The general issue of the relationships between three crucial historic phenomena, colonial rule, the extension and integration of markets domestically and internationally (“economic globalization”), and economic development (or not) in the colonized territories, is perennial but continually recast. British West Africa is a classic case, because the conflicting pressures on British policy in this respect have provided material for very different interpretations of the same story. The debate originated in arguments at the time among colonial policymakers and African nationalists. It has continued ever since in academic contributions from various disciplines, motivated by interest in the significance of this history for theories of the sources of economic growth as well as for understanding the original period. The purpose of this chapter is to re-consider the case, giving attention to African agency – the capacity to affect one's own future by one's own actions – both in economic change and, thereby, as an influence on colonial policy, and taking account of recent quantitative research into the evolution of living standards under colonial rule.

The discussion that follows has seven substantive sections. The first and second, respectively, introduce the wider debate and the case of British West Africa, especially Ghana and Nigeria. The third and fourth sections identify, in turn, ways in which British rule was and was not a “globalizing” force in West Africa, in the sense of integrating the British colonies in the region ever more deeply into the world economy; it will be seen that the record was very mixed. The fifth section highlights the importance of African agency in the changes that happened during colonial rule. We then ask how the particular British West African mix of “globalizing” and “anti-globalizing” policies affected the development of the Ghanaian and Nigerian economies. The sixth section examines what happened to economic growth and living standards: an unusually positive story for the colonial period in Africa. However, the seventh section is devoted to the political economy of development, arguing that the generally low-taxing, low-spending administrations of British West Africa did little to establish conditions that might have enabled these economies to shift their site of comparative advantage within the world economy.