Shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge and how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about 'progress' and 'modernization' in the Global South. Both place-based environmental history and global intellectual history, this book explores the politics of environment, agriculture, poverty, development, and science in Lesotho. Drawing on diverse experiences with this landlocked, mountainous nation, and based on bilingual archival and oral history research in Sesotho and English, the book examines how Basotho intellectuals, farmers, migrant workers, chiefs, experts, and politicians formed vernacular ideas of tsoelopele (progress) amid the structural violence of colonialism and capitalism in southern Africa. Rather than a unidirectional flow of 'enlightened' knowledge from Europe to Africa, the study shows that a fraught historical process was at work in which Basotho drew on local and global sources of knowledge, from ancestral agricultural practices to colonial soil science and from African American missionaries to African nationalists in Ghana. Basotho ideas about tsoelopele, it is argued, informed the many political, social, and environmental innovations that enabled survival within a sea of white supremacy and that underpin approaches to development in independent Lesotho. Throughout, the book shows how this small nation surrounded by South Africa can serve as a valuable case-study for wider conversations about 'progress' and 'modernization' in the Global South.

"Poverty of Progress centers the moral vision of tsoelopele--or "progress"--which guided Sotho farmers as they navigated colonialism and economic dependence on South Africa. Focusing on innovators and their husbandry practices, Conz delivers a readable and astute history of farming as an intellectual project and political act." - Professor Nancy Jacobs, Department of History, Brown University

"This book is a consummate study of local agricultural knowledge and its co-evolution with colonial rule. And it breaks new ground. His intensive field interviews and archive-based evidence and stories show the intersection between local knowledge and colonial imposed policies in soil science and farm management. Lesotho is small, but it admirably illustrates a much larger issue for southern Africa and the world's rural histories. This study gives a voice to farmers who sought to sustain their views and practices in a rapidly changing world." - James McCann, Professor Emeritus of History and African Studies, Boston University, Author of Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa