CUSTOMARY LAW, COLONIALISM, AND THE COURTS: LAND LAW AND CAPITALIST CLASS FORMATION IN THE GOLD COAST COLONY

In this dissertation I evaluate the impact of British rule on customary land law and capitalist class formation in the Gold Coast Colony (now Ghana) from the early 1800s to independence in 1957. I do so from an Africanist "dependency perspective" which proposes that a major function of colonial regimes in Africa was to constrain the growth of the rural capitalism that unexpectedly emerged there with new opportunities for cash-cropping. According to Africanist dependency theorists, the two main techniques colonial regimes relied on to defuse an indigenous capitalist challenge were interference with supportive native institutions and alliance with opposition classes. I find evidence of both in the Ghanaian case.;Given the confines of a recorded body of doctrine, this legal retrenchment could only have a limited impact on rural class formation, however, permitting capitalist broker- and creditor-farmers to grow in strength until they challenged expatriate domination of cocoa marketing in a six-month cocoa hold-up in 1937-38. Thereafter, British attempts to regulate cocoa capitalism shifted to the electoral arena where, ironically, the success of cocoa capitalism had generated an opposition class of workers, cocoa laborers, and elementary school leavers that came together to form the Convention People's Party. After brief strikes and riots in the late 40s, the British began grooming this party as its political heir. The neo-colonial state thus forged, by eliminating private agro-mercantile capital from participation in cocoa marketing, finally succeeded where the British, though their legal half-measures, had failed: dismantling in little more than a decade rural capitalism's long-forming chance to expand and become exclusive in the formation.;I suggest that dependency theory, by focussing on the politics of underdevelopment, is a needed corrective to the now-dominant world-systems perspective on colonialism. I also propose the applicability of the concept of contradictions to the analysis of relations of imperialism.;By the 1880s, farmers in the land-short eastern part of the Gold Coast Colony had begun to migrate west in search of land for cocoa farming. Although sales of land had been very rare "before cocoa," chiefs obliged and native and British courts (the latter spurred by investors' and traders' demands for legal security) found precedent in customary law for such transactions. By the early 1910s, however, wealthy migrant farmers were hiring laborers away from the gold mines in the west and becoming creditors, brokers and lorry owners as well. Then followed a verbal campaign in London in 1912-14 in which colonial officers called for a return to "pure native custom." The results of this were the revamping of the appellate process and freezing of land law's further doctrinal modernization. Although the period 1915-56 witnessed no great turning back from the recognition of land sales, the courts worked against the perfection of a free market in land in smaller ways: e.g., subjecting the sale of land to greater corporate control and accepting land's characterization as self-acquired instead of family property only where failing to do so would undermine land's use as security in an expanding credit economy.