Colonial officials deliberately maintained forced labor while only regulating its abuses

Evidence

Such measures did not resolve altogether the ambiguity about coercion in recruiting African wage laborers, particularly in Ivory Coast. This ambiguity was deliberate; while most members of the colonial establishment agreed in theory that free labor was superior to forced labor, they also remained convinced that without “pressure” Africans would not work for Europeans. Deprived of a labor force, the Europeans would then be obliged to leave the colony. Yet without them, the administration believed, no progress of any kind would take place in West Africa. The most enlightened course of action, in this context, was to end the abuses associated with forced labor, without actually abolishing forced labor itself. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 855

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader republican-empire paradox — the civilizing mission’s free-labor rhetoric coexisting with coercion — threaded throughout this book.