This paper is meant to be a contribution towards assessing the impact of the colonial experience upon Nyasaland, concentrating upon the decision-making processes involved in building the railways that served Nyasaland and the impact that they had upon Nyasaland's economy. In the early 1890s British metropolitan interests became alive to the strategic and commercial importance of Portuguese East Africa south of the Zambezi. To further British interests in the area, imperial decisions were taken to protect the British proxy there, the Mozambique Company. This protection included support for the Trans Zambesia Railway project. This support was calculated to protect British interests from American commercial threats, but the cost of the railway was placed upon the Nyasaland administration. Lumbered with the burden of the railway guarantees, Nyasaland's economy stagnated in the 1920s and African agricultural development was impeded. As a result, by the end of the twenties Nyasaland was being described as ‘the Cinderella of Africa’.

In the late 1920s a second major project was approved. This was the construction of the Zambezi bridge. Again, the decision to build this was not taken with the interests of Nyasaland in mind, but rather in order to provide steel orders for a stagnating British steel industry in 1929. The one possible moneymaker for the bridge and railway system, coal from Moatize, was prevented from being developed lest it compete with Welsh coal. And when the decision to build the bridge was made, it was decided that Nyasaland should pay.

The history of the London-based Natal Land and Colonisation Company is explored against the background of the evolving political economy of rural Natal. In the early years of the colony, white-controlled farming operations consistently failed. The landholdings of bankrupt colonists passed into the hands of a small group of men with capital. In 1861 this group activated its links with financiers in Britain to float the Natal Land and Colonisation Company. The Company ‘bought’ 250,000 acres of surplus lands from them in return for an injection of metropolitan capital into productive operations to be carried out on the remaining mainly coastal lands, or into further speculative activity. In fact, white-controlled farming activity in the interior continued to stagnate. Money which the Company loaned to white farmers in the 1860s, secured as mortgages on their farms, was not repaid, and the Company took over the lands of the bankrupt until in 1874 it controlled 657,000 acres in Natal. Anxious for a sizeable and more reliable source of income, the Company, in common with some colonists, concentrated on extracting rent from Africans, as yet the only successful farming population of the Natal interior. The increasing importance of this source of income to the Company was rudely interrupted in the 1890s by a fundamental shift in the Natal political economy. New mining centres in South Africa looked to Natal to furnish some of their needs for raw material and labour. The balance of economic and political forces favoured those who demanded labour, not rent, from Natal Africans. The Company switched its capital in good time out of renting land to African farmers and into renting and property development in the growing urban areas of white South Africa. Its properties were brought within the empire of the Eagle Star Insurance Company in 1948.

The article examines the factors which influenced Tiv initiative and response in the development of the Nigerian export production of benniseed or sesamum indicum. A trade hitherto largely ignored, it has been overshadowed by the Bohannans' classic account, with its emphasis on the subsistence aspect of Tiv economy. It is therefore presented both as a case study of the development of an African export commodity and as a contribution to the broader field of socio-economic history of the colonial era.

This paper is a comparative study of the impact of colonial rule on two African societies, the Gbaya and the pastoral Fulani, inhabiting the Adamawa Plateau in central Cameroon. The main discussion focuses on the difficulties experienced by the French in their attempts to administer these two politically uncentralized and geographically mobile peoples. Geographical mobility was not the result of population pressure or other ecological constraint but was a political strategy and means of dispute regulation frequently employed by these societies living in a lightly populated region. Conflicting with this structural tendency towards mobility in both societies was the French policy of regroupement, the concentration and resettlement of subject peoples in stable villages. Examination of the historical record reveals that despite more or less stringent attempts on the part of the colonial powers to restructure Gbaya and pastoral Fulani societies along more politically amenable lines, these societies have changed little in this respect up to the present day and continue to pose the same problems of administration for the modern government of the United Republic of Cameroon.

The institutional framework imposed upon Niger in 1946, tended to function according to traditional political concepts, norms, notions and values. Hence the distinction established in this paper between ‘traditionalist’ (UNIS/BNA) and ‘modern’ political parties, refers to the degree of reliance upon this traditional culture and also to the degree to which party-leaders were able to manipulate the norms, notions, etc., of the traditional political systems, in order to gain influence within the new institutional framework. The French Administration, functioning largely as an indigenous chieftaincy, was to a certain extent forced to interfere in politics, since an electoral victory for a ‘modern’ political party (i.e. the évolués) would have to be interpreted—according to the logic of traditional political theory—as a loss of the ‘force’, ‘power’ or ‘luck’, without which the French could no longer be regarded as the legitimate rulers of Niger.

If the French finally decided to collaborate with the évolués (and in the process disentangled themselves from the ‘chieftaincy-model’), it was because the évolués constituted the only group capable of grasping the intricate problems of economic development and of running a modern state.

This paper argues that interpretations which would view pre-colonial Akan political life as ‘normative’ and structured may be incorrect, at least in so far as stool succession is concerned. Contemporaneous evidence for this early period is at best sparse and at worst simply non-existent and seldom allows even tentative hypotheses. Rather, it is necessary to infer past practices from more recent data, whether this be observation of present behaviour or recent testimony about the past. In this case I have used the testimony presented at various stool and jurisdictional disputes during the colonial period for which records survive. These are generally, of course, ex parte statements and can be used only with caution. However, there is a surprising consensus throughout these records that both the principles and the patterns of stool succession and paramountcy in the pre-colonial period were variegated and even extemporaneous although, not surprisingly, there is much dispute about the reasons for this. On balance, this testimony suggests that a re-interpretation of early Akan political culture using a wider range of evidence is desirable.

Although this implies that the impact of colonial ‘indirect’ rule was not as profound as has often been supposed, I have not discussed this problem directly except as it bears on the quality of the data. Nor have I attempted to analyse the day-to-day dynamics of political life, either for the earlier period (which would be impossible on the evidence) or for the colonial period (which would be irrelevant for comparison). Nevertheless, within the restricted compass of stool succession and paramountcy the argument here is that colonial rule involved little fundamental change from earlier practices. If anything, it probably served to delimit a greater range of previous options by seeking to codify them.

Par l'analyse comparée de l'évolution, depuis le début du siècle, des deux plus grandes firmes d'import-export de l'Afrique francophone, l'article teste une méthode d'analyse des bilans visant à préciser l'histoire des investissements privés dans l'Empire colonial français, en privilégiant tour à tour les analyses de conjoncture et le trend à long terme.

Les firmes ont trouvé dès le milieu des années 20 leur extension géographique définitive. La C.F.A.O., représentative du commerce colonial marseillais, a toujours été plus timorée, mais aussi plus rentable dans le cadre restreint de ‘l'économie de traite’ coloniale. La S.C.O.A., plus dynamique et liée aux milieux bancaires, s'est montrée plus sensible à la conjoncture (crise de 1921 et grande Dépression), mais s'est reconvertie plus tôt aux méthodes financières contemporaines.

Dans le long terme, ce qui ressort le plus nettement, c'est une croissance régulière des profits jusqu'au tournant de l'année-charnière 1952, qui marquait l'apogée de la hausse des cours des produits tropicaux. Au-delà, la détérioration accélérée des termes de l'échange et l'accroissement des charges sociales ébranlèrent les profits coloniaux ‘classiques’. C'est surtout depuis l'indépendance que les firmes ont modernisé leurs structures, caractérisées par l'ampleur nouvelle des investissements d'équipement, la diversification des activités et l'internationalisation des investissements.

Néanmoins, l'investissement global reste médiocre, et le renversement tardif de la tendance confirme l'hypothèse d'un impérialisme colonial français archaïque et malthusien.