Decolonization and African society : the labor question in French and British Africa / Frederick Cooper.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 627-655) and index.

Map of French and British colonial Africa -- 1. Introduction -- 2. The labor question unposed -- 3. Reforming imperialism, 1935-1940 -- 4. Forced labor, strike movements, and the idea of development, 1940-1945 -- 5. Imperial plans -- 6. Crises -- 7. The systematic approach: the French Code du Travail -- 8. Family wages and industrial relations in British Africa -- 9. Internationalists, intellectuals, and the labor question -- 10. The burden of declining empire -- 11. Delinking colony and metropole: French Africa in the 1950s -- 12. Nation, international trade unionism, and race: anglophone Africa in the 1950s -- 13. The wages of modernity and the price of sovereignty.

This detailed and authoritative volume changes our conceptions of "imperial" and "African" history. Frederick Cooper gathers a vast range of archival sources in French and English to achieve a truly comparative study of colonial policy towards the recruitment, control, institutionalization of African labor forces from the mid-1930s, when the labor question was first posed, to the late 1950s, when decolonization was well under way.

Professor Cooper explores colonial conceptions of the African worker, and shows how African trade union and political leaders used the new language of social change to claim equal wages, equal benefits, and share of power. This helped to persuade European officials that their post-war project of building a "modern" Africa within the colonial system was both unaffordable and politically impossible.

France and Great Britain left the continent, insisting the they had made it possible for Africans to organize wage labor and urban life in the image of industrial societies while abdicating to African elites responsibility for the consequences of the colonial intervention.