This chapter delineates the changing political, economic and ecological settings in which resources were put to work over the period. Section A outlines the political institutions and policies within which Asantes pursued their livelihoods. It describes the structure of government and assesses what the states (precolonial and colonial) claimed to do and what they lacked the power to do. Section B surveys the output of goods and services, from which the demand for factors of production derived. It summarizes the varieties and approximate scale of subsistence and extra-subsistence economic activity. Section C describes the stocks of labour, land and capital. Finally, Section D draws together the implications of the previous sections for markets and property rights in productive resources. The primary purpose of the chapter is to provide a foundation for the analysis developed in subsequent chapters. But the discussion is also intended to contribute directly to the literature: on various specific points, and in the sense that the overview of economic activity and resources presented here is the first to be offered for the colonial era in Asante, let alone for our period as a whole.

Government: Structure, Pretensions, Limitations

This section begins with a description of the structure of government, vertical (the hierarchy) and horizontal (the metropolis and the provinces), and of the major conflicts and changes over the period. I then outline the demands and claims made by the nineteenth-century kingdom and by the colonial regime on the population, especially fiscal.