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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Perfecting the 'Fertile Seed': The 'Compagnie du sel Agglomere and Colonial Capitalism, c. 1890-1905
Author:McDougall, E. AnnISNI
Year:2002
Periodical:African Economic History
Volume:30
Pages:53-80
Language:English
Geographic terms:Mali
France
Subjects:colonialism
trading companies
trade
salt industry
mercantile history
History and Exploration
Economics and Trade
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/3601602
Abstract:In 1893, the Compagnie du sel aggloméré pour exportation (CSA) was launched under the patronage of the French colonial firm the Compagnie française de l'Afrique occidentale (CFAO). The company aimed at expanding colonial commerce, particularly salt exports, into West Africa's Soudan, thereby supplanting Saharan salts. This was to be accomplished by using a French invention to remove the impediments to transporting and marketing French sea salt: the sea salt was agglomerated into compact blocks. However, the product 'sel aggloméré' never quite reached the standard of perfection needed to equal, let alone supplant, Saharan salts in the markets of the Soudan. Only a few years after its inception, the CSA was forced to seek both new patronage and new local African distributors. It reconstituted itself as the Compagnie nouvelle du sel aggloméré, then vanished from colonial records and French business archives after 1905. The story of the CSA is the story of failure: an individual failure which was nonetheless revealing of a collective illusion of what capitalism and colonialism could accomplish in West Africa. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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