Emily Lynn Osborn

‘CIRCLE OF IRON’: AFRICAN COLONIAL EMPLOYEES AND THE INTERPRETATION OF COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH WEST AFRICA

This article investigates the role of African colonial employees in the functioning of the colonial state in French West Africa. Case studies from the 1890s and early 1900s demonstrate that in the transition from conquest to occupation, low-level African colonial intermediaries continually shaped the localized meanings that colonialism acquired in practice. Well-placed African colonial intermediaries in the colonies of Guinee Francaise and Soudan Francais often controlled the dissemination of information and knowledge in the interactions of French colonial officials with local elites and members of the general population. The contributions of these African employees to the daily operations of the French colonial state show that scholars have long overlooked a cadre of men who played a significant role in shaping colonial rule.

‘RUBBER FEVER’, COMMERCE AND FRENCH COLONIAL RULE IN UPPER GUINÉE, 1890–1913

This article examines the trade in wild rubber that emerged in Upper Guinee, in the colony of Guinee Francaise, at the end of the nineteenth century. Guinees rubber boom went through two phases. The first, from the 1880s to 1901, was dominated by local collectors and Muslim traders who directed the trade to the British port of Freetown, Sierra Leone. In the second phase, 1901–13, expatriate merchant houses entered the long-distance trade and, with the help of the colonial state, reoriented the commerce to Conakry, port city and capital of Guinee. The Guinee case offers an alternative perspective to that provided by the better studied rubber markets of Central Africa and South America, and contributes to scholarly debates about export economies, colonial rule and social change. In Guinee, local production and commercial networks maintained significant influence in the market throughout the rubber boom, thwarting colonial efforts to control the trade. The colonial state proved particularly challenged by the practice of rubber adulteration, whereby local collectors and traders corrupted rubber with foreign objects to increase its weight. While the trade exposes the limits of colonial power, rubber also played a largely overlooked role in the social and economic transformations of the period. Evidence suggests that profits from the rubber trade enabled peasants, escaped slaves and former masters to alter their circumstances, accumulate wealth and rebuild homes and communities destroyed during the preceding era of warfare and upheaval.

Casting aluminium cooking pots: labour, migration and artisan production in West Africa's informal sector, 1945–2005

This article investigates the history of aluminium casting, a sector of the informal economy devoted to recycling scrap aluminium. Artisans who cast aluminium make a variety of products out of scrap, including various utensils and receptacles for food preparation, such as cooking pots. While labour and its history in West Africa has garnered much historical research, as has the work of artisans who specialise in working other types of metal, especially iron, little attention has been paid to aluminium casting. The oversight is significant, because the diffusion of aluminium casting opens up a history on the transnational movement of labour and artisan production in late colonial and post-colonial Africa.

Containers and mobility in West Africa

ABSTRACT In West Africa, containment practices have long been localized in their production, moulded by environmental forces, and scaled to the human body. In the twentieth century, fossil fuels have changed how people keep and carry things. But newer technologies have tended to alter, rather than eliminate, older forms of storage.

From bauxite to cooking pots: Aluminum, chemistry, and West African artisanal production

The history of aluminum’s transformation from a precious to a commonplace metal over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has frequently been told as a narrative about intrepid western chemists, whose discoveries made it possible for industrialized manufacturers to make the metal global. This paper questions both the singularity of that discovery and the inevitability of aluminum’s global dominance as a ‘modern’ material of manufacture. It does so by considering the history of aluminum in West Africa and the ways in which artisans in that region domesticated the substance to an artisanal mode of production and developed quotidian chemical knowledge of it in the process. Considering aluminum from the perspective of West Africa suggests that aluminum may not have been discovered once, but many times, and that everyday material engagements can inspire forms of chemical knowhow that operate well beyond the bounds of the laboratory and industrial manufacturing plant.