Short Abstract

Across much of nineteenth-century Africa, trade was reckoned in dollars or their equivalents: thalers, Spanish pesos, five-franc pieces, rupees, and nominal "trade dollars". How did these stand to bars, bundles, mithqals and cowries? We invite papers on coins and units of account in African trade.

Long Abstract

Pre-colonial African trade was long reckoned in units named after objects, weights or coins, then detached from their material referents: the Senegambian bar, Angolan macute, Akan ounce, Saharan mithqal. The Bight of Benin cowrie was fixed to, then fell against, the Spanish dollar; Gulf of Guinea merchant houses kept books in a "trade dollar" equated with the five-franc piece; the Maria Theresa thaler passed across East Africa at rates that diverged from the global silver price. As silver depreciated against gold after 1870, merchants and speculators imported coins en masse.

This panel invites papers on coins and units of account in African, merchant and early colonial accounts, c. 1800–1920, before traders, firms and administrations reckoned in colonial currencies. These include trade coins and nominal units whose meanings and values were reshaped through local use. Work tracing such units from the early modern period, or their persistence and transformation in colonial and postcolonial times, is equally welcome. We ask how these units were converted between metrological systems by brokers and money-changers and linked to a global mesh of silver and credit, and how they fused, were subsumed or discarded. Read through its units, one money splits into a spectrum of values.

Propose paper