West Africa’s demographic crisis justified deeper colonial labor intervention
Evidence
Beyond a renewed interest in rational mise en valeur, a second factor helps explain the development of a labor policy in Dakar in the interwar years. This was the discovery that West Africa lacked not only the basic infrastructure for transporting its presumed potential wealth to sea but also the basic manpower to generate this wealth in the first place. Recruitment between 1914 and 1917 had exposed the extent to which the peoples of West Africa were impoverished and unevenly distributed among the member colonies. The presence of a sufficient number of healthy African workers to carry out a policy of colonial development in a given part of the federation could not be taken for granted. West Africa, in short, suffered from an even greater demographic crisis than France. For this reason, too, more intervention in every aspect of labor-productivity, availability and reproduction-was clearly required. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 761
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEEPTHINKING: The colonial logic of a ‘demographic crisis’ justifying intervention in labor productivity, availability, and reproduction is a dense case of development discourse masking coercion.
Related
- West African manpower scarcity drove deeper French intervention in African labor (similarity 0.94)
- Colonial policy deliberately tolerated forced labor while condemning only its abuses. (similarity 0.83)
- French West Africa abolished slavery yet embraced forced labor as civilizing progress (similarity 0.82)
- Centuries of colonial recruitment as a human reservoir pushed West Africans to revolt (similarity 0.81)
- Each French West African colony’s labor fate hinged on land and population (similarity 0.80)
- Renewed mise en valeur emphasis drove interwar colonial labor coercion policy (similarity 0.80)
- African slaves replaced decimated Indians and colonial policy shifted to importing bozales only (similarity 0.80)
- Forced labor backfired by delaying West Africa’s market integration (similarity 0.80)
- Forced labor concentrated in colonies with labor shortages or surpluses (similarity 0.80)
- Forced cotton cultivation left West African farmers starving and unpaid (similarity 0.79)
- Colonial officials deliberately maintained forced labor while only regulating its abuses (similarity 0.79)
- West African poverty forced a pooled federal structure to justify colonial costs (similarity 0.79)
- Republican free-labor ideology coexisted with systematic forced labor in French West Africa (similarity 0.79)
- French officials justified forced African labor as beneficial paternal intervention (similarity 0.79)
- French colonial officials argued economic production outweighed military recruitment (similarity 0.79)