The culmination of an ambitious and unique campaign to make humanitarianism self-sufficient, comprehensive reconstruction work became the focus of and heir to all previous international Jewish social welfare work. This chapter considers this humanitarian response to Jewish impoverishment as a result of war. Superimposing American wealth and Progressivism onto long-standing Jewish self-help ideology, prewar vocational training, housing construction, and agricultural colonization were revived and expanded, especially in the Soviet Union. Crucially, this involved the creation of two American-Western European foundations to foster Jewish microlending and cooperative systems in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Jewish reconstruction sat somewhere between state social welfare and international development. The crash of 1929 made economic relief the primary form of Jewish relief and serves as an endpoint to the narrative.

Focusing on the years between 1763 and 1789, Chapter 4 explores French attempts to embark on cash crop cultivation in Senegambia alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When the French crown took control of the French holdings in Senegambia at the end of the Seven Years War, it abolished the monopoly of the Compagnie des Indes and installed a colonial official on the island of Gorée. From here, local officials started exploring opportunities for sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo, and tobacco cultivation in the region, often against the wishes of the central government. As the future of French colonial empire looked increasingly uncertain, and the cost of slave labour appeared unnecessarily costly, private merchants and semi-private commercial companies joined such activities, eager to exploit African resources for private gain. The chapter explores the language with which colonial entrepreneurs articulated these projects. It also studies endeavours to create agricultural plantations on land leased from local rulers on the mainland opposite the island of Gorée and along the Senegal River. The chapter uncovers how French officials made some headway with cash crop cultivation before the French Revolution disrupted such experiments.