Paper short abstract:

This paper examines multiple imaginary moneys or “ghost” units of account in the 19th century Gulf of Guinea to critique inappropriately conceived terms and assumptions in African economic history (e.g. “law of one price” “commodity value equilibrium” “balance of trade” “surplus” “balance sheet”...)

Paper long abstract:

Currency is a major stumbling block for historians who have wrestled with making sense of price data and different denominations in pre- and early colonial Atlantic Africa. The widespread view from standard concepts of economic history onto such economies produces fundamentally flawed “observations”, due to their one-dimensional calculations of “prices on the African coast”, when in fact, across the Gulf of Guinea, until the early 20th century, regional or river-based units were used to price the ratios of exported and imported goods. All goods passed through “imaginary” (Einaudi, 1936), “ghost” (Cipolla, 1956) or “fictional” (Guyer, 2004) units of account, such as the “round” trade in Ivory Coast, the “bar”, “copper” and “crue” in the Bight of Biafra, the “bundle” “paquet” “panno” or “quilt” in Loango and Angola, etc. These were not a material means of payment with intrinsic value expressed in European money but were rather nominal, conventional units with lagging and highly distorted exchange rates to European money-goods.

I draw these and further conclusions from Karl Polanyi’s original remarks (in Dahomey and the slave trade, 1966, part III) on “assortment” and the “ounce” trade in 18th century Gold Coast and Ouidah, whose historical implications for other periods and regions are still largely unprocessed. This revisiting reframes our ability to account for gains, margins, continuous bookkeeping, inflation as well as exploitation in exchange in the context of African interdependencies with Asian and European commodity and money markets, and the demise of the international silver and then gold standards.