Geography and transportation costs, not just French policy, limited West African export integration.

Evidence

However impressive, this integration of West Africans into the world economy remained very regionalized in 1895, for a variety of ecological, economic, and historical reasons. Among the vast territories conquered by the French, only the Senegambian basin and the coast of Ivory Coast and Dahomey were actively engaged in the commodity export trade. Peanuts and palm kernel required a specific climate and soil. Peanuts did best in light sandy soil and a reliable long dry season. At the same time, as bulky items with a low weight-tovalue ratio, they had to be grown close to the coast, where transportation costs could be controlled. Both of these conditions were met in the Senegambian basin; the Western Sudan, in contrast, although it offered the same soil and climate, was too far from the ocean to make it profitable to grow peanuts for export. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 115

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to questions of French mise en valeur policy: colonial development was constrained by preexisting physical-geographic conditions.

Related

• Geography limited precolonial West African export trade to coastal zones. (similarity 0.93)
• Infrastructure obsession blinded Dakar to West Africa’s varied geographical and cultural conditions. (similarity 0.82)
• West African poverty forced a pooled federal structure to justify colonial costs (similarity 0.81)
• French planners hoped to make West Africa a cotton plantation for metropolitan self-sufficiency (similarity 0.80)
• French colonial development rhetoric failed economically in West Africa (similarity 0.80)
• Failed colonial policy was blamed on African noncompliance rather than the strategy (similarity 0.79)
• African rail investment enriched local markets while export cotton schemes failed (similarity 0.79)
• The federation’s prosperity was pegged to Senegalese peanut exports. (similarity 0.79)
• The Dakar-Saint-Louis railroad quickly expanded Senegal’s peanut production and trade (similarity 0.79)
• Labor shortages and Atlantic commerce drove West African slavery’s expansion. (similarity 0.79)
• Faith in infrastructure blinded colonial planners to labor and geography needs (similarity 0.79)
• Railroads built for strategy also expanded West African peanut cash-crop production (similarity 0.78)
• Africa was selected for slave labor because it sat outside Europe’s world-economy. (similarity 0.78)
• France federated its West African colonies to decentralize rule and rationalize economic development (similarity 0.78)
• West Africa had a diversified precolonial economy centered on agriculture and widespread trade. (similarity 0.78)