2004
DOI: 10.1017/s0021853704009867
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‘Rubber Fever’, Commerce and French Colonial Rule in Upper Guinée, 1890–1913

Abstract: This article examines the trade in wild rubber that emerged in Upper Guinée, in the colony of Guinée Française, at the end of the nineteenth century. Guinée's 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 Con… Show more

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Cited by 26 publications
(5 citation statements)
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References 4 publications
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“…35 Not all colonial interventions so obviously warped local economic life, and, moreover, one can certainly find examples of colonized people taking advantage of new (if often fleeting) economic opportunities, either in spite of or in interaction with the colonial state. 36 Yet French colonial systems of rule and law were always subject to the charge that what they prescribed as legitimate economic behavior was at best questionable and at worst unfounded on any legitimacy at all.…”
Section: Reconsidering the Means And Loci Of Economic Lifementioning
confidence: 99%
“…35 Not all colonial interventions so obviously warped local economic life, and, moreover, one can certainly find examples of colonized people taking advantage of new (if often fleeting) economic opportunities, either in spite of or in interaction with the colonial state. 36 Yet French colonial systems of rule and law were always subject to the charge that what they prescribed as legitimate economic behavior was at best questionable and at worst unfounded on any legitimacy at all.…”
Section: Reconsidering the Means And Loci Of Economic Lifementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Migrants came south from Gurunshi and Gyaman to serve as porters. In Upper Guinée, the rubber trade went through two historical phases (Osborn, 2004). From 1880 to 1901, local collectors and Muslim traders exported their product through British-controlled Freetown, while after 1901 European merchants entered and redirected the trade to Conakry.…”
Section: Background and Sourcesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Exhaustion of natural rubber supplies was repeated throughout Africa, in Guinée (Osborn, 2004), in Ghana (Dumett, 1971), and in the Congo (Harms, 1975). In none of these scenarios could colonial officials or concessionary companies establish institutions that created effective incentives to extract rubber at a sustainable rate, or restrict tapping to methods that did not injure the trees.…”
Section: Wild Rubbermentioning
confidence: 99%
“…96 In French Guinea (now the Republic of Guinea), as Emily Osborn has shown, rubber-tapping provided opportunities for former slaves during the early years of colonial rule. 97 For those slaves who wanted their own farms, rent-free, but who had no rights to land in an export-crop zone, there was the possibility of establishing food farms in their original home. For cash they would have either to plant whatever cash crop would grow, probably getting only slight returns because of soil quality or distance to market.…”
Section: T H E C a S H -C R O P '' R E V O L U T I O N '' A N D T H Ementioning
confidence: 99%