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ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes the phenomenon of economic nationalism as part of the decolonization process in West Africa, especially from the 1930s to the 1950s. It examines the economic thought, policies and practice of both non-state actors (African entrepreneurs and other nationalists) and state actors (the emergent nationalist governments of Ghana and Nigeria during the 1950s). Economic grievances against the colonial state and expatriate firms drove much of the nationalist activities in West Africa during this period. These ranged from unfair allocation of scarce shipping space during World War I to the near exclusion of African exporters and importers by external trade control schemes during World War II. Groups of indigenous private entrepreneurs formed "political enterprises" (trade and banking corporations) in the inter-war period, while self-governing administrations of African nationalists during the 1950s established shipping lines to break the stranglehold of expatriate shipping conferences. The paper concludes by setting the discussion in the comparative context of anti-foreign economic nationalism in the Middle East and other regions of Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This makes for a better appreciation of the peculiarities of the processes of decolonization and independence in West Africa.
Introduction
The European colonization of swaths of territories in the Global South over several centuries reached its apogee in Africa between 1850 and 1950. During this period, the acquisition (by force and diplomacy) and administration of the colonies elicited both spontaneous and coordinated reactions from the colonial subjects. In the particular case of West Africa, the Western educated elite constituted the vanguard of political, economic and intellectual responses to various colonial policies (Ayandele, 1966; Coleman, 1971; Olukoju, 2002).
As will be made clear in the rest of this article, economic nationalism was, from the 1930s, a major response to the colonization of West Africa. However, this tbeme is under-researched in the literature2 and it is the task of this article to highlight some of the most prominent examples of West African economic nationalism and underscore their significance in a comparative context. The article seeks to demonstrate that, while colonial West Africans sought to achieve economic independence along with political independence, most of the nationalist enterprises remained on a small scale and did not achieve the goal of creating large-scale indigenous enterprises...