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12 selling the Colonial economic Myth (1900–1940) Catherine Coquery-vidrovitch in 1815, at the end of the napoleonic Wars, France found itself with a colorful assortment of colonies: a few islands in the West indies, réunion in the indian ocean, islands in the Pacific, and two outposts on the coast of senegal. Throughout the nineteenth century, France positioned itself in order to reconstruct its empire. Competing with Great Britain, it set its sights on the african continent. The relatively early conquest of algeria (1830) led to a razzia-style war, which in the short term had economically catastrophic results. in contrast, business preceded conquest in sub-saharan africa, which, for its part, did not see battle until the end of the century. international commerce increased tenfold between 1820 and 1850. Businesses descendant from former slave-trade firms, like that of the régis brothers from Marseille, followed the wave of so-called legitimate products, and rejected the now shameful business of slavery. The catalyst was the industrial revolution, which, as we know, first began in england. The industrial revolution made tropical oleaginous seed both necessary and fashionable, notably with peanuts from the coasts of india and palm oil from the niger delta in West africa (1802–1804). France, in a period of commercial expansion, began to imitate england during the July Monarchy. an already old Colonial Commerce The régis brothers were already negotiating with King Ghezo, the sovereign of the kingdom of dahomey (a region located in what is today the southern Benin), for a monopoly on the purchase of its artisanal oils, fabricated by the country’s women from natural backshore palm trees. This was soon followed by a business of peanut cultivation by senegalese peasants. The culture of exports was in a state of permanent expansion, especially after the French constructed a railroad between dakar and saint-louis (1883–1885), which facilitated the transportation of goods. The importation of peanuts from senegal to Bordeaux’s oil mills, which the government subsidized throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, continued until after the period of independence. during the nineteenth century, oil from tropical plants became an indispensable raw material for the industrialization of metropolitan France. directly or indirectly, every national firm needed it, 180 Selling the Colonial Economic Myth | 181 for either oiling their machines or lighting their workshops. dating back to the nineteenth century, the wax candle industry (these types of candles were considered preferable to candles made from olive oil or bee’s wax) faced only marginal competition from coal-based gas lighting. This latter became popular in France under the July Monarchy, but only really for public and industrial lighting purposes ; it was considered dangerous and unhealthy for private homes, and electricity did not become popular until the turn of the twentieth century. There was an increasingly pressing need for lighting, especially with the introduction of continual industrial labor (“shift work”). similarly, the so-called Marseille soap industry owed its existence to the colonies. This product was the result of a French discovery in soap making, which relied upon a bleaching technique that used tropical oils; British-made black soaps were snubbed by French consumers, who were put off by their appearance. However, British soap makers, the lever brothers , in turn created their own firm in the 1880s, and worked to put into place a vertical process of production, from the raw material to the distributed product. They began by purchasing sites in Belgian Congo (early twentieth century) on which to plant palm trees, and in 1928 they formed the multinational firm unilever by uniting British and dutch capital. a Growing Body of exchange Though the atlantic slave trade was officially banned in 1815, it continued in secret until at least 1848 (the date of the abolition of slavery, and therefore also of the slave market in the French colonies), and beyond that in the form of laborers who were known as “indentured labor”—régis was implicated in an international scandal concerning this issue. The decline in trafficking did not put an end to commerce in africa. on the contrary, imports of raw materials essential to the metropolitan French industry only intensified exchange, which increased tenfold during the first half of the nineteenth century. This relationship of exchange endured as such until a series of international agreements put an end to them. or until the natural raw materials were replaced with products from the chemical industry and derivatives of petroleum. Thus, manufacturing in...

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