Negotiated Economies: Reckoning with Ghana's Uncharted Business History

Despite the remarkable strides in the historiographies on Africa’s economies, narratives of African economic (and business) history still tend to be dominated by discourses on the Atlantic Slave Trade and its attendant economic transformations, European businesses in the colonial period, and more recently, rural agrarian developments. In the postcolonial period, these scholarly interests have waned significantly. Thus, our panel offers a revival of new discourses on African economic histories by proposing novel ways of imagining and thinking about African
business history in the post-independence period. The three papers that define the panel demonstrate how African business history lies at the intersection of social, environmental, gender, and race history. Using Ghana as an example, each of these papers interrogates what it means for different interest groups and stakeholders—Sissala migrants, secondhand motor dealers, and Sindhi “aliens”—to operate “Ghanaian” businesses and economic ventures in the public interest. The panelists offer fresh and diverse perspectives into African business history by oscillating between small-scale, trans-regional, and trans-national economic expeditions of Ghanaians and “non-Ghanaians” alike in the first sub-Saharan African nation to attain independence in 1957.