Introduction

The question of African economic history, and its relationship to colonial history and external economic pressures, has been one of the key elements of historical scholarship on Africa since the rise of “African studies” as a discipline in the 1960s. Throughout all that period of time, questions of “development” and “underdevelopment” as they relate to colonial economic history have never been far away.

To many readers of this journal, these debates will be perhaps almost overfamiliar; with little “new” to be said about questions such as the formalism/substantivism debate, dependency theory and the rise of “agency” as a trope to challenge it, and questions of development and underdevelopment having characterised these debates since the late 1960s, until something of a truce emerged in the late 1980s.¹

These debates largely sought to understand African economic history through the impact of the ways in which colonial economic dynamics affected the immediate economic life of independent African nations. Dependency theorists such as Samir Amin located the beginnings of African “economic development” in the 1830s (that is, in the era of what historians have come to know as “legitimate trade”), and traced how investment directed at the extraction of resources helped to under-develop African economies within a capitalist paradigm.² This followed the work of pioneering scholars such as Kenneth Dike, who examined how the rise of palm oil exports from the Niger Delta in the 19th century offered new economic opportunities to small-scale producers—a pattern which in fact was mirrored on many other parts of the continent.³ In this sense, African economic history was largely located as a post-19th century phenomenon, though some scholars such as Paul Lovejoy and Walter Rodney did trace important facets of pre-19th century economic activity—even while locating the key phase in the transformation of Africa’s relationship with world economies to the 19th century.⁴

Since these foundational debates of the 1960s and 1970s, the majority of work in economic history has tended to emphasise the colonial period’s centrality in establishing the framework of development and underdevelopment which Rodney analysed with such penetration in How Europe Under-developed Africa.⁵ If there can be said to be anything such as a status quo in the literature today, it is that while colonial economies were extractive and damaging to African economic autonomy and prosperity, the way these economies took shape “on the ground” depended as much on individual agency and decisions by African entrepreneurs and farmers as on anything that might be called central planning by colonial authorities.⁶ The rise since the 1980s of “agency” as a trope is clearly central here, with its concomitant dependence on conceptions of individual autonomy and responsibility as prescribed by the intellectual badlands of neoliberal economics.⁷ While this means that “agency” as a concept must be understood as coming with certain forceful limitations—and not as some sort of conceptual panacea, as sometimes appears the case within the Western Academy—it remains a useful one to balance macro- and micro-approaches to both the process and experience of economic changes on the African continent.

With these theoretical parameters in place, it is instructive to introduce some of the key themes in colonial economic history which are examined in the papers collected in this special issue. Economic production in twentieth century West Africa was greatly influenced by the colonial policies of the imperial powers. “Ghana’s integration into the world capitalist system,” according to Rhoda Howard, saw it emerge as a peripheral capitalist enclave.⁸ Based on the logic of comparative advantage, colonies focused on the production of commodities that they had the comparative advantage on. Consequently, differences were emphasized in the administration of territories. Francis Agbodeka argues that the economy of Ghana in the twentieth century was influenced by the British policy in the country.⁹ The British administration encouraged the growth of so-called “productive sectors”; productivity was however measured in terms of its benefit to British society in the metropole.

The mining sector was one area that attracted foreign monopoly capital. This sector was dominated by expatriates. The indigenes offered their labour in the mines as wage workers and not as owners of capital. This sector was restrictive to indigenous entry because of the initial capital requirement. However, the agricultural sector was less restrictive, and it offered the prospects of accumulating capital that was not subject to direct taxation by the colonial administration. In Ghana, the cocoa revolution of the early twentieth century allowed peasant farmers to become owners of indigenous capital.¹⁰

The papers forming this special issue examine production in the colonial economy and their legacies in the twenty-first century from different perspectives. Hopkins noted several decades ago that “Historians do not always offer an explicit justification of their work.”¹¹ We see the same thing playing out in this collection of essays. However, as Hopkins argued further, some historians’ areas of inquiry are on undisputable subjects such as the Russian Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. In such cases, the historian’s work is informed by some universal assumptions which are “generally agreed to have been of fundamental significance.”¹² On the other hand, historians writing about subjects that are not so well-known will be expected to offer some justifications for their subject choice. Fortunately, the themes that engage the attention of writers in this special issue are subjects that are known in the colonial historiography on economic production on the west coast of Africa. Hopkins notes that “established priorities and common values may make it hard to achieve an entirely fresh interpretation.”¹³ Nevertheless, a nuanced interpretation is brought to bear on the themes discussed in the essays.

It is from within this lens that the sort of comparative perspective offered here on colonial economic history may prove useful for scholars of both colonial and postcolonial African economic history. The papers collected in this special issue look at the colonial economic histories of two British colonies, Gold Coast (Ghana) and The Gambia. Superficially, an imperial historian might expect similar economic priorities and paradigms to emerge, and yet the papers collected here suggest the importance of local conditions and structures in shaping economic outcomes. The Gambia, as a “loss-making” economic unit with a specific demographic and ecological subsystem, saw a comparative lack of colonial administrative reach and interest. The Gold Coast, by contrast, offered a different economic outlook: much greater urbanisation, a productive mining sector, contrasting economic fortunes between north and south, and the development of different and more complex administrative machinery and infrastructure. As the papers as a whole show, different structures and different local institutions led to different economic outcomes in these two British colonies.

The two essays contained here on The Gambia present important contributions to the economic history of this tiny colony. While the coastal region of The Gambia had connections since the 19th century with other British colonial enclaves such as Freetown and Lagos, through the settling of the Aku (liberated Africans), the interior of the colony was integrated into political and economic activities which connected far more to neigh-bouring Senegal. To the south of the river, areas around the Bintang creek were closely connected to the economies of Casamance and the Kaabu federation. Meanwhile, existing political structures had been challenged in the 19th century during the “Soninke-Marabout wars,” and the rise of a more theocratic form of Islamic government.¹⁴ When the Scramble for Africa began in the 1880s, the Gambia was so small and unproductive that the British initially tried to bargain it away to the French; once this had failed, the British belatedly began to invest in the colony. However this investment was always limited by the lack of economic potential in a colony, whose main export lay in the groundnut crop.

Ensuring that the colony paid its way as far as possible meant ensuring that cultivable land was maximised, and that hut taxes were properly collected. As Hassoum Ceesay shows in his essay in this special edition, Chiefs formed a vital weapon in the colonial armoury to enforce this policy. Chiefs were given incentives to act as tax collectors, to maximise groundnut production on the lands which they controlled near their villages, and as fomenters of cottage industries. While some resisted, the majority acquiesced in this structure, and annual gatherings of Chiefs were held to ensure that the key policy planks of the colonial government would be achieved. Ceesay’s essay is an important contribution both to colonial economic history, and also for considering the role of Chiefs in postcolonial Gambia today—both their perception by Gambians, and relative lack of actual power, and also the way in which working with chiefs could provide an important resource to the government of Adama Barrow in “the new Gambia.”

Another aspect of colonial economic history which was peculiar to Gambia was the role of migrant or “strange” farmers. This is the topic of the second paper on Gambia presented here, by the economist Tijan Sallah. Sallah contextualises the role of strange farmers in the economies of the Gambia river region, dating from the 19th century, as young and unmarried men who would offer to work land for a local chief and provide a portion of their produce as a payment to the chief in return for the right to work the land. Sallah shows the importance that this Senegambian system of strange farmers (which also operated in the precolonial Guinea-Bissau region) had in colonial times also, boosting production in years of high migration. This is therefore an important contribution showing the significance of precolonial economic and social structures in shaping the economic output of the colonial era.

Turning to the essays on the Gold Coast (hereafter Ghana), Ghanaian knowledge of economic production was developed during the pre-colonial era. In this context, Hopkins notes that “the pre-colonial economy was complex, efficient and adaptable, and it had reached a relatively advanced stage of commercial capitalism long before the impact of the western world was felt in Africa.”¹⁵ He adds that “it was not the will to achieve that was lacking, but the means of achieving which were limited.”¹⁶

Colonialism then occasioned “the expansionist phase in the evolution of the modern market economy,”¹⁷ in the colonized territories. Colonial economic policies removed “the constraints which had hindered the development of the export sector in the nineteenth century.”¹⁸ The open economy of Ghana saw some expansion in the number of commodities exported from the colony.¹⁹ In the early colonial period, participation in the economy was restricted to the British and the expatriate trading associations. The natives were barred from participation in the wholesale and some retail business.²⁰ Consequently, the colonial economy “had its limitation in terms of inherent deficiencies and of expectations which it aroused, yet seemed incapable of satisfying.”²¹ The colonial economy as Hopkins noted, “was not a changeless economy, and it started to acquire important new features,”²² especially when indigenous capital was mobilized for production in the agricultural sector. Cash crop production was dominated by peasant farmers. Their capture of this sub-sector revolutionized agriculture in the early twentieth century in Ghana.

Another important feature of the colonial economy was migration. Before colonialism, Ghanaians had moved across different territories in search of economic opportunities or to escape insecurity.²³ However, international and internal migrations were linked to the structure of the colonial economy. Two types of internal migration were significant in the 1900s. The first type of internal migration saw the mass movement of cash crops cultivators. However, this movement was limited in geographical scope. It was the movement of peasant farmers within southern Ghana from the semi-forest areas to the tropical forest belt. Polly Hill’s seminal study, The Migrant Cocoa-farmers of Southern Ghana, focused on the production of cocoa as a commercial cash crop.²⁴ This study examined how the first generation of cocoa farmers raised capital—including funds and lands to cultivate the crop in Akyem Abuakwa territory. Essentially, Polly Hill’s work examined indigenous forms of capitalism.

Rural capitalism, according to Francis Agbodeka, occasioned the introduction of “freehold land ownership and the operation of the market principle as well as the development of an economically dominant group of large successful peasant farmers.”²⁵ Polly Hill showed how Akwapim and Krobo farmers moved across the Densu river in search of lands to cultivate cocoa.²⁶ The migration of farmers in search of land, according to Polly Hill, largely accounted for the cocoa revolution of the early twentieth century in Ghana. Consequently, Ghana emerged to be one of the biggest exporters of cocoa beans by 1911.²⁷ The cultivation of cocoa soon surpassed the cultivation of other traditional cash crops such as oil palm, as it spread to the tropical forest belt reaching the Asante and Ahafo districts in the early 1900s.²⁸

The pioneer cocoa cultivators negotiated for farm lands from land owners. These lands were paid for over several years through an annual instalment payment plan. The selling of land was revolutionary in a sense. Land in many places was communally owned. However, Agbodeka argues that “the credit must go partly to some far-seeing chiefs in the Eastern Region who were willing to sell portions of their lands for individual uses instead of the traditional communal uses with all their constraints on agricultural expansion.”²⁹ The cocoa revolution impacted other aspects of the colonial economy. Profits from cocoa farming were reinvested in the acquisition of large farm lands. Others invested their profits in the transport business and in the construction of houses in the big towns. Gareth Austin notes that “the original Ghanaian cocoa migration is of exceptional historical importance as the classic case of economic development largely by African initiative during the colonial era.”³⁰

The second internal migration was the movement of labour from the Northern Territories to Asante and the colony. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British took possession of territories that lay north of Asante and the Black Volta River.³¹ The colonial power faced challenges in its acquisition of “unproductive” territories. In the particular case of the Northern Territories, Hawkins wrote that “soon after the Northern Territories were created, as an afterthought to the incorporation of Asante within the Gold Coast colony, the colonial government realized that they offered little economic potential.”³² The colonial policy towards the north was revisited and changed in 1906 when the resident Commissioner “received a request for northern labourers from the managers of the Tarkwa gold mines.”³³ Consequently, the processes of internal migration across the Black Volta river was initiated by this request. In no time, colonial officials were requesting mostly male workers to be send to the mines in southern Ghana. The initial response to this colonial policy was “negative.”³⁴ In many northern communities, notables and elders were described by the colonial authorities as “old obstructionists” and “fetishists” when they protested the recruitment of young men for the mine.³⁵ The resistance to the “volunteer labour” policy was linked to the loss of farm labour. The young men were needed back in the north to support production in the peasant economy. Furthermore, “the workers resented the deplorable conditions in the mines and the brutal treatment to which they were subjected, and the journey to the south and back was difficult.”³⁶

The three papers from Ghana collected here analyse key aspects of this colonial economy. Adu-Gyamfi and Oware’s paper examines the health policies of the British and post-colonial administrations. There is a correlation between the health status of people and the level of economic development in any place. The presence of diseases that make people fall sick would affect productivity. The environment of the Gold Coast was very hostile to European habitation. The endemic nature of diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, dysentery and sleeping sickness among others affected productivity. With increased urbanization and the expansion of the expatriate community, the health needs of the community became a major concern of successive colonial administrations. Yet, it is clear from this contribution that the natives benefited indirectly from the health policies of the British administrations.

Nyaaba and Bob-Milliar’s paper focuses on the northern question in Ghanaian development history. The much-debated underdevelopment of Northern Ghana is revisited with a nuanced interpretation. The state’s attempt at bridging the development gap between northern and southern Ghana is usually couched in the language of a blame-game. The authors seek to deconstruct popular narratives of the “blame-game,” by highlighting the economic potentials of the northern savannah zone. Arguably, both the colonial and post-colonial state has shown ambivalence; economic development in northern Ghana was characterized by false starts, duplications and under-investment. Thus, the state approached socio-economic development with a lukewarm attitude, and this has left the economy of the North lagging behind the advanced “south,” in terms of socio-economic development.

Finally, Kuusaana’s study examined how increased migration and urbanization shaped the economy of the Gold Coast. Movements within the Gold Coast economy were largely male dominated labour migrations. The urbanization of the economy was occasioned by the expansion of the labour market to allow for the partial participation of native populations. The availability of economic activities, mainly in Asante and the colony attracted labour from the peripheral regions. Groups of men moved into cocoa farms, mining towns, port towns, and commercial centers to find jobs in the colonial economy. This paper examines the intricacies of urbanization and migration that involved mixed group of labour migrants.

Taken together, therefore, the five papers add an important level of nuance and comparative analysis to the ways in which economic history unfolded in the British colonies of West Africa in the 20th century. Questions of urbanization, extractive productivity, the incorporation of political and migration regimes dating from precolonial times, and the gendered dimensions of economic change, healthcare, and internal migration offer as a whole a significant overview of this key moment in African economic history.

One salient point to note is that all the essays in this volume have been authored by scholars based at institutions on the African continent, and indeed located in the countries which form the core of the comparative analysis presented here. Interest in this special issue was first generated at two academic writing workshops funded by the British Academy, through the African Studies Association of the UK, at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and at the National Centre for Arts and Culture in Banjul, both held in March 2018.

This location for the production of scholarship is part of a growing trend noticed in recent times by the editors of this journal, where the majority of submissions to African Economic History are now written by Africa-based authors—something which presents a marked difference with some other established journals in the field of African Studies. Indeed, this is the second issue of African Economic History in succession where all the articles have been authored by Africa-based scholars. Given the growing centre of gravity of the field in Africa, the editorial team of African Economic History have decided to appoint two new Africa-based editors in 2020, and announcements on this will be made shortly.

It is worth reflecting on why it is that economic history, in particular, is a growing focus of research excellence and interest in Africa. Two core issues can be identified, related to the nature of the sources and the salience of the topic to African historical experiences. With regard to the first, as these papers show, many of the sources needed to produce the fine-grained analysis of economic change require exhaustive knowledge of archives in Africa. It is African archives which contain the key details which can allow reconstruction of policy changes, relationships between Chiefs and colonial officials, or the volumes of agricultural production. This makes the study of economic history one that is easily accessible to Africa-based scholars, who do not therefore require to go through the costly (and often futile) process of visa applications to research in “fortress Europe”; at the same time, it makes such studies harder for Northern scholars to undertake, given the increasing bureaucratic and technocratic demands made by universities in the era of managerial capitalism, and the way in which such demands make long periods of archival study ever harder to undertake.

A second core issue relates to the fundamental importance of economic activity and economic history in making sense of present experiences on the continent. This importance is both historical, and present-day, and thus brings together many shared intellectual interests and concerns. To take the question of historical importance first, Africa as an idea may have been “invented” in the 18th century, as Valentim Mudimbe reminds us;³⁷ and since then, the common economic histories of the continent, grounded in the intersection of imperial and neo-imperial extractive economies with local autonomy and practice, has helped to bind together shared African identities. Beyond this shared historical experience, the significance of the deep economic past in shaping current historical inequalities has been recognised by a number of important African thinkers, such as Achille Mbembe.³⁸ All of this makes the study of African economic history of great relevance to contemporary questions on the continent, and surely helps to shape this research focus.

Beyond this, the place of economic activity in shaping development agendas and the policy frameworks of African and global actors of course makes the study of African economic history a salient one for thinkers and policymakers on the continent. Understanding paths to sustainable development requires an understanding of the economic past of Africa, and how it has shaped present questions and choices. It is important to recognise the limits of the developmentalist paradigm, grounded as it is within the neoliberal assault on the African university system and the resource grab dressed up as structural adjustment programmes. All the same, the importance of economic development and change certainly makes the study of African economic history increasingly pressing, and no doubt shapes the research interests and agendas of scholars in Africa.