French colonial economic premises persist today as development economics and enduring racism

Evidence

These shifts did not resolve the ambiguities that had always marked France’s republican empire. Despite the reforms of the Popular Front and the early Fourth Republic, French governments continued to deny the colonized the full rights of metropolitan citizens. Although forced labor was abolished in 1946, the latter-day investment in the empire did not challenge the premises of mise en valeur articulated in the 192o’s. African economic well-being was still conceived exclusively in terms of integrating the federation into the world economy through the export of cash crops. Indeed, that tenet has survived in the form of development economics. … The main difference between now and then is that whereas the colonial powers assumed that African poverty was primarily the result of the African producer’s moral deficiencies, modern economics attributes this poverty to social factors. Last, the current discrimination against children born on French soil of foreign parents suggests that republican France has not yet divested itself of the racist thought that peoples of nonwhite ethnicity cannot become truly French. As the interwar years showed, the combination of increased immigration, social dislocation, and rising nationalism can easily turn liberals into neo-traditionalists, xenophobes, and racists-who maintain an official rhetoric of republican fraternity and progress. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 891

Categorization

• XREF: Directly answers the reader’s goal of understanding mise en valeur (French forcible development economics) and its lasting ramifications. The tenet surviving as ‘development economics’ is a striking continuity worth connecting to postcolonial development critiques.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how French ‘mise en valeur’ rationalization of West African extraction quietly became the template for modern development economics.