Abstract

"An English Village in the Congo: Towards a History of European Imperial Capitalism in the Twentieth Century"

Claire Wrigley, University of California, Berkeley (pqf2nn@virginia.edu)

In 1911 Lever Bros., now Unilever, founded a subsidiary, Huileries du Congo Belge, to extract palm oil for their soap factories in Merseyside, England and, at the same time, attempted to export their model of ‘civilized’ – and civilizing – worker villages to the Belgian Congo. The capital flows that this expansion relied upon were cultural and political as well as economic, bound by a shared imperial past. This paper gives a theoretical and methodological overview of this project, and would conclude by discussing this project’s broader intervention into the political economy of European imperial capitalism.
With its neat cottages, parks, schools and churches, Port Sunlight was lauded as an example of how an enlightened capitalist could keep his workers healthy, productive, and contented. William Lever was so famous that – after the catastrophe of King Leopold’s personal rule over Congo – the Belgian parliament invited Lever Bros. to establish palm oil concessions in their colony, complete with European-style villages for the workers. This was, theoretically, beneficial to all parties: to the Belgians, who could attempt to recover from the international scandal their exploitation of the Congolese people had caused, to Lever Bros., who could secure a supply of palm oil for their soaps, and – so the Europeans argued – to the Congolese themselves who would be brought onto the ‘civilizational ladder.’ The establishment of HCB cannot be reduced to a story of extractive colonial capitalism, though it was, of course, that; it is also a story of how a business influenced and was influenced by the cultural and political imperatives of its day. Lever’s own conviction that ‘well-planned towns’ made men ‘healthy and virile,’ the foundation of the empire, looks one way from Port Sunlight; quite another from the palm plantations of the Congo.