The Imperial Energy Economy: Energy, Industrialization, and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Senegal

In the early nineteenth century, France and its overseas territories functioned within an organic economy in which all forms of energy stemmed from solar radiation and plant photosynthesis. To break free from this, the French constructed what I call an “imperial energy economy”—a bricolage of labor, production, and industrial raw materials from their expansive overseas empire. As African states—and the Wolof kingdoms of the Senegal Valley in particular—mobilized their organic economies to export cash crops like peanuts, peanut oil, and gum to the metropole, French entrepreneurs fueled their burgeoning industrial economy by processing, refining, and transforming African commodities into industrial lubricants, soap, and confectionaries. At the same time, however, African systems of energy use also greased the wheels of French imperial expansion, fueling the very steamships and railways used to subjugate them.