Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana

GARETH AUSTIN is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge. He taught at the University of Ghana, 1982-85.

• Theories and Debates: Some Tools for Thinking about the History of Property and Markets in Asante and BeyondAsante, 1807-1956: the State, Output and ResourcesThe Changing Relationship Between Inputs and Outputs, 1807-1956Land Tenure, 1807-1896The Mobilization of Labour, 1807-1896Capital and Credit, 1807-1896Factor Markets without Free Labour: The Nieboer Hypothesis and Asante Slavery and Pawnship, 1807-1896Gender and Kinship Aspects of the Social Relations of Production, 1807-1896Exploitation and Welfare: Class and 'Social Efficiency' Implications of the Property Rights Regime, 1807-1896Why Was Prohibition So Long Delayed? The Nature and Motives of the Gradualism of the British 'Men on the Spot'The Decline of Coerced Labour and Property in Persons in Practice: Change from Above and from Below in Colonial Asante, 1896-1950Cocoa and the Ending of Labour Coercion, c. 1900-c. 1950Land Tenure: What Kind of Transformation under Cash-Cropping and Colonial Rule?Capital and Credit: Locking Farms to CreditFree Labour: Family Workers, the Spread of Wage Contracts, and the Rise of SharecroppingLand in a Tree-Farm EconomyCapital in a Tree-Farm EconomyFree Labour: Why the Newly Emerged Wage Regular Wage Contracts Were Eclipsed by Sharecropping

Austin's economic history of the agricultural and labour patterns of pre-colonial and colonial central Ghana may be considered a magnum opus in the European sense; it represents a crowning achievement and the product of many years of careful research and analysis. . . This work is a profoundly important contribution to economic history, the history of the transition from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to 'legitimate' commerce, the history of land tenure and agricultural production.