Decolonization and African Society
The Labor Question in French and British Africa

Large-scale comparative study of African labor and colonial policy.

Frederick Cooper (Author)

9780521566001, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 August 1996

700 pages
23 x 15.2 x 4 cm, 1.104 kg

"Frederick Cooper's work has consistently deserved the favorable and excited attention it has received. This book, like the rest of his corpus, is extensively researched and extremely original. The field of African historical studies is once again in debt to this fine scholar." Richard Rathbone, Int'l Jrnl of Afri Hist Soc

This detailed and authoritative volume changes our conceptions of 'imperial' and 'African' history. Frederick Cooper gathers a vast range of archival sources in French and English to achieve a truly comparative study of colonial policy toward the recruitment, control, and institutionalization of African labor forces from the mid 1930s, when the labor question was first posed, to the late 1950s, when decolonization was well under way. Professor Cooper explores colonial conceptions of the African worker and shows how African trade union and political leaders used the new language of social change to claim equality and a share of power. This helped to persuade European officials that the 'modern' Africa they imagined was unaffordable. Britain and France could not reshape African society. As they left the continent, the question was how they had affected the ways in which Africans could reorganize society themselves.

1. Introduction
Part I. The Dangers of Expansion and the Dilemmas of Reform: 2. The labor question unposed
3. Reforming imperialism, 1935–40
4. Forced labor, strike movements, and the idea of development, 1940–45
Part II. Imperial Fantasies and Colonial Crises: 5. Imperial plans
6. Crises
Part III. The Imagining of a Working Class: 7. The systematic approach: the French code du Travail
8. Family wages and industrial relations in British Africa
9. Internationalists, intellectuals, and the labor question
Part IV. Devolving Power and Abdicating Responsibility: 10. The burden of declining empire
11. Delinking colony and metropole: French Africa in the 1950s
Conclusion: 12. The wages of modernity and the price of sovereignty.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], African history [HBJH]