Themes and Approaches

Abstract

TROPICAL Africa, the lands lying between the Sahara desert and the Limpopo river, sometimes also regarded as ‘Black Africa’ between the Arab North and the white-ruled South, historically experienced both governance by British agencies and penetration by British business. Trade and investment, however, were never wholly synonymous with, or dependent upon, the exercise of colonial administration. British capitalism’s links with the coastal areas of West Africa originated long before the colonial Partition of the 1880s and 1890s. British merchants and financiers subsequently participated in the economic activity of Belgian, Portuguese, French and German, as well as British, colonial territories. The retreat from formal empire during the late 1950s and the 1960s left British business interests to operate under local African governments once again. The economic connections between Britain and Tropical Africa, in short, were wider and more enduring than those relationships with territories under British sovereignty. But if colonialism and capitalism did not always require each other’s support, the central thrust of Britain’s economic impact on Tropical Africa took place between 1880 and 1960 in what were, or became, formal dependencies.