The Role of Money

The Ghana case invites us to focus more closely on the possible long-run role of money in peasants’ exports, because coincidental with the growth of cash crops for export during the nineteenth century was the introduction and rapid growth can be obtained from Table 4.1 (there are no separate data for Ghana — these figures relate to British West Africa, the Gold Coast plus Nigeria). Pressure for payment in silver came from the side of African producers and traders. In 1888, the chief of Akwapim had made a request to the Governor to instruct Europeans to pay for produce in silver. And as early as 1883 the Governor was remarking that ‘money was in very great demand by the trading community, in order to pay for large quantities of rubber which are brought down from that country’.1 In Nigeria, too, there had been strong pressure for money payments from indigenous traders in the Niger Delta since the 1840s. Dike considers this to have been at the roots of the Afro-European political conflicts in the coastal areas of Nigeria, throughout the nineteenth century.2 It us generally agreed too, that it was by the judicious use of sterling silver in transactions that German firms had managed to capture most of the Lagos produce trade from the British before World War I.