Author Description

As currency bills are issued in denominations of thousands or hundreds of thousands, as economies return to barter, and as soldiers riot over their paychecks, people throughout the world are becoming painfully aware of currency instability. But West Africa has been subject to changes and instabilities in currency systems for centuries, and West Africans have long been skilled at negotiating multiple-currency economies at the interface with Europe. Many indigenous African currencies were created at least partly in response to international trade. Some widely circulated African currency items were originally introduced from overseas to finance the slave trade. All colonial money was a European invention. Heavy experimentation on both sides meant that people had to improvise, adjust, and be prepared to suffer and recover from losses. Cultural and social innovation around money was exuberant. No other work has made this argument, and nowhere else has the evidence for currency innovation on the part of African communities been brought together. By examining currency and value in African communities over the past hundred years, this collection offers a social history of ordinary people's conceptions of money, their innovations in its use, and the interactions between indigenous monetary systems and those emanating from the international arena. The contributors to this volume include British, French, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and American scholars, all recognized specialists in the history, economics, and anthropology of African societies. Money Matters offers an essential complement to the new history of imperialism, suggests fresh ways of analyzing money in those vast areas of the globe outside the centers of financial power, and contributes to a new economic anthropology of West Africa.