Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (review)

As the title suggests, Alabama in Africa seeks to reveal how the American South shaped the German colony of Togo through a now obscure expedition of Tuskegee Institute men to Togo in 1902 to develop industrial cotton cultivation. Andrew Zimmerman claims that this event is at the heart of other connections that established the New South as a model for the capitalist exploitation of free labor in both Africa and Germany, as well as in the development of a global sociology of race. He asserts that any one of these in isolation cannot be understood fully without reference to the other. Such transnational history, he claims, offers "new strata of actors, events, and processes" that have been overlooked by narrowly national historiographies. (249) The common thread tying the three continents together was the problem of controlling and exploiting formally free labor.

The book begins by recounting Germany's relationship with Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute as it came to pursue new development strategies in Togo that encouraged, by way of industrial-grade cotton cultivation, new forms of discipline and control of the subject population. This culminated in experimental cotton farms and agricultural schools established by Tuskegee personnel in German Togo between 1902 and 1908. Zimmerman contends that the significance of this relationship lies not only in the spread abroad of forms of domination and exploitation native to the American New South but also in the diffusion of the racist assumptions that undergirded it. The author then turns his attention to Germany, discussing the parallel dilemmas raised by emancipated peasants in Germany's eastern marches, as well as seasonal migrant Polish labor drawn to work on large German agricultural estates. He contends that German social scientists in the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy) were likewise drawn to new ways of controlling the mobility of this free labor pool to prevent proletarian radicalization. The author claims that these drew on observations of the New South and that the propagation of smallhold farming became a key policy in that effort in Germany, just as it would be in Togo. He argues further that both in the German east and in Togo smallhold farming aimed at creating docile, patriarchal households and an available labor pool that assured "capitalist profits" (128). In the following chapter, the author explores the influence of Booker T. Washington and his Togo experiment on European colonial policy in the years shortly before and after the Great War. Zimmerman demonstrates that at this time Tuskegee industrial education and colonial smallhold cash crop production were seen as a promising and relatively enlightened form of liberal colonialism widely admired and emulated by other colonial powers. Moreover, its segregationist racial assumptions and developmental template became models for the League of Nations Mandate System, assuring the spread of the New South to what the author calls the "New Global South" that carried with it, however, a baleful long-term legacy of downward mobility and underdevelopment. In the final chapters, Zimmerman explores how a racist and colonial sociology took form in Germany and the United States, reinforcing and justifying this New Global South and segregation, focusing on the sociologists Max Weber and Robert E. Park. He contrasts this with what he terms the "revolutionary social science" of Marx, Kautsky, Lenin, Bukharin, and Trotsky, which rejected outright racist liberal imperialism and smallhold capitalist farming. Social Democracy and Communism, the author contends, thus emerged as the only authentic black emancipatory movements. However, the legacy of the Global South lives on, as do "political and economic elites" who unjustly appropriate wealth and "prevent the free labor necessary for capital accumulation from becoming truly free labor" (250).

Zimmerman's book is a work of vast sweep and ambition, and the author is to be commended for bringing together the disparate strands of his...