Post-Doc Researcher Twisted development: Failed attempts to create export textile production in Sub-Saharan Africa, ca. 1810-1990 (1.0 FTE)

The Department of History and Art History seeks to appoint a Post-Doc Researcher for the project "Race to the bottom? Family labour, household livelihood and consumption in the relocation of global cotton manufacturing, ca. 1750-1990", funded by means of an ERC Consolidator grant awarded to prof. Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk. 

The Post-Doc Researcher will be working on the following sub-project of this ERC-project:

Twisted development. Failed attempts to create export textile production in Sub-Saharan Africa, ca. 1810-1990

This 3-year post-doc project investigates the impact of colonial policies in two sub-Saharan African countries with very different factor endowments and different colonizing powers. It aims to answer the question of why some areas of the world, despite relatively favourable conditions for textile production, including relatively low wages, nevertheless did not evolve into successful cotton textile exporters. To this end, two sub-Saharan African countries, Nigeria and D.R. Congo will be studied. These two countries make an interesting comparison for several reasons. Initial factor endowment differed, with Nigeria being relatively densely populated in contrast to the Congo, which was land-abundant. Second, in Nigeria, men and women had engaged in a flourishing pre-colonial cotton textile industry, which enjoyed developments in economies of scale during the nineteenth century, but purportedly fell into decline with the 20th-century growth of British textile imports. In the Congo, on the other hand, pre-colonial textile making was largely limited to small-scale raffia (palm) cloth. Third, these countries had different colonizers during the late 19th/early 20th century (Britain and Belgium), which pursued quite diverse colonial policies. The Belgians in Congo made efforts to industrialize the colony on a large scale, after first having focused on the exploitation of plantation labour and mining. In British Nigeria, initiatives to revive local weaving were also undertaken, yet initially these projects did not fare well, as local households were reluctant to accept new technologies for women because of existing gender norms. In the 1980s, however, in the context of enduring economic crisis, traditional hand weaving revived in particular regions, and found a stable internal market. Likewise, textiles from Congo are known to have been popular on the continental African market. Despite these favourable developments, large-scale industrialization of textile production has not taken off in these countries.