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  • Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South by Andrew Zimmerman
  • Udo J. Hebel
Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. By Andrew Zimmerman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010.

Alabama in Africa follows the promising paths opened up in American Studies and American History by transnational approaches and comparative perspectives. Zimmerman’s profound study traces the circumatlantic convergence of American and German ideologies of race, agricultural labor, and family farming in early twentieth-century West Africa. Focusing on an expedition of Tuskegee Institute cotton experts to the German colony of Togo in the 1910s, it explores the symbiosis intended by German authorities of Booker T. Washington’s concepts of “industrial education” with their own economic goals and political ambitions in the larger contexts of global imperialism. Zimmerman bases his astounding trajectory of the transfer of knowledge and paradigms of labor control from the U.S. to German-colonized Africa on affinities between the implications, ideologies, and interests of the historical transition from serfdom and slavery to free, yet controlled labor in Prussia after 1807 and in the American South after 1865. In view of the mutual influences between German and American social science and social policy especially in the later decades of the nineteenth century, Alabama in Africa examines the role of the cotton experts from the Tuskegee Agricultural Department in the subordination of previously independent African farmers to the coercive programs of the German colonial system. Zimmerman uncovers the participation of the model farms of the Tuskegee experts in the “civilizing mission” of the German colonial authorities in Togo and problematizes the position of the Tuskegee expedition of reproducing the American South in Africa while inspiring Pan-African notions of anticolonialist solidarity. Zimmerman’s narrative raises new questions in connection with Booker T. Washington’s complicity with Southern racism and puts Lenin’s and the Communist International’s contemporary criticism of independent small farming and the “Negro question” into unexpected perspectives. The Tuskegee expedition to Togo and its connection with German imperialist interests serves Zimmerman well as a multifaceted prism to analyze the extension of “the mutually sustaining constructs of ‘cotton’ and ‘Negroes’ to an international level” (65) and to discuss the globalization of “the New South of segregation, disfranchisement and sharecroppoing” (237). The volume contains hitherto unpublished photographs of colonialism at work which make for a significant illustration of the book’s very topic but may have warranted closer interpretation for their specific visual framing of the colonizing venture under scrutiny here, especially with regard to similarities with photographs of Southern slavery and post-Civil War sharecroping. The thorough research in U.S. American, German, and African archives which also projects further work on the circumatlantic transfer of knowledge during a time of global imperialism is borne out by close to one hundred pages of very informative notes, followed by another fifty pages of bibliographical documentation. 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” [End Page 138] (248), 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” (239).

Udo J. Hebel
University of Regensburg, Germany
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