This paper responds to the broad debate about the interactions of three major themes in the study of African history and political economy: the content and phasing of economic ‘globalization’ in relation to Africa; the developmental or anti-developmental consequences for African economies of their involvements in the world economy; and the role of African agency in the various episodes of ‘economic globalization’.
The discussion will focus on the perennially controversial case of British West Africa. For MacPhee in 1926, colonial rule was making British West Africa ‘more and more one cog in the world economic machine’, to the material benefit of its inhabitants. To contemporary critics of the ‘Lands Policy’, in contrast, official attempts to protect a frozen version of customary land tenure and related institutions were a denial of the universalizing obligations of capitalist empire. A similar contrast of perspectives can be seen in recent work by the imperial historian
Reviewing the evidence, the paper argues for the importance of seeing the period in the context of the prior history of African extra-subsistence production and market activity. Perhaps paradoxically, and with ambiguous economic consequences, positive indigenous responses to the commercial opportunities presented by the world market served to rebuff the pressure for the imposition of the kind of property rights system that a line of writers from Marx to Acemoglu have seen as uniquely – and universally – conducive to long-term economic development.