Abstract
The lines between formal and informal empire in nineteenth-century Africa were abstract, even wistful. While maps were often inaccurate and overlapping zones of influence impossible to trace, trade nonetheless radiated from the coasts deep into the interior and played a decisive role in the transformation and modernization of Africa. When Europeans first began to trade on the coastal cities, and as penetration moved steadily inland up the shallow rivers and over the trails of high plateaus and rainforests of the interior, African elites traded with outsiders and new economic structures arose. The quest for guns and other Western commodities by African elites stimulated slave-trading, while European farming methods and the introduction of new crops like corn and wheat and of new livestock-grazing practices, notably for cattle and sheep, changed eating habits and the very landscape of the continent. Missionaries like David Livingstone (1813–73) and the many thousands who followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries propagated Christianity, further promoting economic change. As Africans began to eat European food so they also exported these foods through port cities, particularly south to the Cape Colony — a growing economic powerhouse. Hunting for export spurred a change in traditional society. Africans sold elephant tusks that Europeans made into billiard balls and ivory piano keys.
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Notes
Morel (1902). Mahmood Mamdani, in Citizens and Subjects (1996), blames indirect rule as practiced by the British for the suppression of human rights found in contemporary black Africa. This assumes Africans as passive and a blank slate, with Europeans creating racial and power categories ex nehilo. Oddly it also contradicts his own experience as a refugee fleeing the violence of Idi Amin and seeking protection in Britain. This protection came with a wide array of financial support, and then the concomitant employment preferences in both Britain and the United States. His arguments bring to mind the neocolonial and postcolonial scholars who trace the genealogy of contemporary African failure to an ever more distant, white-ruled past. The only identifiably constant in his historical and political rationalizations appear to be racism against his European benefactors.
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© 2014 Gregory A. Barton
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Barton, G.A. (2014). Informal Empire and Africa. In: Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315922_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315922_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31271-9
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