The widespread planting of cocoa trees created a stock of fixed capital with no parallel in the previous history of Asante. Issues of ownership arose, especially in the contexts of divorce settlements and inheritance. As far as the supply of working capital and consumption credit was concerned there were three fundamental, and related, qualitative changes during the colonial period.

The first was a transition from lending on people to lending on the crops and farms of the new agricultural export sector. In Part IV we examined one side of this, the decline of human pawning. Though, as we saw, that process was drawn out to mid-century, the spread of lending on cocoa assets began soon after the prohibition of pawning in 1908. In the rural economy perhaps the most conspicuous trend of the 1910s–30s was the growth of agricultural indebtedness, in the sense of borrowing on the security of cocoa farms or future cocoa crops. There were two main types of such loans, which were usually short-term and long-term respectively. An ‘advance’ was payment in advance for—and thus credit on the security of—a forthcoming crop. A ‘mortgage’ was where a loan was secured on a cocoa farm. Given the distinction in Asante land tenure between the land itself and what grew on it, this meant specifically the cocoa trees rather than the land beneath.