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Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South reprint Edition
Author(s): Angela Elisabeth Zimmerman (Author)
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication Date: 7 May 2012
- Edition: reprint
- Language: English
- Print length: 416 pages
- ISBN-10: 0691155860
- ISBN-13: 9780691155869
Book Description
In 1901, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, sent an expedition to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, with the purpose of transforming the region into a cotton economy similar to that of the post-Reconstruction American South. Alabama in Africa explores the politics of labor, sexuality, and race behind this endeavor, and the economic, political, and intellectual links connecting Germany, Africa, and the southern United States. The cross-fertilization of histories and practices led to the emergence of a global South, reproduced social inequities on both sides of the Atlantic, and pushed the American South and the German Empire to the forefront of modern colonialism.
Zimmerman shows how the people of Togo, rather than serving as a blank slate for American and German ideologies, helped shape their region's place in the global South. He looks at the forms of resistance pioneered by African American freedpeople, Polish migrant laborers, African cotton cultivators, and other groups exploited by, but never passive victims of, the growing colonial political economy. Zimmerman reconstructs the social science of the global South formulated by such thinkers as Max Weber and W.E.B. Du Bois, and reveals how their theories continue to define contemporary race, class, and culture.
Tracking the intertwined histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas at the turn of the century, Alabama in Africa shows how the politics and economics of the segregated American South significantly reshaped other areas of the world.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"
Alabama in Africa is a remarkably rich work of transnational scholarship, one that will make lasting contributions to German, African, African American, and southern history. Thanks to this groundbreaking book, historians will see the profound and widespread impact of the New South's 'freedoms' in entirely new ways."---Mark R. Finlay, Journal of Southern History"
Alabama in Africa is a truly remarkable achievement, one of the most powerful and illuminating works to emerge so far in the effort to recast historical thinking beyond national scales. . . . Elegantly wrought, subtly argued and carefully researched, it is a model of global history writing that provides one of the most convincing histories available of the forging of racialized power in the modern world."---Paul A. Kramer, H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews"
Alabama in Africa is an uncommonly ambitious and broadly conceived work. It is a compelling fusion of micro and transnational history. . . . With enviable erudition in disparate historiographies and exceptional clarity of exposition, Zimmerman reveals connections, traces influences, and assigns consequences amidst the swirling events on three continents during a period of furious transformation. His accomplishments as a prose craftsmen and researcher are impressive, and, I hope, will inspire subsequent scholars to attempt similar works."---W. Fitzhugh Brundage, H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews"
Alabama in Africa, with its focus on the particular moment of the synthesis of 'three of the most powerful forces in the Atlantic world--German social science, African cash cropping, and the racial political economy of the New South' is a paradigmatic case study in the transnational dimensions of U.S. American, German, and African histories. The book fully succeeds in exposing, in the words of the author's own conclusion, the implications and power of 'transnational networks of capital, social science, racial ideologies, and empire.'"---Udo J. Hebel, American Studies Journal"[A]n impressively conceptualized and rigorously researched work that has the potential to be a paradigm shifter for historians of race, work, power, and ideas."
---Alison Clark Efford, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era"Andrew Zimmerman has recovered an important but overlooked aspect of colonial history, and he tells his story with much verve. He succeeds most admirably in his broader aim of illuminating larger historical processes with seemingly minor events and bridging historiographical traditions."
---Erik Grimmer-Solem, Enterprise and Society"Andrew Zimmerman's
Alabama in Africa is an ambitious and outstanding book. The author has thought deeply about a large subject, explains his ideas forcefully, and bases his thesis in staggering research. His efforts have resulted in a valuable contribution to the history of three continents linked, as the author has shown, more closely than many historians have realized. . . . Scholars interested in the symbiotic relationship between the southern United States, Germany, and West Africa during the Progressive era will find Zimmerman's study of great worth, one that answers as well as provokes new questions concerning the international impact of the American South."---James S. Humphreys, Canadian Journal of History"As someone who coincidentally taught a course on African-American history for the first time during the fall of 2012 while reading
Alabama in Africa, I found Zimmerman's reassessment of the contributions to U.S. relations with Africa at the turn of the twentieth century by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois to be helpful and enlightening."---Andy DeRoche, H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews"More than an exemplary study of colonial globalization,
Alabama in Africa holds out the proposition to understand blacks neither as its objects, nor as its opponents, but also its agents."---Elisabeth Engel, Books&ideas.net"The chapters begin with useful introductory paragraphs and end with concise concluding thoughts that allow the reader to pause and reflect on the rich evidence and sophisticated analysis that Zimmerman offers.
Alabama in Africa is also thoroughly and beautifully illustrated with useful maps and wonderfully detailed photographs. These are particularly helpful in a work of this kind that moves from continent to continent and in which many readers might encounter somewhat unfamiliar regions and story lines. Recommended for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates, Alabama in Africa is a sterling example of transnational history at its finest."---Robert T. Vinson, Labor"This book . . . is incontestably a major contribution. It demonstrates decisively the value of the vanguard trend that is the internationalizing of the African-American experience."
---Gerald Horne, Journal of American History"This is in many ways a brilliant book. It is pathbreaking in its tracing of the intellectual roots, economics, and politics of transnational links that transformed the global South. Particularly significant is the fact that Zimmerman reveals how Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Tuskegee scientists and colonists played active roles in this tricontinental undertaking."
---Douglas Henry Daniels, Journal of World History"Zimmerman analyzes an exhaustive amount of archival, published primary, and secondary sources to shape his narrative. This excellent transnational history will be of interest to scholars of the Atlantic World, the United States, Germany, and Africa."
---Jeannette Eileen Jones, American Historical Review"Zimmerman has made a valuable contribution to the fields of transnational and imperial history. Drawing together multiple and disparate narrative strands, he deftly weaves a compelling story about the importance of the migration of ideas about race, labor, and education. Of equal importance, Zimmerman provides a useful roadmap for historians seeking to broaden the horizons of the past."
---Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, H-Net Reviews"Zimmerman vividly and powerfully tells this whole triangulated story, a superb example of the new transnational history."-- "Choice"
"Zimmerman's important new book brings a fresh perspective to the historiography of cotton and colonialism, upending much of it in innovative and compelling ways. He writes with the perspective of a European intellectual and political historian, but is firmly grounded in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. history."
---Benjamin Lawrance, H-Net Review-West-Africa"Zimmerman's meticulously researched book displays the best this scholarship has to offer. . . . Andrew Zimmerman has achieved a remarkable feat that advocates of transnational and comparative history might only dream of. The deep archival research leaves no stone unturned and the argument is exceedingly persuasive. The multi-layered complexity and nearly impenetrable nature of the narrative may simply reflect the price one pays for a successful transnational history."
---Natalie J. Ring, H-Diplo Roundtable ReviewsFrom the Back Cover
"This conceptually sophisticated, empirically rich, and genuinely transnational book mines sources on three different continents and exposes a dense network of connections and comparisons. It makes original contributions to German, American, and African history, as well as to the history of the social sciences."--James T. Campbell, author of Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa
"Zimmerman's compelling and beautifully executed book is an innovative tracking of the interrelations among free labor, race, and social science, linking Germany, Africa, and the United States. This is a groundbreaking book, one that will have a major impact."--Geoff Eley, University of Michigan
"Zimmerman has written a superb book about the transfer of knowledge from North America to Germany to West Africa. He has written an Atlantic history that connects East Prussia, Togo, and the American South. Zimmerman writes insightfully about economics, social relations, and the origins of sociology. This is a model of the new global history."--Eric D. Weitz, University of Minnesota
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Alabama in Africa
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, THE GERMAN EMPIRE, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE NEW SOUTHBy Andrew Zimmerman
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15586-9
Contents
List of Illustrations...................................................................................................................................viiPreface.................................................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................................1CHAPTER 1 Cotton, the "Negro Question," and Industrial Education in the New South......................................................................20CHAPTER 2 Sozialpolitik and the New South in Germany...................................................................................................66CHAPTER 3 Alabama in Africa: Tuskegee and the Colonial Decivilizing Mission in Togo....................................................................112CHAPTER 4 From a German Alabama in Africa to a Segregationist International: The League of Nations and the Global South................................173CHAPTER 5 From Industrial Education for the New South to a Sociology of the Global South...............................................................205CONCLUSION Prussian Paths of Capitalist Development: The Tuskegee Expedition to Togo between Transnational and Comparative History.....................237Notes...................................................................................................................................................251Bibliography............................................................................................................................................347Index...................................................................................................................................................391
Chapter One
COTTON, THE "NEGRO QUESTION," AND INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN THE NEW SOUTH
The New South that Tuskegee Institute would help reproduce in West Africa was a temporary outcome of a long-standing conflict between workers and employers over the meaning of the freedom of labor. Workers, black and white, enslaved and emancipated, sought a kind of economic freedom given one of its now-classic formulations by Garrison Frazier, an African American Baptist minister interviewed in Savannah, Georgia, by General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in January 1865. "Slavery," explained Frazier, "is receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the [1863 Emancipation] proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage and placing us where we can reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom." Frazier not only contrasted economic freedom with slavery but also implied that economic freedom stood in tension with wage labor, in which employers also took the "work of another," compensating employees for their labor time only. Workers around the Atlantic, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, demanded, like Frazier, economic autonomy as a foundation of political and personal self-reliance, seeking to attain a freedom suggested by, but also antithetical to, emerging capitalist relations of production. Employers sought to direct the autonomous and self-emancipatory activity of workers into myriad channels, including the routines of factory, plantation, and tenant farm. The resulting economic forms were hybrids of emancipation and exploitation, rarely satisfactory to workers or to employers. The New South, both in the United States and as European authorities reproduced it across the Atlantic, represented one such hybrid.
The American South interested European and American elites, and finally made the region a model for European colonial rule, because of the interdependent social constructions of industrial-grade cotton and submissive, hardworking, and poorly paid "Negroes." Both of these constructions were vigorously resisted by the entities that they were meant to describe. The particular quality of American cotton came from constant control of varietals and, more importantly, strict supervision of African American cotton growers. As one British cotton expert warned: "Where the negro is his own master, custom, not the condition of the crop, dictates when he shall begin the harvest. Should the crop mature early, while the full heat of August is still felt, nothing will persuade the negro to face the arduous task of a day's work in the fields, with the result that his fields may be seen white with cotton for a week or a fortnight before work is started." American cotton emerged from the racist division of labor in the South as much as it did from processes of natural selection and artificial breeding. Growing American cotton in Africa or anywhere else outside the United States would involve significantly more than transplanting American cotton seeds. It would involve reproducing an approximation of the entire biological-social complex of American cotton growing, as it had developed in slavery and in freedom.
The permanent coercion needed to maintain American cotton also maintained the status of millions of southerners as "Negroes." African Americans themselves contradicted the image of the "Negro" presupposed by ideologies of slavery and of the New South through their self-conscious political action, their everyday forms of resistance, and the simple fact of their complex humanity. An alleged affinity for cotton growing has long been central to racist images of African Americans, suggesting that blacks need and even enjoy the hard work, low pay, and coercive treatment of the southern cotton plantation. Even after the turn of the century, when the number of white cotton growers approached, and finally exceeded, the number of black cotton growers, many experts continued to assert that cotton could only be grown profitably with black labor. Industrial-quality cotton and the "Negro" of New South ideology were indeed codependent images whose failures to correspond to reality—natural, social, economic, and political—authorized coercive interventions that gave these images, in the end, a superficial plausibility. The Negro-cotton pair, interdependent in ways inconceivable to most white elites, founded a New South that would prove as attractive to the colonial rulers of Africa as it did to their counterparts in the northern and southern United States.
The connection between blacks and cotton hardly merited discussion before emancipation, for slavery had ensured that blacks alone worked America's cotton fields. With the end of slavery, the meaning of black freedom for political and economic elites in America and around the world came to be formulated around a so-called Negro question, which concerned the nature and the proper treatment of African Americans. The "Negro question" was largely reactive, seeking to reinterpret and thus deflect African American self-emancipation onto paths that maintained white political and economic domination. Thus, the peculiar forms of sharecropping that emerged in the southern United States travestied prior African American demands for independent family farming. Sharecropping remained the main force responsible for continuing the coercion of African...
