ALABAMA IN AFRICA: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South

ALABAMA IN AFRICA: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. By Andrew Zimmerman. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010.

Alabama in Africa follows the promising paths opened up in American Studies and American History by transnational approaches and comparative perspectives. Zimmerman's profound study traces the circumatlantic convergence of American and German ideologies of race, agricultural labor, and family farming in early twentieth-century West Africa. Focusing on an expedition of Tuskegee Institute cotton experts to the German colony of Togo in the 1910s, it explores the symbiosis intended by German authorities of Booker T. Washington's concepts of "industrial education" with their own economic goals and political ambitions in the larger contexts of global imperialism. Zimmerman bases his astounding trajectory of the transfer of knowledge and paradigms of labor control from the U.S. to Germancolonized...