In the area that would become the German colony of Togo in West Africa, cotton booms and busts intersected with transatlantic struggles for economic freedom and political autonomy. In the period between the American Civil War and the First World War, this region of Africa began recovering from the Atlantic slave trade, established new forms of political and economic autonomy, and saw these new forms crushed with the growth of European colonial states. Like much of the world, this area had produced cotton for local textile production since antiquity. The forced integration of this local cotton production into a world market in raw cotton fiber dominated by industrialized core capitalist nations was part of a larger global struggle over the control of labor. This struggle led to a series of emancipations of bonded labor—serf and slave—and the imposition of new forms of control including sharecropping, factory supervision, and colonial rule.Footnote ¹

Global Civil War

The American Civil War was a—perhaps the—central episode in more than a century of international struggles against bonded labor and over the meaning of the free labor that would replace it. Even while President Abraham Lincoln still limited official war aims to preserving the Union rather than ending slavery, many in the United States and abroad recognized that the conflict was about slavery specifically and about the freedom of labor more generally. A cohort of European radicals, many exiled after the European revolutions of 1848–49, observed and even fought in the Civil War as part of a larger battle against despotism and feudalism and for free labor. These revolutionary refugees arrived in the United States as conflicts over slavery gained renewed force and began to break out into armed struggles in the 1850s. These American conflicts added to already existing revolutionary projects on both sides of the Atlantic. Karl Marx, perhaps the most articulate of these nineteenth-century Atlantic republicans, was especially engaged with the politics of American antislavery. Although he did not participate in the conflict, he wrote extensively on the American Civil War. A number of his associates, including Joseph Weydemeyer and Marx's one-time rival in the Communist League, August Willich, served as officers in the Union Army. Writing to Engels at the beginning of 1860, Marx proclaimed that “the greatest thing happening today in the world is, on the one hand, the American slavery movement opened with [John] Brown's death; on the other, the slavery movement in Russia.”Footnote ² Marx perceived the struggles against slavery in the United States and against serfdom in Russia as part of a global struggle for free labor.

The American Civil War made Marx's socialism especially relevant to the movements in which it had long held an important, though not dominant, position. Marx and Engels distinguished their own socialism from the many competing varieties by rejecting moral economic reasoning and employing classical political economy, with its presupposition of free labor, as a revolutionary social science. Still, although many have regarded Marx as leading naïve workers away from their nostalgia for an idealized precapitalist world, he is better understood as a commentator who embraced new forms of free labor made possible by the global struggles against unfree labor.

Marx regarded the American struggle against slavery as part of a struggle for free labor that would take various nineteenth-century struggles for worker autonomy beyond capitalism. Not just Marx's political work, but also his own political-economic theory was fundamentally shaped by his engagement with small and big “R” republican politics in the United States. Marx engaged most directly with U.S. Republicanism in his critique of the economist Henry Carey, a favorite of many in the Republican Party. Carey argued that high tariffs could foster an economic progress that would harmonize the class interests of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The Panic of 1857 gave Carey new credibility among Republicans, and Marx devoted the earliest notebooks for Capital, which he began writing that year, to criticizing Carey. These notebooks were much later published as the Grundrisse.Footnote ³

The Civil War experience of the transnational community of republican exiles marked the foundation of the International Working Men's Association, also called the First International, in 1864. In his famous inaugural address to the organization, Marx singled out its American members for special praise, noting that, after the 1848 revolutions, “the most advanced sons of labour fled in despair to the Transatlantic Republic.” He praised European workers for preventing their own governments from recognizing the Confederacy. Marx called on the First International to seize political power in order to end bourgeois efforts against worker-controlled cooperatives. These cooperatives represented a new form of free labor, abolishing “hired labor” from below, much as slave labor and serf labor had already been abolished.Footnote ⁴ For Marx, the emergence of free labor within capitalism foreshadowed a free labor that exceeded the boundaries of capitalism.

The Cotton Famine and the First Cotton Boom and Bust in Togo

The first cotton boom in Togo occurred as a result of the so-called cotton famine during the American Civil War, before the onset of direct colonial rule. Fears that the Union blockade would drastically shrink supplies to European industry sent cotton prices skyrocketing and merchants scrambling to acquire cotton from all over the world, as Sven Beckert has importantly revealed.Footnote ⁵ One of the most widely admired and imitated of the new cotton regions would be German Togo. This imposed integration into international markets, however, set the stage for a series of cotton busts among the African inhabitants of the area.

During the cotton famine that came with the American Civil War, some Togolese near the coast borrowed money to establish plantations and purchase slaves to produce cotton for French and English merchants. In contrast to palm oil, cotton, although long an important local commodity, had played virtually no role in the Togolese export economy before the American Civil War. One of these new plantations employed more than forty slaves and a cotton gin and press. The operation exported twenty to forty bales a month to Liverpool. The struggle against bonded labor in the United States thus led to a small increase in the use of bonded labor to grow cotton in Togo. The economic contraction of the 1870s brought global cotton prices down dramatically. American farmers saw cotton prices decline by almost 50 percent between 1872 and 1877.Footnote ⁶ Their Togolese counterparts saw cotton prices decline to a tenth of their wartime high. Those Africans who had neglected subsistence crops for cotton now found they could not earn enough to buy food. Some of these slaveholders had to sell their own children into slavery just to survive.Footnote ⁷ When cotton production for export returned to Togo under German colonial rule thirty years later, this occurred precisely because of its association with the old forms of unfreedom defeated in the United States and the new forms of unfreedom that had emerged in their wake.

Checking the Freedom of Free Labor in the United States, Germany, and Africa

In the wake of the American Civil War and the worldwide wave of emancipations and mobilizations of which the war was a central part, elites around the world sought to invent modern forms of economic exploitation and political oppression that would maintain old hierarchies and establish new ones. These elites did not embrace economic freedom or even the absolute reign of private property, for they, like Marx, recognized the subversive potential of these doctrines of political economy. Rather than laissez-faire economics, political and economic authorities around the world introduced various regimes designed to undermine economic freedom, including master-servant codes, vagrancy laws, sharecropping, racial segregation, lynching, and prison labor.

In Germany, economists like Gustav Schmoller called for a benevolent and paternalist treatment of peasants and workers to prevent both the extremes of exploitation and oppression and the chaos that they thought would result from the unconstrained freedom of workers. For many of these German economists, American Reconstruction and, to an even greater extent, the New South that emerged after Reconstruction, served as a model for the control of labor within capitalism. Georg Friedrich Knapp, a student of comparative emancipation in Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States, and a close associate of Gustav Schmoller, Max Weber, and others, characteristically lamented that the social science of the eighteenth century had condemned serfdom without finding “a replacement” (Ersatz) for it.Footnote ⁸ Like the architects of the New South, Knapp and other German social scientists aided the state in devising new forms of constraint to maintain what they regarded as a proper social order in an era of legal freedom. The main outcome of their advice inside Germany was the massive settlement of German farmers inside formerly Polish areas of Prussia both to push out Poles and to establish new forms of labor constraints on the German settlers. This program was known as “internal colonization.” It would also lead, as we shall see shortly, to efforts that borrowed even more directly from the American New South in Germany's colonies in Africa.

The largest socialist party in the world at the time, the German Social Democratic Party, continued to fight for the expanded notion of free labor that Marx had sought in the Civil War, now against the new capitalist forms of unfreedom, especially state paternalism and colonialism, that had replaced the old forms of serfdom and slavery. The Social Democrats rejected even benevolent state socialism. After all, they wanted to overthrow class society, not support it with ameliorative and authoritarian social programs. The Social Democrats would also, apart from a few notorious exceptions like revisionist Eduard Bernstein, decisively reject colonialism, with its even more paternalist and oppressive “civilizing mission.” Leading Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky rejected the supposed “right of peoples of higher culture to ‘exercise tutelage’ over peoples of lower culture” as precisely the right that the bourgeoisie claimed justified its own political and economic power in Europe. The proletariat could not, Kautsky wrote, endorse the colonial civilizing mission “without sanctioning its own exploitation and disavowing its own struggle for emancipation.”Footnote ⁹ The Atlantic civil war over the freedom of labor continued beyond the formal emancipations of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, expanding into questions of paternalist domestic social policy and overseas colonial policy.

Colonialism and the Second Cotton Boom and Bust in Togo

West Africa was involved in several ways in this global civil war over free labor. The people of southern Togo enjoyed a brief period of relative freedom and prosperity in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period when the region recovered from the demographic, economic, and political catastrophe of the slave trade, but before the new catastrophe of colonial rule.Footnote ¹⁰ With the decline of the slave trade, palm oil, which possessed numerous industrial uses, became the most important item of international commerce between West Africa and Europe.Footnote ¹¹ Oil palms grow freely along the West African coast and thus remained independent of the private land ownership, industrial cultivation, and biological engineering characteristic of most international agricultural commodities. Small producers could profitably harvest palm oil for their own consumption or for sale in local or international markets. The international palm oil market thus neither required nor brought about the subordination of agricultural workers to large landowners, merchants, and industrial processors, as cotton would. On the contrary, palm oil afforded its producers a certain economic autonomy.

As part of the broader struggle of capital against free labor, colonial states sought to check the economic freedom won by Africans after the slave trade, both by imposing political obligations on Africans and also by assisting European merchants in increasing their control over the oil trade and over the other marketing opportunities that emerged alongside this growing cash economy.

Germany played a leading role in the European colonization of Africa because of the particular energy it devoted to developing new cash crops and intervening in Africans' social structure. The victors in the First World War would later renarrate German colonial history as a history of uniquely horrific or oppressive atrocities in order to justify seizing the German territories as wards of “a sacred trust of civilization.” Germans carried out numerous well-documented atrocities in their overseas empire, but this hardly distinguished their colonial rule from that of the French or English regimes, which presented themselves after the war as the saviors of Germany's colonial victims. Before the war, in contrast to this revised version of recent colonial history, French, English, and Belgian observers held up Germany as a model colonizer. To cite just one example: E.D. Morel recommended transferring the Belgian Congo to Germany in order to correct the abuses he criticized there.Footnote ¹² For Morel and others, the introduction of commercial cotton farming into Togo by the German government was the most important and best example of this supposedly good colonialism.Footnote ¹³

So important was the model of the New South racial division of labor for German social scientists and colonial authorities, that the German state enlisted Booker T. Washington, the African American educator and principal of Tuskegee Institute, to guide them. In 1900, an agricultural attaché in the German embassy in Washington, D.C., persuaded the Tuskegee educator to recruit “two negro-cottonplanters and one negro-mechanic . . . who would be willing to come over to . . . the colony of Togo in West-Africa to teach the negroes there how to plant and harvest cotton in a rational and scientific way.”Footnote ¹⁴ As Ernst Vohsen, the most important colonial publisher in Germany, remarked in his preface to the 1902 German translation of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, the educator's famous words from his 1895 Atlanta address—”In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress”—”are also true for us in Africa.”Footnote ¹⁵

Germany, which had the second largest cotton spinning industry in Europe, had an obvious national economic interest in growing cotton in the colonies. Although cotton had been grown all over the world, including in Africa, since antiquity, the spinning and weaving machines of European mills required Upland cotton, a variety grown at that time almost exclusively in the United States. The quality of this cotton depended on the discipline to which its growers were subjected. Every aspect of the crop judged in the cotton exchanges of New Orleans, New York, Liverpool, Bremen, and elsewhere had a counterpart in the exacting control of labor in the cotton fields of the American South. The meticulous control of labor remained essential to the production of cotton in both slavery and freedom.

Indeed, at least as important as the desire to obtain this raw material from a source outside the United States was a desire to reproduce the discipline of cotton growing. The German business organization most important for promoting colonial cotton explained to the German government that introducing cotton cultivation for the world market would bolster its power in Togo, making the Togolese “economically dependent upon us” and thus making the Germans “finally the real masters” of the region.Footnote ¹⁶ Apart from the value of cotton itself, German officials also hoped that cotton growing for export, rather than as part of extended household production, would foster a patriarchal domesticity that promised to control everything from sexual reproduction to the behavior of men and women, the availability of labor, and the spatial location of inhabitants.

Part of the political advantage of cotton growing was precisely that it was not profitable for its growers and that it limited their ability to participate in the palm oil economy, in more profitable wage labor, or in the white-collar jobs that the growth of the German colonial state and colonial capitalism offered some Africans. Paul Rohrbach, a particularly racist German colonial expert, praised the German cotton program in Togo because it increased African agricultural output without increasing the wealth of African farmers, which might become “a means of political resistance [Widersetzlichkeit].”Footnote ¹⁷

The Tuskegee faculty member James Nathan Calloway and the Tuskegee graduate John W. Robinson led a number of other Tuskegee alumni in setting up, first, an experimental cotton plantation and, later, a three-year, cotton-growing school in Togo. The Tuskegee personnel assumed that they faced an abject black population that had, as they believed also to be the case for many in the American South, nowhere to go but “up from slavery.” The Tuskegee personnel and their German backers further supposed that they were improving an indigenous cotton industry. In fact, they demanded that Africans grow cotton in unprecedented quantities under government supervision for export to European mills rather than for local spinning and weaving. Given the low price for raw cotton on world markets at the turn of the century, there was absolutely no economic incentive for Africans to do this, and so, not surprisingly, the program worked only by forcing Africans to attend cotton school and then to grow cotton afterwards.

John Robinson, the head of the Tuskegee cotton school in Togo, suggested that the German state treat cotton school graduates “halfway as a settler would be treated, and halfway as a laborer or what we call a ‘cropper’ i.e. one who makes a farm under the direction of another.” Like many apologists for the system, Robinson portrayed the brutal coercion of sharecropping, in both the American South and in German West Africa, as placing people, in his words, “full of childish simplicity” under “the will of a good shepherd.”Footnote ¹⁸ The colonial cotton project in Togo actively wrecked African possibilities for economic prosperity and autonomy. This was, for some colonial cotton enthusiasts a means, but for others a goal, of colonial cotton production.

Between 1901 and 1911, cotton exports recorded by the Germans expanded more than fifty-fold.Footnote ¹⁹ The importance of the Tuskegee cotton project in Togo did not, however, lay in the sheer amount of cotton exported from the colony, which was small both relative to the world market and to the export economy of Togo. Rather, the Tuskegee project served as a pilot program for other colonial cotton projects in Africa. It was the first beginning of a cotton export industry that formed a major part of the economy of many West African countries by the end of the twentieth century. Thanks to lavish subsidies provided to European and American growers, but denied, by the terms of “free trade” agreements, to West African growers, cotton remains to this day associated with poverty that enforces and reproduces global inequality.

From the perspective of those who performed the work of cotton cultivation in Togo, the West African cotton boom was an economic bust. This was true of both the initial experiments by Togolese slaveholders during the American Civil War and of German colonial projects at the start of the twentieth century. Cotton as industrial raw material was itself an artifact of labor coercion, so the expansion of cotton was necessarily an expansion of coercion. The boom of cotton required a bust of cotton growers. This is, to a certain extent, the case for all commodities, which, as Marx suggested, reveal their true character only when analysis looks beyond the realm of the market (where booms and busts, as they are conventionally understood, occur) to the “hidden abode of production,” where even freely sold labor is subjected to various forms of coercion.Footnote ²⁰ Morever, cotton as an industrial raw material evolved as part of a peculiarly vicious racist political economy in the United States, both before and after the Civil War. The cotton boom in German Togo contributed to the development of a global South that included parts of the American New South and to a global economy that remains, for most, little more than a series of busts.