The appearance in 1973 of A. G. Hopkins's Economic History of West Africa has been regarded as the beginning of serious academic attention to the history of Africa's economic past. In the same year, an equally important study, R. O. Ekundare's Economic History of Nigeria, appeared in print. Before the close of the 1970s, a more specialized literature focusing on specific aspects of economic history and parts of Nigeria appeared. In this category, Paul Lovejoy's Caravans of Kola, Jan Hogendorn's Nigerian Groundnut Export, and A. A. Lawal's “History of the Financial Administration of Nigeria” stand out clearly. The quality and breadth of Wale Oyemakinde's essays on labor and the Nigerian railway published in the 1970s are indicative of the large body of data on these aspects of Nigeria's colonial history as well as the fruitfulness of the new economic history of Africa.

The extent to which historians can, or cannot, do without the work and methodology of their colleagues in other disciplines (especially social sciences) has attracted scholarly attention. In describing the relationship between history and the social sciences, Hopkins points out that “reliance on the work of scholars other than historians is not simply a matter of necessity, but also of choice.” He identifies two reasons why history and social sciences are interrelated: first, although it is not their sole interest, historians and social scientists are interested in social change; and second, their approach “has much more in common than is often allowed.”