Cash Crops and Freedom
Export Agriculture and the Decline of Slavery in Colonial West Africa
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5816628 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gareth Austin (London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-37 |
| Publication date | 2009-03-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Review of Social History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-8590 • E-ISSN: 1469-512X |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0020859009000017 |
| OpenAlex | W2137244684 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 37 |
| References cited | 14 |
This article argues that the greatest economic and social transformations of the early colonial period in West Africa, the "cash-crop revolution", and "the slow death of slavery" and debt bondage, had stronger and more varied causal connections than previously realized. The economic circumstances of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century West Africa delayed and diluted abolitionist measures. Indeed, the coercion of labour, through the exercise of property rights in people, contributed to the speed with which the cash-crop economies developed. Conversely, however, the scale and composition of cash-crop expansion did much to determine that the slave trade and pawning would be replaced by a consensual labour market. They also shaped the possibilities for peasant versus larger-scale organization of production, and the distribution of income by gender and between communities
Agriculture · Cash · Cash crop · Coercion (linguistics · Colonialism · Debt · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · Peasant · Political science · Scale (ratio · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Law
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Contestations over Agricultural Production in Colonial Africa
Water and Development
French Colonialism and The Making of the Modern Sahel
The Colonial Era
Slavery in Africa, 1804–1936
Drivers of Divergence
Explaining and Evaluating the Cash Crop Revolution in the “Peasant” Colonies of Tropical Africa, ca. 1890–ca.1930
“How Can I Liberate the Slaves?” the Neglected Tradition of Developmental Abolitionism
Counter-mapping racial capitalism in the Niger Delta
Cash-Crop Migration Systems in East and West Africa
Forced Labor and Migration in British East and West Africa
Migration in the Contexts of Slaving and States in 19th-Century West Africa
Factor endowments, vent for surplus and involutionary process in rural developing economies
The development of the arid tropics
Touts and Despots
Family and labour in an Angolan cash-crop economy, 1910
From Unfree Work to Working for Free
Slavery and Labour Contracts
Mediating Labour
Living standards in Angola, 1760–1975
Commodification and Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Indonesian Archipelago
Twilight of an Industry in East Africa
The Role of Slave Labor in Groundnut Production in Early Colonial Kano
Vent for surplus or productivity breakthrough? The G hanaian cocoa take‐off, c. 1890–1936
Colonial development policies as tools of ecological imperialism in Southeast Asia
Colonialism and Economic Development in Africa
No Global Labor History without Africa
Land abundance and economic institutions
A WestAfrican experiment
Income inequality and export-oriented commercialization in colonial Africa
French Ecological Imperialism
Canarios en el Ecuador
Even if we Meet in Heaven We Will Fight
Dependence, Unfreedom and Slavery in Africa
A 'Despicable Shambles
Unanticipated consequences of 'humanitarian intervention
The Resurgence of Pawning in French West Africa during the Depression of the 1930s
Abolitionist expectations
Structural Changes in the Economy of Ghana 1891–1911
The "Classical Theory" of International Trade and the Underdeveloped Countries
Rubber Fever’, Commerce and French Colonial Rule in Upper Guinée, 1890–1913
Slave Emancipation, Trans-Local Social Processes and the Spread of Islam in French Colonial Buguni (Southern Mali), 1893–1914
French Colonial Rule and the Baule Peoples--Resistance and Collaboration 1889-1911
The Lagos Strike of 1897
Nineteenth-Century Patterns of Slavery and Economic Growth in Southeastern Nigeria
The Economic and Social Significance of Rubber Production and Exchange on the Gold and Ivory Coasts, 1880-1900
Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa
Accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante history
The Migrant Cocoa Farmers of Southern Ghana
| Unique citing works | 37 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,31 |
| Citation span | 2010 - 2026 (17) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 36 |