Market Encounters. Bianca Murillo
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stores inland. According to historian Kwame Arhin, in 1897 “trade in goods of European manufacture was microscopic” within northern Asante and the Northern Territories, but this trade expanded significantly after colonialism. Within “five years of the establishment of colonial rule,” demand soared for items including silk handkerchiefs, cheap cloth, assorted perfumes, combs, knives, tin spoons, hairpins, buttons, pomade, and mirrors.13 The imposition of colonial caravan tolls in 1898 to control trans-Saharan commerce and a general policing of trade routes in the two regions also contributed to this shift. We know that in the precolonial era trade with other West African countries had been particularly important. What was left of these networks with the imposition of colonialism was mainly trade with other British West African colonies.14
The expansion of firms into the interior was further aided by improvements in transportation and communication networks. To facilitate the extraction and export of raw materials such as cocoa, gold, and rubber, the Colonial Office began improving transportation, mostly through railway construction. Completed by 1902, new railway routes from Sekondi to Tarkwa to Kumasi were equipped with a telegraph system, a technology that improved internal communication within firms.15 The increasing number of all-weather roads was, however, the result of African rather than British achievement. These road networks made it easier for merchants to travel hundreds of miles from the coast to sell all types of goods, and to sell them more cheaply, to towns deep in the interior.16 (Before this time, porters balanced goods on their heads and carried them for several miles on foot—a journey that often took several days.) The new mobility shortened distances between population centers, areas of production, and ports. Imports of motor vehicles for commercial use, mostly Ford cars and light American trucks, rose from twenty-one in 1912 to 133 by 1913.17 New roads and railways determined the location and construction of new stores. Firms’ employees, as well as African chiefs, often cited “good roads” in appeals to firms for opening stores in their towns.18
New thinking in Britain about colonial markets also refocused manufacturers’ and exporters’ attention on Africa. British imperialists had long dreamed of their colonies as a vital market for British goods. Men like Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlin invoked the image of “new markets” abroad to “woo support for their imperial ambitions” among the British working class. Access to new markets, they assured the voting public, “would secure the future of British capitalism and thus British jobs.”19 Yet, it was not until after World War I that imperialist fantasies would begin to materialize. As historian Richard Rathbone argues, Africa before 1914 “was for the most part a dream for the greedy speculator.”20 The devastation of the war and the economic stagnation that followed it introduced a new sense of urgency; imperial markets became essential to Britain’s recovery. This sentiment was echoed in British commercial publications, reinforced at public events like the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–25, and bolstered by individual businessmen who claimed that the African market was “one of the world’s hopes for the future.”21 Strengthening economic links between Britain and its colonial possessions became central to parliamentary discussions and was reflected in a series of tariff reforms throughout the interwar period. These initiatives allowed exports from the colonies free entry into Britain, whereas those outside the empire had to pay duties and set limits on the amount of goods imported into British West Africa from other countries. The rhetoric of imperial preference further increased awareness of the colonies as economically vital to the metropole. In 1926 the colonial secretary established the Empire Marketing Board as a means of promoting intra-empire trade and, through public marketing campaigns, convincing British consumers to buy commodities from the colonies.22 Interwar development efforts initiated by the Colonial Office further encouraged financial links between Britain and its imperial possessions. The Colonial Development Act of 1929, for instance, incentivized British capital investment throughout the empire.23
It is from this interwar context that large foreign firms—which are central to the present study’s analysis—would emerge. In contrast to state-chartered companies and private firms, formed by one man or a partnership, twentieth-century firms were large limited liability companies established through the taking over of other firms. Among economic historians the years between 1880 and 1930 are known as the era of acquisitions. As smaller firms were swept up through mergers and takeovers, commercial power was concentrated in the hands of a few large firms. While some older firms, including John Holt & Company, outlasted this process, most did not. Independent African businessmen suffered most, however; African import-export businesses did not completely disappear, but many struggled to compete with the emergence of these large conglomerates. Operating with less capital, African-owned firms were more vulnerable to rapid changes in market fluctuations and could not match the capabilities of larger firms to import goods in large quantities at once. Combined with colonial policy that favored European business, these changes increasingly pushed African merchants “out to the margins in the system they had helped to create.” Specifically, they were “denied access to credit, price-fixing agreements, shipping rebates, and others sorts of concessions which Europeans enjoyed.”24 Additionally, there was fierce competition with Lebanese and Syrian businessmen, whose numbers grew steadily after the war. The Gold Coast government categorized Lebanese and Syrians as a single group, and commercial records often used the terms interchangeably. Thus, in West Africa, the terms Syrian and Lebanese encompassed both groups as well as other Eastern Mediterranean migrants.25 Commercial competition was further fueled by European firms that preferred to do business with these—slightly less foreign seeming—Lebanese businessmen over Africans. While historians have demonstrated how shrewd business strategies aided the success of Lebanese trading families, proximity to whiteness was also an important factor in their growing success as a new group of commercial middlemen operating between firms and African retailers and customers.26
By 1930, three large firms prevailed: the United Africa Company (UAC), the Union Trading Company (UTC), and the Compagnie Française de l’Afrique Occidentale (CFAO).27 In the Gold Coast, the main business activities of these commercial giants included the purchase, packaging, and export of raw materials (mainly cocoa) from producers and the importation, distribution, and sales of manufactured goods to consumers. All of these firms also operated shipping lines and owned large fleets of vehicles for delivery. Given that most manufacturers in Britain, Europe, and the United States did not build factories or open offices of their own, the services provided by large firms—shipping, distribution, sales, and promotion—were essential to reaching African markets. The commercial networks of these large firms were vast, comparable in size and importance to the administrative system operated by the colonial government, and as such a firm’s district agent in a single area often held more influence than the colonial district officer in charge. Timothy Burke refers to large firms like the UAC as “new modern monopoly firms” and argues that they became central to the operation and structure of colonial capitalism.28
Out of the three major firms that came to dominate the West African commercial scene, the UAC was the largest and most powerful. Known as the West African trading arm of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, the UAC was established in 1929 through a series of mergers and the acquisition of a number of other firms, some of which had dated back to the seventeenth century. Among the most important were the Royal Niger Company and the African & Eastern Trade Corporation, the latter an amalgamation of a number of firms (F. & A. Swanzy, Miller Brothers, and the African Association). Through the process of amalgamation, the UAC would inherit more than twelve thousand retail stores, fifty-eight wholesale stores, and thousands of credit customer accounts.29 By the mid-1930s the UAC also purchased G. B. Ollivant (GBO) and the Swiss African Trading Company (SAT), yet these firms were allowed to retain their original company names, trademarks, and network of stores. By 1940 it also acquired the CFAO (a major competitor in French West Africa) and the German firm of G. Gottschalck. African customers often perceived of GBO and the SAT as separate from the UAC.30 While the UAC had business interests in Morocco, in almost every country along the West African coast from Senegal to Angola, in the east and south from Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to Zambia and Zimbabwe, the bulk of its assets remained in Nigeria and the Gold Coast. Although its parent company Unilever was formed in part by Dutch investment, the UAC’s headquarters remained in London; its