French West African trade barely grew in the federation’s first decade

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. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 232

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete counterpoint to any narrative of automatic colonial extraction success; trade volume data for teaching/comparison.