Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figure
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Capital and contingencies of postcolonial politics
- 2 The colonial market
- 3 Consolidation of a regime: Neocolonialism in the 1960s
- 4 Growth of Senegal's textile industry, 1960–1975
- 5 Reappropriation of the state: The 1970s
- 6 Demise of the Dakar textile industry
- Conclusion: States, capital, and capitalist states
- Appendix: Exchange rates
- References
- Index
2 - The colonial market
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figure
- Preface and acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Capital and contingencies of postcolonial politics
- 2 The colonial market
- 3 Consolidation of a regime: Neocolonialism in the 1960s
- 4 Growth of Senegal's textile industry, 1960–1975
- 5 Reappropriation of the state: The 1970s
- 6 Demise of the Dakar textile industry
- Conclusion: States, capital, and capitalist states
- Appendix: Exchange rates
- References
- Index
Summary
[I]f it is distressing to watch the constant regression of our exports to foreign countries, it is nonetheless comforting to find that our colonial markets have remained stable. The colonial market, which can never escape us, … must be developed for the benefit of French industry and commerce.
M. C. René-Leclerc 1933:4Merchants do not make their profits by revolutionising production but by controlling markets, and the greater the control they are able to exercise the higher their rate of profit. For this reason merchant capital tends to centralise and concentrate itself into monopolies … [M]erchant capital … eschewed the principles of laisser-faire and sought state support for monopolistic privileges.
G. B. Kay 1975:96Senegal's économie de traite was an economy structured around and for colonial merchant capital. By buying cheap and selling dear, rather than by imposing direct control over land and labor, capital extracted surpluses from Senegal's rural producers. The colonial state played a central and necessary part in this process. State power was used to promote the extension of export crop production and to sanction and bolster a rural political order that tied producers to colonial trading circuits. The colonial state also underwrote the monopolies that made the operations of French merchant capital profitable.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal1930–1985, pp. 31 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992