6. Colonial Governance Models, Economic Extraction, and Forced Labor

Course header image for Jorge Majfud's Africa history course — academic copyright notice

The content published on this webpage is protected by copyright. It may be used for academic, educational, and research purposes, provided that the original source is properly acknowledged and cited. Any reproduction, distribution, modification, or commercial use of the material without prior authorization is prohibited. Users are responsible for ensuring that any use of this content complies with applicable copyright laws and academic integrity standards. ISBN: 978-1-956760-65-1.

“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is not, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.

British indirect rule vs. French assimilation vs. settler colonialism
Congo Free State, mining economies, plantations, infrastructure for export

What was the main characteristic of the British system of indirect rule in Africa?
Which of the following best describes the French policy of assimilation in Africa?
Why was settler colonialism different from other forms of European colonial rule in Africa?
What was one major consequence of economic extraction in colonial Africa?
What was the significance of the pieds-noirs in French Algeria?

Table of Contents

Mechanisms of oppressions

When the major European powers gathered at the Berlin Conference in 1885, they set in motion a scramble that would reshape the African continent for generations. Although the resulting colonial systems varied widely in their methods, they shared a common set of underlying goals.

At the heart of every colonial project lay the pursuit of political control —the subjugation of African territories and their populations under European administration. This control was never an end in itself, though; it existed primarily to serve economic extraction, as colonial powers systematically drew out natural resources and labor to fuel their own industrial economies. In doing so, they folded African economies into a global capitalist system, one structured to benefit Europe and, increasingly, the United States, while leaving African nations in a position of dependency.

Beyond the political and economic dimensions, colonialism also pursued a deeper transformation of African societies themselves. Through the imposition of European legal codes, education systems, religious institutions, and propaganda, colonizers sought to reshape African social and cultural life according to their own values — often reinforcing rigid racial hierarchies in the process.

Though the specific tools differed from one colonial power to another — whether through direct rule, indirect rule, or various hybrid systems — the outcomes across the continent were strikingly similar: African societies lost their sovereignty, were stripped of ancestral lands, endured entrenched racial inequality, suffered under exploitative labor systems, and were left economically dependent on their former colonizers, a legacy whose effects continued long after formal colonial rule ended.

European colonization and control can be summarized in five objectives:

Political control over African territories and populations.
Economic extraction of natural resources and labor.
Integration of African economies into global capitalist networks dominated by Europe and the USA.
Social and cultural transformation through European legal systems, education, religion, propaganda, and racial hierarchies.
These systems differed in methods but produced similar outcomes: loss of sovereignty, land alienation, racial inequality, labor exploitation, and economic dependency.

British Indirect Rule

Sepoys

The sepoy system emerged in the 18th century as European trading companies —first the French, then more extensively the British East India Company— began recruiting local Indian men into disciplined, European-style infantry and cavalry units. This allowed colonial powers to maintain large military forces in India without having to ship in costly numbers of European troops. Sepoys were trained, drilled, and armed in the European manner, but typically commanded by British officers, and organized into regiments that became the backbone of the East India Company’s military power across the subcontinent.

Sepoys played a central role in Britain’s territorial expansion in India through the 18th and 19th centuries, fighting in campaigns that extended Company control over vast regions. Their significance in history peaked dramatically in 1857, when widespread grievances —including religious and cultural insensitivities, unequal treatment compared to British soldiers, and specific triggers like the introduction of cartridges rumored to be greased with cow and pig fat (offensive to both Hindu and Muslim soldiers)— sparked the Sepoy Mutiny (also called the Indian Rebellion of 1857 or India’s First War of Independence). This uprising, though ultimately suppressed, marked a turning point that led to the British Crown formally dissolving the East India Company and assuming direct control over India in 1858.

Malcolm X

1. British indirect rule

Developed by Frederick Lugard, British indirect rule was built on a simple premise: govern through existing African authorities rather than replacing them outright. Local rulers —emirs, kings, chiefs— remained in place, continuing to collect taxes, administer courts, and manage daily governance, but always under the watchful supervision of British officials, who retained final say over major decisions.

The appeal of this system was largely practical. It required far fewer European administrators on the ground, making colonial rule significantly cheaper to run, while also reducing the likelihood of resistance —after all, communities were still nominally led by their own traditional figures. Existing elites often benefited too, gaining enhanced power and authority under British backing, even as their independence was quietly hollowed out.

But this arrangement came at a cost. Traditional systems of communal decision-making were eroded, replaced by a rigid hierarchy that served colonial interests. Rather than dismantling social stratification, indirect rule often reinforced it, entrenching the authority of chosen elites while stripping away the accountability and consensus that had once characterized local governance.

This model played out across several British territories: in Northern Nigeria, colonial administration ruled through the region’s emirs; in Uganda, the British governed via the Buganda Kingdom; and in the Gold Coast (Ghana), chiefs became the intermediaries between local communities and colonial authority.

2. French assimilation policy

France’s colonial approach diverged sharply from Britain’s, driven by an ideology that aimed not merely to govern African societies but to fundamentally reshape them in France’s own image. French colonial thinking held that colonized peoples could be culturally transformed through the spread of the French language, education, and political institutions and, unlike the British model of working through existing structures, France initially sought to replace indigenous political systems outright with French ones.

In Senegal, this ideology took shape through the Four Communes, urban areas granted special status where residents could theoretically become full French citizens —provided they spoke French, received a French education, accepted French law, and renounced certain traditional legal practices. The system produced a landmark moment in 1914, when Blaise Diagne became the first African elected to the French parliament. Yet in practice, assimilation remained tightly restricted: only a small African elite ever achieved citizenship, the vast majority remained colonial subjects, and the promise of political equality proved largely symbolic.

Algeria represented the most extreme expression of this assimilationist ideology. As a settler colony, it saw French imposed as the official language, French schools promoting French history and culture, Islamic institutions curtailed, and European legal systems supplanting indigenous ones. The result was a stark two-tiered society: French settlers enjoyed full political rights and access to land and institutions, while Muslim Algerians remained subject to colonial law with limited rights — and could only obtain citizenship by abandoning aspects of Islamic personal law. Far from creating equality, this system entrenched a rigid hierarchy.

Across French West Africa more broadly, France established schools to train a cadre of African administrators, teachers, clerks, interpreters, and colonial officials. While most Africans remained excluded from this education, the small Francophone elite it did produce would go on to play an unexpected role: figures like Léopold Sédar Senghor and Félix Houphouët-Boigny, educated within this very system, later emerged as leaders of the independence movements that would ultimately dismantle French colonial rule.

3. Settler colonialism

Settler colonialism represented a fundamentally different colonial model —one aimed not at administration alone, but at permanent European occupation. Rather than simply governing African populations, settler colonies sought demographic and political domination, with Europeans establishing lasting communities that would control land, labor, and political institutions indefinitely.

By the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, «pieds-noirs» (“black feet”) in French, European settlers and their descendants who lived in French Algeria. They controlled large agricultural estates while Algerians lost significant amounts of land.

South Africa offers the starkest example of this trajectory. European settlement began with Dutch arrivals in the 17th century and expanded significantly under later British rule, as settlers seized vast tracts of agricultural land while confining Africans to designated reserves. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 intensified this dynamic, drawing mining companies that depended heavily on African labor while simultaneously restricting African freedom through pass laws and migrant labor systems that tore workers from their families. Political institutions were built to serve settler interests exclusively, excluding Africans from meaningful participation —a foundation that would eventually harden into the formal system of apartheid after 1948.

Kenya followed a similar pattern in the early twentieth century, as British settlers claimed the colony’s most fertile land, creating the so-called «White Highlands.» Africans were pushed into reserves, their traditional farming systems disrupted, and then pressured —through taxation, land restriction, and labor regulation— into working on the very settler farms that had displaced them. Politically, settlers secured representation within colonial institutions while African influence remained marginal at best. These accumulated grievances eventually erupted into the Mau Mau Uprising.

Algeria, though already discussed under French assimilation policy, also functioned as a settler colony in its own right —one where the ideology of cultural transformation existed alongside, and ultimately in service of, a settler society determined to entrench its own permanent presence and privilege.n policies, it was fundamentally a settler colony too.

This inequality fueled the Algerian independence struggle (1954–1962).

The case of Congo

What defined the Congo was a system built around concession companies: private corporations granted monopolistic rights to extract rubber, copper, and other resources, using forced labor enforced through quotas, mutilation, and violence to compel production. This made the Congo Free State (1885–1908) one of the most extreme and internationally condemned colonial regimes, eventually forcing Leopold II to cede control to the Belgian state in 1908 due to international outcry over the scale of atrocities. Extractive, exploitative practices continued under formal Belgian Congo administration as well, just with somewhat reduced brutality.

The case of Belgium: Leopold II

The Congo Free State under King Leopold II (1885–1908) stands out as one of the most stark examples of colonial power because of its unusual structure: a vast swath of Central Africa was effectively run as the personal property of a single European monarch, operated through a blend of state power and private commercial corporations. Internationally, Leopold framed his enterprise as a philanthropic, «civilizing» crusade against the slave trade. On the ground, however, the system was built to extract ivory and, after the 1890s boom, rubber for Western markets. The regime declared massive stretches of land state property and handed sweeping concessions to private companies, with Leopold retaining deep financial stakes and direct control over key territories.

At the heart of this extraction machine was forced labor. Local Congolese communities were coerced into gathering wild rubber to hit quotas set by corporate agents and colonial officials. These demands were backed by the Force Publique— a colonial army led by European officers —alongside armed corporate guards. Failing to meet quotas brought brutal retaliation: severe beatings, burning of entire villages, summary executions, and taking women and children hostage to force men into the forests. Outraged contemporary reports documented these atrocities, and the practice of severing hands became the enduring symbol of the regime’s brutality.

While Europe had technically outlawed the slave trade, the Free State’s labor regime functioned through coercion so absolute that historians treat it as slavery by another name. Labor wasn’t traded on an open market; it was extracted through forced quotas, labor taxes, military violence, and fear. As a British consular report famously put it in 1908, it was a system of «veiled slavery» —a reality modern scholarship confirms was foundational to the entire colony’s economic survival.

Crucially, these abuses weren’t simply the work of rogue corporations acting without state knowledge. The state built the legal apparatus, seized the land and resources, granted private monopolies, supplied the military enforcers, and took a direct cut of the profits. Companies provided the drive for maximum yields; the state provided the muscle to guarantee them. Public authority and private capital acted as joint partners in extracting African wealth and labor.

Global outcry eventually forced a reckoning, spearheaded by missionaries, journalists, and investigators who exposed the conditions to the world. When an official Belgian commission of inquiry confirmed these horrors in 1905, the diplomatic pressure became unbearable. In 1908, the Belgian government officially annexed the territory, stripping Leopold of his private estate. Yet the shift to formal Belgian colonial rule didn’t bring an instant end to coercion; forced labor simply evolved, continuing in different forms deep into the twentieth century.

Ultimately, the Congo Free State reveals how state monopolies, private corporate incentives, monarchical authority, and global commodity markets could converge into a single system. Sold to the world as an anti-slavery humanitarian mission, its rubber economy relied on brutal labor practices that generated immense profits for Europe while inflicting catastrophic human and demographic destruction across the Congo.

¿How many people did Leopold kill in Congo?

According to classic estimates, about 10 million people. This calculation is based on an estimated population of 20 million in 1880. By 1921, it was estimated that half of the population had been killed over the previous two generations. Since the Congo’s population at the time was estimated at 10 million, the number of people killed during that period was 10 million.

The central issue here comes down to a crucial distinction: a net decline in population isn’t the same thing as the total number of deaths. If the Congo had an estimated 20 million inhabitants around 1880 and roughly 10 million by the early 1920s, that 10-million difference reflects a net population loss—not necessarily 10 million actual deaths.

To figure out how many people actually died, you have to account for everyone born during those four decades. The foundational equation of demography is straightforward: final population equals initial population plus births minus deaths (assuming we leave migration aside). Consider a population that starts at 20 million: if 15 million children are born over a given timeframe and the final population ends up at 10 million, then roughly 25 million people died during that period—even though the overall population only dropped by 10 million.

Because of this, saying the Congo «lost 10 million people» isn’t mathematically identical to saying «10 million people were killed.» The actual number of deaths could have been substantially higher, since people were dying both from normal, everyday causes and from the extraordinary mortality driven by colonial violence, forced labor, famine, and disease.

Ultimately, the widely cited «10 million deaths» figure is best understood as a rough demographic estimate rather than a literal tally of people directly killed. Arriving at a truly rigorous estimate would mean reconstructing the population’s entire birth and death patterns over those decades to calculate how many deaths exceeded what would have normally occurred naturally.

The same mathematical principle should be considered when calculating the deaths caused by European colonialism (and capitalism) globally since the 17th century. A cumulative population deficit is not a death count.

In India, for example, between 1881 and 1921, the population increased by about 49 million, or roughly 19 percent. However, the number of people who died as a result of British colonial rule has been estimated at up to 164 million. In the early case of the Americas, approximately 90 percent of an estimated 80 million Indigenous people died as a result of disease, slavery, warfare, displacement, starvation, and forced labor during the first century or so following European colonization.

Bibliography

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham, Monthly Review Press, 1972.
Davidson, Basil. The African Slave Trade. Little, Brown and Company, 1961.
Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, 2001.
Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. Henry Holt, 2005.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1963.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Lindqvist, Sven. «Exterminate All the Brutes.» Translated by Joan Tate, New Press, 1996.
Lugard, Frederick. The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. William Blackwood and Sons, 1922.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton University Press, 1996.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Howard Greenfeld, Beacon Press, 1965.
Pakenham, Thomas. The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. Random House, 1991.
Reader, John. Africa: A Biography of the Continent. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. «Preface.» The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1963, pp. 7–31.
Tharoor, Shashi. Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. Hurst & Company, 2017.
Wolfe, Patrick. «Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.» Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, pp. 387–409.
Young, Crawford. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. Yale University Press, 1994.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Harper & Row, 1980.