The Business of Decolonization: British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast. By Sarah Stockwell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 265. $80.00.

Extract

This book examines British companies' involvement in the decolonization process in the Gold Coast. Sarah Stockwell argues that British business interests “were much more than bystanders” in the rapid political changes between the end of the Second World War and Ghanaian independence in 1957 (p. 2). Her study fits within an emerging literature on British business and the end of empire, which avoids treating decolonization as the mere product of conflict between nationalist politics and colonial policy. But neither is the book about the “economics of decolonization,” in the sense of asserting some inexorable economic imperative behind the transfer of power. Instead, it documents British companies' struggles to understand—and, more ambitiously, to influence—major political and constitutional changes prompted by intensified African opposition to the colonial order.