Alabama in Africa : Booker T. Washington, the German empire, and the globalization of the new South
In 1901, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, sent an expedition to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, with the purpose of transforming the region into a cotton economy similar to that of the post-Reconstruction American South. This book explores the politics of labor, sexuality, and race behind this endeavor, and the economic, political, and intellectual links connecting Germany, Africa, and the southern United States. The cross-fertilization of histories and practices led to the emergence of a global South, reproduced social inequities on both sides of the Atlantic, and pushed the American South and the German Empire to the forefront of modern colonialism. The author shows how the people of Togo, rather than serving as a blank slate for American and German ideologies, helped shape their region's place in the global South. He looks at the forms of resistance pioneered by African American freedpeople, Polish migrant laborers, African cotton cultivators, and other groups exploited by, but never passive victims of, the growing colonial political economy. He reconstructs the social science of the global South formulated by such thinkers as Max Weber and W.E.B. Du Bois, and reveals how their theories continue to define contemporary race, class, and culture
Print Book,English, ©2010
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, ©2010
History
xii, 397 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm.
9780691123622, 9780691155869, 0691123624, 0691155860
463674842
Cotton, the "Negro question," and industrial education in the new South
Sozialpolitik and the new South in Germany
Alabama in Africa: Tuskegee and the colonial decivilizing mission in Togo
From a German Alabama in Africa to the segregationist international: the League of Nations and the global South
Prussian paths of capitalist development: the Tuskegee expedition to Togo between transnational and comparative history