Forced labor backfired by delaying West Africa’s market integration

Evidence

The peoples of West Africa did not passively submit to their own exploitation. Resistance took a variety of forms: flight, noncooperation, and strikes. In some cases, the presence of coercion achieved the desired results, but not in the manner anticipated by the French. Flight from forced-labor demands in their own circles was a powerful motivation for inhabitants in the interior to engage “voluntarily” in migrant wage labor in Senegal and Gold Coast, then eventually in Ivory Coast. From migrant laborers these workers often went on to become independent cash-crop farmers. In neither case, however, did they learn the “law of labor” from the French. Indeed, if anything, administrative recourse to forced labor delayed the integration of West Africa into the world market-a fact Inspector Kair underscored. Rather, these individuals were responding to opportunities that Dakar had helped create, but never fully understood or controlled. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 864

The peoples of West Africa did not passively submit to their own exploitation. Resistance took a variety of forms: flight, noncooperation, and strikes. In some cases, the presence of coercion achieved the desired results, but not in the manner anticipated by the French. Flight from forced-labor demands in their own circles was a powerful motivation for inhabitants in the interior to engage “voluntarily” in migrant wage labor in Senegal and Gold Coast, then eventually in Ivory Coast. From migrant laborers these workers often went on to become independent cash-crop farmers. In neither case, however, did they learn the “law of labor” from the French. Indeed, if anything, administrative recourse to forced labor delayed the integration of West Africa into the world market-a fact Inspector Kair underscored. Rather, these individuals were responding to opportunities that Dakar had helped create, but never fully understood or controlled. For this situation, the ideology of the mission civilisatrice was partially responsible, both before and after World War I. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 864

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle on coercion producing the opposite of its intended economic effect.
• XREF: Directly extends the book’s central thesis that the civilizing mission was coercive infrastructure, now showing its counterproductive economic effects.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 864