Twenty-first International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

The turn of the nineteenth century saw major European capitalists implement policies geared towards sustaining their colonial economies. Thus, the colonial state embarked on policies that encouraged their colonies in Africa to produce various cash crops to satisfy the needs of the external markets. This turn of event in the colonial agricultural history according to most scholars diversified cash crop production on the continent. Notwithstanding this conclusion, scholarship on Ghanaian agricultural history is often cocoa centered. “Hiding in the Shadows: The Growth of the Gold Coast Coconut Sector, 1874-1957,” is that history that sheds light on marginalized cash crops in the colonial and post-colonial economies of Africa. The study operates on three tangents. At its core, the study is an agricultural, commodity and an economic history that uses coconut farming, plantation, and industries as lenses into understanding realities of pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial economic life and the ways Ghanaians, entrepreneurs, and government navigated economic reforms since the late 1800s. My research is based on archival materials. It also draws on oral data and secondary sources. My work draws on two theories: the dependency theory and the vent for surplus theory. Yet, it offers a unique evaluation of the Gold Coast colonial economy— one that uses the lens of the coconut sector to make more nuance of the colonial and post-colonial economies of Africa.