Review by Choice Review
Cooper offers a sweeping comparative survey of French and British colonial policy toward native labor movements, primarily in West and East Africa from the 1930s to the 1950s. The author's chief interest is the interaction or "intersection" between colonial policy and practice and African reaction and response. Applying at times Foucauldian power/knowledge methodology, Cooper effectively considers similar French and British bureaucratic imagination of the African proletariat. There is little, however, on how the African proletariat imagined and mobilized itself, particularly in its incipient stage. Cooper acknowledges that there is, for example, a need to examine striking workers' social "networks." The post-1945 coverage of the colonial "intersection" features the manipulation of labor movements as decolonizing instruments by adept nationalist elites (e.g., Nkrumah, Toure). This book's macroperspective of the colonial labor question is an important contribution. Cooper has provided not only a significant resource, with more than 175 pages of chapter notes and an extensive bibliography, but also a coherent context for more concentrated attention to individual labor questions. Recommended for Africana collections. Upper-division undergraduates and above. P. C. Naylor Marquette University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
