Outsourcing African Labor by Jeffrey Gunn

Outsourcing African Labor by Jeffrey Gunn

Author:Jeffrey Gunn [Gunn, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Africa, General, Modern, Social History
ISBN: 9783110680416
Google: Llw8EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2021-07-19T01:08:12+00:00


Chapter 6 Growth in Diaspora and Decline in the Homeland

For a greater part of the nineteenth century, the Kru homeland and diaspora were deeply influenced by the social, political, and economic forces enacted by the Liberian state.658 From its founding in 1822, the colony of Liberia excluded the Kru from citizenship. Thereafter, the Kru had to contend with the interests of the American Colonization Society in order to continue their labor migration with the British. The capital, Monrovia, became the unique site of two Kru diaspora communities that were linked with the British trade network and European factories, yet founded independently. Surfboats remained at the center of Kru activity in Monrovia as they transported people and commodities ship and shoreside and continued to obtain contracts for service on ships sailing the coast.

As the ACS established colonies in the vicinity of the Kru Coast in the 1830s, a series of treaties were negotiated to maintain peace between their communities and the Kru amid mounting tensions. However, the establishment of the Liberian state in 1847 increased political tensions through state-sanctioned land acquisition and the implementation of Port of Entry Laws, which imposed a tax on Kru laborers. Liberian State measures fostered competition between the British and French, which compelled some Kru to accept an increase in French contracts in Grand Bassam in order to evade an oppressive regime of taxation.659 Legislation impeded the authority of the krogba and headmen, and by the 1870s led to a shift in the Kru economy towards increased palm oil production. Equally disruptive was the state strategy to support missions on the Kru Coast, which resulted in greater conversion rates to Christianity amongst the Kru. In response to all of these factors, Kru migration to their diaspora communities in ports in West Africa increased in the later decades of the nineteenth century.660



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.