This detailed and authoritative volume changes our conceptions of ‘imperial’ and ‘African’ history. Frederick Cooper gathers a vast range of archival sources in French and English to achieve a truly comparative study of colonial policy toward the recruitment, control, and institutionalization of African labor forces from the mid 1930s, when the labor question was first posed, to the late 1950s, when decolonization was well under way. Professor Cooper explores colonial conceptions of the African worker and shows how African trade union and political leaders used the new language of social change to claim equality and a share of power. This helped to persuade European officials that the ‘modern’ Africa they imagined was unaffordable. Britain and France could not reshape African society. As they left the continent, the question was how they had affected the ways in which Africans could reorganize society themselves.
• Encompasses a vast range of archival material in French and English • Changes the focus of colonial studies from who controls the state to what they do with that power • Comparative and interdisciplinary: of value to historians, economists, those interested in African politics, development
Contents
1. Introduction; Part I. The Dangers of Expansion and the Dilemmas of Reform: 2. The labor question unposed; 3. Reforming imperialism, 1935–40; 4. Forced labor, strike movements, and the idea of development, 1940–45; Part II. Imperial Fantasies and Colonial Crises: 5. Imperial plans; 6. Crises; Part III. The Imagining of a Working Class: 7. The systematic approach: the French code du Travail; 8. Family wages and industrial relations in British Africa; 9. Internationalists, intellectuals, and the labor question; Part IV. Devolving Power and Abdicating Responsibility: 10. The burden of declining empire; 11. Delinking colony and metropole: French Africa in the 1950s; Conclusion: 12. The wages of modernity and the price of sovereignty.
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