The rubber trade of the Gold Coast and Asante in the nineteenth century: African innovation and market responsiveness

Abstract

The export trade in wild rubber occupies an important place in the nineteenth-century economic history of the Gold Coast and Asante, and the impetus which it gave to the future economic development of the country was greater than is commonly recognized. The timely development of this new product by African entrepreneurs and up-country producers in the 1880s enabled the colony to diversify its export bill at a time when flagging prices for palm products and dwindling supplies of ivory, monkey skins, and surface gold threatened economic stagnation. Between 1884 and 1898 Gold Coast rubber exports registered a twenty-five fold increase in volume, thereby placing the country among the top five rubber producers of the world. An analysis of the Gold Coast rubber trade contributes to the demolition of certain myths concerning the economically passive role of West Africans in the development of their own hinterlands. European agencies—whether mercantile or governmental—contributed only indirectly to the development of the local rubber trade. No doubt the general protection and opportunity for exercise of individual initiative which the British colonial government provided enabled the Gold Coast to escape the excesses of forced labour and expropriation which marred European concessionaire rubber operations in other parts of Africa. But it was chiefly the myriads of African merchants, middlemen and producers who supplied the driving force of the local trade during the nineteenth century. The rubber trade accelerated the pace of economic change in Asante and other interior states where the pull exerted by the sea-borne export sector previously had been minimal. It is clear that the number of people involved in trading generally—whether as middlemen or producers—increased greatly as a result of the lucrative returns to be gained from rubber tapping. With rubber trade expansion came a growing demand by producers for a wider range of European merchandise imports, plus the acceptance of a uniform metallic currency which facilitated market transactions throughout the interior. Finally, the profits saved from rubber tapping became an important source for indigenous capital investment in cocoa-farming, particularly in Asante.

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