1. Miers, Sue and Roberts, Richard, The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988)Google Scholar; Miers, Sue, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar; Klein, Martin and Miers, Sue, Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Klein, Martin, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. These themes are addressed by Frederick Cooper in several of his publications, most thoroughly, in Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see especially 110–70. See also Monica van Beusekom and Dorothy Hodgson's Introduction in a special issue of the Journal of African History; “Lessons Learned? Development Experiences in the Late Colonial Period,” ed. van Beusekom, Monica and Hodgson, Dorothy, The Journal of African History 41 (2000): 29–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. The full text of the ILO's Forced Labor Convention (Co29) can be found at the following link (checked and working on July 8, 2017): http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C029 Amongst the countries discussed in this special issue, Co29 was adopted by the ILO on June 28, 1930, and ratified by Liberia on May 1, 1931, Britain on June 3, 1931, Italy on June 18, 1934, France on June 24, 1937, and Portugal on June 26, 1956. Following the end of colonial rule, it was ratified by Ghana on May 20, 1957, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on September 20, 1960, Somalia November 18, 1960, Niger on February 27, 1961, Tanzania on January 30, 1962, and Mozambique on June 16, 2003. For a discussion of the circumstances in which the Convention was developed, see Miers, Suzanne, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (Walnut Creek, CA, Altamira, 2003), 134–51Google Scholar.

4. The expression “politics of altruism” is used differently by different authors, see Lissner, Jørgen, The Politics of Altruism: A Study of the Political Behaviour of Voluntary Development Agencies (Geneva, 1977)Google Scholar; Sullivan, Robert, “The Politics of Altruism: an Introduction To the Food-for-Peace Partnership Between the United States Government and Voluntary Relief Agencies,” Political Research Quarterly, 23 (1970): 762–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Smith, Brian H., ed., More Than Altruism: The Politics of Private Foreign Aid (Princeton, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Ferguson, James suggested that the entrenchment of state power is the principal structural side-effect of “development” in his The Antipolitics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticisation, and Bureaucratic State Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis, 1990), 255Google Scholar. Mark Duffield sees aid an essentially political form of global governance, Duffield, Mark, “Social Reconstruction and the Radicalization of Development: Aid as a Relation of Global Liberal Governance,” Development and Change 33 (2002): 1049–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Tania Murray Li addressed similar questions but argues that attributing responsibility for the hegemony and dispossession that results from development intervention is far from straightforward: Li, Tania Murray, “Revisiting the Will to Improve,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100 (2010): 233–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. See Li, Tania Murray, The Will to Improve (Durham, NC, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a classic discussion of the application of this principle in the history of South-East Asia. For a discussion of how the ideology of the free gift shapes relations between donors and NGOs, see Roderick Stirrat and Heiko Henkel, “The Development Gift: The Problem of Reciprocity in the NGO World,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 554 (1997): 66–80.

7. See Maul, Daniel Roger, “The International Labor Organization and the Struggle Against Forced Labour from 1919 to the Present,” Labor History 48 (2007): 477–500 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maul, Daniel Roger, Human Rights, Development and Decolonization. The International Labour Organization, 1940–70 (Geneva, 2012)Google Scholar; Rossi, Benedetta, “Periodizing the End of Slavery: Colonial Law, the League of Nations, and Slave Resistance in the Nigerien Sahel, 1920s–1930s,” Annales 72 (2017)Google Scholar, forthcoming.

8. For a colonial anthropological study of the ambiguities of the village chiefs’ position caught between allegiance to his community and the demands of the colonial administration, see Gluckman, Max, Mitchell, J. and Barnes, J., “The Village Headman in British Central Africa,” Africa 19 (1949): 89–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more recent study of the role of chiefs as intermediary between development donors and local communities, see de Sardan, Jean Pierre Olivier, “L'espace public introuvable: Chefs et projets dans les villages nigériens,” Revue Tiers Monde 157 (1999): 139–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These anthropological studies reveal the ambiguities inherent in the chiefs’ role as intermediary between the villagers and the colonial or national administration. However, by using the term “contractor” in this paragraph I highlight that from the perspective of donors, chiefs could be used, and were used, to outsource coercive methods in the recruitment of workers who were not free to withdraw; for a study of contract labor in Africa see Little, Peter and Watts, Michael, eds., Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, WI, 1994)Google Scholar.

9. Wiemers in this issue.

10. Ibid.

11. Kagan Guthrie in this issue.

12. Ibid.

13. McMahon in this issue.

14. Ibid.

15. See for example, van Beusekom, Monica, Negotiating Development: African Farmers and Colonial Experts at the Office du Niger, 1920–1960 (Portsmouth, NS, 2002)Google Scholar: xxx.

16. Some of the developmental activities promoted by colonial and post-colonial states can be seen as directed toward the building and maintenance of “public goods” and raising problems of collective action. In these circumstances states normally establish forms of coerced contribution either through taxes in cash or through taxes in labor (the “labor tax”). Unwillingness to volunteer is not necessarily evidence that the goods in question were not worth the effort to the local population. But the point here is that this question was rarely posed in relation to “development” interventions. Debates on the viability of the labor tax (or of prestations in French Africa) preceded the introduction of the development discourse. The problem is precisely that developmentalism made it possible to elude these debates altogether: “participation in development” was not conceived of as work, the relative usefulness and value of which could be measured according to different criteria, e.g., in terms of opportunity cost to the workers, salary scales in the public sector, collective action problems, or fiscal burden imposable to a certain population or group.

17. Guthrie, Zachary Kagan, “Introduction: Histories of Mobility, Histories of Labor, Histories of Africa,” African Economic History 44 (2016): 1–17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rossi, Benedetta, “Migration and Emancipation in West Africa's Labour History: The Missing Links,” Slavery and Abolition 35 (2014): 23–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Many colonial and post-colonial development schemes required the resettlement of local groups either away from the building sites of major development infrastructure, or into development schemes that required more labor than was available locally. The following studies detail forced evictions and resettlements: Isaacman, Allen and Isaacman, Barbara, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007 (Athens, OH, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van Beusekom, Negotiating Development; Porter, Doug, Allen, Bryant, and Thompson, Gaye, Development in Practice: Paved with Good Intentions (London, 1991)Google Scholar. In addition to positive actions to force groups to move in the name of development, some authors have highlighted the negative attitude of development discourse toward autonomous migration, which is often seen as a consequence of development failure to allow people to stay put rather than be mobile. See for example Bakewell, Oliver, “‘Keeping Them in Their Place’: the ambivalent relationship between development and migration in Africa,” Third World Quarterly 29 (2008): 1341–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Whyte in this issue.

20. Wiemers in this issue.

21. Loffman in this issue.

22. Urbano in this issue.

23. In 1948, the racial discrimination and forced labor that continued to characterize French colonial recruitment and labor policies were highlighted in a report written by the General Labor Confederation (Confederation Generale de Travail) which listed a range of concrete examples of such discriminatory and exploitative practices. An extract of this report is published as “Discriminations Raciales et Travail Forcé dans les Territoires d'Outre Mer,” in Le Travail en Afrique Noire, ed. Balandier, Georges and Dadié, Bernard (Paris, 1952), 368–76Google Scholar.

24. Charles Fayet, Travail et Colonisation (Paris, 1931), 7. The citation in this quote is from a report written for the French Senate by senator Henry Bérenger for the Commission of Foreign Affairs (ibid, footnote 1).

25. Inspection to Tete District, 1944, Fundo da Inspecção dos Serviços Administrativos e Negócios Indígenas (ISANI), AHM, as cited by Kagan Guthrie in this issue.

26. For a comprehensive overview of the historiography of development from its origins to the present, see Hodge, Joseph, “On the Historiography of Development (Part 1: The First Wave),” Humanity 6 (2015): 429–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hodge, Joseph, “Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider),” Humanity 7 (2016): 125–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a less up-to-date overview of economic theories of development, see Hunt, Diana, Economic Theories Development: An Analysis of Competing Paradigms (London, 1989)Google Scholar. For a concise critical discussion of debates on development in the social sciences, see Cooper, Frederick and Packard, Randall, “Introduction,” in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, ed. Cooper, Frederick and Packard, Randall (Berkeley, 1997), 1–41 Google Scholar.

27. Austin, Gareth, “Resources, Techniques, and Strategies South of the Sahara: Revising the Factor Endowments Perspective on African Economic Development, 1500–2000,” Economic History Review 61 (2008): 587–624 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 588.

28. Early contributors to this approach, such as Walter Rostow, Arthur Lewis, and Alexander Gerschenkron focused on the state's role in creating and supporting institutions that promote growth. More recent contributors such as Gordon White and Robert Wade talk of the “ideology of “developmentalism” and consider the relation between economic development and state intervention. White, Gordon, “Developmental States and Socialist Industrialization in the Third World,” Journal of Development Studies 21 (1984): 97–120 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 97; Whyte, Gordon and Wade, Robert, “Developmental States and Markets in East Asia: An Introduction,” in Developmental States in East Asia, ed. Whyte, Gordon (London, 1988), 1–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 1–2.

29. Escobar, Arturo, Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 9Google Scholar.

30. Esteva, Gustavo, “Development”, in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Wolfgang Sachs, ed. (London, 1993), 6–25 Google Scholar; Crush, Jonathan, ed., Power of Development (London, 1995)Google Scholar; Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts, Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar.

31. See Chang, Ha-Joon, Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity. (London, 2008)Google Scholar; Ziai, Aram, “The Discourse of ‘Development’ and Why the Concept Should be Abandoned,” Development in Practice 23 (2013): 123–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Helleiner, Eric, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Ithaca, NY, 2014): 141Google Scholar.

33. This point has been illustrated in a large number of regional and country-specific studies. See, for example, Bloom, Peter, Miescher, Stephan, and Manuh, Takyiwaa, eds., Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (Bloomington, 2014)Google Scholar; Miescher, Stephan, “Building the City of the Future: Visions and Experiences of Modernity in Ghana's Akosombo Township,” Journal of African History 53 (2012): 367–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunter, Emma, “A History of Maendeleo: The Concept of ‘Development’ in Tanganyika's Late Colonial Public Sphere,” in Developing Africa: Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-Century Colonialism, ed. Hodge, Joseph et al. (New York, 2014), 87–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schneider, Leander, Government of Development: Peasants and Politicians in Postcolonial Tanzania (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Laron, Guy, Origins of the Suez Crisis: Postwar Development Diplomacy and the Struggle over Third World Industrialization, 1945–1956 (Baltimore, MD, 2013)Google Scholar.

34. Bayart, Jean-Francois, “Africa in the world: a strategy of extraversion,” African Affairs 99 (2000): 217–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Bierschenk, Thomas, Chauveau, Jean-Pierre, and de Sardan, Jean-Pierre Olivier, eds., Courtiers en Développement : Les Villages Africains en Quête de Projets (Paris, 2000)Google Scholar; Lewis, David and Mosse, David, eds., Development Brokers and Translators (London, 2006)Google Scholar; van Beusekom, Negotiating Development.

36. Frederick Cooper, for example, argued that in spite of its shortcomings development “provided a basis on which the people of impoverished, ex-colonial countries could make claims’. Decolonization,” 470.

37. For a similar approach in relation to non-state humanitarianism, see O'Sullivan, Kevin, Hilton, Matthew, and Fiori, Giuliano, “Humanitarianisms in Context,” European Review of History 23 (2016): 1–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Moon, Suzanne, Technology and Ethical Idealism: A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies (Leiden, 2007)Google Scholar.

39. Hopkins, Antony, “The ‘New International Economic Order’ in the Nineteenth Century: Britain's First Development Plan for Africa,” in From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce: the Commercial Transition in Nineteenth Century West Africa, Robin Law, ed. (Cambridge, 1995), 240–64Google Scholar.

40. Hodge, Joseph, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, OH, 2007)Google Scholar.

41. Law, Robin, Schwarz, Suzanne, and Strickrodt, Silke, eds., Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade, and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2013)Google Scholar.

42. Cooper, Frederick, “Modernizing bureaucrats, backward Africans, and the development concept,” in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds. (Berkeley, 1997), 64–92 Google Scholar, here 70.

43. Sluga, Glenda and Clavin, Patricia, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth Century History (Cambridge, 2017)Google Scholar; see also Burke, Roland, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grant, Kevin, Levine, Philippa, and Trentmann, Frank, eds., Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950, (London, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Abou Bamba talks of “triangulation” to highlight the interactions between the US, France, and the Ivory coast in the realization of the Kossou Project, Bamba, Abou, “Triangulating a Modernization Experiment: The United States, France and the Making of the Kossou Project in Central Ivory Coast,” Journal of Modern European History 8 (2010): 66–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. See Price, Bayard, The Marshall Plan and Its Meaning (Ithaca, NY, 1955), 367–93Google Scholar; Wood, Robert, From Marshall Plan to Debt Crisis: Foreign Aid and Development Choices in the World Economy (Berkeley, 1986)Google Scholar; Raffer, Kunibert and Singer, Hans, The Foreign Aid Business. Economic Assistance and Development Cooperation (Cheltenham, 1996)Google Scholar; Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar. David Ekbladh suggests that the United States’ involvement in foreign aid started in the 1930s crisis and before the Point Four Program, Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, NJ, 2010)Google Scholar.

45. It may be argued that colonial states were not in any way accountable to the societies they ruled, not at least in the modern sense of democratic accountability. But as suzerain governments they were responsible for the financial stability of the territories they ruled and for the management of public works. After World War Two they were increasingly expected to be accountable to the African populations they governed. A lot has been written about citizenship and the accountability of colonial and independent African states to their voters. Here, I only intend to signal that in principle post-independence European donor countries are accountable to European taxpayers, but not in any clear political way to the “beneficiaries” of their “aid.”

46. On accountability (or lack thereof) in the aid sector see Easterly, William in The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and so Little Good (Oxford, 2006), 13–15 Google Scholar.

47. Neubert, Dieter, “Le rôle des courtiers locaux dans le système du développement,” in Courtiers en développement, ed. Bierschenk, , Chauveau, , and de Sardan, Olivier (Paris, 2000), 243–59Google Scholar; Rossi, Benedetta, From Slavery to Aid: Politics, Labour and Ecology in the Nigerien Sahel, 1800–2000 (Cambridge, 2015), 310–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Apthorpe, Raymond and Gasper, Des, eds., Arguing Development Policy: Frames and Discourses (London, 1996)Google Scholar.

48. Porter et al., Development in Practice: Paved with Good Intentions.

49. Edelman, Murray, “The Political Language of the Helping Professions,” Politics Society 4 (1974): 295–310 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. See in particular Barchiesi, Franco, Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa (Scottsville, 2011): 10Google Scholar.

51. Not necessarily their individual advantage, but their class interests, inasmuch as specific labor and political arrangements reproduced the privileges of some and exploitation of others. For a discussion of the connection between power, politics, and the law, see Tomlins, Christopher, “Subordination, Authority, Law: Subjects in Labor History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 47 (1995): 56–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bourdieu, Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power (London, 1992)Google Scholar.

52. See for example Jones, Sam, Page, John, Shimeles, Abebe, and Tarp, Finn, “Aid Growth and Employment in Africa,” African Development Review 27 (2015): 1–4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar which introduces a special issue on this theme.

53. Page, , John, , and Shimeles, , Abebe, , “Aid, Employment, and Poverty Reduction in Africa,” African Development Review 27 (2015): 17–30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The OECD's eleventh issue of its yearly African Economic Outlook was focused, too, on promoting youth employment: OECD, African Economic Outlook 2012: Promoting Youth Employment, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/aeo-2012-en (link checked and working on July 15, 2017).

54. See Weiss, Thomas, Humanitarian Business (London, 2013)Google Scholar.