This book examines the changing relationships through which resources were mobilised for production during the development of an agricultural export economy. The process entailed a transformation in the breadth and intensity of land use: a transition from a sparsely-populated rural economy within which cultivable land was allowed generous fallow time or was not cultivated at all, to a steadily more populous, much more commercial agriculture in which little tillable space escaped cultivation altogether, in which rotation cycles had become ever shorter, and much land was under permanent cropping. This trajectory is characteristic of the modern economic history of tropical Africa. It has involved opportunities for prosperity but entailed the depletion of natural resources and, because land varies greatly in its economic potential, conflicts over access to the most valuable lands, and thereby over the appropriation of their fruits. The book describes and analyses a West African history of property rights and markets—of ownership and control—in what economists call the factors of production: labour, land and capital. A major concern here is to explore the broader implications of this story, for African and comparative historiography and for social science theory.

In history the specifics of place and period are usually critical. This is a study of the Asante forest zone: which was the heartland of the eighteenth-nineteenth century kingdom of Asante, before forming most of the British colony of Ashanti, which in turn became the Ashanti and Brong-Ahafo regions of the Republic of Ghana. Asante is of inescapable importance in Ghanaian history.