Colonial spending was justified by promised famine relief and repopulation.

Evidence

Over the next six years he would allocate fifty-two million francs from the federal reserves to its completion. Carde nevertheless insisted on experiments in rice farming, too. He also declared that if no cotton were ever harvested in the Niger Valley, he would still complete the works in question in an effort to free the peoples of the interior once and for all from the misery of famine. He optimistically envisioned the day that rice cultivation in the valley would eradicate starvation, help repopulate the hinterland, provide additional manpower to develop the coastal colonies, and facilitate increased production of oleaginous crops in the Sudanese zones by eliminating the need to grow any foodstuffs there. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 789

Categorization

• XREF: The claimed humanitarian rationale for a cash-crop infrastructure project parallels the ‘civilizing mission’ discourse the reader is tracking — economic coercion disguised as famine relief.