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

In 1900 the German agricultural attaché in Washington D.C., Baron von Herman auf Wain, obsessed with Germany’s economic dependence on U.S. production of 60% of the world’s industrial quality cotton, persuaded Booker T. Washington to send a contingent of four African-American agricultural experts from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to the German colony of Togoland to “teach” Africans how to grow cotton for international export. The Tuskegeeans established a cotton experimental station in Tove, Togo in 1901. Five more Tuskegeeans joined them the following year, but ominously, two of the new arrivals drowned on disembarkation. By 1904 all but one of the experts had died or returned disillusioned to the U.S. Only James Robinson remained, learned to speak the Ewe language, married Togolese women, and kept up a struggling agricultural training school, until he too died in a river accident in 1909.

Around this curious colonial episode Andrew Zimmerman has built a wide-ranging transnational intellectual history which examines the personal and ideological linkages of African-American intellectuals, especially Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, with German social scientists, particularly Gustav Schmoller and Max Weber, and American sociology pioneers such as Robert E. Park and William I. Thomas. Zimmerman is fundamentally a German historian and has made impressive use of German archives and colonial records in Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg, as well as some papers from Tuskegee. He demonstrates a thorough mastery of late nineteenth and early twentieth century German social science publications upon which he also draws.

The book’s first two chapters are insightful analytical discussions concerning “Negro” labor patterns in the post-civil war New South, Polish migrant labor in post-serfdom Prussia, and the socio-political theories devised for policy-makers to control these new social patterns. This is the context in which German economic and academic strategists conceived of the plan to transplant U.S. black sharecropping methods of cotton production to their African colony—the racist, patriarchalist, and capitalist overtones of which are staggering. In the third chapter Zimmerman focuses on the historical narrative of the Tuskegee expedition to Togo. Two succeeding chapters discuss intellectual and ideological interactions between German, African-American and American scholars on race, labor, education, and family. Zimmerman also examines some transnational colonial policy discourse, exemplified by the extension of Tuskegee accomodationist “industrial education” to other colonies like Congo. The influence of African-colonial, Polish-migrant, and African-American labor issues on the development of German and American social science thought is thoroughly documented and convincingly argued via the author’s history of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in Germany and the University of Chicago school of sociology.

The transnational connections between German social scientists and the educational, labor, racial theories, and influential personalities coming out of Tuskegee are illuminating, and constitute an original contribution of the book. W.E.B. Dubois received crucial years of graduate education in Germany. Booker T. Washington was courted by German intellectuals, who even arranged a trip for him through Germany and Eastern Europe to compare conditions of poor European agricultural workers. Max Weber, while on tour in America in 1904, visited Tuskegee and Chicago in addition to his commonly known visit to the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences. Robert E. Park studied in Germany under George Friedrich Knapp, and taught at Tuskegee before developing the University of Chicago school of sociology. Such intriguing examples of transnational interconnections dominate the refrain of this book, and Zimmerman argues that they transformed the direction of European and American social science.

Zimmerman is far less persuasive when he insists that the Tuskegee/Togo expedition transformed the political economy of Togo and significantly impacted transnational-thought on liberal imperialism. From an African history perspective very little about the experiment was transformative and it is rather more accurately described as a dry-well. Only one participant managed more than a...