The world witnessed a series of political and economic transformations from 1750 to 1850. Historians often describe this dynamic period as the age of revolutions that brought about the modern world. 1 Among them is the Industrial Revolution which, for economic historians, is a matter of utmost importance, as they assume that it was industrialisation that led the British economy to capital-intensive development and thereby triggered the divergence with other regions of the world. With the growing discipline of global history, economic historians have explored industrialisation in a wider context; namely, why this happened first in Britain, not China or India, in the mid-eighteenth century. They examine a variety of factors, including the use of a new energy source, namely coal, useful knowledge, the mechanisation of the cotton industry and the role of global trade. 2 In the following century, industrialisation diffused into continental Europe and North America . It is often argued that these industrialising âcoreâ regions exported manufactured goods into and imported primary products from the âperipheryâ in the global economy, such as Africa, Asia and Latin America . In this view, the coreâperiphery relationship structured the modern global economy. 3
In the meantime, from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, similar to other regions of the world, West Africa underwent a series of political movements in the interior savannah. On the coast, there was the transition from the Atlantic slave trade to âlegitimateâ commerce, and thus the growth of cash-crop production that stimulated the West African economy. This transition overlapped with the increasing colonisation of West Africa. For historians of Africa, West Africaâs contribution to the origin and development of Britainâs Industrial Revolution has long been the focus of intense debate since Eric Williamsâs seminal work, Capitalism and Slavery, appeared in 1944. 4 In his work, Joseph Inikori highlights that the diaspora from the African continent such as the Atlantic slave trade played a crucial role in the plantation production of commodities in the Americas and in the formation of the Atlantic economy, which, he argues, provided large export markets for British manufactured goods , such as cotton textiles produced in Lancashire. He also argues that West African consumer tastes stimulated the development of modern manufacturing in Britain. 5 So far, historians of Africa have made great efforts to reveal African agency and to unpack the complexity and diversity of the history of the continent, but these valuable findings have yet to be fully incorporated into global history. 6
This book addresses the significant role of West African consumers in the development of the global economy during this revolutionary period. In particular, it throws fresh light on the fact that their demand for Indian textiles not only determined a part of global trade but also influenced economic development in Western Europe and South Asia from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It is also a challenge to the prevailing account of the coreâperiphery model by offering a view on how consumers in a region often regarded as âperipheryâ shaped the trajectory of economic globalisation, or the process of integrating different areas into a larger regional or global economy.
The key perspective is a south-south economic history, namely the economic linkage that connected West Africa (south of the Sahara) with South Asia. Yet, it should be noted that, in the period concerned, European merchants mediated this connection through European imperial and commercial expansion. As will be shown in this book, not only does the south-south perspective explore African agency in global history, but it also shows that the performance of Indian weavers played as large a role as the African consumers in the development of a global economy. By doing so, we will illustrate that the south-south economic history played an essential part in some of the key phases in global history, namely the development of the slave-based Atlantic economy, the British Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern global economy. This history shows the dimension of entanglement with the early modern European commercial and imperial expansion. 7
Rethinking African Agency in Global History
This section provides a historiography of (West) African agency to reveal several issues within the literature that are central to this book. Economic historians of Africa have long engaged in exploring the African past since Kenneth Onwuka Dikeâs 1956 book marked the beginning of the modern research of African economic history. 8 Ayodeji Olukoju points out that the field of research has developed mainly with two different approaches: the mainstream orthodox and the radical political economy. The former, represented by A. G. Hopkins, originated from historical scholarship in Western Europe , and the latter, for example, the Zaria School in Nigeria, was rooted in the dependency and radical Marxist approaches influenced by Walter Rodney and Frantz Fanon. 9
When postcolonial African countries joined the international community from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, economic historians of Africa stressed the agency of African actors of the past. During this period these historians, A. G. Hopkins and Philip Curtin, in particular, posed challenges to the prevailing paradigm of dualism that had dominated modes of thought in the colonial period. 10 Economic history was expected to respond to the agenda of writing national, decolonised histories and scholarly interests mainly focused on African enterprise, trade and politics. 11 One of the pioneering achievements was that of J. Forbes Munro who published a textbook of modern Africa and the international economy. 12
In the meanwhile, radical national and Black Power movements in the late 1960s, the burst of post-independence euphoria and an increasing influence of neo-colonialism led radical scholars to gain the upper hand in the field. 13 Thus, the 1970s to mid-1990s saw a growing influence of dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney and Samir Amin. 14 For example, Boubacar Barryâs monograph of Senegambia in the era of the Atlantic slave trade was first published in French in 1988 and later translated into English to appear as a series in African Studies by Cambridge University Press. 15 Also, Immanuel Wallerstein, a historical sociologist whose original research interest focused on Africa as well as India, developed world-system theory as a variation of dependency theory. Although he did pay attention to the Atlantic slave-based economy in the early modern period, world-system theory primarily focused on European agency in the rise and development of the capitalist world-economy. Hence, it obscured African agency as well as the contribution of Indian cotton textiles in the emergence of the Atlantic economy. 16 As John Thornton critically noted, despite their sympathetic attitude towards Africa and other Third World countries, there was irony in the fact that dependency theory reinforced the view that Africa was a victim of Atlantic and wider history. 17 This kind of pessimism in the literature partly reflected the harsh world of reality, such as failure of economic growth, poverty, and political and social problems that undermined much of Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s, that marked a sharp contrast with the rapid growth of the East and Southeast Asian economy. 18
Around the turn of the century, however, there were changes in the field. One of the stimuli was brought by new institutionalists in the 2000s. In the âreversal of fortuneâ thesis formulated by Daron Acemoglu and his coauthors, they argued...