Colonial governors debated means, never the goal of cotton production

Evidence

Carde’s initial rejection of the Niger project offers not so much a lesson in altruism as a concrete example of his approach to making the federation more profitable. In labeling the Niger project wasteful, the governor general was not contesting the validity of its purpose-cotton cultivation. Indeed, Carde issued his own circular stressing the need for increased cotton production. Rather, Carde was simply contesting Merlin’s means to that end. Limited financial and human resources, and unrelenting pressure from Paris to transform Africa into the supplier of raw materials, were facts of life in Dakar in the I 92o’sY Carde thus determined early on that the best way to increase production, in the short term, was to work within the existing framework of African peasant agriculture. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 790

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: even seeming ‘benevolent’ colonial administrators shared the extraction goal, differing only on method — a useful corrective to narratives of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ colonizers.