A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers ANDREW ZIMMERMAN IN 1900, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, the founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, sent three...
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A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers ANDREW ZIMMERMAN IN 1900, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, the founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, sent three Tuskegee graduates under the leadership of a faculty member to establish an experimental cotton farm in German Togo. One of those graduates, John W. Robinson, founded a cotton school in the German colony in 1904 that trained hundreds of students, recruited from every region of the country, to grow cotton for the European market. German colonial officials required grad- uates of this school to return to their home districts and continue growing cotton using the methods they had learned, in expectation that their countrymen would choose to imitate them. Between 1901 and 1909, the cotton exported to Europe from Togo improved in quality and increased in quantity by almost sixty-fold. European and American observers praised the German gov
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