Despite never having delivered sustained economic or social benefits, plantations have been the privileged tool of extraction and development in Mozambique for more than one hundred years. Drawing on extensive archival and qualitative contemporary research, The Plantation Ideal explores ProSavana, the 2009 trilateral megaproject between Brazil, Japan, and Mozambique, which was intended to reorganize rural land and labor for the benefit of large-scale commodity production. Offering new insights into plantation economies, histories, and landscapes, Wendy Wolford tells the story of how the largely failed pursuit of a plantation ideal has shaped agricultural science, government rule, life on the land, and community development in Mozambique from the harshest years of Portuguese colonization to the present.