Beyond Imperial Interests: Settler Regimes, Capital and Africans in Colonial Southern Africa’s Currency Politics to 1920

This essay is about the multiple forces that influenced the adoption and circulation of multiple metallic and paper currencies across Southern Africa from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century. When scholars address questions of currency in colonial settings, they often see this as an imperial imposition or as something that was dictated by the powerful interests based in imperial metropolis. Alternatively, they stress how, in the colonies, local conditions influenced the nature and pace of reception of colonial currencies. This chapter suggests that these forces were not mutually exclusive. Significantly, the essay proposes that rather than shifting between the imperial and the local, scholars also need to pay attention to how the regional political economy and the competing interest groups in the colonies informed questions of currency. It shows that coins in circulation in Southern Africa between 1850 and 1920s, in part, reflected the integration of the region’s political economy and, partly, the calculations of its major powers. It also reflected the mobility of African workers who were not only paid using these currencies, but who carried them across colonial borders.