1890s–1920s: (The Cash-Crop Success Stories — Senegalese Groundnuts Expanding from 50,000 to 240,000 Tons Between 1897 and 1913, Gold Coast Cocoa from 13 Ton…

1890s–1920s: (The Cash-Crop Success Stories — Senegalese Groundnuts Expanding from 50,000 to 240,000 Tons Between 1897 and 1913, Gold Coast Cocoa from 13 Tons in 1892 to 40,000 by 1914 Making It the World’s Largest Producer, Akwapim Farmers as Capitalist Entrepreneurs, and Uganda’s Cotton Gospel Embraced by the Ganda Protestant Chiefly Class from 1904): In Senegal, groundnut production expanded from fifty thousand tons in 1897 to 240,000 tons by 1913, largely because of the railway linking interior to coast. The Gold Coast became the largest single cocoa producer in the world within a generation — from thirteen tons in 1892 to forty thousand by 1914, in the hands of millions of Akwapim smallholder farmers around Accra. The degree of local initiative was remarkable: the railway only began having an impact in the 1920s, by which time African producers had already brought about the dramatic expansion and simply carried cocoa to buyers at the coast. The Akwapim were not novices to the export trade, having sold wild rubber and palm oil in the nineteenth century, and their selection of cocoa indicated long-term economic vision — cocoa trees take up to fifteen years to mature. Pioneer farmers moved westward into less-populated Akim territory, purchasing land, clearing bush, and eventually hiring porters to carry cocoa to the coast — a class of capitalist farmers was emerging. In Uganda, the colonial state was more instrumental: the Uganda Railway made cash-crop production viable, and from 1904 the Ganda chiefly class embraced the cotton gospel spread by the British Cotton Growing Association. Ganda society was highly competitive, and the Protestant elite believed in the close links between Christianity and commercial development. Cotton in Egypt was also king, with the British rebuilding an extensive irrigation system including dams, and in Sudan the Gezira scheme made cotton the engine of the economy.