Suchergebnisse

What did independence mean during the age of empires? How did independent governments balance different interests when they made policies about trade, money and access to foreign capital? Sovereignty without Power tells the story of Liberia, one of the few African countries to maintain independence through the colonial period. Established in 1822 as a colony for freed slaves from the United States, Liberia's history illustrates how the government's efforts to exercise its economic sovereignty and engage with the global economy shaped Liberia's economic and political development over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing together a wide range of archival sources, Leigh A. Gardner presents the first quantitative estimates of Liberian's economic performance and uses these to compare it to its colonized neighbors and other independent countries. Liberia's history anticipated challenges still faced by developing countries today, and offers a new perspective on the role of power and power relationships in shaping Africa's economic history.

Taxation was one of the most contentious aspects of British colonial rule in Africa, shaping relationships between Africans, colonial governments, and European settlers. This text presents a detailed comparative study of both taxation and public spending in British colonies in Africa

Recent research on exchange rate regime choice in developing countries has revealed that a range of factors, from weak fiscal institutions to high costs of borrowing in their own currencies, limits the range of options available to these countries. This article uses the case of Liberia to illustrate that new states in Africa during the gold standard era faced similar limitations, even in the absence of formal colonial rule. The rapid depreciation of the Liberian dollar in the nineteenth century led to the adoption of sterling as a medium of exchange and store of value. This initially made it easier for Liberia to service its sterling‐denominated debt and for Liberians to purchase imports from Britain. However, as economic relations with the US deepened during the twentieth century, instability in the pound–dollar exchange rate created serious dislocations in the Liberian economy, ultimately leading to the official adoption of the US dollar in 1943. The story of Liberia illustrates the long‐standing challenges of globalization for peripheral economies and suggests the need for a reassessment of the origins and impact of colonial monetary regimes.

In 1922, the British colonial administration in the Gambia demonetized the French five franc coin, which had been legal tender since 1843. The cost of the demonetization was equal to a year's revenue, and undermined the stable fiscal position built up over previous decades. The floating exchange rates of the 1920s have long been a fruitful topic of research in European monetary history. Less attention has been paid to the impact of floating on colonial territories in the periphery. This paper uses the rather curious case of a British colonial administration paying to support the local value of the franc to illustrate that the 1920s are an equally useful period in the study of colonial monetary systems. A key aim of imperial governments was to ensure convertibility between colony and metropole, but local conditions in individual colonies often required compromises which went unnoticed until exchange rates became unstable.