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

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. Prussian land policies, Alabama sharecropping, and German colonialism in the West African nation of Togo influenced one another, as specific forms of political domination and economic exploitation were established in each specific geographic area. 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.

In a work with a subject as complex and dense as this, it is useful to present his main points. "By imposing models of 'development' devised for American freedpeople, understood as having nowhere to go but 'up from slavery,' colonial states blocked indigenous paths to prosperity and destroyed institutions of local political autonomy" (p. 237). The Tuskegee introduction of cotton to Togo was a singular instance of the application of the New South ideology in the global South. "The American South, however, served as a model not only for those who would globalize the New South of segregation, disfranchisement and sharecropping, but also, for those who would globalize African American efforts at self-emancipation, both during and after slavery" (p. 237).

Zimmerman analyzes the connections between these developments and the new social sciences, particularly sociology, in Germany and the United States. Furthermore, he explores how "Social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic played an important role in helping states and businesses transform elements of the New South into a global South" (p. 273). They were deeply implicated in either preserving the existing political and social order or in transforming it. The movement of New South ideology, politics, and economics to the southern regions of the world "inspired some of the most important social scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Karl Marx, Gustav Schmoller, W. E. B. Du Bois, Max Weber, Karl Kautsky, Robert E. Park, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin." Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, among others, figure in the author's analysis as well.

His analysis began with Reconstruction in the South and the establishment of different types of schools for the former slaves and their children. He analyzes the considerable influence of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, who acquired his ideas about colonial uplift as the son of a Presbyterian missionary working in Hawai'i and put them into practice at Hampton Institute, where he provided Washington with the model for industrial education that German policy makers admired and used in their West African colony and in eastern Germany, where they drew parallels between the Polish migrant workers and the African American sharecroppers. On the other hand, the American Missionary Association, through Fisk, Howard, and other universities emphasized a liberal as opposed to industrial education, and Du Bois was one of the chief proponents of this idea in the early twentieth century.

In presenting the story of Tuskegee's cotton experiment in Togo, Zimmerman carefully analyzes the racial thought and ideas for Afro-American uplift of Washington, Du Bois, and other black intellectuals, and traces the subtle shifts in their thinking. One learns that on several occasions Du Bois might have joined Washington at Tuskegee, but, unlike Zimmerman, this reviewer is not confident they could have worked together for long. To one familiar with this territory, the analysis is tedious, but it is leavened by the information that both Washington and George Washington Carver affected English accents. We know of Du Bois's graduate study in Germany and his familiarizing European scholars with the labor conditions of Black cotton farmers. Equally significant, however, Washington toured central Europe to study peasant life, and Weber visited Tuskegee and traveled through the South, making comparisons with Polish peasants and gathering evidence and experience for the development of his theories...