Global entanglements of palm oil and kernel extraction from French West Africa (c. 1840-1960)

This article links the regional history of palm oil and kernel extraction in French West Africa to the global history of fat resources. It argues that what happened to fat resources produced and consumed elsewhere is crucial to understanding how the extraction of West African palm products developed over time. The article illustrates how the French became interested in West African palm oil in the nineteenth century in their search for fats for soap production, and how the colonial conquest of the region was linked to the West African groundnut crisis. In the twentieth century, the way in which palm products were then extracted owed more and more to the experience of Sumatra and Malaya: standardised plantations became the model to be replicated in West Africa, with all its environmental consequences, and the Asian oil palm trees themselves were imported to the French colonies.