Cotton Booms, Cotton Busts, and the Civil War in West Africa

The “cotton famine” occasioned by the American Civil War, as Sven Beckert has recently shown encouraged growers in many parts of the world to produce cotton for a European market temporarily willing to pay higher prices for lower quality cotton. This boom, however, produced a major global cotton bust as European manufacturers returned after the Civil War to the American cotton for which mechanized mills had been designed. The region that would become coastal Togo, in West Africa, participated in this wartime mini-cotton boom, when some Africans employed slaves to produce cotton for sale to French and English merchants. When cotton prices in Togo later declined to a tenth of their wartime high, these Togolese planters lost everything, and some reportedly had to sell their own children into slavery to survive. Togo, like most parts of the world outside the United States, did not produce cotton suitable for European mechanized spinning before the twentieth century because such cotton requires levels of discipline over agricultural workers that few places outside the American South could achieve. The American Civil War, I will argue, was not an externality that occasioned the cotton boom and bust in Togo; the cotton boom and bust and the American Civil War were aspects of a transatlantic struggle over the meaning of economic freedom as systems of bonded labor crumbled in the nineteenth century. The German colonial state in Togo would, after the turn of the century, use its coercive powers to begin a West African cotton industry that continues to this day. This paper will show how the Togolese cotton boom and bust of the 1860s reveals an African aspect of transatlantic struggles for economic freedom in a period before many options were foreclosed by the expansion of colonial and domestic states later in the century.