1.1 Deindustrialization in East Africa
Manufacturing was the engine of economic growth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 The mechanization of domestic textile industries, in particular, transformed nineteenth-century Britain into the workshop of the world and later underpinned the rapid twentieth-century advance of several countries in East Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa, however, did not take industrial flight during these centuries. In fact, handicraft textile manufacturing, which had thrived across the continent for centuries fell into rapid decline in a number of locales, particularly in the east, by the early twentieth century. Today, Africa remains the least industrialized continent in the world. What accounts for such stark contrasts of industrial success?2
Sub-Saharan Africa has remained largely overlooked in global studies of the “great divergence,” which saw “the West” rapidly pull ahead of other parts of the world through industrialization-driven economic growth.3 Many scholars of sub-Saharan Africa have settled for a broadly generalized explanation for the region’s comparatively lackluster acceleration, centering on the deindustrializing impact of globalization: as sub-Saharan Africa, and other parts of the global “periphery,” were increasingly integrated into both the global trading system and European empires by the nineteenth century, domestic industries were devastated by a growing influx of imported manufactures, particularly textiles, from those world regions that had more quickly modernized their own industries.4 However, as Munro (1984) pointed out decades ago, the implications of imported manufactures for domestic African industries have been “less than adequately investigated” as “too often historians have merely assumed their disappearance under competition from imports.” He cautioned against “suppos[ing] that when some branches of handicraft production declined they did so under the pressure of imports,” yet numerous scholars have continued to make this assumption (Munro 1984, 62–63). Consequently, limited empirical evidence and a paucity of case studies, especially for East Africa, have precluded definitive conclusions on the causes and nature of industrial decline in sub-Saharan Africa.
This book takes up Munro’s invitation to closely examine industrial decline in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing primarily on handicraft textile production in East Africa, which has received relatively little attention from scholars, who have focused primarily on West Africa, where handicraft textile manufacturing persisted much longer.5 Like much of the continent, East Africa became increasingly integrated into global trade and open to foreign influence by the nineteenth century; but here, textile manufacturing began to decline comparatively earlier than in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The region consequently provides excellent underexplored terrain to examine mechanisms, both global and local, that affected industrial production outcomes.
The central questions addressed throughout this book are: when and why did handicraft cloth industries in East Africa decline? How did cloth imports affect domestic textile industries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? And what role did global and local forces play in influencing local production choices? Although analytical emphasis is placed on East Africa, this study takes a broader comparative approach to better evaluate the purportedly central role played by global forces. In-depth case studies focus on the disappearance of cotton cloth production in central and southern East Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but findings are considered in light of existing studies on more resilient textile industries in both northern East Africa and West Africa, which encountered similar global forces during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Regional comparison highlights the unique periodization and pathways of industrial decline (or persistence) in different African locales, challenging one-size-fits-all deindustrialization suppositions and offering more nuanced insights into sub-Saharan Africa’s piece of the global textile puzzle.
This study provides the first long-term quantification of cloth imports into East Africa from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, detailing the scale, composition, and pricing of imports, which is a crucial step in investigating any relationship between cloth imports and deindustrialization. As this first chapter will illustrate, these data suggest that competition from imported cloth is indeed an insufficient explanation for the deterioration of domestic textile industries in the region and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. In some parts of East Africa, textile manufacturing disappeared before cloth imports ramped up. Furthermore, cloth producers residing in northern East Africa persevered much longer than their central and southern East African neighbors in spite of significantly higher per capita import levels. Similarly, West Africa imported more cloth per capita than East Africa, yet handicraft production continued to thrive in the west after similar industries waned in much of the east. Competition-centered explanations have evidently overlooked other decisive mechanisms that affected differing regional production outcomes in late pre-colonial and early colonial sub-Saharan Africa. This book highlights the importance of bringing local factors into the deindustrialization equation. Comparative analysis reveals that local conditions played a key role in determining how global forces affected domestic industries across sub-Saharan Africa. In some cases, for example, growth in global trade helped stimulate local cloth industries, while in others, it helped set in motion local transformations that precipitated a decline in domestic production.
The following sections provide an overview and critique of deindustrialization perspectives that emphasize global forces, followed by an introduction to alternative conceptualizations that bring local factors to the fore. This chapter concludes with a discussion on methods, sources, and the organization of the book.
1.2 Globalization and Industrial Decline
For the past half-century, academic debate has raged over the causes of limited industrial growth in much of the developing world compared with the rapid industrial expansion experienced in Europe and North America from the second half of the eighteenth century. In the early post-colonial period, dependency theorists suggested that underdevelopment had been effected via an exploitative “world system” that was dominated by wealthy “core” countries at the expense of poorer “peripheral” countries (Frank 1966; Wallerstein 1989). The concept of a core-controlled global economy has been recently revisited by Beckert (2014) in his sweeping history of the cotton-driven industrial divergence, whereby Europe—with the use of institutionalized, state-backed violence—usurped Asia’s position as the original textile workshop of the world and undermined burgeoning industries across the globe. He broadly argues that European industrial dominance was actively orchestrated through a system of “war capitalism,” which facilitated Europe’s global control over factors of production and external markets through “slavery, the expropriation of indigenous people, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs” (Beckert 2014, xv). In the case of Africa, however, he suggests that imperial efforts to secure the continent’s resources often met with failure since many Africans “remained far removed from world markets and experienced little if any commercialization in their lives [and thus] felt little economic pressure to produce cash crop...