Toward the Comparative Study of Money: A Reconsideration of West African Currencies and Neoclassical Monetary Concepts

Abstract

Economists have long considered African currencies as lesser reflections of modern money in the West. Because core Western economic ideas were formulated before much was known about money in the nonWest, the tendency was to compare non-Western currencies with modern Western money, and, against this standard, non-Western currencies generally fared poorly. They seemed to lack, in part or wholly, one or more of the attributes of modern money. In this paper, I suggest that an analytical approach to the behavior of West African money will contribute toward the comparative study of money. This reconsideration of money is stimulated, in part, by Philip Curtin's recent overview of the major monetary flows into Africa during the period 1250-1850. His research brings together rough estimates of the cowrie shells, cloth, copper, iron, silver, and other imported moneys and areas of their use within Africa.1 These moneys were imported in sizeable quantities, and the existence of these monetary flows poses many questions about our understanding of money and our assumptions about the meaning of the money supply and its relation to economic growth. In this paper, I address some of these questions, attempting to integrate African and Western moneys in a single theoretical framework.