The Second World War and the Sierra Leone Economy: Labour Employment and Utilisation, 1939–45

Abstract

Micro-studies1 on the economic impact of the Second World War on some important strategic African colonial outposts of the British Empire, such as Sierra Leone2 and Kenya, have not received much attention from political scientists and historians. This neglect in the past could be attributed to the inaccessibility of official materials covering the critical years 1939–45. This chapter seeks to stimulate research on this crucial period of African history now that some materials are open to the public in British and other archives. It examines the impact of the Second World War on Sierra Leone’s economy, with particular attention to labour utilisation. It reinforces the argument initially advanced by La Ray Denzer, L. Sptizer, M. Amolo and H. Conway that the colonial state used war-time emergency powers to crush the development of an independent labour movement. The paper also demonstrates the machinery of Britain’s manipulation and domination of Sierra Leone’s economy, and proceeds from two hypotheses: (i) that during the war, Sierra Leone’s economy was further integrated into that of the metropole and the resultant linkages continued into the post-colonial period; (ii) that Sierra Leone’s economy operated in an environment shaped indirectly by a war directly affecting the metropole, a world system,3 moreover, in which Sierra Leone was only a peripheral part.KeywordsTrade UnionIndustrial RelationUnion LeaderColonial StateColonial AdministrationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.