Editor's note: Andrew Zimmerman teaches history at George Washington University and is the author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South.

PA:  The story of Booker T. Washington, the post Civil War South and the struggle of African Americans for education is a pretty well known story. What compelled you to place it in this global context, with Germany and Africa as part of the story?

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN:  There are two components to that. First of all, there is a kind of biographical component. I was trained as a German historian and was interested in German imperialism from my earlier work. Then I just sort of stumbled on this fascinating episode in the German sources. The Germans had hired Booker T. Washington to send one faculty member and some students to set up a cotton-growing school in Togo, and the Germans were incredibly excited by this, and this was surprising to me.

Then my thought was how can I go beyond this as just a mere curiosity. I mean it’s interesting, but is it more than interesting, and is it actually going to tell us something about imperialism, about race, about the Atlantic world, and about the United States? So that’s when I began to really trace this story outside of its German context, first into its U.S. context and then into its African context. I think it’s an interesting story; but beyond being an interesting story, it helps challenge what historians sometimes call American exceptionalism, the idea that there is something about America that makes it not just different from other nations, the way every nation is different from every other nation, but that it’s exceptional, exceptionally democratic or exceptionally open, or exceptional in that it’s not an imperialist power. I think a lot of historians cast doubt on that now and I am definitely one of them.

I began to understand the United States as part of the network of imperialism, and that the U.S. South and the kinds of racial oppression that existed there, not only during slavery but even more so after slavery, really were interlinked with forms of racial oppression and imperialism around the world and especially in Africa. I also got interested in African Americans as global actors. That’s something that a lot of historians are working on now, and for me – especially in the U.S. South in the 1890s and before and after the First World War – that a group so singled out for oppression is also acting globally is, I think, a surprising and important aspect. So I had an important story to tell.

And finally, thinking in terms of international labor history, I am telling a labor history that links together a lot of different kinds of workers who might seem to be separate. African American sharecropping cotton-growers were working with African farmers and workers, but this isn’t a story of, well, they’re both workers and both separate. They are actually part of a story that is connected, not just because they are similar but because there are real links between those two stories. Those are some of the things that really got me interested in pursuing this beyond just being a kind of interesting story to being really a meaningful story, I hope.  

PA:  You mention the role of African Americans as global actors. One of the parts of the story I think you do so well to tell is about how their aspirations for freedom, for education, and for landownership propelled or shaped this narrative you write about in the book. Could you talk about that a little?

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN:  One of my fundamental approaches – and it’s something that I don’t want to approach dogmatically – but I always think that to understand situations of extreme oppression, we have to start with the desires and activities of the people who end up being oppressed. Oppression works by power seizing hold of either the spontaneous or organized efforts of the people they are seeking to oppress and exploit.

For African Americans, both in slavery and in freedom, the two primary and almost spontaneous demands and efforts were for education and for independent landownership, and these are both fundamentally means, good and quick means, of achieving political and economic freedom and autonomy. In education, it’s primarily about literacy. Precisely because so many African Americans tried to achieve it, literacy was something white elites in slave-holding times and afterward sought to deny.

What literacy meant was a kind of personal autonomy, what we call maybe self-cultivation or reading, whether it was the Bible or literature or the newspaper. That allowed a lot of people to participate in a world beyond their immediate surroundings and maybe achieve directly political action, but it also was about just self-cultivation and personal interests. Literacy, especially after slavery, also allowed African Americans to read, for example, the contracts they were often forced to sign, and at least, while the power was very much against them, to take some action, to at least be able to negotiate somewhat. In slavery times, literacy even allowed some African Americans to forge passes that allowed travel without being harassed by slave patrols. So literacy led to a lot of directly practical forms of resistance and also cultural forms of resistance – just allowing people to enjoy life more than the white elites were allowing them to, away from those kinds of oppression.  

Landownership – typically small-hold farming – was the most immediate way to gain economic autonomy. These were people who had a lot of agricultural skills, who had been in the U.S., often farming and working as farm laborers, for generations, and owning a small piece of land would allow individuals and families to control their own labor. They could grow subsistence crops to feed themselves and crops for the market if they wanted to earn cash, and ideally it would be a kind of a mixed cultivation of both that would allow people to control their own labor in the most direct and immediate sense.

These were really spontaneous demands, and these were demands I also saw in West Africa and in Russia after the end of serfdom. You really see it globally. It is very immediate and maybe it’s almost kind of universal, the human demand for political and economic autonomy and self-control. But what we see the white elites after slavery doing is first attempting to just force African Americans into continuing the kinds of labor that existed under slavery but with a wage contract, and then gradually seizing on these aspirations and subverting them, partly because they have no choice: they simply cannot treat people as they want.

So these demands for literacy got channeled into what was called industrial education, which wasn’t vocational training, but really a kind of education to impart into African Americans what were seen to be the virtues of subordination and a willingness to do hard and poorly paid work for others, rather than work for themselves, just being channeled into sharecropping.

Initially the planters, that is, the plantation owners, had wanted African Americans to work in a gang system as much as possible like in slavery times, but African Americans simply refused to do this in large enough numbers, so the solution that they came up with was this sharecropping solution, in which African Americans were rented land in exchange for a share of the crop. That was a kind of standard arrangement. In the case of the South, the sharecropping contracts had a lot of stipulations that didn’t allow African Americans to be free, primarily by forcing them to grow only cotton. Then there was also an enormous amount of violence by the state, by the Klan, and simply informal violence by groups of managers and other white elites. So that desire for landownership was also subverted. It’s interesting that the forms of power ultimately have to mimic the forms of resistance, and I think that shows how resistance even in the most grim situations does have some effect.

PA:  You allude to the need to impose industrial education, and a major figure in this, as we know, was Booker T. Washington. Given your particular perspective and your approach to this story, how do you assess the contradictory and controversial career of Washington?

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN:  He is really fascinating, and I think one thing I noticed is that people from the beginning saw Booker T. Washington, even those who were his critics, as a contradictory figure. There were many people, including West Africans, who were observing industrial education from afar and were often critical of industrial education of the kind that Booker T. Washington was promoting, seeing it as a way to limit possibilities for Black achievement.

At the same time, everybody, and I would include myself here, is sort of astonished at someone like Booker T. Washington, who was born in slavery with nothing and had no special advantages, and simply by the force of his own ambition and organization and creativity became this major African American leader and an internationally-recognized leader by the time he was 40. And everybody was impressed by that, and there is often a contradiction there, where people would say, you know, he made so much of his life through literacy, through white collar work, through political organization, and yet he did that partly by promising to deny other African Americans those kinds of achievements. So he is already a kind of contradictory figure just in his own biography. You can admire him for his own achievement, and yet also criticize him for helping to deny other people those very achievements. Now one of things I discovered, I think, that is new about Booker T. Washington is the importance of European imperialism, and particularly German imperialism, in making him (if we want to see him as a conservative figure, which I think is right) the conservative figure he later became.

Booker T. Washington was a student of Samuel Chapman Armstrong who was a white educator and the founder of Hampton Institute. Initially Booker T. Washington was supported by Samuel Armstrong and by Hampton to found a new institute like Hampton in Tuskegee, Alabama –Tuskegee Institute. This was in 1881. In 1895, Booker T. Washington gave this famous speech in Atlanta – Du Bois later called it the Atlanta Compromise speech, in Washington described Blacks and whites as separate as the fingers in all things social, but as one hand in all things related to economic progress – I am more or less paraphrasing here. With this speech he became a nationally and internationally famous African American leader and achieved a significant amount of autonomy from Hampton Institute and from white elites in the South. He got a lot of philanthropic donations from people like Carnegie in the North, who certainly had an interest in keeping Black workers productive for a kind of ultimately authoritarian capitalist system, but it nonetheless gave Booker T. Washington a certain degree of autonomy for action.

What I found that he did between 1895 when he made this speech and 1900 when he began working with the German imperialists, was to develop a Tuskegee that is very different from the Tuskegee that we know about today. In that period, he hired George Washington Carver, the famous African American agricultural scientist, who is remembered today I think primarily as a figure who is associated with the  conservative Tuskegee model that we have today, but at the time was really trying to, I would say, revolutionize Black agriculture. He was trying to come up with new kinds of crops, or trying to come up with ways for African Americans to grow crops that would get them out of the cycle of dependent cotton-growing, and allow them to grow things like peanuts and sweet potatoes that African Americans could consume themselves or sell on the market, so that they could achieve a kind of economic autonomy, even on their own sharecropping plots, that they were denied under the system of compulsory cotton cultivation.

Now Washington, I think, realized that one of the main reasons African Americans weren’t growing things like peanuts, yams and other crops for economic autonomy but were growing cotton for white planters, was not simply because they didn’t know how to grow peanuts or yams well, but because they weren’t allowed to grow peanuts and yams well. There needed to be political transformation as well as agricultural transformation.

It was at this time Booker T. Washington began working to hire someone he thought of as his enemy later, W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois at this time was a young sociologist just back from graduate education in Germany and at Harvard, and Washington wanted to hire Du Bois as a kind of sociological expert, parallel to Carver. Du Bois was to publish pamphlets not just for Tuskegee students but for Black farmers generally, and the hope I believe was to really transform the South insofar as it was possible. I don’t think Washington or Du Bois at this time were particularly revolutionary, but they did want to introduce political and economic transformations. So it is a very different Tuskegee that might have developed at this point.

In 1900, Washington and Du Bois, and many others, got involved in planning the first Pan-African Conference in London. This is the conference where Du Bois said: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Booker T. Washington was very involved in its planning and encouraged people to go, but the summer that Du Bois and so many others went to London, Washington was contacted by the German imperialists, asking him to help set up this cotton school in Togo in West Africa.

And through Washington’s imperial engagements, through his work with the German imperialists, Booker T. Washington began to think about the situation of African Americans differently, and the situation of the African diaspora in very different terms, than the pan-Africanism that Du Bois and others were developing in London. He began to think of African Americans as almost a colonial leader, maybe a colonial intermediary between white colonial powers and African colonial subjects, and took a very different trajectory than the one he had been developing between 1895 and 1900. 

Most of the texts by which we know Booker T. Washington come from after this period when he works with German colonialism. His famous autobiography Up From Slavery was published in 1901. That’s after he took the imperial turn and began working with the Germans, and so he really rewrote, I think, a lot of his aspirations from that period and before in light of his later imperial engagements. We also know Washington from Du Bois’s famous critique of him in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, and that is also, again, a text from after the Du Bois and Washington split, and after Du Bois began developing a very strong critique of imperialism and  Washington began developing a really strong collaboration with imperialism.

In a lot of ways this 5-year window is erased in Washington, when Washington and Du Bois might have worked together to create a very different Tuskegee and ideally a very different American South than developed in the period of the 1890s and afterward. So the legacy I found is even more ambivalent – and more possibly progressive in the period from 1895 to 1900 – than I think many people know about Washington, and then that legacy becomes even more entangled with white oppression both at home and abroad in the period after 1900, especially abroad, than people often know.

PA:  What was driving German interests to link up with Booker T. Washington and African American educators?

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN:  It was a couple of things. One is that German social scientists were more involved with the German state than social scientists in other countries. That was something the German state was especially interested in, social scientific expertise. The German social scientists had been interested in the American South as a model for the control of free labor all throughout the 19th century.

One thing that is important to remember is that the end of slavery in the United States and elsewhere in the New World was one of the great phenomena of free labor in the 19th century. But the eastern parts of Germany, particularly the eastern parts of the Kingdom of Prussia, which was part of Germany, also saw bonded labor as serfdom, and Russia saw serfdom ended in 1861.

So there was really this wave of emancipations, and Germany saw the U.S. South after emancipation already as a model for controlling free labor. They saw in segregation, in sharecropping, and in disfranchisement a kind of model. But when Germany began seizing colonies in Africa in the 1880s they looked to the US South even more as a model, because they not only saw it as a way to control free labor, they also saw it as a way to control Black labor. So Germany was already interested in the U.S. South.

They saw Booker T. Washington as somebody who promoted an image of the U.S. South as a productive model of Black labor, as especially productive and potentially subordinated labor. Germany really saw the US South, and was already kind of predisposed to admire the U.S. South, as a place of labor control and labor coercion, and when it seized its African colonies it began to see the US South as a model for the control of Black labor. Germany, like a lot of colonial powers, practiced a kind of oppressive pan-Africanism, where they saw Blacks in the United States and Blacks in Africa as connected not as people who were seeking common kinds of emancipation and liberation, but rather as people who could be oppressed in similar ways.

The German Embassy in Washington, DC sent an agricultural expert to tour around the South and observe Black labor and finally to contact Booker T. Washington as an expert in training and controlling Black labor for particular kinds of subordination. As I said before, I think this was partly a misunderstanding of what Washington wanted, but it gave Washington a lot of credibility among these colonialist elites. I know that white elites in the German colonies, including in Togo, thought that African Americans from Tuskegee would have a special understanding of Africans because of what they saw as the racial similarity between African Americans and Africans. They were very enthusiastic about the Tuskegee educators, but the German colonialists also worried that if they brought over too many African Americans as educators, they also might bring over African American resistance to white oppression, and they didn’t want that. There was a particular kind of model of African Americans that they saw in Tuskegee that they were interested in.

PA:  You argue in the book that one of the things that German colonial policy aimed to do in Togo, in terms of controlling African labor, work habits and discipline – all of those things – was to try to transform families and gender relationships. How did that work? What were they trying to accomplish there, and how did Togolese families and the workers and farmers there resist those kinds of actions?

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN:  That was something that was really interesting for me to learn, because it has always been kind of axiomatic to me that oppression of race, class and gender are always interlinked and inseparable from each other. But to really see how it worked so well in this particular episode was really illuminating for me. The Togolese, and particularly the Ewe of southern Togo, where German colonialism did most of its cotton experiments and the Tuskegee expedition worked, had a gender and household division of labor that imperialist elites recognized as a challenge to imperial political and economic control, and that also, maybe for that reason, seemed to be generally immoral.

The way southern Togolese households were set up, several women would share a single husband, so that while women were expected to do work in the household of their husband, there were multiple wives, and they had significant free time for their own economic activities. Each of the wives lived in her own household with her own fields separate from her husband’s household and her husband’s fields. Each of the wives had their own children in their household, and could produce their own crops and had their own independent economic activities.

Economic activities in each of these separate households, whether they were female-headed or male-headed were very diverse and included, for example, manufacturing pottery, crafts and spinning, or, in male households, weaving. These households were interlinked by trade and by gifts, with each other and with the husband’s household, and also with other households throughout the region, so that you had, women and men who were independent of each other and relatively economically independent.

I don’t want to make this seem like some kind of idealized African, pre-capitalist utopia. There were still significant class differences in southern Togo at this time. Slavery existed – household slavery – but nothing like the plantation slavery of the U.S. Nonetheless, household slavery did exist and there were a whole series of oppressions that existed, so I don’t want to present an idealized Togolese society, but nevertheless it was one that afforded a lot of its members a lot of economic autonomy and a lot of political autonomy.

One of the ways that capitalist agriculture, for sure, but also all forms of capitalist production, worked in the United States and in Europe, and they wanted to work in Togo, was through a patriarchal household in which a husband controls the labor and the property of his wife and children, so that you get a kind of articulation between capitalist forms of production and  household forms of production, in which the labor of the wife and children is extracted by the patriarchal head of household and then generally not compensated, or at least not compensated in cash.

This kind of household farming was something that you see developing all over Europe and in the United States, and you can even see these patriarchal households working similar ways in cities among urban workers, with the unpaid labor of women and the unpaid labor of children as very much part of it. In Togo, this didn’t happen because women had a great deal of economic autonomy, so patriarchal husbands couldn’t be used as sort of sub-agents of colonial government and colonial capitalism.

Now, particularly what the Tuskegee expedition to Togo was helping the German state with its number one colonial priority, which was to produce cotton as a raw material in Africa for industrial spinning in Germany specifically and in Europe more broadly. Here also the household form of production you saw in Togo, with  independent women’s households, presented an obstacle. The Togolese already grew cotton and spun cotton and wove their own cotton, and in fact produced excellent cotton cloth, much better than European cotton cloth, in West Africa.

A nice illustration of the superiority of Togolese cloth to European cloth at this time was that when Germans traveled in West Africa, they traveled like African elites, and the way elites traveled was in hammocks carried by people. There weren’t a lot of draft animals there or horses to ride on, so they were carried in hammocks. But the Germans, when they traveled in hammocks, would only travel in hammocks made of African cloth, because hammocks made of European cloth tended to rip open because the cloth was so shoddy and people would fall off onto the ground. So even Germans recognized that Africans produced better cloth, but the Germans didn’t want African-produced cloth, they wanted raw materials for European industry.

The way textiles were produced in Togo at this time – and this is kind of a comment on a lot of areas in this part of West Africa – is that there was a gender division of labor, where women in their own fields grew the cotton and picked the cotton, not in large quantities, not as an industrial product, not as a monoculture, but grew it for their own use. They spun the cotton by hand and dyed their own cotton, and then they would either sell it or trade it with male weavers. Most of the weavers were male and they wove this yarn into cloth. For the imperialists this was a problem for a number of reasons.

At the most obvious level, it was that the Germans didn’t want the Togolese to spin their own cotton. They wanted the cotton to be a raw material for European industry, so they wanted to get the cotton directly from the Togolese before they spun it, before they processed it. They also wanted to end male weaving and expand the amount of cotton production. They didn’t want the Togolese to grow just enough cotton for their own needs, or for their own needs plus some local commerce, they wanted to grow it in the massive quantities needed for European production.

The Germans thought that by imposing patriarchal households on the Togolese, they could make men grow cotton first of all and make the labor of the entire household work towards growing cotton in larger quantities than had been grown before, growing this cotton not for local processing but for export abroad. They hoped to leverage patriarchal authority to make it assist their own processes, which, really, were the de-industrialization of West Africa and the transformation of it from a kind of mixed craft-agricultural economy into an economy producing cotton for the world market.

A related thing is that this idea of a patriarchal male household with a dominant man, one subordinate wife, and subordinate children seemed moral to both Europeans and Americans, very much the way we hear the right talking about family values today. And what we see is that this morality – this so-called morality – is very much in the service of political oppression and in turn in the service of economic control, and it’s really also ultimately in the service of ending a lot of individual freedom for women and for children, as well as for men, too. So this was the system that the Germans wanted to impose and the Tuskegee Institute personnel also wanted to impose. It seemed to them like an improvement in morality to have patriarchal households producing cotton for the world market.

Let's talk now about resistance and how that worked. So this utopia, what they saw as a kind of patriarchal utopia, was something the Tuskegee personnel and the German colonial state would have liked to impose, but it’s not something that the colonial state or the Tuskegee educators could impose.

The colonial state is very different from the way we conceive of the modern state, where we think of a relatively bureaucratic state that has control over most of the region inside its borders. For example, think of the United States today, where the state is kind of ever-present; it rules through law and there is, of course, police power, but it’s not constantly exercised; it’s exercised to keep people obedient to the law. The colonial state had very few numbers of people. It was a very small number of German authorities with African soldiers and African police officers who collaborated with them, but still a relatively small number of them, ruling over a much, much larger African population and over a territory they had very little control over.

The way the colonial state worked in Togo, and I think probably in most places, was that it could exercise much greater violence than states in Europe or America could legitimately, or did at least, but it could exercise this violence only in very small areas. If we imagine the modern state in Europe, the United States and elsewhere as a kind of level of broad control, but not particularly, or at least not overtly, violent control, here there is an area where there is very spotty control but extremely violent control.

These were the places where the colonial state could exercise power, this kind of intense violence that included killing and whipping and threats of killing and whipping. It was violence that was legal in the colonial legal system but certainly would have stretched the norms of legality in Europe or in the United States.

There were a few places where this violent control was exercised. One was the cotton school that was set up by the Tuskegee educators in Togo, where about 30-40 students a year were forced to attend. They were just simply taken from their home districts, young men from each district in Togo, and they were forced to attend the school for three years. It was supposedly to learn to grow cotton, but what it really was was to learn to grow cotton for export to the world market. That was one place. Another was the district station. Togo, like most colonies, was divided up into a number of districts. Each district had a station with a German district officer, a number of police officers, and possibly a contingent of soldiers. In the immediate area around the district, the district officer could exercise a lot of coercion. The graduates of this cotton school were forced to settle near their home districts, where they were forced to continue to grow cotton.

The colonial state also exercised a great deal of control over the regional markets where cotton and cotton seed were sold and distributed. This is how they could control the cotton-growing even of people who weren’t cotton school graduates, people who weren’t growing cotton under supervision, because they could control the periodic markets where cotton seed and raw cotton were sold and distributed.

Then finally a fourth area where the colonial state could exercise power was over the agricultural fields. District officials could inspect the fields even once a month and still exercise coercion that way, because people can’t hide their fields – they’re immobile. These were the sites of coercion and the means of coercion – incredible violence but also very localized violence.

And there were a number of ways the Togolese could resist. The most obvious way and the most common way was through simply escaping. The Germans couldn’t control the entire region, so it was possible to escape either within Togo, simply to go into hiding, or to escape across the border to the Gold Coast, which is today Ghana. Based on my analysis of the number of people entering the cotton school and the number of people who ended up being forced to grow cotton under the supervision of individual district officials, I think about 50 percent of the cotton school actually escaped, which is an enormous number, but it’s still an enormous number that ended up coerced that way.

The Germans also forced people who weren’t cotton school graduates to grow cotton for the export market, both by forcing people to take cotton seeds in the periodic markets and then supervising the fields. One of the ways people resisted this kind of forced cotton growing was simply to let the cotton die, they would explain accidentally – they didn’t mean to let the cotton die but it did. Because the Togolese planted multiple crops in the same fields, if the cotton died off other crops, like corn, which was more profitable than cotton and also could be consumed by the Togolese themselves, would grow to take over the fields. And the district officials would constantly explain how these incompetent Togolese farmers were letting their cotton die off, and in fact what makes sense to me is that they weren’t incompetent at all; they were quite competent, but they recognized that cotton was a bad deal and letting it die was a wise agricultural decision and one many made. This also subjected them to punishment. Even though they were seen as doing it out of incompetence and laziness, rather than out of maliciousness, they were still punished, and this could include even being physically beaten. Nonetheless it was a strategic decision that people made.

There were at least two limits to this kind of resistance. One thing we have to acknowledge is how heroic this was, and how people really took a lot of risks – the risk of being killed or being lashed – to do these kinds of resistance. But this kind of resistance could only be individual resistance, and oftentimes this kind of resistance was used by the state to bring about further coercion, so in a sense a little bit of resistance allows for the state to ratchet up the coercion. That’s just a factor that people had to deal with, because they couldn't see any other way out of it. But since the resistance was individual mostly rather than collective, there really wasn’t an organized means for the Togolese cotton farmers or the Togolese systematically to resist the colonial state.

One interesting beginning of this resistance was in neighboring Gold Coast, present-day Ghana. They did have a relatively free, African-run press, and sometimes Togolese would escape from German Togo, flee to the Gold Coast, and then publish in English (because the Gold Coast press was an English-language press) exposés of German abuses in Togo and in this way at least expose to the world – to all of West Africa who could read the press and also to the world abroad who would also see this press, what the Germans were doing, and, if not organize collective resistance, at least organize some international condemnation of what was happening. But the resistance was limited, really, by the impossibility of organizing collectively inside of Togo.

PA:  Colonial governments, especially in Europe, often fought over their colonies, killing millions and millions of Europeans in the process. So you have these bloody conflicts. But, as you describe, there is a kind of unifying principle around white supremacy. Why this contradiction?

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN:  That’s a good question. Both European imperialism abroad and imperialism inside of Europe – these kinds of colonial rivalries, as well as other rivalries, led to what at that time was the bloodiest war in history, in which, as you say, millions and millions died. That was an exception, though. In a sense, you could say that that kind of colonial violence came home in the First World War, but before 1914, while there was certainly inter-colonial rivalry, it was very much different from the warfare that Europeans carried out against the people they were colonizing. Racism was absolutely central to the European treatment of the people they colonized.

The other side of the oppression of people of color is that whites treat each other better than people of color, and there is a kind of, white solidarity you could call it, here. One of the things that illustrates to me so clearly the nature of this white solidarity among white imperialists against people of color is that there were conventions in the late 19th century that were signed about rules of war, and these rules of war applied only to war among European powers but not to colonial warfare, warfare by colonial powers against uprisings by their colonial subjects. Even the kinds of bullets! When white people had wars with each other, they used different bullets than the ones they used when when they had wars with their colonial subjects. White people in the European powers outlawed dum-dum bullets, that is, expanding bullets, bullets that produced much more horrible injuries in the people they struck, when they fought wars against each other, but when they fought wars in the colonies, they used these hollow-point bullets, these dum-dum bullets, against their colonial subjects. In fact, the bullets were called dum-dum bullets because they were made in an arsenal near Calcutta in British India called the Dum Dum Arsenal. That’s why they are called dum-dum bullets; they're colonial bullets.

So, while white people did fight against each other – the European powers, and sometimes over colonies, there was a basic white solidarity against people of color in Africa, the Pacific, and South Asia and East Asia, in which they fought more viciously against the people of color they sought to colonize than they did against each other. In the First World War that changes, and it becomes the most bloody war in history at that time, but that’s something that was new at that time.

One thing I would also add, though, to make it more complicated, is that it’s not all white people against all people of color. There is also very important political resistance inside of Europe against colonialism. Some of the kinds of anti-colonialism that people often point to inside of Europe isn’t really anti-colonialism. There were liberal opponents of colonialism like E.D. Morel, who was the founder of the Congo Reform Association and denounced abuses by the Belgians in the Congo, which was perhaps the most brutal colonialism at that time, and there were often Christian missionaries who criticized colonial abuses.

But what these groups typically did was to call for an improved, more humane colonialism. For example, they would say that the Belgians were terrible and brutal, but it was often also said at the time that the Germans in Togo were better because they were working with the Tuskegee educators and they were improving people. There were often criticisms of abuse, but this was typically a criticism of colonial abuse and a call for a better, more humane colonialism. The basic assumption of a European civilizing mission, a European right, or even, they way they saw it, a European obligation to rule Africa and elsewhere around the world, they didn’t criticize. In fact, they supported it; they just wanted it to be better.

But there was very strong resistance to colonialism by social democratic parties in Europe, both the German Social Democratic Party and other social democratic parties throughout Europe. Some individuals in the social democratic parties did call for this kind of better, improved colonialism, a kind of socialist colonialism, but the  majority of the Social Democratic International, the Second International, rejected the idea of an improved colonialism and said there was no such thing as a socialist colonialism or a benign colonialism. Karl Kautsky wrote a wonderful analysis of colonialism called Socialism and Colonial Policy in 1907, in which he said that colonialism and socialism are a contradiction, and that no socialist can support any kind of colonialism, or even think of a benign colonialism, without also supporting the oppression of workers inside Europe. So it wasn’t simply all white people against all people of color. It was the European imperialists, from people who were self-critical imperialists to people who were gung-ho imperialists, but they were resisted especially by the social democratic parties in Europe.

PA:  Your book winds up with the internal debates in the Communist International in the 1920s about global agricultural issues and colonialism and national liberation. How does the story get to that point?

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN:  As I was writing the book, I didn't want it to be only a story about gloom and horror, because I don’t believe that history is ultimately about gloom and horror and inevitable oppression. I think it is ultimately a story about striving for freedom and about resistance to gloom and horror and oppression. But the period I was writing about, the period before 1914, was a period in which people in Togo and African American farmers and many others in the American South really resisted heroically, but didn’t have a lot of success in resisting and didn’t have a strongly organized resistance.

But I wanted to end on a more hopeful note, on a time when people really began to resist and think about how to resist, so I end the story on the period right after the October Revolution when people began to think about how they could organize anti-colonial resistance and connect it with struggles against capitalism inside of Europe. This very much continues the position of Karl Kautsky and others inside the Social Democratic in Germany, but it is much more powerful and much bigger, and much better linked up with anti-colonial resistance inside of Africa and resistance to racism inside the United States.

I think that what the Comintern was able to do was to take the kind of critiques of colonialism that Karl Kautsky and other social democrats were beginning to make and really begin to intensify them and develop them further. One thing that people like Kautsky did was to reject racism, without recognizing how important racism was in the reproduction of forms of agricultural capitalism in the United States and colonialism in Africa. They recognized it as racist, but they thought it was only about capitalism. It was focused on capitalism. But I think that the Third International, the Comintern, by working with African Americans and people from the colonies, began to develop a more comprehensive critique, not just of capitalism, but of capitalism, imperialism and racism as interlinked.

Imperialists and white elites in the United States had long recognized how useful race was as a way of controlling and oppressing workers in the US, in Africa, and elsewhere around the world, and in a sense the Comintern recognized this too and then turned it around. The Comintern, and also African Americans in the Comintern, began to develop a kind of a counter to the Tuskegee ideology, in a sense a theory of racial uplift in the South and around the world that wasn’t uplift through industrial education in the way Booker T. Washington liked to put it, starting at the bottom and working hard for white bosses in order to kind of get ahead slowly, but to really challenge the whole system of racial oppression and capitalism in the South and around the world.

Harry Haywood in his book Black Bolshevik writes about how his father had been a strong proponent of Booker T. Washington – they even had a picture of Washington in their house, but I think a lot of African Americans in the South  saw Tuskegee really as the only option for improving their lot in life. Haywood rejected that and said, no, we have to have something much more revolutionary, much less accommodationist.

The most famous person who made this transition from working with Tuskegee to criticizing Tuskegee, to using Marxist concepts, to finally joining the Communist Party, was W.E.B Du Bois, who really, throughout his long life, kind of goes through the entire story and ultimately takes on a revolutionary anti-colonialist position, when in the 1890s he was, somewhat reluctantly perhaps, but nonetheless working with Tuskegee.

So we really see a radical transformation by working with the Comintern. A lot of people who were never in the Party nonetheless used the concepts not just of Marxism, but the kinds of anti-imperialist and anti-racist analysis that people in the Third International, in the Comintern, developed, to develop critiques of racism in the US and elsewhere that were also very powerful criticisms, even they weren’t directly connected to the Party. Originally, I didn’t stop there, I stopped just before there, but I wanted to make this a story not about just gloom and horror, which it is, but not only a story about gloom and horror; it's also about resistance and about a struggle for freedom.

In fact, the project I’m working on now doesn’t go forward in time, it goes back in time. I am writing an internationalist history of the American Civil War and looking at links between Black freedom struggles in the US and in the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the African diaspora against slavery, and the connection of that with socialist and communist exiles from the European revolutions of 1848, to try to tell a story of the Civil War that is also a story about the interlinked struggles of freedom of labor, both slave labor and wage labor, and struggles against racism in an internationalist context.