The intensification of French colonial economic exploitation and extraction in French Equatorial Africa following World War I required concessionary companies to make considerable investments in both production and security in the 1920s and 1930s. When assessing economic growth, historians have tended to investigate increases in productivity and infrastructure expansion while also noting the financial and human cost of such endeavors. However, another, more subtle catalyst of production has often been overlooked: that of enforcement. Africans both managed and were employed in economic extraction schemes in the interwar period and compensation varied widely between those who mobilized labor for production, those who imposed labor demands through violence, and those who suffered violence and coercion as part of their achievement of production demands. This article establishes a broader framework for considering ‘economic development’ in Central Africa that fully encompasses the costs and consequences of industrial escalation, the expansion of market productivity, and rise in export production by taking into account the compensation and the deprivation that flowed from the need to mobilize vast numbers of laborers as well as coercive forces to compel and propel human performance.