Having argued that in the nineteenth century labour and capital markets depended for their existence upon coercion, in the social form of various categories of property rights over people, in the next three chapters I examine the transition to a situation in which factor markets could and did operate largely through economic imperatives and incentives. The ending of slavery and pawning occurred under colonial rule and during the growth of export agriculture. In this the Asante experience—much neglected in the literature—has many parallels with other parts of West Africa and beyond. This part has three aims, each significant for the general and comparative discussion of the end of property rights in people. First, by means of an unusually full analysis of the motivation of colonial policy (Chapter 11), it attempts to sharpen our understanding of why prohibition was long delayed. The term ‘prohibition’ is used advisedly: as will be seen, the measures taken against slavery and pawn-ing (as distinct from slave trading) had none of the terminal efficacy connoted by ‘abolition’. Accordingly, the second aim is to unravel some of the many strands of the decline of slavery and pawning ‘on the ground’ and to relate them to the trajectories of the other coercive institutions of labour mobilization (Chapter 12). The third aim is to examine the historical relationship(s), if any, between coerced labour and the development of the cash-crop economy (Chapter 13).