Here's an incredibly geeky question. Who owns these companies?
I'm assuming most are public corporations, but that would mean the shareholders are probably in Metropolitan, hostile, France. I doubt anyon'e lis listening to them. This suggests these corporations are, in practice, controlled by the French government in exile, even if their nominal owners are in France itself.
Thinking out loud, the revenues from these corporations will be available in ways they weren't OTL to develop the place. Sound feasible?
Most of these companies are indeed public corporations. During the 1920s the French private investors looked to the empire to provide healthy returns to venture capital after the calamitous of the Russian market in 1917, and more joint stock companies were established to the colonies between 1919 and 1929 than in any other period of colonial rule. But the private investment was focused to the high-profit export industries, whereas the private sector investment in colonial development was rather minimal - and initially the state was far from eager to fill the gap.
When the WWII begun, French Africa had a business life where 77 international firms, 15 of them foreign in origin ruled the markets. 39 of them were focused solely on exporting agricultural and forestry goods to global markets. These companies were based on local centers such as Bamako, Conakry, Abidjan, Porto Novo, Lomé but above all Dakar. But while the situation seemed complex on the first glance, in reality the
Société commerciale de l´Ouest Africain (SCOA) and
Compagnie francaise de l'Afrique Occidentale (CFAO) were the ones who runned the show.
Through the war SCOA was the largest trading company in West Africa - it based it´s success on the same strategy that had gained it considerable profits during the Great War by supplying raw materials to war-waging global markets while simultaneously expanding its capital base. Together with CFAO the two companies runned effective oligopolies, dwarfing the other companies by the resources at their disposal, the multiplicity of their interests, scale of their organization and the links they had to the commercial and industrial groups in France. Through the war these colonial exporters depended on foreign shipping to carry much of their produce, the French merchant fleet being too small to handle the bulk of the colonial exports.
In OTL these happy days of colonial business were effectively over in April 1944 when Free French Comissioner for Colonies, René Pleven, reminded the AEF Grand Council that a key objective of Brazzaville conference was to reverse the previous twenty-five years of governmental neglect and under-investment in Sub-Saharan Africa especially.
I would say thay your theory is quite plausible. OTL pre-war French colonial state taxed subject populations to generate sufficient budgetary revenue to support its bureaucracy, military costs and limited social provision. Meanwhile the colonial development, the biggest single item of budgetary expenditude, was supported by a combination of fiscal revenue, state loans and private sector investment. And while in OTL there remained an underlying community of interest between colonial government and French trading companies, settler industrialists and landowners to ensure a continued supply of cheap local labour after the war, they don´t have the power to maintain status quo in the situation they are facing in post-Zürich world in summer 1946.
Whoa, nice update!! Seems like the French aren't through the mourning over the loss of their métropole yet. How much of those events is OTL, and how much ATL?
Actually it´s all OTL so far, except the fact that there is no Provisional Government that would bring first African representatives to the National Assembly when the Fourth Republic is established. Instead the CFLN sticks around with the constituent assembly and tries to work around a new administrative structure to their remaining powerbase in Africa.
Very interesting observation. As long as there are still markets, there will be revenue. If that revenue is kept within the colonial empire, Free France may actually have more money to develop the colonies than OTL France spent on them.
And since the CFLN doesn´t have any place to run, they are unsuprisingly trying desperately to secure their future in Africa.
On the other hand, those markets may be small for a long time. Axis Europe is firmly shut off from international trade and limping along producing inferior ersatz products from inferior ersatz resources. Instead of using Cobalt, Vanadium, Chromite, Bauxite, Uranium and other rare materials which Africa produces, they use what is available inside the Nazi sphere.
As a sidenote all those minerals you mentioned are actually found from the area of New Europe, allthough the size of these deposits varies greatly.
So there is only a limited market for African resources, not comparable to the favorable environment of the OTL 1950s. The markets are mostly closed off, and until Japan and the UK recover from the war and restart their civilian economies, which may be years later than in our history, Africa will remain as poor as it was before the war.
It´s all true, allthough one should also include the Republic of Italy to the list of future Western markets. But there is still one recovering major economy that has dire need for new exports now. The main problem for Africa is indeed the fact that European markets are now gone.
Has anything been said about how where Germany and its satellites are getting their raw materials from? Are they still going by the prewar and wartime guidelines about autarky? Stuff like the chemical coal-to-liquids industries and a lot of metallurgic processes were developed to cope with the lack of crude oil and rare metals that plagued Germany before and during the war. If Germany stays on autarky course (and particularly if China stays fubar for the next decades), the world might never get the kind of industrial boom that happened in OTL late 1950s/1960s. With all the consequences for the export countries in South America and Africa.
Autarky is indeed the official economic goal of the New Europe, but the different economic camps of the divided Cold War world are still recovering from the war through various means. The European economy is severely capped by constant shortages of certain raw materials, and this affects their policy towards their remaining colonial possessions - the Portuguese colonies. But more of this later.