Imperialism, Economic Development and Social Change in West Africa by Raymond E. Dumett (review)

Toyin Falola, editor of Carolina’s African World series, has single-handedly revived the extremely useful practice of publishing collections of the major papers of a distinguished scholar. In this case it is Raymond Dumett, and any historian of modern Ghana would be delighted to have this volume at hand. It opens with a new essay in which Dumett introduces the twenty that follow, which originally appeared in journals and edited volumes from 1968 to 2011. Geographically, they confirm the author’s specialization, over a long career, on southern—especially southwestern—Ghana. Eighteen chapters are devoted basically to this country, though one of these examines an Anglo-French dispute over the Côte d’Ivoire‒Ghana frontier and another includes a section on the precolonial state of Gyaman, which spanned that future frontier. The other two chapters include Ghana but have a wider geographical frame: one on the campaign against malaria in early British West Africa, the other surveying Africa’s strategic minerals during the Second World War. Thematically, the Ghana chapters present Dumett’s core contributions on slavery, African and European entrepreneurship, import‒export trade, mining and railway-building, and the process of colonization, mainly for the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Along with his El Dorado in West Africa: The Gold Mining Frontier, African Labor, and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875‒1900 (Ohio University Press, 1998), this collection represents a massive contribution to the study of Ghanaian and West African economic, social, and political history, providing painstaking research and well-argued analysis. The author has made insightful use of oral testimony and such private papers as survive from African merchants of the early colonial era, as well as government records.

At least a quarter of this big book examines labor issues, including the history of slavery and its eventual prohibition. The book includes Dumett’s critique of Emmanuel Terray’s thesis that the fiscal foundation of Akan states was gold mined by royal slaves, one of the most fruitful debates provoked by French Marxist “modes of production” theory in the 1970s. Dumett conceded that slave labor had been more important than he thought at first, and that some of it was deployed in large concentrations by rulers, but he insisted, plausibly, that most mining was done by household labor, though in some cases the latter included slaves. Another chapter features Dumett’s remarkably detailed and subtle account of the work process in artisanal mining in the Akan region, and the reasoning behind his plausible claim that two-thirds of the labor was supplied by females.

The field of African business history has been expanding recently (helped by a special issue of Business History Review in spring 2007), but indigenous enterprises remain chronically under-researched. Thus it is particularly apt that the volume includes Dumett’s three pioneering but still state-of-the-art pieces: case studies of John Mensah Sarbah and of Nzeman entrepreneurs in southwestern Ghana, and “African Merchants of the Gold Coast, 1860‒1905.” The latter remains the best-documented and most nuanced overview of how Africans entered the field of direct shipments to Europe, their strategies and struggles, and the context in which they were then squeezed by the growth of large-scale and increasingly cartelized European firms. Dumett refutes the myth that these African merchants passively “hugged the coast,” showing, to the contrary, their enterprise in production and trade further inland, on both sides of what became the Anglo‒French frontier. The work on entrepreneurship partly overlapped with, and partly followed upon, his pioneering investigations of the elements of the commercial expansion in Ghana, especially in rubber and mahogany, that immediately preceded the cocoa boom.

Most of the later chapters examine the intersections of British imperialism and British capital in relation to Ghana: for example, with reference to Anglo‒French border rivalry and...