Popular literature on the history of technology maintains that the limited adoption of more complex technologies in pre-colonial Africa placed the continent at a disadvantage in its interactions with the wider world.
My suspicion is that the West doesn't truly understand what led them to the industrial revolution. (Proof: They are still awarding Nobel prizes to researchers who attempt to explain it, we are now in the 2020s).
And so their efforts in exporting it without local support have failed.
Great piece highlighting African ingenuity and agency, thanks.
True, the reality is that even the best scholars understand (or at least can convincingly explain) only part of the Industrial Revolution (either for a specific time period, society, or geographic region, but rarely all at once). Those who attempt to explain it using the framework of the "Great Divergence" oftentimes find themselves insufficiently informed about non-Western societies, so any comparative analysis falls short of the rigorous standards that they originally applied to studying Western societies. They leave it to the more confident but reductive types like Acemoglu and Jared Diamond, who are unfraid to come up with general theories that are poorly sourced and easy to disprove.
This is a most interesting essay, full of very informative historical references.
Thank you very much for sharing it.
.
I would however point to what I believe is an exaggerated interpretation on your side of the perceived inferiority of African techniques that you are trying to underline in regards to agricultural practices.
Reading the few translations you provide from French accounts in West Africa, I am easily guessing the original French form, and I do not find in it the contradiction you repeatedly point out to, between simplicity and productivity or success. In essence, you keep describing their perception as one of simple "yet" productive practives; but what they describe is rather simple "and" productive practices. They do not see a contradiction. The contradiction stems from your own interpretation.
.
I happen to have a very extensive collection of French books on agronomy from the 18th and 19th centuries, including close to every collection of courses or manuals in practical agriculture published in France in those years.
I can testify that simplicity of tools and practices is always considered positively, and is always advised as a preferred way for the aspiring farmer. Of course, productivity is the goal, but it is never sought after through unnecessary complexity. Regarding plowing, its use is always closely dependent on the quality of local soil, and it is most often advised as light, surface plowing only.
.
I note also that the agricultural experiments you reference did not simply consist in practising plowing with the certainty of success. Those who carried out the experiments seem to have made sure to compare playing and hoeing, in a sincere attempt to see IF plowing could bring markedly better results. And they seem to have easily admitted that it did not.
Had they been set to proclaim the superiority of European-style technical agriculture, they could easily have found ways to explain the failings of their experiments through climate, bad wheather or poor work from their indigenous workers. Instead, they were openly and honestly ready to explain why simpler practices coupled with better knowledge of local conditions brought equivalent or better results.
.
Considering the progress in mechanised agriculture had brought improvement in so-called "grandes cultures" (the cultivation of cereal, sugar and oil-seed crops) in France in the late 19th century, I can understand why experiments about it would be carried out in French African colonies. Bur by then, the progress in France were recent. Until the last quarter of the 19th century, French agriculture progressed through improvements in seeds, animal breeds, and fertilizers, but not so much through mechanical means. Mostly because even simple plows were a significantly expensive investment for most French farmers, who were farming small lots.
The colonial agronomists also seem quite aware of the issue of animal workforce, and how it would not prove easily practicable in Africa. In France, those owning plows and draft animals were usually renting their services to farmers, rather than farming for themselves, and it was considered a seperate, specialised trade.
.
All the reasons why they concluded that plowing was not the best approach in Africa were also argued for in France, at least for the most widespread types of small-scale agriculture, until the advent of engine-powered agricultural machines. With explosion engines, deep plowing became the rule on every type of soil, under every climate. But it also demanded land ownership reforms and the creation of much larger agricultural lots. So, that is basically a change that took place after World War 1, rather than in the 19th century.
.
As I see it, the cultural and academic bias you are trying to correct must have developed throughout the 20th century, and it is likely a mistake to assume that it already drove 19th century colonial attempts at agricultural development. I believe some investors would have been keen to test mechanised practices, but they knew quite well that such practises did not succeed verywhere and under every condition.
19th century agronomy did not know petrol-fueld engines nor petrol-derived chemical fertilizers. When it is described as "modern", the term refers to rigourous testing of improved methods, yes, but using pretty much the same means as had been used for centuries. And the way it was applied in France and other European countries in the hope of improving "traditional" techniques is not essentially different from what you show was applied in the colonial African context.
Thanks for this, but in this essay, I use a lot of euphemisms in place of what was extremely negative and, at times, vitriolic language in my sources.
While the more scientifically inclined agronomists mentioned in my references may not have used this language extensively (although it's certainly implied by frequent use of terms such as "primitive" and the highly racialised colonial context in which they worked), the colonial officers, administrators, and settlers who commissioned their research definitely used it ad nauseam and intended to prove the superiority of foreign/European technology over "primitive" African techniques.
One doesn't need to look far, in virtually all French descriptions of West Africa since the time of Binger and Archinard, to find examples of how the absence of more complex technologies (mostly the plow, but also furnaces, stone construction, metallic currency, non-Arabic writing, etc) was part of a package of "evidence" that proved the supposed inferiority of Africans and superiority of the colonialists, and used as a justification for the latter to conquer the former.
Terms such as "primitive," "backward," "stupid" and a whole vocabulary of racial slurs punctuate many of these accounts very frequently in association with these perceived deficiencies of technology, so one shouldn't divorce them from the context of legitimizing colonialism, which was afterall explicitly justified on the grounds that French governors and merchants would exploit African resources better than Africans
Hopkins and other historians of the legitimate trade of the late 19th century, such as Robin Law, have examined how one of the main reasons that European coastal traders (specifically begining with the French in Senegal) advocated for a more foward policy during the late 19th century to extract better terms of trade from the Africans (during a time of falling commodity prices) was informed by the belief that the production, processing and marketing of african commodities, which was until then in African hands, would be more "effecient" under European government. They thought African techniques of cultivation, harvesting, transportation, and pricing mechanisms were wasteful, primitive, and inefficient.
In my essay, I chose to restrict my analysis to just two technologies: the plow/hoe and the furnace, because there wasn't enough space to explore how they fit into the broader context of colonialism (and even less savory but related topics of perceived racial hierarchies in colonial contexts, which I hinted at in Angola).
Lastly, the fact that a policy/tradition/practice has been shown to be irrational and unscientific, whether by scientists living at the time, or historians reconstructing specific events during the period, doesn't mean that it was widely understood and accepted by the decision-makers or general public at the time.
It's for this reason that professional scholars much later, like Jack Goody in 1971 or the Nobel-prize-winning economists Acemoglu and Robinson in 2012, can confidently repeat a misconception that was disproven by some colonial scientists a century before them. It's also why any layperson, even those unfamiliar with the history of technology, can confidently assert that the plow or blast furnace or 16th-century musket is a consistently better (read: superior) tool/weapon than the hoe, bloomery furnace, or arrow, contrary to the historical evidence.
I guess I could edit one of those paragraphs to read "French colonial administrators and agronomists who generally despised African agricultural methods ..."
I can easily believe that colonial administrators and entrepreneurs would be inhabited by racist colonial perceptions. This is also coherent with the official ideology driving colonialism in Africa, which for France was entirely about the "civilisational mission" of the civilised towards the uncivilised.
This would of course transpire onto hired agronomists: in part because these agronomists were themselves products of the society whose government was promoting colonialism; in part because they may have been selected specifically for their adequation to the ideology driving those who hired them, whether colonial administrators or whether private investors; in part because you would tend to comply with the expectations of those who pay you; and in part because once located in the colonial context, they would be exposed to and embbeded into the mechanisms of colonialism.
.
Yet their primary job was not to forge a belief, it was to provide solid ground for investment. The colonial investors would not have had a problem finding very lucrative ways to put the natives to work for them, and they would have enjoyed support from colonial administrators. So, I'd say they didn't need to prove the superiority of the plow. If the hoe was better, finding masses of workers for a cheap price could be arranged. The ultimate goal would be profit.
.
Furthermore, French authorities and investors in colonial agricultural endeavours had already been faced with similar issues in Algeria, where they encountered failures more than one time. It took about 40 years before successive French regimes managed to turn Algeria into a mass settlement colony, in a large part because farming in Algeria was known to be difficult and risky, while agriculture in France was experiencing some kind of a golden age by then, meaning farmers had conditions good enough not to be easily convinced to leave their land and migrate to some remote, unknown country.
In the end, the Imperial government of Napoleon III managed to attract a good numbers of farmers, but most of them weren't French: a few Swiss came through a scheme that was ultimately a failure; and then many came from Spain and Southern Italy. Both these countries had experience instability and civil war (Italy being unified through war in the mid 1860s), and they were characterized by a situation of Latifundio, through which few powerful people owned the land and farmers were mostly tenants. Also, their climate was much more similar to the one found in Algeria. For all those reasons, it was easier to attract farmers from these lands to Algeria by offering free lots. In fact,
But their agricultural practices were still largely traditional (anyway, it wasn't easy for a small farmer in a remote side of Algeria in the 1860s to find a modern steel plow for sale). Inf act, in the 1880, the then Western region of Ranie had more Spanish than French people; and during the mass repatriation of 1962, more than 40% of the Pied-Noirs that left ALgeria were of Spanish descent.
It took a few more decades and many more failed experiments before French colonial authorities managed to spread more modern techniques in Algeria and to guarantee productivity. It also took some massive infrastructure investments to provide irrigation.
.
So in short, behind any discourse agronomists would have adopted in Senegal, for instance, they would necessarily have been aware of the good chances that their expriments would fail. And they would have known that making the land more productive would come first from organisation and labour, rather than from the technique per se.
.
From then, I would imagine that decades of pro-colonial propaganda in European societies until the mid-20th century may have produced the belief that colonisation had resulted in wonderful success from the start due to the superiority of European knowledge. And it is easy to see how those beliefs may have nourished the minds of historians who wrote in the 1970s. But that kind of belief can be dispelled by other means than anlysing late 19th century discourse.
.
It is important to keep in mind that colonisation is a self-reinforcing process. At the beginning, the explorers, the military conquerors, or the first practical scientists to be sent to new colonies were often much more honsetly curious and less bigoted than those who came for decades after.
Thank you for this excellent article. I am going to have to read everything you cite. I am working on a book on mining in 18th to 20th century Nepal. And I have done some work on military hardware production in the same time period. These histories of skill, labour, and production too will offer us narratives other, and more interesting, than that of 'backwardness' that you pushing against I hope. Reading this, I was also thinking how wonderful it would be to have comparative work where colonial Europe is not necessarily one central pole of comparison. But rather to do comparative work on artillery manufacturing in Nepal and West Africa, for interesting. What insights we might happen upon!
I really enjoyed reading it - and have shared it with my family and friends; Considering our hierarchy of priorities of daily needs, I would have without prejudice to the importance of protection and defense, possibly titled it as 'Reframing The History of African Farming, Furnaces, and Fighting Technologies'...
My suspicion is that the West doesn't truly understand what led them to the industrial revolution. (Proof: They are still awarding Nobel prizes to researchers who attempt to explain it, we are now in the 2020s).
And so their efforts in exporting it without local support have failed.
Great piece highlighting African ingenuity and agency, thanks.
True, the reality is that even the best scholars understand (or at least can convincingly explain) only part of the Industrial Revolution (either for a specific time period, society, or geographic region, but rarely all at once). Those who attempt to explain it using the framework of the "Great Divergence" oftentimes find themselves insufficiently informed about non-Western societies, so any comparative analysis falls short of the rigorous standards that they originally applied to studying Western societies. They leave it to the more confident but reductive types like Acemoglu and Jared Diamond, who are unfraid to come up with general theories that are poorly sourced and easy to disprove.
This is a most interesting essay, full of very informative historical references.
Thank you very much for sharing it.
.
I would however point to what I believe is an exaggerated interpretation on your side of the perceived inferiority of African techniques that you are trying to underline in regards to agricultural practices.
Reading the few translations you provide from French accounts in West Africa, I am easily guessing the original French form, and I do not find in it the contradiction you repeatedly point out to, between simplicity and productivity or success. In essence, you keep describing their perception as one of simple "yet" productive practives; but what they describe is rather simple "and" productive practices. They do not see a contradiction. The contradiction stems from your own interpretation.
.
I happen to have a very extensive collection of French books on agronomy from the 18th and 19th centuries, including close to every collection of courses or manuals in practical agriculture published in France in those years.
I can testify that simplicity of tools and practices is always considered positively, and is always advised as a preferred way for the aspiring farmer. Of course, productivity is the goal, but it is never sought after through unnecessary complexity. Regarding plowing, its use is always closely dependent on the quality of local soil, and it is most often advised as light, surface plowing only.
.
I note also that the agricultural experiments you reference did not simply consist in practising plowing with the certainty of success. Those who carried out the experiments seem to have made sure to compare playing and hoeing, in a sincere attempt to see IF plowing could bring markedly better results. And they seem to have easily admitted that it did not.
Had they been set to proclaim the superiority of European-style technical agriculture, they could easily have found ways to explain the failings of their experiments through climate, bad wheather or poor work from their indigenous workers. Instead, they were openly and honestly ready to explain why simpler practices coupled with better knowledge of local conditions brought equivalent or better results.
.
Considering the progress in mechanised agriculture had brought improvement in so-called "grandes cultures" (the cultivation of cereal, sugar and oil-seed crops) in France in the late 19th century, I can understand why experiments about it would be carried out in French African colonies. Bur by then, the progress in France were recent. Until the last quarter of the 19th century, French agriculture progressed through improvements in seeds, animal breeds, and fertilizers, but not so much through mechanical means. Mostly because even simple plows were a significantly expensive investment for most French farmers, who were farming small lots.
The colonial agronomists also seem quite aware of the issue of animal workforce, and how it would not prove easily practicable in Africa. In France, those owning plows and draft animals were usually renting their services to farmers, rather than farming for themselves, and it was considered a seperate, specialised trade.
.
All the reasons why they concluded that plowing was not the best approach in Africa were also argued for in France, at least for the most widespread types of small-scale agriculture, until the advent of engine-powered agricultural machines. With explosion engines, deep plowing became the rule on every type of soil, under every climate. But it also demanded land ownership reforms and the creation of much larger agricultural lots. So, that is basically a change that took place after World War 1, rather than in the 19th century.
.
As I see it, the cultural and academic bias you are trying to correct must have developed throughout the 20th century, and it is likely a mistake to assume that it already drove 19th century colonial attempts at agricultural development. I believe some investors would have been keen to test mechanised practices, but they knew quite well that such practises did not succeed verywhere and under every condition.
19th century agronomy did not know petrol-fueld engines nor petrol-derived chemical fertilizers. When it is described as "modern", the term refers to rigourous testing of improved methods, yes, but using pretty much the same means as had been used for centuries. And the way it was applied in France and other European countries in the hope of improving "traditional" techniques is not essentially different from what you show was applied in the colonial African context.
Thanks for this, but in this essay, I use a lot of euphemisms in place of what was extremely negative and, at times, vitriolic language in my sources.
While the more scientifically inclined agronomists mentioned in my references may not have used this language extensively (although it's certainly implied by frequent use of terms such as "primitive" and the highly racialised colonial context in which they worked), the colonial officers, administrators, and settlers who commissioned their research definitely used it ad nauseam and intended to prove the superiority of foreign/European technology over "primitive" African techniques.
One doesn't need to look far, in virtually all French descriptions of West Africa since the time of Binger and Archinard, to find examples of how the absence of more complex technologies (mostly the plow, but also furnaces, stone construction, metallic currency, non-Arabic writing, etc) was part of a package of "evidence" that proved the supposed inferiority of Africans and superiority of the colonialists, and used as a justification for the latter to conquer the former.
Terms such as "primitive," "backward," "stupid" and a whole vocabulary of racial slurs punctuate many of these accounts very frequently in association with these perceived deficiencies of technology, so one shouldn't divorce them from the context of legitimizing colonialism, which was afterall explicitly justified on the grounds that French governors and merchants would exploit African resources better than Africans
Hopkins and other historians of the legitimate trade of the late 19th century, such as Robin Law, have examined how one of the main reasons that European coastal traders (specifically begining with the French in Senegal) advocated for a more foward policy during the late 19th century to extract better terms of trade from the Africans (during a time of falling commodity prices) was informed by the belief that the production, processing and marketing of african commodities, which was until then in African hands, would be more "effecient" under European government. They thought African techniques of cultivation, harvesting, transportation, and pricing mechanisms were wasteful, primitive, and inefficient.
In my essay, I chose to restrict my analysis to just two technologies: the plow/hoe and the furnace, because there wasn't enough space to explore how they fit into the broader context of colonialism (and even less savory but related topics of perceived racial hierarchies in colonial contexts, which I hinted at in Angola).
Lastly, the fact that a policy/tradition/practice has been shown to be irrational and unscientific, whether by scientists living at the time, or historians reconstructing specific events during the period, doesn't mean that it was widely understood and accepted by the decision-makers or general public at the time.
It's for this reason that professional scholars much later, like Jack Goody in 1971 or the Nobel-prize-winning economists Acemoglu and Robinson in 2012, can confidently repeat a misconception that was disproven by some colonial scientists a century before them. It's also why any layperson, even those unfamiliar with the history of technology, can confidently assert that the plow or blast furnace or 16th-century musket is a consistently better (read: superior) tool/weapon than the hoe, bloomery furnace, or arrow, contrary to the historical evidence.
I guess I could edit one of those paragraphs to read "French colonial administrators and agronomists who generally despised African agricultural methods ..."
I can easily believe that colonial administrators and entrepreneurs would be inhabited by racist colonial perceptions. This is also coherent with the official ideology driving colonialism in Africa, which for France was entirely about the "civilisational mission" of the civilised towards the uncivilised.
This would of course transpire onto hired agronomists: in part because these agronomists were themselves products of the society whose government was promoting colonialism; in part because they may have been selected specifically for their adequation to the ideology driving those who hired them, whether colonial administrators or whether private investors; in part because you would tend to comply with the expectations of those who pay you; and in part because once located in the colonial context, they would be exposed to and embbeded into the mechanisms of colonialism.
.
Yet their primary job was not to forge a belief, it was to provide solid ground for investment. The colonial investors would not have had a problem finding very lucrative ways to put the natives to work for them, and they would have enjoyed support from colonial administrators. So, I'd say they didn't need to prove the superiority of the plow. If the hoe was better, finding masses of workers for a cheap price could be arranged. The ultimate goal would be profit.
.
Furthermore, French authorities and investors in colonial agricultural endeavours had already been faced with similar issues in Algeria, where they encountered failures more than one time. It took about 40 years before successive French regimes managed to turn Algeria into a mass settlement colony, in a large part because farming in Algeria was known to be difficult and risky, while agriculture in France was experiencing some kind of a golden age by then, meaning farmers had conditions good enough not to be easily convinced to leave their land and migrate to some remote, unknown country.
In the end, the Imperial government of Napoleon III managed to attract a good numbers of farmers, but most of them weren't French: a few Swiss came through a scheme that was ultimately a failure; and then many came from Spain and Southern Italy. Both these countries had experience instability and civil war (Italy being unified through war in the mid 1860s), and they were characterized by a situation of Latifundio, through which few powerful people owned the land and farmers were mostly tenants. Also, their climate was much more similar to the one found in Algeria. For all those reasons, it was easier to attract farmers from these lands to Algeria by offering free lots. In fact,
But their agricultural practices were still largely traditional (anyway, it wasn't easy for a small farmer in a remote side of Algeria in the 1860s to find a modern steel plow for sale). Inf act, in the 1880, the then Western region of Ranie had more Spanish than French people; and during the mass repatriation of 1962, more than 40% of the Pied-Noirs that left ALgeria were of Spanish descent.
It took a few more decades and many more failed experiments before French colonial authorities managed to spread more modern techniques in Algeria and to guarantee productivity. It also took some massive infrastructure investments to provide irrigation.
.
So in short, behind any discourse agronomists would have adopted in Senegal, for instance, they would necessarily have been aware of the good chances that their expriments would fail. And they would have known that making the land more productive would come first from organisation and labour, rather than from the technique per se.
.
From then, I would imagine that decades of pro-colonial propaganda in European societies until the mid-20th century may have produced the belief that colonisation had resulted in wonderful success from the start due to the superiority of European knowledge. And it is easy to see how those beliefs may have nourished the minds of historians who wrote in the 1970s. But that kind of belief can be dispelled by other means than anlysing late 19th century discourse.
.
It is important to keep in mind that colonisation is a self-reinforcing process. At the beginning, the explorers, the military conquerors, or the first practical scientists to be sent to new colonies were often much more honsetly curious and less bigoted than those who came for decades after.
Thank you for this excellent article. I am going to have to read everything you cite. I am working on a book on mining in 18th to 20th century Nepal. And I have done some work on military hardware production in the same time period. These histories of skill, labour, and production too will offer us narratives other, and more interesting, than that of 'backwardness' that you pushing against I hope. Reading this, I was also thinking how wonderful it would be to have comparative work where colonial Europe is not necessarily one central pole of comparison. But rather to do comparative work on artillery manufacturing in Nepal and West Africa, for interesting. What insights we might happen upon!
I really enjoyed reading it - and have shared it with my family and friends; Considering our hierarchy of priorities of daily needs, I would have without prejudice to the importance of protection and defense, possibly titled it as 'Reframing The History of African Farming, Furnaces, and Fighting Technologies'...
Very Interesting, Very informative and Very important. Thank you Very much.
Very interesting! Thank you.