Cash Crops and Freedom: Export Agriculture and the Decline of Slavery in Colonial West Africa

Abstract

SummaryThis article argues that the greatest economic and social transformations of the early colonial period in West Africa, the “cash-crop revolution”, and “the slow death of slavery” and debt bondage, had stronger and more varied causal connections than previously realized. The economic circumstances of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century West Africa delayed and diluted abolitionist measures. Indeed, the coercion of labour, through the exercise of property rights in people, contributed to the speed with which the cash-crop economies developed. Conversely, however, the scale and composition of cash-crop expansion did much to determine that the slave trade and pawning would be replaced by a consensual labour market. They also shaped the possibilities for peasant versus larger-scale organization of production, and the distribution of income by gender and between communities.

Vent for surplus or productivity breakthrough? TheGhanaian cocoa take‐off, c. 1890–1936

“…Perhaps partly because they paid little attention to institutional matters, such as the organization of labour, but also because they shared in a collective amnesia, in the early years after Independence, about the fact that slavery had ever existed within African societies; Austin, ‘Cash crops and freedom’, pp. 8–9.…”

Exploring the factors causing the poor performance of most irrigation schemes in post-independence sub-Saharan Africa

“…The export economy drove the expansion of irrigation and changes to production systems during the colonial period ( Figure 2). Enforced by colonial administrations, export production continued to increase despite declining terms of trade (Austin, 2009). The domestic economy and markets declined due to expatriation of the revenue from the export economy; closure of manufacturing industries; discouragement of interregional trade; disruption of local food production and livelihoods (Worboys, 1988); and payment in provisions rather than cash for domestic and farm labour on plantations and settler estates.…”

Dependence, Unfreedom and Slavery in Africa: Towards an Integrated Analysis

“…Gareth Austin has shown that the transition from slavery to freedom was facilitated by the development of cash crops (2009). Those who owned profitable land grew crops that earned them relatively high profits.…”