Post-emancipation states suppressed slavery only to enforce other forms of compulsory labor

Evidence

The French administration in West Africa was hardly the first “post-emancipation” state to suppress slavery only to justify and regulate other forms of compulsory labor. Such behavior was typical of nineteenth-century industrializing societies, seeking both at home and in their colonies to transform existing modes of labor organization through law and state authority, and to adapt them to the new demands of a capitalist economy. These economies could not condone the personal tyranny and violence associated with slavery and the slave trade. They required, instead, a system of “free” labor enforced by an objective authority, in which workers internalized such supposedly absent values as self-discipline and temperance. The challenge in this context was to make workers do independently what the new capitalist economy necessitated. Faced with this challenge, European states, committed in theory to free labor, did not hesitate to resort to various coercive forms of social control to achieve the desired objective. The same process can be seen in French West Africa between 1895 and 1930 in general, and in the 192o’s in particular. Determined to integrate African producers into the cash economy, the Government General first refused to recognize slavery, then rationalized a system of forced labor designed to tie the African peasant to the world market. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 749

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader historical pattern of how abolition gave way to indentured labor and other coercive labor regimes across nineteenth-century empires — parallels the British and US post-emancipation experience and, later, apartheid-era labor control. — connects to: States imposed marriage on freed slaves under threat of forced labor until the 1900s — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 218
• SEED: The claim that ‘free labor’ regimes are coercively enforced by states that profess liberty could anchor an essay on how republican ideals systematically legitimated empire-wide labor compulsion.