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Title:The coercion of free markets: cotton, peasants, and the colonial State in the French Soudan, 1924-1932
Author:Roberts, Richard
Book title:Cotton, colonialism, and social history in sub-Saharan Africa / ed. by Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts. - Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann
Year:1995
Pages:221-243
Language:English
Geographic terms:Mali
France
Subjects:colonialism
agricultural policy
cotton
trade
Abstract:In 1924 Governor-General Jules Carde outlined an ambitious plan to transform the French Soudan (now Mali) into the major cotton colony of the French West African Federation. This chapter examines the creation of the central institution of this pro-peasant cotton policy - the official cotton market - and the coinciding debates about incentives and coercion, and free markets and fixed prices. Proponents of irrigated cotton cultivation, who expected to create both social order and rational cotton farming on a million hectares of semiarid land to the west of the Niger River, argued that in order to yield cotton, Africans' farming needed to be managed and their labour tightly controlled. On the other side stood those agronomists and administrators who believed that Africans were responsive to market incentives and would produce vast quantities of cotton when it was in their interests. Most colonial officials fell on this side of the debate. Both the irrigation model and the pro-peasant, free market programme were tried in the Soudan. They both failed because they were unable to capture the robust domestic economy of handicraft textile production, which responded with alacrity to satisfy West African continental demand for cloth. Notes, ref.
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