The Great Depression and the Making of the Colonial Economic System in the Belgian Congo

Abstract

If we expect to understand the economic and political formation of today's world and the origins of world-wide political and economic problems, we must seek the real structure of both former and present relationships between industrial regions and the so-called developing regions, the latter having almost always been colonial. Not a lot was done even in the recent works of Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin to explain the peculiar social and economic structures of the colonial world.1 Almost nothing has been done to identify the structure of relationships between the building of the industrial economy and society in Europe--which came about through the so-called industrial revolution--and the development and diversification of colonial exploitation up to the 19th century, a phenomenon followed by the political and cultural appropriation of the colonies. Only very recently Immanuel Wallerstein has launched a project in this field.2 In order to analyse colonial economies and societies, I would suggest the following: 1. The use of the concept of the colonial mode of production, important for understanding the former colonial and present independent or neocolonial countries, as well as for a better understanding of the present world-wide economic depression. 2. While the colonial mode of production was the dominant one, the colonial economic system simultaneously contained a capitalist mode of production and many pre-capitalist modes of production (peasant, tribal, etc.). 3. The colonial economic system has been articulated a) on relations between colonial and capitalist modes of production, on the one side, and b) on the administration's enforced relations between both of them and precapitalist modes of production,: on the other side. These special articulations, required to maintain what have been elaborate political and ideological instruments of the colonial economic and social system, are the most important and strongest featuresof the colonial system. Unconditional, totalitarian, state domination; incomplete social class formation; and an authoritarian administration keeping strong control over the political, economic, and social life of the citizens maintained the traditional life of the villages (a source of cheap raw materials and cheap labor). These are prominent features of a colonial, dependent society.3 In the pages that follow I would like to show how in the Belgian Congo the Great Depression was the most important stage of elaboration of the colonial economic system, and how it is, even now, the dominant one in this part of Africa.