This book has grown from a project to which I have devoted my primary research over the quarter-century since I first went to Ghana, as an undergraduate: a broad study of indigenous capitalism in Asante, and in southern Ghana in general, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The early published result of the project was a series of essays ranging over political economy, production techniques and entrepreneurship, and the social organisation of production. This book, which I began to plan at the end of 1993, focusses on the latter. Accordingly, it supersedes only two, at most, of those earlier papers; while referring to the others for context.

For research funding I am extremely grateful to the UK Economic and Social Research Council, which financed my doctoral research at the University of Birmingham, and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. I did shorter periods of research during breaks from teaching at the University of Birmingham (with a grant from the Centre of West African Studies' Travel Fund), at the University of Ghana, and then at the London School of Economics, which I joined in 1988. The LSE's Staff Research Fund enabled me to fill gaps and pursue leads from my earlier, generally longer periods of archival and oral research.

Publication of this book has been made possible by a grant from the bequest of the late Miss Isobel Thornley to the University of London; and by one from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.