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The Business Firm in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Robert L. Tignor
Robert L. Tignor
Affiliation:
Robert Tignor is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University
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Type
Literature Review
Information
Business History Review , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 87 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2007

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References

1 There are, however, articles that trace African economic history. See, for instance, Verhoef, Grietjie, “Informal Financial Service Institutions for Survival: African Women and Stokvels in Urban South Africa, 1930–1998,” Enterprise and Society 2, no. 2 (2001): 259–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Alford, B. W. E. and Harvey, C. E., “Copperbelt Merger: The Formation of the Rhokana Corporation, 1930–1932,” Business History Review 54 (Autumn 1980): 330–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newbury, Colin, “Technology, Capital, and Consolidation: The Performance of De Beers Mining Company Limited, 1880–1889,” Business History Review 61 (Spring 1987): 1–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dumett, Raymond E., “Sources for Mining Company History in Africa: The History and Records of the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation (Ghana) Ltd.,” Business History Review 62 (Autumn 1988): 502–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Vansina, Jan, “Towards a History of Lost Corners in the World,” Economic History Review 35 (May 1982): 165–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other relevant articles include Iliffe, John, “The South African Economy, 1652–1997,” Economic History Review 52 (Feb. 1999): 87–103CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Uche, Chibuike Ugochukwu, “Foreign Banks, Africans, and Credit in Colonial Nigeria, c.1890–1912,” Economic History Review 52 (Nov. 1999): 669–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the gold-mining industry, see, for instance: Phimister, Ian R., “The Reconstruction of the Southern Rhodesian Gold Mining Industry,” Economic History Review 29 (Aug. 1976): 465–81Google Scholar; and Richardson, Peter and Helton, Jean-Jacques van, “The Development of the South African Gold-Mining Industry, 1895-1918,” Economic History Review 37 (Aug. 1984): 319–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Katz, Elaine N., “Outcrop and Deep Level Mining in South Africa before the Anglo-Boer War: Re-Examining the Blainey Thesis,” Economic History Review 48 (May 1995): 304–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the Journal of Economic History, see, for instance, Cohen, David William, “Agenda for African Economic History,” Journal of Economic History 31 (Mar. 1971): 208–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Inikori, J. E., “Market Structure and the Profits of the British African Trade in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 41 (Dec. 1981): 745–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For a recent exception, see Decker, Stephanie, “Decolonizing Barclay's Bank DCO? Corporate Africanization in Nigeria, 1945–1969,” Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 33 (Sept. 2005): 419–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Wild, Volker, “Black Competition or White Resentment? African Retailers in Salisbury, 1935–1953,” Journal of Southern African Studies 17 (June 1991): 177–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Southall, Roger, “African Capitalism in Contemporary South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 7 (Oct. 1980): 38–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bessant, Leslie and Muringai, Elvis, “Peasants, Businessmen, and Moral Economy in the Chiweshe Reserve, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1930–1968,” Journal of Southern African Studies 19 (Dec. 1993): 551–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Torchia, Andrew, “The Business of Business: An Analysis of the Political Behavior of the South African Manufacturing Sector under the Nationalists,” Journal of Southern African Studies 14 (Apr. 1988): 421–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Hopkins, A. G., “Imperial Business in Africa”: Part I, “Sources,” Journal of African History 17, no. 1 (1976): 29–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Imperial Business in Africa”: Part II, “Interpretations,” Journal of African History 17, no. 2 (1976): 267–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hopkins followed this up with “Big Business in African Studies,” Journal of African History 28: 1 (1987): 119–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See, for instance, Wariboko, Nimi, “A Theory of the Canoe House Corporation,” African Economic History 26 (1998): 141–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jalloh, Alusine, “The Fula and the Motor Transport Business in Freetown, Sierra Leone,” African Economic History 26 (1998): 63–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See, for instance, Muranda, Zororo, “Market and Channel Preferences of Manufacturing Exporters: A Study of Zimbabwean Companies,” Zambezia 28, no. 1 (2001): 67–84Google Scholar. Karekwaivenani, George, “A History of the Rhodesian Stock Exchange: The Formative Years, 1946–1952,” Zambezia 30, no. 1 (2003): 9–34Google Scholar; Phimister, Ian R., “Speculation and Exploitation: The Southern Rhodesian Mining Industry in the Company Era,” Zambezia 30, no. 2 (2003): 178–89Google Scholar.

8 Piquet, Caroline, “The Suez Company's Concession in Egypt, 1854–1956: Modern Infrastructure and Local Economic Development,” Enterprise & Society 5, no. 1 (2004): 107–27Google Scholar.

9 Turrell, Robert V. and Helten, J. J. van, in “The Rothschilds, the Exploration Company and Mining Finance,” Business Histoiy 28, no. 2 (1986): 165Google Scholar, argue that the African mining operations do not really fit the description of a “free-standing firm.”

10 On the broader subject of colonialism, see also Kay, Geoffrey, The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana: A Collection of Documents and Statistics, 1900–1960 (Cambridge, U.K., 1972)Google Scholar; Austen, Ralph A. and Derrick, Jonathan, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and Their Hinterland, C.1600–C.1960 (Cambridge, U.K., 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Austen, Ralph A., African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency (London, 1987)Google Scholar and Northwest Tanzania under German and British Rule: Colonial Policy and Tribal Politics, 1889–1939 (New Haven, 1968)Google Scholar.

11 Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 35 (Feb. 1982): 3Google Scholar.

12 See the following articles by Lovejoy, Paul and Richardson, David: “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (1999): 333–55CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; “The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c. 1600–1810,” Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (2001): 67–89Google Scholar; and “‘This Horrid Hole’: Royal Authority, Commerce and Credit at Bonny, 1690–1840,” Journal of African History 45, no. 3 (2004): 363–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Evans, E. W. and Richardson, David, “Hunting for Rents: The Economics of Slaving in Pre-Colonial Africa,” Economic History Review 48 (1995): 665–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Gerstel, Cherry, “John Holt: A British Merchant in West Africa in the Age of Imperialism” (unpublished D.Phil, diss., Oxford University, 1959)Google Scholar.

15 Lovejoy, Paul E., Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700–1900 (Zaria, 1990)Google Scholar. See also a chapter on precolonial traders by Reid, Richard in Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar.

16 See, for example, Feis, Herbert, Europe, the World's Banker to 1914, an Account of European Foreign Investment and the Connection of World Finance with Diplomacy before the War (New Haven, 1930)Google Scholar; Gallagher, John, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism (London, 1961)Google Scholar; and Kanya-Forstner, A. S., The Conquest of the Western Sudan: A Study in French Military Imperialism (Cambridge, U.K., 1969)Google Scholar.

17 Now revised as British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (London, 2000)Google Scholar.

18 See, for instance, Austin, Gareth, “Capitalists and Chiefs in the Cocoa Hold-Ups in South Asante, 1927–1938,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1988): 63–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Southall, R. J., “Cadbury on the Gold Coast, 1907–1938: The Dilemma of the ‘Model Firm’ in a Colonial Economy” (Ph.D. dissertation, Birmingham, U.K., 1982)Google Scholar; Alence, Rod, “Colonial Government, Social Conflict and State Involvement in Africa's Open Economies: The Origins of the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board, 1939–46,” Journal of African History 42, no. 3 (2001): 397–416CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Deutsch, Jan-Georg, Educating the Middlemen: A Political and Economic History of Statutory Cocoa Marketing in Nigeria, 1936–1947 (Berlin, 1995)Google Scholar.

19 David Fieldhouse also made use of the records of the United Africa Company in Merchant Capital and Economic Decolonization (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar.

20 Phimister, Ian R., Wangi Kolia: Coal, Capital, and Labour in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1894–1954 (Johannesburg, 1994)Google Scholar.

21 Richardson, Peter, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal (London, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richardson, Peter and Helten, J. J. van, “The Development of the South African Gold Mining Industry, 1895–1918,” Economic History Review 37, no. 3 (1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helten, J. J. van, “La France et l'Or des Boers: Some Aspects of French Investment in South Africa between 1890 and 1914,” African Affairs 84: 335 (Apr. 1985): 247–63Google Scholar.

22 Spar, Debora L., The Cooperative Edge: The Internal Politics of International Cartels (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994)Google Scholar.

23 Kubicek, Robert V., Economic Imperialism in Theory and Practice: The Case of South African Gold Mining Finance, 1886–1914 (Durham, N.C., 1979)Google Scholar.

24 This thesis was put forward for West Africa by Hopkins, A. G., An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973)Google Scholar. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido and others argued along similar lines for South Africa: see Marks, S. and Trapido, S., “Lord Milner and the South African State,” History Workshop Journal 8 (1979): 50–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This work led to much controversy with Andrew Porter, who wrote “The South African War (1899–1902): Context and Motive Reconsidered,” Journal of African History 31:1 (1990): 43–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Portugal, the work of W. G. Clarence-Smith is very relevant; see his article, “The Myth of Uneconomic Imperialism: The Portuguese in Angola, 1836–1926,” Journal of Southern African Studies 5:2 (Apr. 1979): 165–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Uche, Chibuike Ugochukwu, “Foreign Banks, Africans, and Credit in Colonial Nigeria, c. 1890–1912,” Economic History Review 52, no. 4 (1999): 669–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Jones, Stuart, “The Apogee of Imperial Banks in South Africa: Standard and Barclays, 1919–1939,” English Historical Review 103 (1988): 892–916CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Stuart, ed., Banking and Business in South Africa (London, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mabin, Alan and Conradie, Barbara, eds., The Confidence of the Whole Country: Standard Bank Reports on Economic Conditions in Southern Africa, 1865–1902 (Johannesburg, 1987)Google Scholar; Verhoef, Grietjie, “Informal Financial Service Institutions for Survival: African Women and Stokvels in Urban South Africa, 1930–1998,” Enterprise & Society 2:2 (2001): 259–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Bonin, Hubert, C.F.A.O.: Cent Ans de Compétition (Paris, 1987)Google Scholar; d'Almeida-Topor, Hélène, “French Trading Companies in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1960–1990,” in The Multinational Traders, ed. Jones, Geoffrey (London, 1998)Google Scholar.

28 Leventis, A. G.Foundation, A. G. Leventis, the First Twenty Years (Athens, 1998)Google Scholar.

29 Cannon, Byron D., “Mortgage Banking Strategies in Egypt, 1880–1914: Crédit Foncier Egyptian Investment and Local Borrowing,” Business History 43:4 (October, 2001): 29–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Middle East Journal 44, no. 3 (1990): 383–98Google Scholar.