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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Cotton Imperialism: Manchester Merchants and Cotton Cultivation in West Africa in the Mid Nineteenth Century |
Author: | Ratcliffe, Barrie M. |
Year: | 1982 |
Periodical: | African Economic History |
Volume: | 11 |
Pages: | 87-113 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | West Africa |
Subjects: | cotton cotton industry History and Exploration Economics and Trade colonialism Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3601218 |
Abstract: | This paper deals with the interest evinced by Manchester merchants in West Africa as a supplier of raw cotton in the second half of the nineteenth century and is intended to be a contribution to the major controversy on the significance of relationships between metropolitan and peripheral economies in general and on the economic causes and consequences of the European presence in West Africa in particular. In this debate both orthodox and neo-marxist scholars have recently attached increased importance to the European quest for raw materials. Three aspects are stressed: 1) the longstanding if ill-founded, belief among Europeans that the tropics - and especially West Africa - were capable of providing the metropoles with the tropical staples they needed; 2) the importance from the nineteenth century onwards of cash crop exports that met the changing raw material needs of the metropoles; 3) the most pertinent aspect for the purpose of this paper: the link of the search for raw materials to forward policy-making in the second half of the nineteenth century. Notes. |