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Paper short abstract:

Navigating the extractive economy between Lagos and Ibadan, African farmers, merchants and businesspeople challenged the late colonial state’s developmentalist interference. This paper investigates the institutional and organisational development of the Co-operative Bank of Western Nigeria.

Paper long abstract:

In the ‘late colonial period’ that followed WWII, the British administration’s shift to developmentalism intensified the colonial state’s institutional capacity to expand exports and reorganise the domestic market for agricultural produce. The introduction of marketing boards, the Colonial Development Corporation, financial intermediaries and the regulation of the booming co-operative sector reflected the late colonial state’s specialisation in agricultural exports. African businesspeople were quick to take advantage of the commercial opportunities presented by the growth and diversification of the economy. It was however in Nigeria’s Co-operative Movement where some of the clearest examples of agricultural innovation in the attempt to adapt local customs and economic institutions to the growing demand of the export sector are to be found. Even if Polly Hill (1970) never intended to study West Africa’s cocoa farmers as rural capitalists in the Marxian class process, Nigeria’s cocoa entrepreneurs consolidated their economic and political interests into new social identities though the Co-operative Movement. Navigating the extractive economy between Lagos and Ibadan, African farmers, merchants and businesspeople challenged the colonial state’s developmentalist interference. The establishment and political work of the Co-operative Bank of Western Nigeria during the indigenous ‘banking mania’ of the mid-1950’s was indeed the culmination of anti-colonial organisation and decades of financial marginalisation in the agricultural sector. This paper investigates the institutional and organisational development of the Co-operative Bank of Western Nigeria. As such, the paper aims to contribute to the expanding literature on the history of agricultural finance, rural capitalism, and the Co-operative Movement in Africa.