Plang Yai program," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 39(6), pages 1231-1251, September.
    3. le Polain de Waroux, Yann & Kronenburg García, Angela, 2025. "“Dream brokers” and the moral economy of frontier investments," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 195(C).
    4. Nikita Sud, 2020. "The Unfixed State of Unfixed Land," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 51(5), pages 1175-1198, September.
    5. Lisa Alvarado, 2019. "Institutional Change on a Conservationist Frontier: Local Responses to a Grabbing Process in the Name of Environmental Protection," Land, MDPI, vol. 8(12), pages 1-17, November.
    6. Gravesen, M.L. & Albrecht, P. & Yding, M., 2026. "Scarcity reimagined: global green imaginaries, frontier-making, and resource conflict in Africa," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 198(C).
    7. Nicolas-Artero, Chloé & Karaouli, Fatma & Dhaouadi, Latifa & Ali, Zaineb & Khelif, Nadia & Ben Zaied, Mongi & Ouessar, Mohamed & Bresci, Elena & Rulli, Maria Cristina, 2025. "Water (in)security in Gafsa, Tunisia: A hydrosocial approach," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 317(C).
    8. Saputra, Irfan & Faturachmat, Fatwa & Muin, Andi Vika Faradiba & Sirimorok, Nurhady & Sahide, Muhammad Alif K., 2025. "Sequencing the political forest: Power, exclusion, and the corporate hijacking of social forestry in Indonesia," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 181(C).
    9. Vuola, Marketta, 2022. "The intersections of mining and neoliberal conservation," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    10. Thaler, Gregory M. & Viana, Cecilia & Toni, Fabiano, 2019. "From frontier governance to governance frontier: The political geography of Brazil’s Amazon transition," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 59-72.
    11. Nicholas Pope, 2023. "Militias going rogue: Social dilemmas and coercive brokerage in Rio de Janeiro's urban frontier," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 35(3), pages 478-490, April.
    12. Meyfroidt, Patrick & Abeygunawardane, Dilini & Bey, Adia & Kronenburg Garcia, Angela & Oliveira, Eduardo & Rodriguez Garcia, Virginia, 2024. "Understanding agricultural and tree plantation frontiers emergence in Southern and Eastern Africa," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 2(1), pages 29-39.
    13. Cotton, Matthew & Barkemeyer, Ralf & Renzi, Barbara Gabriella & Napolitano, Giulio, 2019. "Fracking and metaphor: Analysing newspaper discourse in the USA, Australia and the United Kingdom," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 1-1.
    14. Abeygunawardane, Dilini & Kronenburg García, Angela & Sun, Zhanli & Müller, Daniel & Sitoe, Almeida & Meyfroidt, Patrick, 2022. "Resource frontiers and agglomeration economies: The varied logics of transnational land-based investing in Southern and Eastern Africa," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 51(6), pages 1535-1551.
    15. Bennett, Mia M., 2018. "From state-initiated to Indigenous-driven infrastructure: The Inuvialuit and Canada’s first highway to the Arctic Ocean," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 134-148.
    16. Chih-Hung Wang & Yu-Ting Kao & Jo-Tzu Huang, 2021. "Riverfront as a re-territorialising arena of urban governance: Territorialisation and folding of the Xindian River in Taipei metropolis," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(6), pages 1245-1261, May.
    17. Raycraft, Justin, 2020. "The (un)making of marine park subjects: Environmentality and everyday resistance in a coastal Tanzanian village," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    18. José Barrena & Alberto Harambour & Machiel Lamers & Simon R Bush, 2022. "Contested mobilities in the maritory: Implications of boundary formation in a nomadic space," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 40(1), pages 221-240, February.
    19. Kioko, Eric M. & Changwony, Winnie, 2025. "Infrastructure-driven land appropriation, institutional change and conflict in a communal conservancy in Kenya," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 195(C).
    20. Victor Kaiyuan Lin & Jenn‐Hwan Wang, 2023. "The Green Energy Transition and Peripheral City Development in China: Towards a Local Eco‐developmental State," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 54(3), pages 514-542, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:agspub:v:11:y:2022:i:3:p:287-307. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.