Cotton Booms, Cotton Busts, and the Civil War in West Africa Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University In the area that would become the German colony of Togo in West Africa, cotton booms and busts intersected with transatlantic struggles for economic freedom and political autonomy. In the period between the American Civil War and the First World War, this region of Africa began recovering from the Atlantic slave trade, established new forms of political and economic autonomy, and saw these new forms crushed with the growth of European colonial states. Like much of the world, this area had produced cotton for local textile production since antiquity. The forced integration of this local cotton production into a world market in raw cotton fiber dominated by industrialized core capitalist nations was part of a larger global struggle over the control of labor. This struggle led to a series of emancipations of bonded labor—serf and slave—and the imposition of new forms of control including sharecropping, factory supervision, and colonial rule. 1 Global Civil War The American Civil War was a—perhaps the—central episode in more than a century of international struggles against bonded labor and over the mean- ing of the free labor that would replace it. Even while President Abraham Lincoln still limited official war aims to preserving the Union rather than ending slavery, many in the United States and abroad recognized that the conflict was about slavery specifically and about the freedom of labor more generally. A cohort of European radicals, many exiled after the European revolutions of 1848–49, observed and even fought in the Civil War as part of a larger battle against despotism and feudalism and for free labor. These revolutionary refugees arrived in the United States as con- flicts over slavery gained renewed force and began to break out into armed 1 This essay incorporates material from Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010), and from a new project on the global history of the American Civil War. Cotton Booms, Cotton Busts, and the Civil War in West Africa doi:10.1017/S1537781411000302 454