Results by title

Marginalizing Colonialism offers a social, political, and spatial history of Bolgatanga, a northern Ghanaian town whose colonial-era urban development has been largely overlooked in African historiography. Covering the late nineteenth century through the 1940s, the book traces how this settlement—long characterized as a remote hinterland of the British Empire—emerged as a commercial and political center in the region. Rather than depicting urbanization as an imperial project, it reveals how African actors actively shaped Bolgatanga’s growth and repeatedly marginalized, redirected, and evaded colonial authority.

The narrative follows Bolgatanga’s transformation from a dispersed settlement organized around kinship, ritual geographies, and earth shrines into a dynamic urban hub integrated into regional trade networks. Central to this shift were new land tenure systems, commercial expansion, and changing spatial practices. By the 1930s and 1940s, trade in kola, groundnuts, livestock, and other goods surged, stimulated by new roads and increased mobility. Population growth converted farmland into leased plots, permanent buildings replaced older compounds, and areas around the market became focal points of economic and social life.

These changes were driven not by the colonial state but rather by local negotiations and strategic adaptations. Chiefs, earth priests, merchants, and migrant traders mediated and reshaped colonial policies, while missionaries and settlers concluded land agreements beyond official oversight. Roads and marketplaces, planned through negotiations between colonial officials and local chiefs and built largely through African labor, became central infrastructures of local economic life. Even as colonial administrators sought to codify land tenure and regulate commerce, their influence remained largely nominal—a background presence in a story propelled by African initiative.

Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and unpublished manuscripts by local intellectuals, Marginalizing Colonialism provides the first comprehensive urban history of Bolgatanga. It challenges dominant narratives in African colonial and urban historiography by exposing the silences of the colonial archive and highlighting the significance of medium-sized towns as arenas of negotiation and creativity. Ultimately, the book argues that Bolgatanga’s urbanization was a locally driven process that redefined power, space, and governance—leaving a legacy that continues to shape the city’s identity and regional role today.

In Market Encounters, Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible. Fusing economic and business history with social and cultural history, she traces the evolution of consumerism in the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana from the late nineteenth century through to the political turmoil of the 1970s.

Murillo brings sales clerks, market women, and everyday consumers in Ghana to the center of a story that is all too often told in sweeping metanarratives about what happens when African businesses are incorporated into global markets. By emphasizing the centrality of human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Murillo introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an Africa-centered perspective. The result is a keen look at colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions, including its entanglement with gender and race.