Colonial infrastructure projects frequently backfired against their designers’ expectations

Evidence

In Guinea, for example, the Government General had assumed that the local populations would simply move their villages alongside the railroad. Instead, they sometimes fled villages that happened to be located in the railway’s path. … In the Middle Niger Valley, in contrast, the railroad between Kayes and Bamako did increase commercial activity, but not in the manner the administration had hoped. Thanks to the railroad, the regional grain and cloth market expanded as local inhabitants increased production of both commodities for local consumption. Cultivation of export commodities, including cotton for which the administration and French textile manufacturers had high hopes, failed to develop. Prohibitive transportation costs kept Sudanese cotton from being competitive on the world market. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1364

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how republican/civilizing projects in French West Africa produced unintended consequences that undermined their stated goals.
• QUESTION: Why did cotton specifically fail while grain and cloth markets expanded? The passage gestures at transport costs but the admin’s assumptions about export substitution seem loaded with unexamined premises.