A Comparative Advantage in Labor Exports? Liberia, Fernando Po, and the League of Nations

In 1930, the League of Nations established a commission to investigate the export of forced labor from Liberia to sugar plantations on Fernando Po and other parts of West Africa. This paper revisits the findings of the commission in the context of new research on Liberia’s economic history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the export of forced labor by Liberian elites was an effort to counter the relative decline in Liberia's position in West Africa after a long period of economic stagnation beginning in the 1880s. The export and domestic use of forced labour provided a source of revenue to the Liberian government which fell outside the control of international financial organizations, and allowed Liberia to develop a comparative advantage in the region. Subsequently this became part of a larger story of the Liberian government using its unique political status to carve out a new economic position for the country after failing to compete with colonized neighbors in the development of commodity export trades.