French West Africa abolished slavery yet embraced forced labor as civilizing progress

Evidence

In 1905, the Government General of French West Africa had abolished the legal existence of slavery throughout its territories. In advocating the abolition of slavery, Dakar nevertheless failed to make clear what form of labor should replace it. Implicit in the 1905 decree was a belief in the superiority of free labor and the law of the marketplace; both beliefs were unquestioned tenets of liberal republicanism. Yet a pervasive feature of the French colonial system in West Africa was administrative recourse to forced labor, which the Government General made no effort to conceal. To the contrary, it insisted that use of force was required to help Africans progress; this justification was particularly evident in the 192o’s, when a new demand in Paris for the mise en valeur of the federation encouraged Dakar to develop a coherent labor doctrine and regulate its labor practices. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 743

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of the republican mission civilisatrice doctrine and its internal contradictions discussed across this book.
• SEED: The contradiction between liberal free-labor ideology and colonial coercion is an angle: ‘civilization through coercion’ as a usable framework for understanding post-slave societies generally.

Related

• Republican free-labor ideology coexisted with systematic forced labor in French West Africa (similarity 0.94)
• Post-emancipation states suppressed slavery only to enforce other forms of compulsory labor (similarity 0.86)
• French officials justified abolition by claiming freed slaves worked harder than they did enslaved (similarity 0.86)
• Racist beliefs about African laziness justified forced labor as necessary schooling (similarity 0.85)
• Forced labor backfired by delaying West Africa’s market integration (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial officials deliberately maintained forced labor while only regulating its abuses (similarity 0.84)
• Post-emancipation states revived compulsory labor to feed capitalist economies (similarity 0.83)
• French conquest itself drove Africans into slavery while France posed as liberator. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial policy deliberately tolerated forced labor while condemning only its abuses. (similarity 0.83)
• A continuous republican idea of empire drove French policy from 1895 to 1930 (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial labor coercion was rhetorically rebranded as progress rather than slavery (similarity 0.83)
• French West Africa claimed leadership over British colonies in antislavery enforcement. (similarity 0.83)
• The mission civilisatrice was largely a lie according to West African critics (similarity 0.82)
• The antislavery campaign justified French intervention as deliberately directing Africa’s evolution. (similarity 0.82)
• West African manpower scarcity drove deeper French intervention in African labor (similarity 0.82)