Michael Crowder

Biographic Data

ID96875
NAMEMichael Crowder
GIVEN NAMESMichael
FAMILY NAMECrowder
SIGNATURECROWDER M
AFFILIATIONSCommonwealth Education Trust
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS76
TOTAL CITATIONS400
AUTHOR COUNT74
EDITOR COUNT2
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1960
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2023
H-INDEX8

  • The origins of European imperialism and the rise of militant Islam

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    Before the abolition of the slave trade by Denmark in 1802 and Britain in 1807, the various European settlements of the West African Coast had been almost exclusively concerned with obtaining slaves for the plantations of the New World. The French carried on trade in gum arable from their posts on the Senegal river; gold was exported from the European forts on the Gold Coast. The relationship between Europe and West Africa was to be radically alt…

  • British administration in West Africa

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    British methods of colonial rule in West Africa did not receive such trenchant criticisms as those of the French either from its own nationals or from those of other colonial powers. The educated elite was disinherited under the new British system of colonial rule in favour of the traditional chiefs, who were not encouraged to speak the language of the coloniser, nor imbibe Western culture. The emphasis on the traditional ruler rather than the ed…

  • Lebanese and monopolists

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    The collapse of the post-war boom in 1920 stripped the West African market of its weaker traders and revealed the true nature of its structure: the domination of trade by a half dozen or so European import-export houses. The Lebanese who gained control of the bulk of the retail trade from the Europeans and Africans, and likewise the purchase of the peasant’s export crops, first arrived in West Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. The Leba…

  • The administration of French West Africa

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    The most obvious characteristic of our colonial administration is the instability at every stage of both men and matters. Before examining the achievements and failures of the French administration in West Africa it may be appropriate to suggest the main causes to which the state of afiairs described by Cosnier can be attributed. The economic development of the country, apart from the intensive capital programme of the first decade, lacked foresi…

  • Prelude to de-colonisation

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    In British West Africa the war was the prelude to a radical restructuring of the economy. For the first time the large expatriate commercial houses were subject to control by the colonial governments. On the outbreak of the Second World War the French had at their disposal a large, well-trained source of troops in West Africa. For French West Africa, then, the establishment of the Vichy regime meant a policy of non-involvement in the conflict. Br…

  • Indirect rule in practice

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    Indirect rule in British West Africa took two forms: interventionist and non-interventionist. The key difference between Lugard’s system of indirect rule and the non-interventionist type was how the Resident interpreted his role as adviser. In Lugard’s conception it was an active role; his successors in Northern Nigeria tended increasingly to look on it as a passive one. Indirect rule in the Nigerian sense was not introduced to the Gold Coast and…

  • The economic impact of colonial rule

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    The economic impact of colonial rule on African society was much less profound than colonial administrators liked to think. The period 1919–39 was one of ‘immobilisme’ in which what little change there was did not stand comparison with what was taking place in the outside world. For the African peasant the growing of cash crops during the colonial period was, except in the cocoa- and coffee-producing areas, primarily geared to paying taxes and su…

  • The origins of protest

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    In British West Africa the colonial authorities were more liberal, and Africans did and could voice protest against their colonial governments. A very large proportion of the members of the Gold Coast section of the National Congress of British West Africa was connected with the traditional ruling élite. The 1900 Pan African Congress, as far as the composition of its delegates was concerned, reflected the essentially extra-African inspiration of …

  • Politics in British West Africa, 1920–39

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    Politics in British West Africa during the inter-war years was dominated by the same elite that sponsored the National Congress of British West Africa. The members of the educated elite who gained control of the elected seats in the three legislatures were, with rare exceptions, constant in their dedication to the principle of protest only through constitutional channels. The grievances of the elite were mainly concerned with the betterment of th…

  • Migration and the new towns

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    The establishment of colonial rule in West Africa produced what has been described as the colonial situation. The impact of European administration led to change in all spheres of African life, though it was limited in the number of people it affected. Colonial occupation grouped peoples into new political units, and facilitated their movement within them, especially towards the new urban centres which were the focus of colonial commerce and admi…

  • The Colonial European

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    The colonial situation involved not only the Africans but also the Europeans who came out to administer and exploit them. In the administrative centres where there were more than three or four Europeans, and especially where there were wives, colonial society created its own hierarchy, albeit the hierarchy of an aristocracy, its own customs and codes. For the British the educated African was a gaudy, despised imitator of European ways. In the col…

  • French West African politics, 1919–39

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    As a manifestation of political radicalism, the Senegal election of 1914 was the high water-mark in French West African politics for the next three decades. Protest movements, voluntary associations and the activities of the elite are our main source for the history of French West African politics in these years. Education in the Lycee at Dakar or in France was only possible for those living outside the Quatre Communes if they had independent mea…

  • Togo, the model colony

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    At the Versailles Peace Conference, and in the Press of Colonial Powers with greedy eyes on Germany’s overseas empire, a campaign of vilification of Germany’s record as a Colonial power was carried out with such effect that Germany stood condemned as morally unfit to govern ‘native’ peoples. Up to 1914 both France and Britain cast admiring eyes on Togo, which the Germans called their model colony. Britain had even been prepared to sign treaties w…

  • Islam and Christianity

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    The monotheistic world religions of Christianity and Islam made great advances in West Africa under colonial rule. Islam, as Froelich has put it, made greater and more profound progress in fifty years of colonial rule than in the thousand years preceding it. In that half century the Muslim population of West Africa doubled. Islam had the initial advantage over Christianity in that it had been much longer established in West Africa. Islam was not …

  • The British occupation of the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Gambia

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    By 1885 the largest area controlled by Britain on the West Coast of Africa was her colony of the Gold Coast. Throughout the nineteenth century British relations with Ashanti had intermittently deteriorated. British protection of the coastal peoples was a source of constant irritation to Ashanti. Apart from blocking their direct access to the coast, and preventing their export of slaves, it provided a refuge for those trying to escape Ashanti auth…

  • Background to the Scramble

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    A comparison of a map of European colonial possessions in West Africa in 1850 with one of 1880 shows very little change in their extent, with the notable exception of Senegal where Faidherbe’s expansionist policy had brought almost a third of the modern state under French control between 1854 and 1865. In 1850 Britain’s interests were limited to Bathurst on St. Mary’s island at the mouth of the river Gambia; Freetown and its peninsula; and the Go…

  • Government and economy in the inter-war years

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    In 1933, at the height of the depression in West Africa, Sir Arnold Hodson, Governor of Sierra Leone, who like his colleagues in other West African colonies had had to take extraordinary measures to protect his colony’s economy, told his Legislative Council. An attempt at long-term planning was however made for French West Africa in 1921 by Albert Sarraut, who saw in the colonies the source of supply of the raw materials that would furnish French…

  • West Africa and the 1914–18 War

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    Colonial rule brought Europe and Europeans to Africa; it did not bring Africa and Africans to Europe. West Africa, far from being integrated into the wider world, remained largely isolated from it. British West Africa felt the touch of that war but lightly in comparison with French West Africa, for whose people it proved a heavy human and economic burden, and an opportunity for revolt against colonial domination. The Second World War was to bring…

  • Western Education

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    Both France and Britain, whether through the agency of the missionaries or directly through their colonial administrations, came to see the introduction of Western education as essential to the prosecution of their exploitation of West Africa. Whilst both Britain and France saw as the basic objective of their educational policies the training of Africans for participation in the colonial economy and administration, they differed substantially in …

  • The French conquest of the Western Sudan

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    At the Berlin Conference the gun was fired for the start of a race for which two of the participants, France and Britain, had already been in training. The French had already shown themselves impatient of the treaty-making process and quick to resort to the armed column. France’s occupation of West Africa was much more of a military exercise than Britain’s. On the Upper Niger the military had virtual autonomy of action, so that it is not surprisi…

  • The British occupation of Nigeria

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    In 1885, the year of the Berlin General Act, Britain still was only in effective occupation of the small island colony of Lagos and a narrow strip of the adjacent mainland. In the Cameroons Britain had been forestalled by Germany, so that the eastward limit of her territorial claims on the Nigerian coast was Calabar where the Church of Scotland mission had been active since 1846. The hinterland of the Niger-Benue confluence, most of which was cov…

  • Colonial development and commercial exploitation

    Michael Crowder, Michael W CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    English government has brought peace and security and abolished slavery. The economic impact of the colonial governments in the period up to 1918 was felt most in the following fields: the development of a communications system; the introduction of a portable currency; and in a negative sense, the prevention of the alienation of the land from Africans to Europeans. The policy of both French and British colonial governments during the early years …

  • The completion of the French occupation of West Africa

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    The lands wrested by the French from Samory and Ahmadou together with the Senegalese conquests represented over half of what was to become French West Africa. The defeat of Ahmadou and Samory gave France a dominating position in the Western Sudan. France’s trading posts on the Guinea coast had been established from Senegal. Their natural hinterland consisted of parts of Samory’s empire and the Imamate of Futa Jallon which had remained independent…

  • Administration in theory and practice

    Michael CrowderCHAPTERWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023

    Little time was left to colonial conquistadors of West Africa to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the systems of administration they decided to impose on the peoples whose lands they had occupied. There was growing concern among the European colonial powers over the whole question of colonial responsibility. During the early years of colonial rule there was considerable debate as to what type of colonial rule was desirable for Tropica…

  • West Africa Under Colonial Rule

    Michael CrowderBOOKWest Africa Under Colonial Rule2023Cited by: 101

    Originally published in 1968, this book became the standard work on the colonial period in the vast and varied areas of the coast and hinterland of West Africa. It is a comprehensive survey of the domination of West Africa by the British and the French, which challenges the accepted view of the colonialists that their rule was generally beneficial. Penetrating descriptions of the colonial economic system are given, and the quality of colonial adm…