French infrastructure policy conflated colonial self-interest with African benefit

Evidence

This choice of means can be accounted for in a variety of ways. First, building lines of communication and making the federation healthier dovetailed with the immediate interests of the reorganized federal government, whose raison d’etre was rational economic utilization of the colony’s resources, principally through development of modern infrastructure. Indeed, so neatly did it tie in with Dakar’s interests, this particular tenet blinded the French to the fact that not all development was equally beneficial to colonizer and colonized. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s goal — the causal claim that French interests were mistaken for African welfare, a core mechanism of republican imperialism.