Commerce, Credit, and Mobility in Late Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast: Changing Dynamics in Euro-African Trade

Abstract

Introduction The nineteenth century represents one of the most fascinating and dynamic centuries in the history of West Africa in the second millennium in terms of West Africa’s relations with the wider world. The century began with the abolition of the export slave trade and the substitution (a return to in some cases) of an export trade in primary products such as palm oil and groundnut oil. The simple technology behind African agriculture – the hoe, cutlass, and pick – and the centrality of the family as the social and economic basis of production and reproduction expanded the ranks of the economically active with the abolition of the slave trade. Chiefs and “big men,” who dominated the slave trade as they had monopoly over the means of capture, remained major players in the era of “legitimate trade,” deploying their capital and labor resources in new ways. It was a century of political revolution with Islamic jihads in the West African sahel and savanna and political experimentation along the coast based on the fusion of African and European ideas. In the social sphere, Christian missionary work and Western education from the 1820s created “new men and women,” while kin and clan systems responded to the new opportunities of trade during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through social engineering in structures such as the “house system” in the Niger Delta. Technological advances added to the excitement of the century, and in mid-century, the introduction of the steamship and the demonstrated utility of quinine opened up West Africa to European traders and adventurers. Banks and commercial credit linked West African merchants with European merchant houses, and European commission houses served as brokers for West African traders, selling West African produce and purchasing European manufactured goods on their behalf. Palm oil, palm kernel, and rubber from West Africa underpinned this buoyant trade during the nineteenth century. The enormous opportunities for social mobility these economic factors presented received a severe setback from the 1870s with a glut in the world market of fats and oils, the onset of economic crisis, and the constriction in credit facilities. The scramble for and partition of Africa would end a remarkable era of socioeconomic opportunity, and British imperial historian David Hargreaves noted with irony how European military force had been summoned to contain the socioeconomic revolution in West Africa that free trade had unleashed (Hargreaves 1986).