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