28 February 2025 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100
Sylvester Abedi Akyea (UT)
“‘Essential War Supplies of Timber’: World War II and Timber Exploitation in Colonial Ghana”
The contribution of colonial Ghana (the then Gold Coast) to the British war effort during World War II (WWII) was enormous, and so was the impact of the War on the country. It is therefore surprising that the timber industry has received little attention in the extant historiography of WWII and the Anthropocene debate. This study reconstructs an environmental history of timber exploitation in colonial Ghana during WWII in the context of how “cheap nature” was exploited toward an “imperial crisis.” The study argues that the timber industry was an integral component of colonial Ghana’s contribution to British and Allied wartime efforts. In the name of war, British propaganda and defense regulations penetrated resource frontiers more than before, consequently altering landscapes, trade, and forest management practices. The imperial crisis marked a turning point in timber exploitation against poor forest management. The study demonstrates through comprehensive empirical data (including archival documents) how timber was crucial for British and the Allied war efforts. Also, the political economy of the war and the massive need for the resource spawned a vibrant capitalist industry run by local and expatriate entrepreneurs and skilled loggers in the post-WWII period. The expansion of the resource frontiers was nevertheless detrimental to the natural environment in the long term. To ignore this is to impoverish the historiography of the War and to blind us to the impact the War had on Ghana’s timber industry and environment.
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Sylvester Akyea is a doctoral student in the UT History Department. His primary research focuses on forest ecology, World War II, US Military Alliances, and the intersection between the environment and war between the 1800 and mid-20th century Colonial Ghana and British West Africa.