Zimmerman, Andrew. Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Summary
In 1901, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, sent an expedition to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, with the purpose of transforming the region into a cotton economy similar to that of the post-Reconstruction American South. German colonial authorities saw in Washington’s model a means to train former slaves into “subordinate and productive black labor in its own African colonies.” This project thus brought together German social science, African cash cropping, and the racial political economy of the New South; each transformed the other and the world in the process and transplanted to Africa the oppressive labor regime of the New South that sought to control and subjugate newly emancipated “Negro” workers. Zimmerman reconstructs the social science of the global South formulated by such thinkers as Max Weber and W.E.B. Du Bois, and reveals how their theories defined contemporary race, class, and culture. Race replaced “slave” and “serf” and was used to justify the exploitation of labor. The transition of precolonial coastal trade to European capitalist control of African agricultural brought with it a new racial classification: Africans became “Negroes,” with the help of the Tuskegee Institute and the patriarchal small farmer was the model for maintaining economic control over labor. *All of this supported by social science research (Park, Dubois, Weber, etc. using the American South as a model of “development”, a transatlantic social science). Sexuality was also tied to this racial classification and helped consolidate capitalism and Zimmerman argues that “Colonial authorities sought to replace the individual autonomy of the Togolese extended household with the personal and sexual constraint of a patriarchal family farm.” He looks at the forms of resistance pioneered by African American freedpeople, Polish migrant laborers, African cotton cultivators, and other groups exploited by, but never passive victims of, the growing colonial political economy.

See also: David Elkbadh