During the colonial period, the largest maisons de commerce imported (mostly) French textile goods to the AOF by way of the port of Dakar. In the early 1950s, this link in the chain of merchant capital's operations was threatened. A few industrialists tried to cut the colonial trading houses out of the distribution chain by jumping the tax and tariff barrier, producing textile goods in Dakar, and selling these goods directly to dozens of local traders. The effort to end-run merchant capital failed. Through dumping and price wars, the trading companies succeeded in breaking the independence of the Dakar textile manufacturers. In the late 1950s, the maisons de commerce began to absorb the local factories into their sphere of commercial control.

This process would continue unabated after independence. By the mid-1960s, local production, importation, and the wholesale distribution of staple textile goods lay in the hands of a few industries and large commercial houses. These firms worked in concert, dividing the market amongst themselves, setting prices, and calibrating the flow of imports and made-in-Senegal goods onto the local market.