Some French contemporaries condemned colonial progress as manufactured misery and labor extraction.

Evidence

European colonization a force for progress? Progress, when we have only one means for bringing blacks to our side: to stimulate artificial needs that contribute only to their unhappiness, their eternal damnation? … Poor black humanity. Let us at least have the frankness to admit that if we take such an interest in you, it is because you appear to us to constitute an inexhaustible reservoir of labor … We intend to make the African races “yield” the maximum … But what do science, justice, goodness and especially progress have to do with any of this? — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 196

Categorization

• XREF: Regismanset anticipates postcolonial critiques of development as labor exploitation — connects to the forced-imposition thread of the reader’s stated purpose. — connects to: Anti-colonial guilt was recast by French intellectuals as masochism justifying Third World repression — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 395