Abstract
Located at the heart of Senegal’s old peanut basin, the small province of Siin was long regarded by French administrators as an ideal terrain for the advancement of colonial commercial interests. With its sophisticated agriculture and “peaceful” peasant population, Siin would supply cheap cash crops for international markets while receiving metropolitan products in return. To convert local peasants to commodity farming, however, required the deployment of colonial technologies promoting new ideas of property, social relations, and moral economies. The material world was a key theater in the fashioning of colonial subjects, as taxation, commodification, and monetization labored to bring local villagers within the fold of the market. At the same time, colonial projects were mediated by local institutions and cultural imaginations, revealing, beneath legal codifications and customary relations, the negotiated, tense character of colonial empire building. Written and archaeological archives afford an initial look at the emergence of cultural experiences in Siin among local institutions, market forces, and colonial governance and the materialities framing these encounters.
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- 1.
As examined elsewhere (Richard n.d.), this decentering move can be applied within imperial formations as well. For instance, the presence of different artifactual assemblages and archaeological patterns in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century French occupations in Louisiana, Guadeloupe, and Gorée speak to the possibility that different configurations of subjectivity, sociality, and placemaking were in existence in various parts of the French imperial world.
- 2.
Some of these family resemblances can be traced to very concrete historical processes of knowledge diffusion and construction. In effect, as shown in Stoler et al. (2007), social planners often looked “beyond the nation” to other colonial empires for inspiration regarding effective technologies of rule, development programs, and blueprints of population management (also Morgan 2009).
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Similar arguments have been extended to the use of “colonial governmentality” or “colonial modernity” declined in the singular, which both paper over the precise operations and mechanism involved in the construction of different ways of being and feeling in colonial settings (Cooper 2005).
- 4.
In this optic, I should indicate that when, in the course of the case study, I occasionally reference “colony” or “colonial state” in the singular, those abbreviations refer to the specific context of French Senegal – which does not mean that they cannot speak to a broader set of colonial dynamics.
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Certainly, the recent and sophisticated forays spearheaded by literary studies scholars associated with the journal Critical Inquiry into the analysis of materiality underscore the capacity of textual interpretation to enhance our understanding of the relationships binding people and things (e.g., Brown 2004a, b).
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- 8.
This lends some support to contemporary writings that lamented the prodigious consumption of alcohol in the region and debilitating effects of chronic drunkenness on Serer populations (Bérenger-Féraud 1879: 18–20, 279; Corre 1876–77: 598–599; Guy 1908: 305; Pinet-Laprade 1865: 154), as well as the darker repercussions of “civilization” (Carlus 1880: 105, 411). While these testimonies contain a probable amount of strategic distortion and ethnic defamation on the part of European observers, their consistency across colonial correspondence suggests a measure of historical truth, underwriting the central role of alcohol in processes of colonization (see Richard 2007: 166, 212–213, 215; also Dietler 2006). Archaeological and documentary evidence, however, also indicates some differences in alcohol and glass use/consumption across the Siin during the colonial period (Debien 1964: 549; Richard 2010).
- 9.
Expansion in the volume of cash crop exports offers telling evidence of peanuts’ increasing role in Siin’s economy. The amount of peanuts exported from the region rose from 8,000 tons in 1884 to 40,000 tons in 1909, and then more than doubled by 1914 to reach 100,000 tons. Cash crop exports reached a high plateau in the 1930s at an average of 250,000 tons a year, thereby making Siin-Saalum the premiere economic region in French West Africa (Klein 1979: 77–79; Mbodj 1978: 542–543).
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Richard, F.G. (2011). “In [Them] We Will Find Very Desirable Tributaries for Our Commerce”: Cash Crops, Commodities, and Subjectivities in Siin (Senegal) During the Colonial Era. In: Croucher, S., Weiss, L. (eds) The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0192-6_9
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