Note: The following article is a review of a book. In this review I apply the concept of the conjuncture of fortuitously propitious historical factors.

Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa. Edited by Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; London: James Currey, 1995. Pp. xi + 314, $60.00, $26.95.
 
 

Every once in a while, a book is published on an apparently arcane topic, which appears to be of interest to a narrow few, and is seemingly of limited importance; however, once one has overcome the natural proclivity to judge a book by its title (or cover?), one quickly discovers how deeply wrong were one's initial assumptions on all three counts. One such book, undoubtedly, is Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa. But first, some preliminary remarks are in order about the broader context within which this book may be situated.

Those who study history, especially comparative history, are burdened by the constant and sobering reminder that no matter how intelligently purposeful human beings may consider themselves, at the end of the day--that is, in the final analysis or in the last instance--social transformations are as much a product of chance and circumstance as directed human endeavors (in the shape of 'social movements'--broadly understood), as has been graphically shown in that popular science television series hosted by James Burke. To put the matter differently: any teleological order that may appear to exist in the history of social transformations is in reality a figment of the historian's imagination. History is, ultimately, a selective chronicle of a series of conjunctures of fortuitously 'propitious' factors where the role of human agency, while not entirely absent (hence the qualifier: ultimately), is, more often than not, far from pivotal to the social transformation in question. Stephen K. Sanderson, in his book Social Transformations: A General Theory of Historical Development (Blackwell, 1995), makes this point with even greater clarity:
 

"...individuals acting in their own interests create social structures and systems that are the sum total and product of these socially oriented individual actions. These social structures and systems are frequently constituted in ways that individuals never intended, and thus individually purposive human action leads to many unintended consequences. Social evolution is driven by purposive or intended human actions, but it is to a large extent not itself a purposive or intended phenomenon." (p. 13)
 

For many colonized peasants of Africa and India, the working classes of Europe and the enslaved Africans in the Southern United States, the veracity of this fact was embodied at a particular point in time in that ubiquitous, yet wondrous plant fibre called cotton. None of these groups could have ever envisioned, much less planned, the centrality of cotton in their lives. The transition of cotton from a raw material for a cottage level industry to a raw material for that engine of the Industrial Revolution, the textile industry, while itself the embodiment of the conjuncture of fortuitously propitious factors--as represented, for example, by the inventive lives of Messrs. John Kay, James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, Edmund Cartwright and others--became for them this dominant, yet unplanned and unforseen, force that governed their lives (and in this instance often brutally).

Consider, for example, the specific case of the various African peasantry that the book under review is about: within the context of the ever expanding global industrial capitalism there emerges the issue of slavery in the U.S. and its precipitation of the Civil War, followed shortly by a natural disaster in the form of the boll weevil. These events, consequently, lead to a worldwide raw material supply crisis: the 'Cotton Famine.' This crisis, in turn, spawns vigorous cotton production policies by various European colonial regimes in Africa. As a result, the African peasantry and ecology become the unwilling victims of these policies and the resulting transformations from which there is no escape--only subservience and compromise (but to varying degrees of intensity). The final outcome of all this is irreversible social transformation for the African peasantry.

At a broader level then, Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa is a study of how transformations (the rise of industrial capitalism, and thence the international capitalist system) in a far off place (Western Europe), at a far off time (beginning in the 18th century) and among a far off people (Western Europeans), resulted later in the transformation of the lives of one of these three groups; specifically, the various colonized African peasantry, scattered almost throughout the African continent. It was a transformation that the Africans, like the others, neither foresaw, nor planned, nor wanted--but one that the forces of history would not permit them to escape. This broader level, however, is one with which this book is least concerned; however, its significance is acknowledged: as the editors, summarizing one of the principal perspectives adopted by the book as a whole, put it: "...Africans [made] their own history, but not necessarily under conditions of their own choosing" (p. 2 [emphasis added]).

Instead, the book's primary concern, and in fact a very welcome one at that, is to help in filling a different, but no less important, lacuna in the literature on the absorption of the world into the international capitalist system; it is one represented by the question: precisely how did the lives of those living outside Europe become transformed because of this absorption--viewed from their perspective? In answer to this question the book examines the case of the various African peasantry in the context of cotton production (or 'cotton colonialism'); and the book finds that while the Africans were unable to escape from the tyranny of cotton production imposed on them by the international capitalist system via the agency of colonialism, they were able to blunt it (but with varying degrees of success).

Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa is part of a series (published by Heinemann and edited by Allen Isaacman and Jean Hay) titled Social History of Africa. Its contents are divided into three parts: 'Part I: Cotton Policies and African Realities;' 'Part II: Struggles Over Labor / Struggles over Markets;' and 'Part III: Cotton, Food Security, and Reproduction of Rural Communities.' Preceding Part I is an extensive introduction by the editors that maps out the principal elements of the terrain covered by the book; provides an introductory background by describing the genesis of the specific relationship between the textile industry in Europe and cotton production in the African colonies; and summarizes the principal conclusions of the contributors when taken together--the gist of which is captured by the following statement: "...the social history of cotton and colonialism provides a lens through which to compare the variety of African responses to coercion and incentives, the methods by which Africans carved out spaces for their own lives, and the ways in which Africans actually helped to shape both colonial cotton policies and their outcomes." (p. 30)

Part I has contributions by: Phillip W. Porter--describes the relative climatic constraints on cotton production in Africa that the colonial authorities were usually unaware of; Jan S. Hogendorn--examines the failure of the cotton campaign in Northern Nigeria during the period 1902-1914 as an early example of the folly, which many to this day refuse to heed, of bucking market forces in agriculture, no matter the depth and scope of external intervention (governmental or non-governmental) by way of planning, supports, incentives and/or coercion; Donna J. E. Maier--exposes the failure of the German colonial effort to thwart the pre-colonial patterns of cotton production in German Togoland (1800-1914); Victoria Bernal--explores the social history of the colonial cotton production schemes in Sudan (such as the Gezira Scheme) with a view, in part, toward analyzing the inherent conflict between the meanings and cultural values of the peasant moral economy, and what she refers to as its equivalent: the 'colonial moral economy'; and M. Anne Pitcher--investigates the factors behind the transition, during the reign of the Portuguese colonial cotton regime in Angola and Mozambique (1946-1974), from policies based on brutally severe coercion to ones based on incentives.

The four chapters in Part II are by: Allen Isaacman and Arlindo Chilundo--explores the various facets of peasant labor, termed the 'labor process,' as it was forced to interact with the demands of the larger social order (comprising, among others, the colonial state, foreign capital and international markets), in Northern Mozambique; Thaddeus Sunseri--analyzes the struggle for control over peasant labor among three principal players (the peasants themselves, the colonial state, and the German settlers), each with conflicting agendas, in the cotton regimes of the Rufiji Basin, Tanzania (1890-1918); Osumaka Likaka--describes the various colonial mechanisms of social control ("structural reforms, handouts, propaganda and entertainment") that was used in a tandem with brute force to attempt to obtain peasant compliance with cotton production in the Belgian Congo; and Richard Roberts--examines the seemingly paradoxical consequence, in the colony of the French Soudan, of the victory of a pro-peasant, market incentive-based cotton production policy over a naked coercion-based policy, where the French, much to their chagrin, lost out to the robust, parallel, domestic cotton market of pre-colonial origins (thanks to the economic rationality of the peasants).

The contributors to Part III are: Thomas J. Bassett--exposes the relative failure of the French in Cote d'Ivoire to increase cotton exports in the face of competition from the parallel, pre-colonially rooted, domestic cotton market on one hand (when peasants did undertake to produce cotton), and on the other, the domestic food crop market (when peasants refused to allocate land and labor to cotton production), in the context of an economic policy by the colonial state that gave an almost free reign to the economic rationality of the peasants; Jamie Monson--analyzes the significance of rice production in the moral economy of the peasants, in post-German colonial Tanganyika in the 1930s, with a view toward explaining their reluctance to engage in cotton production as going beyond what a simple binary resistance / compliance model would suggest; and Elias Mandala--examines the conflict between food production and cotton production in Nyasaland as representing conflict, initiated by British colonial cotton production policies, between capital and labor.

Cotton, Colonialism... is history at its best: it represents an approach to historical scholarship that leaves one in considerable awe: solid empirical research from a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives that are perceptively brought together to provide an almost encyclopedic bird's eye view of the topic at hand. Consider the choice of the specific questions around which the book is constructed; there are five: (1) How did the world capitalist system interact with the dynamic, local level, socio-political and economic processes in Africa? (2) In what ways did the onerous demands of cotton production affect the organization of rural work? (3) How did the intrusion of capitalist relations of production accelerate social structural differentiation in the countryside? (4) What impact did the demands of cotton production have on the food supply of the peasant household? And (5), in what ways did the African peasants respond to the demands of 'cotton colonialism' oppressively thrust upon them? Given these issues, readers will find the book, not surprisingly, a gold mine of evidentiary information in support of a number of important points concerning the incorporation of Africa into the international capitalist system (and the resulting social transformations); of which the following come immediately to mind:

One: Colonialism was ultimately a capitalist economic enterprise on a grand scale, but it operated in contradiction to free-market forces. However, while the Africans were without any doubt victims of economically driven, but often brutally coercive, agrarian (in this instance) policies of the colonial regimes--most especially in the Portuguese and Belgian colonies, they were--and this must be stressed--not entirely powerless victims. They were frequently able to creatively and intelligently deflect the intensity of the repression, even while making a nominal effort at complying with the agrarian agenda of the colonial state and its allies.

Two: African peasants were not dumb nor lazy as was the racist picture often painted by colonial officials and their allies; wherever they were given (or were able to 'creatively' wrest) freedom of economic opportunity, they displayed economic behavior that was in complete logical consonance with their specific economic circumstances. Yet, paradoxically, this very rational behavior, however, usually ran into opposition from the colonial regimes because it interfered with their own agricultural agendas (in this case cotton production). In other words, African peasants were not only knowledgeable about market forces, but knew how to respond to them within the specific context of their agronomic and ecological circumstances.

Three: No matter how much praise may have been heaped by economists in the metropole on the illusory laissez faire policy of capitalist development (variations of which are still championed to this day by conservative economists), the reality was that the state was almost always there, ready and willing, to protect the collective interests of the capitalist class at the expense of the working and peasant classes. This fact was never so clear as in the colonies where, both, the metropolitan working class (through their taxes--used to build the colonial infrastructures) and the colonized peasantry (in this case through their coerced production of commodities at below-world-market prices) directly and indirectly subsidized the metropolitan capitalist class. In other words, the myth of the capitalist 'democratic' state as an independent neutral arbiter among competing interests, lacking class biases, has always been there to see, if one is willing to cast aside preconceived ideological blinders.

Four: Any macro level development planning that is viewed merely in technocratic terms where the all-knowing experts dictate the plan in a top-down fashion is in all probability doomed to failure. Development planning, to succeed, must of necessity be democratic; not only for reasons of ethics (human rights), but also to ensure that potential constraints that would emerge at the field level (because of specific elements of human culture and natural ecology) are taken into full consideration. In the story of 'cotton colonialism,' needless to say, there are lessons to be learned by present-day governments and international development agencies such as the World Bank.

Isaacman and Roberts (with their contributors, of course) must be congratulated on the publication of this book; and it would not be out of place to add that it is yet another in a long line of excellent books they have produced. This seminal work will be useful to not only those concerned with African social history, but also those with an interest in agrarian social change and, at a more general level, to those interested in economic development and in major social transformations wrought by the rise of the international capitalist system.

The purpose of all history, ultimately, is to permit the living to comprehend the present (without which it is impossible to escape the tyranny of the past--a necessary prelude to enable the construction, or at the minimum the imagination, of an alternative and better future). Consequently, Cotton, Colonialism... is also a must reading for anyone who is involved today with helping to formulate agricultural policies in Africa--especially those at the World Bank and elsewhere who wish to continue the colonial tradition (though of course they do not view their policies in this light) of using Africa as primarily a supplier of cheap raw materials for the industries of the West.

This is a path-breaking book, and hopefully it will inspire others to produce studies of a similar depth, scope and perspective that look at other agricultural products that have played important roles in social transformations undertaken at the behest of the international capitalist system; such as tea, tobacco, sugar, coffee and peanuts. If there is any criticism that can be made of the book then it is only this one: a concluding chapter by the editors would have provided the icing on the cake.
 

Y. G-M. Lulat

State University of New York at Buffalo