Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on market-making as a social and political process in postcolonial Nigeria. By theorizing the ‘conditions of exchange,’ I turn ethnographic attention to the social worlds, collective mobilizations, and political projects that make entrepreneurial profit possible.

Paper long abstract:

Nigeria’s importation markets are strikingly monopoly-resistant, sometimes paramilitarized, and actively defensive against corporate and non-black foreign actors. This paper follows modes of marketcrafting amongst Nigerian entrepreneurs who are mobile across the Global South over the course of a decade and focuses on one of Nigeria’s largest wholesale commercial spaces that has been collectively financed, constructed, co-owned, operated, and policed by decentralized but modular business associations. Rather than simply being an attempt of market ‘disentanglement’ (Callon 1998), this paper traces how market association leaders coordinated a massive self-organized relocation as a deliberate process of building a new kind of strategic platform (Guyer 2016) for ‘non-indigenes’ of the Lagos area. Based on ethnographic and archival fieldwork amongst Nigerian commercial networks of the Global South, this paper situates these racialized and nationalist protective market logics in longer histories of decolonization and postcolonial anxieties around economic sovereignty in Nigeria. Combining insights from older sociological and anthropological literature on market-making and embeddedness, along with newer political philosophy on commodity exchange and political infrastructure (Karatani 2014; Balibar 2016), the paper considers how Nigerian entrepreneurs are centrally concerned with defining what we might call the ‘conditions of exchange,’ which challenges the often masculinist, liberal, and individualistic framings of entrepreneurship, instead turning ethnographic attention to the social worlds, collective mobilizations, and political projects that make profit possible.