Forced cotton cultivation left West African farmers starving and unpaid

Evidence

The questions of porterage, and of whether the price the producer received for the crop he had been forced to grow was sufficient, were secondary. The lamentable consequences of such an outlook included the fact that the African worker had nothing to eat when he returned home; that he did not have enough money to buy anything from the trading post where he went to trade in the first place; and that the producer who really planted and harvested his crop ended up working exclusively for the collectivity, which went against the individualistic traditions of the peoples in question. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 816

Categorization

• SEED: Possible angle: the gap between colonial rhetoric of protecting individualistic traditions and the collectivist coercion actually imposed.