subjects influenced how firms imagined and encountered the Gold Coast market, but those ideas were also shaped by day-to-day business interactions with firms’ African staff and customers themselves. This argument has far-reaching implications for rethinking the expansion of consumer capitalism in Ghana. We will see that the banal places of business—company offices, wholesale stores, and retail shops—became spaces where ideas about race, cultural difference, and development were constructed, reinforced, and institutionalized through corporate policy. By drawing on inspection reports, monthly circulars, and correspondence between firms’ headquarters in Europe, main offices in the Gold Coast, and district branches throughout the colony, I demonstrate that “doing business” was itself a process where fictions about the untapped African market and the inability of Africans to control its potential were created by foreign firms to justify their financial and cultural intrusions.3
Yet this process of imagining was never unidirectional. The power of these European firms, just like the colonial governments they supported, is obvious to us; it is easy to see African staff and consumers as merely on the receiving end of this power. And indeed, most of what we know about African consumer history is about how firms, manufacturers, and advertisers envisioned African markets and imposed their own commercial agendas. Here we will consider imagining as a reciprocal rather than a one-sided process; through oral histories, I will show how African staff and consumers constructed their own counterfictions about firms that emerged from local beliefs, including those about the circulation of wealth and proper accumulation. For instance, the United Africa Company was often associated with bad magic and witchcraft; such beliefs reflected popular anxieties about the power of foreign capital, but also the reality that Africans after World War I increasingly lost control over market terms. These rich criticisms of the practices and policies of foreign firms further demonstrate that African men and women were, and are, far from passive recipients of global economic change. Links made between firms and witchcraft, typically expressed through humorous tropes and cautionary tales, were acute analyses of the tendencies of capital to push excessive growth and foster fetishism in consumers. The resilience of these stories, which still circulate in historical memory, reveal the importance of theorizing about the global economy “from the south” to disrupt the common sense assumptions that underlie fictive visions of how capitalism works.
I will first analyze the expansion of consumer markets in the Gold Coast at the turn of the nineteenth century and then consider how everyday commercial interactions between firms’ directors and district agents and African staff and customers shaped this process. While this chapter focuses mainly on the activities of the United Africa Company and Union Trading Company before the Second World War, I will also draw on personal memoirs, commercial guides, and photographs and recollections by the staff from other firms such as G. B. Ollivant and John Holt & Company. My focus on the experiences of European management and staff is not to overshadow the contributions of African businesspeople, who will become central to our story in chapter 2, but to explore the role of this professional managerial class of men in shaping and mediating capitalist relations in the colonies. These foreign firms established power, at least in part, by fabricating ideas about Africa and Africans as inherently untrustworthy and immoral.4 Discrepancies between policy and practice within firms, as well as African staff members’ own narratives about capitalist expansion, worked to counter these misconceptions, however. As historian Frederick Cooper has argued, “the story of European firms in West Africa is neither a saga of triumph of superior organization nor a tale of every-growing monsters sweeping the innocent before them.”5 The tension between the available language used by European managers to describe and define Africa and the quotidian operations of the merchandise business that proved their conceptions otherwise offers a more nuanced picture of how colonial capitalism operated. Above all, the relationship between European management and African staff and consumers reveals imperialism as not only a political and military apparatus but also as a commercial one both created and contested by the daily—and inseparable—interactions of culture and commerce.
SETTING THE COMMERCIAL SCENE
Until about the 1880s, Africa’s commercial trade with Europeans was confined to a few coastal enclaves, and the import-export business was conducted in cooperation with African merchants. While much of this trade had been administered through state-chartered firms like the Royal African Company (established in 1672), the eighteenth century saw the rise of individual private traders—the British, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and occasionally Americans.6 Most of these private traders were active in the transatlantic slave trade. Among other works, Margaret Priestley’s history on the elite coastal trading family, the Brews, provides details about the formation of these early West African merchant societies. For the purposes of this study it is important to note that foreign merchants, like Irish slave trader Richard Brew, often lived on the coast for extended periods of time and were subject to intense bargaining with wealthy African merchants and middlemen who owned businesses as large as some of the European companies. Some of these foreign merchants also married African women according to local custom; the range of benefits gained from such unions were pivotal to European men’s commercial success prior to the second half of the nineteenth century.7 For the most part, however, the European trading community was restricted and small; this allowed the African elite merchant class, also known as “merchant princes,” to hold strong bargaining positions and to play European rivals against one another.8
The abolition and suppression of the transatlantic slave trade at the turn of the nineteenth century began to reshape the terms of business between European and African merchants. Referred to by historians as a shift to “legitimate” commerce (in order to distinguish it from the illegal trade in slaves), this era saw the replacement of the trade in human beings with the trade in raw materials such as palm oil, groundnuts, rubber, timber, and minerals.9 Propelled in part by the spread of industrial capitalism and the need to supply new factories in Europe, the import-export trade among British, French, German, Swiss, and occasionally US firms in West Africa grew increasingly competitive.10 The circulation of standardized currencies, the absence of tariff barriers, and the mass production of consumables further contributed to this surge. The pace of trade also sped up with the invention of the steamship. As A. G. Hopkins points out, “in the middle of the century sailing ships took about thirty-five days to reach West Africa, but by 1900 the steamer had reduced this time by half.”11
Such developments made it easier for both African and European newcomers to enter the commercial scene. As a result, a number of small private firms popped up along the coast. In contrast to the merchants before them, these people had little to no previous connection to West Africa. The Manchester firms John Walkden and Pickering & Berthound, as well as the Liverpool brothers who formed John Holt & Company, were some key examples (fig. 1.1). Likewise, shifting trading conditions introduced a new group of African businessmen. Distinct from wealthy African merchant princes who dictated the terms of overseas trade and agreements with foreigners, this new group mainly consisted of people who acted “either as independent wholesalers and retailers, or as agents selling goods on commission for manufacturing firms in Europe.”12 This was a transition from previous decades in which African merchants operated mostly independent businesses outside the purview of European firms and supervisors.
FIGURE 1.1. Exterior of provision store, Sekondi, ca. 1910. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from the original at the Unilever Archives, UAC/1/11/9/12/31.
Thus, when British colonial officials arrived and officially claimed Accra as the capital of their crown colony in 1874, they carried forward an economic process that was already under way. In 1902 the creation of the Gold Coast colony was completed when the British annexed Asante and the Northern Territories and brought both regions under their jurisdiction. Most foreign firms continued to conduct business as usual with little interference from the colonial state. Major changes to the commercial landscape were the size, structure, and geographical location of firms’ operations; companies that had