Railroads were expected to convert Africans into free wage laborers

Evidence

It is now everyone’s conviction that no material or moral progress is possible in our African colonies without railroads: pacification assured, acceleration of commercial exchanges, development of agricultural production, progressive decrease in human porterage, profound modification of the current African social organization as a result of the facility with which more and more the freed laborer will have to sell his labor in the active centers of the colony, not only an instrument of administration and of material progress, but also a tool of social progress and truly a work of humanity. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 185

Categorization

• QUESTION: The passage reveals railroads were deliberately designed to dismantle African social organization and compel wage labor — worth investigating how this forced-labor logic played out.