The Colonial Currency Transition

Introduction

In contrast to West Africa, the history of money in East Africa has received little scholarly attention. As I have stressed elsewhere, when economic historians began to study the African continent in the 1960s and 1970s, the study of money and currency remained almost exclusively confined to West Africa. With very few exceptions, the interest towards the topic waned in the 1990s, along with interest in the economic history of the continent.¹ In the last decade, however, the scholarly interest in the history of money in Africa and in particular in the transition during the colonial period, has given rise to new collaborative and interdisciplinary research that represents a true “renaissance of African monetary history”.² The traditional focus on West Africa has been maintained, but the geographical scope of the research has been extended to other regions of the continent, including East and Southern Africa. Outputs of this “renaissance” include a special issue in the African Studies Review edited by Gerold Krozewski and Tinashe Nyamunda, the collective volume Monetary Transitions. Currencies, Colonialism and African Societies, which I edited, and some monographs that have recently enriched the field.³

The long tradition of the study of money in West Africa and the conspicuous scholarship on the region have necessarily been a source of inspiration for scholars interested in the history of money in other regions of the continent and beyond and have created a common frame of reference in terms of theories and methodologies. The project coordinated by Toyomu Masaki and Gareth Austin which lies at the origin of this special issue, has the merit of revisiting the scholarly tradition of the 1960s and 1970s in order to provide a more articulated understanding of how monetary spheres and circuits in West Africa were transformed by the establishment of colonial rule.

The colonial currency transition in East Africa has important similarities with that in West Africa, but at the same time it is also distinctive in some respects. East and West Africa presented important institutional and economic differences at the time of the establishment of colonial rule, particularly in terms of state centralization and participation in the global economy. West Africa also had an almost pan-regional currency,⁴ i.e. cowrie shells, whereas in East Africa there was a clear divide between the currencies used on the coast (international coins such as the Maria Theresa Thaler or the Indian Rupee) and a variety of commodity currencies (Venetian glass beads, American and Indian cloth, and metal wire) used in the interior regions. Thus, although colonial monetary policies and their failures—especially in the early decades of colonial rule—were often comparable, existing monetary systems and practices forced the colonial state to adapt and issue currencies that were tailored to local conditions and needs.

The articles in this special issue cover various aspects of the transition, ranging from the role of the precolonial and colonial states, to the changing attitudes towards silver in the imperial-colonial context, and from the role of colonial monetary institutions and taxation, to the use of colonial currencies in the purchase of agricultural produce. From the wealth of topics covered in the special issue, I have selected those that lend themselves more readily to drawing parallels between East and West Africa, in order to explore similarities and differences and thus possible synergies within the study of African monetary history.

This concluding article is therefore structured around five main themes. The first section seeks to compare the role of precolonial states in currency adoption and circulation, drawing in particular on some of the points discussed in Adjepong-Boateng’s article. The problems encountered by the British in introducing notes and coins in Nigeria—and the solutions they found—as described by Olukoju, bear striking similarities to what happened in the East African colonies under British rule; this is the subject of the second section. The third section reflects on the limited reach of the colonial state in relation to the imposition of colonial currencies, as discussed by almost all the articles in this special issue, but especially by Masaki. The fourth section discusses the importance of considering border areas as a privileged site for studying the circulation of multiple currencies, a point developed by Cristofaro and Nakao. Finally, the fifth section uses Gardner’s analysis of seasonal currency flows in West Africa to explore the factors that influenced currency circulation in colonial East Africa.

The Role of Precolonial States in Currency Adoption and Circulation

As Leigh Gardner points out in this special issue, “contrary to the claims of colonial officials and early historians, Europeans did not “introduce” money to West Africa”. In fact, the region was already characterized by sophisticated currency systems. West African states often regulated currencies introduced by traders whose circulation was not tied to the jurisdiction of particular polities, and in some cases, such as Asante, imposed their own currency.

The maintenance of a single type of currency for a wide range of transactions seems to have been achieved in precolonial Africa only under very limited conditions, one of which was political centralization.⁵ The Asante state, for example, controlled the pulverization of gold nuggets and supervised the weights needed for the use of gold dust as currency, as discussed by Adjepong-Boateng in this special issue. This allowed them to facilitate trade and to protect the strength of the centralized state. In other parts of West Africa, too, the state played a central role in regulating the circulation of a particular currency. For example, in eighteenth-century Whydah, the issue of strung cowries was a prerogative of the king and royal officials confiscated cowrie strings that contained less that the standard forty shells.⁶

In nineteenth-century East Africa, centralized states comparable to those in West Africa existed only in the Great Lakes region. Here the state also had a central role in enforcing and controlling the circulation of currency. In the Buganda kingdom, for example, ivory pieces (obusanga) were introduced as currency during the reign of kabaka (king) Junju (c. 1790–1800). These were smooth and drilled discs, which were put on strings made of palm fibre. Specialists in the royal palace carved these ivory discs and the kabaka controlled the quantities that were put into circulation.⁷ In a comparative perspective, these ivory discs deserve special attention because they were not imported as were other currencies in use in East Africa at the time but rather sourced locally and transformed into currency in the royal palace under the supervision of the king. As gold dust in Asante, the circulation of obusanga depended on the level of production and on what the kabaka decided to release into the economy.

By mid-nineteenth century, cowries had replaced obusanga as currency in Buganda, and once again, their circulation and acceptance were encouraged by the intervention of the kabaka. Kabaka Mutesa (1857–1884) fixed the price of goods sold in the capital’s market in cowries and enforced the payment of taxes and fees in cowries.⁸ It is interesting to note that in East Africa, with some minor exceptions, cowrie shells were used as currency only in the Great Lakes region. They therefore did not have the wide distribution they had in West Africa. Contrary to West Africa where cowries were all imported, these shells were abundant and readily available along the coast and in Zanzibar. Therefore, they could not be used as currency in the region. Traders from Buganda, however, rarely traveled to the coast and had no direct access to them. Thus, the amounts of cowries that entered the kingdom depended on traders reaching Buganda from the coast and were controlled by the kabaka.

One of the central questions of Adjepong-Boateng’s article is why the Asante kingdom did not mint their own coins. The Asante were indeed familiar with coins, having participated in trans-Saharan trade and global trade since the fifteenth century. Adjepong-Boateng also mentions that small unstamped pieces known as kakraas, made of gold mixed with copper or silver, circulated in Asante and were legally permitted to replace cowries in small transactions serving as a small denomination currency in relation to gold dust. The Asante also had the knowledge and technology, having been in contact with Islamic artisans and advisers. But all of this was not enough to spur innovation.

There is no tradition of minting coins in West Africa, but there is in precolonial East Africa. Coins were minted by some of the Swahili coastal towns from about 800 to 1500. Mints operated at Kilwa Kisiwani, Shanga, Zanzibar and Pemba. Given the amounts excavated in archaeological sites along the coast, the majority of coins in circulation were copper coins minted in Kilwa. Their circulation was limited to the coastal areas, and this represents a clear indication that their acceptance was linked to the authority of specific rulers rather than to a wider standard of value.⁹ Thus, polities on the Swahili coast had the knowledge and technology to mint coins and the power to enforce their acceptance, at least locally. This knowledge derived from their longterm commercial relationships with Muslim and Indian traders visiting the coast and thus—similarly to the Asante—their involvement in the global economy. The minting of coins ended in the sixteenth century with the Portuguese occupation of the Swahili coast.¹⁰

Coins were issued in East Africa only by political institutions based on the coast that had access to precious metals and the authority to enforce them. In the areas where there was no centralized political authority, currencies were made by African traders from materials imported by Europeans or, as in the case of cowries, available on the coast. These items became currencies because they were accepted by other traders or by their customers, not because they were backed by a state. For both West and East Africa, this testifies to the power of merchants. The money supply was determined by market conditions on which African states could exercise little control.¹¹

When trading in imported currencies, coastal merchants transported them to the interior of East Africa, thus covering their transport costs and enabling them to circulate and be used as currency. Later, with the establishment of colonial rule, transport costs, especially for small denomination coins, became one of the biggest problems for the colonial states, along with many others, as we will see in the next section.

Fungibility and Durability: The Materiality of Colonial Money

The Deputy Master of the Royal Mint, William Ellison-Macartney, wrote in 1905 that for the colonies what was needed was “A form of coin that will be economical in manufacture, distinctive in character and convenient as currency.”¹² Issues of cost, design, and material were central to colonial in other parts of the empire. West Africa often served as an inspiration for colonial officers in British East Africa, and knowledge was transferred from previously colonized areas to newly occupied ones.¹³ However, this led to generalizations that were ill-suited to the complexities of the African monetary systems that colonial currencies were intended to replace. For example, in a letter discussing the introduction of new subsidiary coins in British East Africa, the Royal Mint emphasised that: “(there is a) proposal now under consideration to introduce a subsidiary currency for Northern and Southern Nigeria and Lagos. The merit of this currency is that while it meets the wants of the local traders, it is part and parcel of the Imperial system. So far as I know, the character of the interior trade of East Africa is not dissimilar to that of the interior of West Africa. A currency which suits the one will suit the other […].”¹⁴

Nonetheless, there were many similarities between the problems faced by the British administration in Nigeria, as described by Olukoju, and those faced by the British in Uganda and Kenya. For example, the material from which currencies were made played a key role in the construction of regimes of value in the colonial context, and thus in their acceptance or rejection. In order to be accepted as a means of payment, currencies needed certain material properties, such as durability and transportability. At the same time, at least some denominations had to be small enough to function in economies where prices and wages were also very low. In the early decades of European rule, colonial officials often ignored or did not attribute enough importance to these aspects, and their monetary policies often failed as a result.¹⁵

One example is the introduction of aluminium coins. This metal was generally chosen for small denomination coins because it was cheaper than other materials, and thus was the only metal that could be used to mint coins that cost less than their face value. In Uganda and the East Africa Protectorate (EAP) it was used to mint oneand half-cent coins. Soon after their introduction, however, it was discovered that these coins were being rejected by African currency users. Investigation revealed that the same thing had happened in Nigeria, and that the reason was that the tropical climate caused aluminium to corrode.¹⁶ As in Nigeria, the minting of aluminium coins for East Africa was also discontinued, and new nickel-bronze coins were introduced.¹⁷

In his article, Olukoju mentions the use of tenths as washers because they were cheaper than ordinary washers of the same size. This may sound anecdotal, but it is striking how exactly the same practice developed in Kenya. In the Central Province, one-cent coins—minted with a hole in the center—had such a recognized small value that they were also used instead of washers on corrugated iron roofing.¹⁸ In areas of the colony where the export economy and wage labour were more developed—such as the Central Province—colonial money soon became completely “domesticated.” Thus, as prices rose, the small denomination coins that could be used in exchange in other areas of East Africa became too small in value to serve as currency and thus lost their monetary function.

Another common problem related to the materiality of money is that of paper banknotes. As in West Africa, banknotes were first introduced in East Africa during and after the First World War in response to shortages caused by the dramatic reduction in the number of coins that could be produced by European mints. During the war, nickel and bronze were actually needed to produce weapons, not coins.¹⁹ In East Africa, one-rupee notes were used to pay demobilized porters and soldiers at the end of the war.²⁰ At the same time, the colonial government openly encouraged the use of notes to pay for farm and government labor, taxes, and produce.²¹ However, soon after the war, one-rupee notes were demonetized overnight without redemption owing to a currency instability known as the “East African Rupee Crisis.”²² This contributed to an increase of the distrust towards the colonial state and its paper money.

The “long struggle of banknotes” is very well known to scholars interested in the study of money in Africa. African societies were particularly suspicious of paper money because it was not durable and could easily be destroyed by fire, water, and insects. At the same time, banknotes had a high value and could therefore only be used for large payments, which Africans generally did not make. Moreover, unlike commodity currencies or coins, paper banknotes had no fungible value. Precolonial commodity currencies were fungible items. Metals were melted down to make tools, cloth was used to make clothes or sails, cowrie shells and glass beads were used to make ornaments or artworks. Banknotes, on the other hand, had no intrinsic value, which limited their acceptance. For example, in the Coast Province of Kenya in the 1920s, bridewealth payments could never be made with banknotes. Only coins (even if of the same value as banknotes) or cattle could be used.²³

At the same time, however, paper money was particularly convenient for the colonial state in terms of costs and thus seigniorage revenues. As Austin points out in this special issue, banknotes can be seen as the “purest form of token currency”. This means that in order to be accepted, they had to be backed by a state in which currency users had confidence, which was not the case in the 1920s. This further contributes to explain why banknotes were largely unpopular during the colonial period.²⁴

Indeed, trust in the state was fundamental to the circulation of a fiduciary currency, which had no intrinsic value or fungibility to allow for other uses, such as banknotes. The lack of trust in the colonial state, as well as its limited reach, was at the root of the problems that the Europeans had in getting their money accepted, as we will discuss in the next section.

The Limited Reach of the Colonial State

Colonial money had some advantages for Europeans that precolonial currencies did not have. It was easier to control; its value was declared and supported by the state; it was generally cheaper because it was made from materials with little intrinsic value (such as paper discussed above); it could generate a profit through seigniorage; it was easier to count and store. But colonial money did not simply follow the establishment of colonial rule, and its use could not be enforced by coercion.

In the case study of Senegal discussed in Masaki’s article, the colonial state treated commodity money and coins in the same way. In the mid-1890s, due to a shortage of coins, the Senegalese colonial government accepted guinée as a means of paying the poll tax. However, treating cotton fabrics, which had different characteristics, as a currency created various difficulties in terms of exchange rates. Masaki shows that in the interior of French West Africa—where the involvement of the public sector was more pronounced than in British West Africa—the colonial government itself provided commodity money as a means of payment, using government funds. This had several pitfalls and was indeed a problem also in other African colonies. In Uganda, for example, during the same period, salaries for African government employees and soldiers were paid in cloth. One British officer complained that he had to stockpile so much cloth to pay salaries that government stations were “looking like draper’s shops”.²⁵

With the introduction of taxes, the inconvenience of collecting, counting, and storing African currencies became even more apparent. In 1900, the first year of tax collection in Uganda, young elephants, zebras, pythons, barkcloth, ivory, goats, sheep, labor, and various types of produce were all brought in for tax payment, along with £11,000 worth of cowries (1£=12,000 cowries), which “poured into Kampala by the million, and the piles and piles of bundles of twenty-thousand shells each were calculated to strike terror into the hearts of those officials who were unfortunate enough to have to count and store them.”²⁶

In Nigeria, as Olukoju points out, the British had to take into account the local practice of counting in tens. As a result, the division of colonial currencies was arranged so that they could be counted in tens. Similarly, in Uganda, the colonial state took into account the way in which people used cowries (on strings of one hundred shells) when it decided to introduce the East African cents and thus divide the Indian rupee into cents. This decision is particularly important because the monetary system in Great Britain was not based on decimals. The decimal system, although common throughout the world today, was not widely used in the early twentieth century, and certainly not in Great Britain and its colonies.²⁷ This reflects the need for colonizers to adapt to existing ways of handling and counting money.

European concepts of money were brought to Africa and introduced into a context where sophisticated and effective monetary systems already existed. Thus, colonial money was rejected, transformed, accepted and/or incorporated into existing currency systems in ways that were beyond the control of the colonial state. This often forced Europeans to adapt to existing monetary practices, such as methods of handling or counting, and to accept payments in commodity currencies. Europeans brought to the colonies the idea that the circulation of currency was linked to a territorial space. In Europe, this was the space of nations, limited by national borders; in Africa, it was the space of colonies, limited by colonial borders.

Borderlands as Sites of Currency Multiplicity

The role of colonial money was not only to replace precolonial currencies. Colonial currencies also served to territorialize a colonial space, delimited by colonial borders and defined by the circulation of a single currency. However, colonial borders remained porous and continued to be crossed by people, goods and currencies. The circulation of money thus served to reinforce colonial borders, but also to transcend them. According to Jane Guyer, borders between communities of currency users can be seen as “sites of active mediation to be examined in their own terms, alongside economic analyses based on reductive assumptions of currency uniformity and frictionless equivalence established through competitive market processes.”²⁸ Looking at borders as such, provides important insights into the nature and circulation of colonial currencies and their relationship to existing ones.

Colonial conquest imposed territorial boundaries that cut across existing regional trade networks. In doing so, it destroyed or transformed them and created new ones. The imposition of colonial rule initially increased the variety of currencies available and contributed to the multiplicity of currencies that had already characterized precolonial monetary systems. These multiple currencies became a critical tool for African traders to negotiate value and mediate exchange during a period of significant change.

In this special issue, Cristofaro and Nakao argue that it was the imposition of two different fiscal regimes that reshaped monetary practices and circulation in the Gold Coast and Haute Volta borderlands. In this area, African traders continued to trade across colonial borders and currency zones to secure marginal profits and, in the absence of financial services, acted as money changers.

In the early decades of colonial rule, borders remained fluid. This, together with the inevitability of currency circulation, forced colonial states to be flexible in terms of currency control in border areas. When the Indian rupee became the official currency of the EAP and Uganda in 1898, the Italian and German governments of the neighboring colonies issued regulations sanctioning only their coins as legal tender. Despite these regulations, different types of colonial coins circulated along the borders between the colonies. In the districts bordering German East Africa (GEA), for example, the colonial government of Uganda received and accepted GEA rupees in payment of taxes. They later exchanged them for Indian rupees at the German consulate in Mombasa or gave them to Arab merchants trading in GEA in exchange for Indian rupees. Accepting “foreign” currency was convenient, as it allowed currency shortages to be dealt with. In 1916, for example, the British paid part of the salaries of porters and soldiers employed in the East African campaign in GEA rupees that had been confiscated in the enemy colony. On their return to the EAP and Uganda, the porters and soldiers were allowed to use these rupees to pay taxes to the government.²⁹

As in West Africa, East African traders acted as money changers in border areas. In 1913, a colonial report noted that ivory was being smuggled from British East Africa into German territory and that “certain Indian shopkeepers act as go-between in this traffic and change the German East African notes received in payment.”³⁰ Traders not only exploited the differences in tax systems between the colonies, but also took advantage of the different price levels. In the South Kavirondo District in Kenya, for example, it was noted that the traders preferred to buy cattle in the district lying along the Anglo-German border where prices were considerably lower than elsewhere. The South Kavirondo Annual Report noted that “Without doubt a great deal of the cattle thus bought is smuggled in from German East Africa either with or without the cognizance of the buyer.”³¹

Cristofaro and Nakao also discuss the impact of tax payments on the ways in which different forms of currency circulated. In British East Africa, colonial coins were used for transactions with the government or the settlers, as they were the currency in which wages and taxes were paid, while precolonial currencies continued to be used in everyday transactions. In the early decades of colonial rule, rupee coins did not circulate as currency in many parts of the East Africa Protectorate and were only obtained when it was tax collection time. This is illustrated by the way in which rupees were called in some areas. In the Baringo District, for example, local people used commodity currencies in daily exchanges and only knew colonial coins in connection with the hut tax, so the local unit of money was called “one hut”. The value of “one hut” was 3 rupees, and anything less than one rupee was not recognized by them.³² This “linguistic oddity”—as Cristofaro and Nakao call a similar example at the beginning of their article—shows very clearly that colonial money was only procured in some regions of Kenya when it was time to collect taxes.

If we look at the persistence of the use of commodity currencies in borderland areas, as Cristofaro and Nakao do for cowrie shells, we can see how precolonial cross-border trade networks survived well into the colonial period, despite trade regulations and prohibitions on “smuggling”. When they were introduced, colonial currencies issued by different European powers were integrated into existing monetary systems and contributed to the multiplicity of currencies in use. Existing interregional trade connections combined with the fragility of state control in the frontier zones, severely limited the possibility of territorializing the colonial space through the circulation of currency.³³

The Seasonality of Currency Circulation

Seasonal fluctuations in currency circulation were linked to the rhythms of agricultural production. Indeed, as Austin points out, seasonal variations were a striking feature of colonial economies in West Africa. In her article, Gardner uses monthly data on currency circulation to analyze the seasonal fluctuations in demand. She shows how this analysis can help explain the persistence of multiple currencies during the colonial period, despite attempts by colonial states to impose a single monetary standard.

Limited access to banking facilities and the use of cash to pay for agricultural produce explain the increased demand for colonial money during the harvest season. But it does not explain why the amount of currency in circulation declined so rapidly after the harvest. Gardner argues that this suggests that producers “soon spent the proceeds of the harvest on some other asset which could serve as a store of value through the rest of the year.”

In the EAP and Uganda, the scarcity of rupees was explained by the colonial authorities as a consequence of the African tendency to bury money or hide it in the roofs of their huts, as when rupees were needed to pay taxes or fees, they suddenly reappeared.³⁴ But rupees did not actually disappear: those earned through wages or through the sale of produce were generally used to buy cattle. As banking services for Africans were very limited, the money earned through wage labor or the sale of produce was used to buy cattle. The Annual Report for South Kavirondo (1913) reported that “At present, the natives generally speaking show little desire to utilize their savings in buying imported goods and with the exception of well-known articles such as iron-wire, beads, hoes, knives and a certain amount of americani [cloth] and blankets the greater part of any money earned is hoarded up to buy live-stock.”³⁵ Cattle could then be used to pay bridewealth or sold when taxes had to be paid.³⁶ As a store of wealth, cattle could be risky, as happened when they died during the rinderpest epidemics in East Africa in the 1880s and 1890s. But unlike commodity currencies, it could not be demonetized by the colonial state.

In Kenya, where agricultural production for export was controlled by white settlers, seasonal fluctuations in the circulation of currency were also linked to the payment of wages to African laborers they employed. During the harvest season, the need for labor increased, as did the need for currency. In British East Africa, problems associated with currency shortages became particularly acute at the end of the harvest season, not only because of the need to pay for produce (as in West Africa), but also because of the need to pay wages.³⁷

The seasonal cycles in West Africa were determined by the seasonality of the agricultural production and the payment of taxes. In East Africa, the sale of livestock was a common method of meeting tax obligations. As the fiscal year approached its end on 31 March, cattle prices in local markets plummeted as people sold their animals to raise rupees for taxes. The 1920–1921 Kitui District Annual Report noted that the increase in the poll tax had not had the desired effect of making the Kamba more willing to work for wages. The way to raise the rupees needed to pay the tax continued to be the sale of cattle. The 1923 Annual Report for Kecheliba District expressed concern about the unsustainable sale of cattle to meet tax demands.³⁸ In 1936, a Luo chief noted that his people called the tax a “cattle tax”, because they always had to sell their cattle to pay it.³⁹ As Jane Guyer points out, the money earned for the sole purpose of paying taxes had only two functions: as a means of payment (for taxes) and as a medium of exchange. She points out that these two functions “formed a short, closed, mutually reinforcing loop without passing through investment and the generation of credit, and even purchase or consumption.”⁴⁰ This led to disruptions in currency circulation that were difficult to control and, at certain times, interfered with the availability of colonial money.

Conclusion

The historical understanding we have of the monetary history of West Africa is much more sophisticated than that of other regions of the continent, being the result of a long tradition of study on the subject. As I have tried to highlight in this article, several aspects discussed in this special issue are not unique to West Africa, but also characterized the currency transition in East Africa. Common problems were those related to the acceptance of colonial money. As discussed, money was rejected by African societies in East and West Africa for similar reasons: materiality, denomination, and a lack of trust in the colonial state. The limited reach of the colonial state was particularly evident in frontier areas, where its power was even more fragile and multiple currencies circulated. At the same time, in both East and West Africa, the circulation and availability of currency was largely linked to the rhythms of agricultural production and the payment of taxes and wages.

A comparison between East and West Africa shows that where we find more differences is in relation to the precolonial period and the use of commodity currencies. Contrary to West Africa, in East Africa cowrie shells had a limited circulation, and glass beads in relation to metal wire or cloth were in use as currency. Merchants played a central role in the creation and circulation of currencies. This is even more true in East Africa, where we find even fewer examples of centralized political institutions than in West Africa enforcing or supervising the use of a particular currency through taxation or state control.

However, these differences seem to have had only a limited impact on the colonial currency transition. The transition was difficult across the continent, especially in the early decades of colonial rule. After the initial failures, colonial states were forced to take into consideration existing ways of using and counting money. Despite the survival of commodity currencies well into and even after the colonial period,⁴¹ colonial money eventually became accepted. This was due to the expansion of the colonial economy, and with it the payment of agricultural exports and wages in colonial currency, the desire of African consumers for imports paid for in colonial money, and the increasing ability of the colonial state to enforce the payment of taxes in cash.

One of the merits of this special issue is undoubtedly the inclusion of case studies from both the French and British empires. The differences and similarities between the empires have not been significantly addressed so far.⁴² Exploring them can open up new avenues of research that are useful for understanding the impact of the currency transition on African currency users, for example in encouraging migration between colonies or in redirecting existing trade routes to new areas across colonial borders.

In conclusion, the colonial monetary transitions in East and West Africa reveal both common challenges and regional nuances. Despite initial resistance, the eventual acceptance of colonial currencies underlines the complex interplay between indigenous practices, colonial economic policies and preexisting interregional trade networks.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the participants of the workshop “Money in West Africa. The economic and social history of the transition from commodity to colonial currencies”, University of Cambridge, December 2019. I am particularly grateful to Tony Hopkins for the stimulating correspondence that followed. Thanks to Toyomu Masaki and Gareth Austin, as well as the anonymous reviewer, for their insightful comments. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support of the research project “Arms, Beads and Cloth: African Consumers and the 19th-century Global Economy” funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU, Missione 4 Componente 1 CUP J53D23000530006.