Austin, Gareth (2009) Cash crops and freedom: export agriculture and the decline of slavery in colonial West Africa. International review of social history, 54 (01). pp. 1-37. ISSN 0020-8590
Abstract
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.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJourna... |
| Additional Information: | © 2009 CUP |
| Library of Congress subject classification: | H Social Sciences > HF Commerce J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration S Agriculture > S Agriculture (General) |
| Sets: | Departments > Economic History |
| Rights: | http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/rights/LSERO.htm |
| URL: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/30313/ |
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