Colonial Infrastructure and Resource Extraction

Colonial transport infrastructure was designed, with striking consistency across empires, as a hub-and-spoke system linking interior sites of extraction to coastal ports for export, rather than as a network connecting colonies to one another or serving the internal economic needs of colonized populations. The Congo-Océan Railway, built between 1921 and 1934 in French Equatorial Africa to connect the inland capital Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noire, was constructed largely with forced African labor conscripted from across the federation, under conditions of disease, malnutrition, and brutal discipline that historians estimate caused between roughly 14,000 and 20,000 worker deaths; the French writer André Gide documented and denounced these forced-labor abuses in his 1927 travelogue Voyage au Congo, contributing to a public reform debate in France.