Finance, Famine, and Foreign Investment in Postcolonial Africa

In October 2024, it was announced that three US-based professors, including two UK-born academics were awarded the Nobel economics prize, and a £810,000 cash prize for their work on post-colonial wealth. Based on a “reversal of fortune” theory, they argued that the effects of colonization could be reversed if a country can “break free of its inherited institutions to establish democracy and the rule of law” (The Guardian, 14 Oct. 2024). The award, coupled by such claims, sparked heated conversations across social media platforms and among groups of scholars. For those of us in the field of African economic history such claims are lacking not only because they are simplistic and center Western institutions, but because they fail to consider histories of decolonization, neocolonial investment, and global finance. This panel engages such claims by considering the role of colonial development projects, foreign investors, and multinational power in shaping post-colonial economies throughout Africa, 1950s-80s. From Ghana to Sierra Leone and Kenya, each of the four case studies illustrate African decolonization as a global “economic and financial event” (Ogle, 2020) with lasting implications. In keeping with the 2025 conference theme, we center the work of architects and building contractors, multinational firms and scientists, public relations and media professionals, and farmers and ordinary people in shaping this process. Collectively, we explore how decolonization in Africa transformed networks of international investment and finance, as well as relationships between government and business. Such economic formations, both old and new, often exacerbated on-going power inequalities and/or created new ones. Lastly, by focusing on African decolonization as an economic event we explore questions about the legacies of empire and finance, international tax regimes and debt, and development discourses and growing global wealth gaps.