Cotton and Race across the Atlantic: Britain, Africa, and America, 1900–1920

What makes the BCGA distinct from other "cotton colonialism" initiatives, and part of what makes Robins's study so compelling, is that rather than state-sponsored coercion, the BCGA, unaffiliated with the British government, adopted a "semiphilanthropic" approach that relied on private industry to offer economic uplift for Africans by providing market incentives for cultivation (5, 6). Once on the continent, environmental, economic, and cultural factors stymied the efforts of the Association, which by the onset of the First World War began relying increasingly on the British government to compel Africans to plant and harvest the crop. Though historians of race may take exception to the author's insistence that it was cotton's association with poverty rather than ideas about the relationship between skin color, physiology, and labor that caused fleece magnates to shift their gaze toward Africa, this work, both in its content and approach, is a welcome addition to the rapidly developing literature on the global cotton economy.