French colonial development rhetoric failed economically in West Africa

Evidence

Dakar’s program of mise en valeur in West Africa between 1902 and I9I4 paid the price of a civilizing ideology forged in a different social, economic, and cultural context than the one in which it operated during the early I 90o’s. Railroad construction would proceed much more slowly than expected and, in the face of high costs of transportation, the lack of sufficient middlemen in the interior, low population density, and peasant resistance, would fail to elicit the anticipated results. In I 9 I 3, the total value in francs for imports and exports in the federation had not even doubled since 1903, increasing only from 155,952,303 to 277,7I8,rp. Exports from the potentially rich coastal colonies of Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Dahomey actually decreased during the same ten-year period. In Senegal alone, peanut exports continued to expand; as a result, this colony provided the federal budget with most of its revenues between r 902 and 1914. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis that a civilizing ideology forged for France and Algeria failed when transplanted to West Africa — echoes of my earlier interest in how ideologies travel across contexts and misfire.