Spheres of Money, Payments, and Credit Systems in the Colony of Senegal in the Long Nineteenth Century

This chapter attempts to show how people made payments before the introduction of modern money and how the system was altered by colonization. The studied area is Senegal during the period of the transition from the precolonial era to the colonial era. In the mid-nineteenth century, Senegal became the first region in Sub-Saharan Africa to have its own issuing bank. Before the introduction of this financial system, some specific commodities were used for payments, and credit systems were developed. The banknotes issued by the Bank of Senegal were circulated alongside these commodities and credit systems. However, the modern and traditional monetary spheres were not clearly distinguished in this transitional period, and the users of each type of money could not be strictly categorized along European or African lines. Rather, both Europeans and Africans chose to use the money that best suited their purposes, regardless of its type. The article describes the complexity of the multiple monetary and credit spheres that existed in Senegal and examines the conditions prompting economic agents to choose an item as “money.”