Royal Monopoly and Private Enterprise in the Atlantic Trade: The Case of Dahomey

Law, Robin

doi:10.1017/s0021853700015711

Cited by 60 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Perhaps the most famous, and influential, of these examples was Karl Polanyi's argument that the kingdom of Dahomey enforced a monopoly over the cowry money supply in order to regulate the market in slaves after 1727. Subsequent research has suggested that the monarchical monopoly that Polanyi described was much more tenuous, and much less important, than he allowed (Polanyi 1964: 390;Law 1977;Johnson 1980). In Ghana itself there is undeniable evidence for the nineteenth-century Asantehene's control over gold specie, and for the revolutionary consequences of its disintegration (Arhin 1995: 99;McCaskie 1983;.…”

Section: Keith Breckenridgementioning

confidence: 99%

The World's First Biometric Money: Ghana's E-Zwich and the Contemporary Influence of South African Biometrics

Breckenridge¹

2010

Africa

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In January 2008 the Ghanaian Central Bank announced that it had introduced a new centralized mechanism for the settlement of transactions between the Ghanaian banks. This interbank switch, as it was called, was purchased from, and managed by, the South African company Net 1 UEPS, and it had a unique central organizing principle. The switch was indexed biometrically, using a key derived from the ten fingerprints of account holders. This new interbank switch and a smartcard encoded in the same way has equipped Ghana with the world's first biometric money supply. This article is an effort to explain the development and significance of this biometric money, which Ghanaians call the e-Zwich. It traces the way in which biometric registration in Ghana (as in other African countries) has leaked from the mundane, difficult, and mostly unrewarding, task of civil registration into the more properly remunerated domain of monetary transactions. Viewed in the light of the rich historical anthropology of money in West Africa, what is at stake in Ghana may be much more significant than any of the current participants fully realize. Perhaps the most interesting finding of this study is that the e-Zwich system might actually succeed.

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Section: Keith Breckenridgementioning

confidence: 99%

The World's First Biometric Money: Ghana's E-Zwich and the Contemporary Influence of South African Biometrics

Breckenridge¹

2010

Africa

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“…Private enterprise was often restricted by the State, e.g. in Asante (Wilks 1979) and Dahomey (Law 1977;Manning 2004), and the systems of land allocation based on chiefs generated inefficient ownership structures and limited the possibility of economic development (Goldstein and Udry 2008). 11 In other words, it is possible that African societies had a relatively marked extractive character, in terms of their ability to concentrate resources and redistribute them unequally.…”

Section: A Long-term View On Inequalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Income Inequality in French West Africa: Building Social Tables for Pre-Independence Senegal and Ivory Coast

Alfani

Tadei

2019

SSRN Journal

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Sub-Saharan Africa is home today to some of the most unequal countries in the world, in Southern and Central Africa, as well as others that are close to the world average, in Western Africa. Yet, there is no consensus regarding the historical factors that led to such a situation. Given limited data on income distribution during colonial times, we do not know whether present-day inequality patterns can be traced back to the colonial period and which role was played by colonial institutions. Most of our knowledge comes from information on British colonies, while territories subjected to other colonial powers are much less well known. To address this gap, we analyze trends in income inequality for colonies in French West Africa, building social tables for Senegal and Ivory Coast during the last decades of colonial rule. We find that income inequality was high during the colonial period, because of the huge income differential between Africans and European settlers (especially in Senegal) and of high inequality within the African population (especially in the Ivory Coast). Nevertheless, it tended to reduce during colonial rule -but the trend inverted after independence. Our findings cast in a new light the connection between colonialism, extractive institutions, high inequality and inequality extraction ratios.JEL Codes: N17, O43.

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“…Reanalysis of most economic systems from Bronze Age Mesopotamia to 19th century West Africa has shown that the strong substantivist differentiation between contemporary and premodern economies is misplaced and gives unfounded importance to social-political integration or control over economies (Chaudhuri 1985;Latham 1978;Launay 1978;Law 1977Law , 1992Lynn 1992). This view, however, does not mean that traders and market mentalities have always dominated in past societies or will continue to dominate contemporary socioeconomic culture, or that laissez faire economies are the ''desired'' end of human economic development (Bogle 2005).…”

Section: An Argument For Trader Autonomy In Premodern Economiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Archaeology of Trading Systems, Part 1: Towards a New Trade Synthesis

2008

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After almost three centuries of investigations into the question of what it means to be human and the historical processes of becoming human, archaeologists have amassed a huge volume of data on prehistoric human interactions. One of the largest data sets available is on the global distribution and exchange of materials and commodities. What still remains insufficiently understood is the precise nature of these interactions and their role in shaping the diverse cultures that make up the human family as we know it. A plethora of theoretical models combined with a multitude of methodological approaches exist to explain one important aspect of human interaction-trade-and its role and place in shaping humanity. We argue that trade parallels political, religious, and social processes as one of the most significant factors to have affected our evolution. Here we review published literature on archaeological approaches to trade, including the primitivist-modernist and substantivist-formalist-Marxist debates. We also discuss economic, historical, and ethnographic research that directly addresses the role of traders and trade in both past and contemporary societies. In keeping with the complexities of interaction between trade and other aspects of human behavior, we suggest moving away from the either/or perspective or strong identification with any particular paradigm and suggest a return to the middle through a combinational approach to the study of trade in past societies.

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Royal Monopoly and Private Enterprise in the Atlantic Trade: The Case of Dahomey

Cited by 60 publications

References 6 publications

The World's First Biometric Money: Ghana's E-Zwich and the Contemporary Influence of South African Biometrics

The World's First Biometric Money: Ghana's E-Zwich and the Contemporary Influence of South African Biometrics

Income Inequality in French West Africa: Building Social Tables for Pre-Independence Senegal and Ivory Coast

The Archaeology of Trading Systems, Part 1: Towards a New Trade Synthesis

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