With the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century, West Africa seems to have lost its main role in the world economy. However, during this same period the region found a new global niche as the producer of vegetable oils for industrializing countries, most notably Britain and France. But does this nineteenth-century commerce provide the economic rationale for the abrupt “scramble” that changed the African map so dramatically in the 1880s and ‘90s?

Economic historians have generally argued against such an interpretation, because they believed that prices of the main West African exports and the region's barter terms of trade were declining by the 1880s. This consensus has recently been questioned by Ewout Frankema, Jeffrey Williamson, and Pieter Woltjer (hereafter FWW) in an important new article (with a valuable accompanying African Commodity Trade Database (hereafter ACTD). FWW challenge the established assessment of the West African export market and thus suggest that there was “an economic rationale for the West African scramble.” The present chapter will examine both the general argument and some of the specific data used by FWW in order to consider the interplay between market forces, politics and ideology in the transitions, first from slave to legitimate commodity trade, and second from coastal trade, often with independent African partners, to fully territorial colonial regimes.

A major theme in both these time frames as well as in FWW's argument is competition between Britain and France. The accent for FWW is on the French rather than the British colonial empire, since it is the French who, according to established interpretations that FWW do accept, initiated the scramble and, in this revisionist account, had more reason – “an economic rationale” – than Britain to think they would benefit materially from it. My own approach rests upon a more detailed examination of British and French initiatives in the free trade as well as the early scramble era. Pursuing these questions involves the rereading of a good deal of seemingly dated “trade and politics” historiography and a less sophisticated economic analysis than that of FWW. Such an effort is only possible, however, because of the database produced by FWW.