background, beginning with a discussion of the establishment of Ivory Coast and the early history of capitalist development in the colony before the Second World War. I follow this overview with an analysis of the triangulated nature of the politics of development in the late colonial and postcolonial periods, in a section that reviews and problematizes the rise and eventual crisis of the Ivorian economic miracle. Then I define what emerged in the 1950s as a French policy of dubbing American-inflected modernization practices, tracing the origin of dubbing as a sociocultural practice to contain the rise of the American Century—defined here as the informal US empire of the twentieth century. Next, I provide an epistemological discussion of the method and sources that I used to write a transnational history of the Ivorian modernization drive from the end of the Second World War until the late 1970s. In the last section, I outline the main articulations of the book as a whole.
FOUNDING A MODERN IVORY COAST
Ivory Coast officially became a French colony in March 1893. In anticipation of this development and hoping to outcompete their British rivals already present in the nearby Gold Coast, the French had gradually signed “protectorate treaties” with a number of chiefs in the coastal communities from Assinie (East) to Grand-Bereby (West).14 As in many parts of Africa before the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, these treaties meant little to the local societies. Regardless, the French military and navy officers used them to extend France’s influence in the region. As a result, their offensive provided France with a number of forts and outposts in Ivory Coast. In a process that echoed historical development in other parts of Africa, however, it was only after the Berlin Conference that the French would consolidate their control over the territory. By the end of the First World War, the “pacification” of the last remaining resisters to a French imperial takeover had been achieved under the iron fist of Governor Gabriel Angoulvant. Thereafter, the colonial state began the policy of mise en valeur (development/exploitation) under the doctrine of the pacte colonial (neo-mercantilism).15
While France carved up Ivory Coast’s administrative space that eventually became enshrined in international law, modernity (and the logics of cosmopolitanism that came in its wake) did not come with the French. During the early modern period when the world became encompassed through global trade and the movement of people, the communities of numerous coastal zones of the future Ivory Coast were active in Atlantic exchanges. In providing food, manual labor, and occasional slaves to transatlantic ships plying the Gulf of Guinea, many of these polities acquired in return foreign commodities and ways of doing that they ultimately domesticated. As a consequence, their cultures were already a dynamic mix of foreign and domestic elements before the French presence became hegemonic.16 Thus, at the time of the creation of the colony, for instance, the area extending from Assinie to Tabou was far from a tabula rasa where the French came to inscribe the first modernist signs. Such precolonial modernity also existed in other parts of the territory. In the northern and midwestern regions, for instance, many polities had been involved in long-distance trading activities that connected the forest zones to the savanna, the Sahelian corners of West Africa, and even to the Mediterranean world. In the Southwest, there had equally existed numerous transregional exchanges that resulted in innovative cultural changes and technological advances.17
To argue the existence of this precolonial modernity does not mean that the arrival of the French in the area was inconsequential. In fact, the extension of France’s imperial control went hand in hand with a vast program of infrastructural development that expanded the zone of interactions among groups as it made the movement of people and ideas within the borders of French West Africa much easier.18 No sooner did effective occupation and colonization become the option for the imperial state than the French began constructing wharves, roads, and a south-north rail line.19 In 1900, planning began to equip the colony with a reliable seaport. In the meantime, the building of the railroad (see map I.1), which had started in 1904, reached such localities as Agboville (1906), Dimbokro (1910), Bouaké (1912), Katiola (1923), and Ferkessédougou (1928). Finally, the Assagny Canal was dug in 1929, to link the Ebrié Lagoon to the estuary of the Bandama River and the Grand-Lahou lagoon network, in an effort to make coastal trading more efficient.20
As in other parts of the empire, French concerns for the development of the natural resources of Ivory Coast were almost coeval with the project of imperial expansion. While the systematic exploitation of woods, ivory, and wild rubber began as early as the late nineteenth century, the limitations of such an extractive economic approach soon became evident and a need for a remedy emerged. Thus, in the early twentieth century, through trial and error, French colonial authorities experimented with European plantation agriculture and later embarked on the promotion of native-run commercial agriculture. These experiments had initially mixed results. The end of the First World War, however, marked a turning point in this new approach. In the aftermath of the war, the new agricultural policy that centered on the natives became articulated as a legitimate governmental policy when the minister for the colonies, Albert Sarraut, conceived the doctrine of mise en valeur.21
In a bid to make colonialism pay for itself, but also in an explicit effort to curb perceived communist-led agitation in France’s colonial possessions, Sarraut indeed argued that “economic development was essential to limit the popular appeal of leftist ideas to colonized peoples.”22 Equally premised on the interwar ideas of developmentalism and politique indigène—the conceit that a new policy that paternalistically respected indigenous culture(s) was essential to lead the natives into progress—Sarraut’s doctrine envisioned a renovated colonial governmentality as the surest road to secure the welfare of the colonial subjects.23 More critically, however, mise en valeur was designed to help France revive its economy after the First World War. This was all the more necessary since the war had left metropolitan France crippled and its citizens demoralized.24
MAP I.1. Ivory Coast and French infrastructural development, ca. 1930. Cartography by author.
The implementation of mise en valeur echoed the practices that the British were deploying in their own empire. Thus, in the French colonies as much as in the British ones, the gradual accumulation of practical knowledge on the colonial subjects, on their mores, their lands, and their agronomic practices, proved essential.25 Minister Sarraut made such doctrine clear when he suggested that science, a systematic imperial division of labor (between metropole and colonies), and the notion of comparative advantage should guide France in a rational development of its empire.26 Although the trend had started in an early decade of the twentieth century, the ministerial sanction of rational exploitation did accelerate the transformation of the various botanical and trial gardens (jardins d’essais) into science-backed experimentation centers geared toward finding and creating improved seeds and plant breeds for colonial agriculture.27 In addition to merging the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Agriculture Coloniale and the Jardin Colonial into an Institut National d’Agronomie Tropicale (INAC) in the metropole in 1921, the imperial decision makers worked to change agronomic institutions in the colonies. In this drive, the Dabou and Bingerville botanical gardens in Ivory Coast that had been created at the beginning of French rule were upgraded to become experimental stations charged with studying cocoa, coffee, cola nuts, and other tropical crops. New agronomic stations were also set up in the colony after 1920, including the Bouaké station, which was charged with studying cotton; a station at La Mé meant to focus on oil palm tree research; and the Man station, which specialized in both coffee and cinchona.28
While these early investments in applied research and infrastructural development boosted the local economy, it was ultimately the actions of the colonial subjects in Ivory Coast that set the stage for what would become an agricultural revolution in the territory. Well before the incorporation of the Ivorian territory into the expanding French West African Empire, some people in the southwestern regions of Ivory Coast had developed
