FOUNDATIONS OF THE COLONIAL EXPORT ECONOMY

The economic changes that took place in Africa in the period under review have been summarised in terms of varied implication, as the economic revolution, the second stage of Africa's involvement in the world economy, the intensification of dependent peripheral capitalism, the completion of the open economy, or simply as the cuffing of Africans into the modern world. The concrete fact, however, from which these descriptions take off in different directions is not itself in much dispute. Between 1905–9 and 1935–9, exports from African countries between the Sahara and the Limpopo increased by about five times in value and by nearly as much in volume; import values rose by some three-and-a-half times, import volumes between two-and-a-half and three times. Total trade thus grew in real terms at an annual average rate of a little over 3 per cent. At first sight this is hardly a momentous expansion. For even though it was nearly double the rate of growth of world trade taken as a whole, it started from such low levels that the global impact was hardly perceptible, and was not of primary significance for the economies of the colonial powers themselves; before the Second World War, trade with sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa still excluded) never accounted for a twentieth part of the United Kingdom's exchanges. So inconspicuous, indeed, were the short-term and even the medium-term commercial gains accruing from the European conquest of tropical Africa that many metropolitan observers, unaware that the investment was a long-term pre-emption, have concluded either that it was a mistake or that it must have been undertaken for reasons that were not commercial.