Bianca Murillo. Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana.

Abstract

Precolonial commercial networks, long-distance trade networks across ecological zones and oceans (Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans), and the “legitimate” trade that replaced the slave trade have all been studied as integral both to African economic history and in detailing the African as a producer, a laborer, and an organizer. But until barely a decade ago, who the African consumer was, and is, has not been a focal point of examination and analysis in any meaningful way. In the compelling study Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth Century Ghana, Bianca Murillo analyzes the importance of consumer politics in the period leading to independence and, after independence, during the time of both civilian and several military governments in twentieth-century Ghana. It provides a richly textured analysis of how colonial and neocolonial domination, wealth and its accumulation, state and political authority, and racial and gendered ideologies all help to explain the contours and dynamics of consumer markets and the conflicts that underlie access to the market in twentieth-century Ghana. The centerpiece of the work is a discussion of access to commodities and consumer markets at different times in the precolonial and postcolonial period, albeit mediated by “European managers and African market women, nationalist politicians and foreign investors, and military soldiers and chiefs” (5).