Taxation and European Colonial Accumulation: The Disruption of Economic Livelihoods in Africa

Did taxation systems transfer excess income and wealth to Europe from Africa? Was overtaxation a tool for extraction, diversion and transfer of income and wealth? How did colonial taxation also reinforce subjugation and dominance? How did it stimulate the importation and consumption of European goods? This chapter explores these and other questions concerning European colonial capitalist primitive accumulation in Africa, and how money taxes in particular created various preconditions for capitalism, such as monetization, commoditization, and marketization. The imposition of a direct tax payable only in the colonial currency meant Africans were required to sell those goods and services, including especially their labor services, specified by the European colonial money monopolist. Most often this meant working for money wages on European plantations and mines and/or growing cash crops to sell to Europeans for colonial currency, rather than subsistence crops for the community to live.