Re-envisages what we know about African political economies through its examination of one of the key questions in colonial and African history, that of commercial agriculture and its relationship to slavery.

Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz, Silke Strickrodt

Introduction
The slave trade and commercial agriculture in an African context - David Eltis
São Tomé and Príncipe: The first plantation economy in the tropics - Gerhard Seibert
The export of rice and millet from Upper Guinea into the 16th-century Atlantic trade - Toby Green
'Our indico designe': Planting and processing indigo for export, Upper Guinea coast, 1684-1702 - Colleen E Kriger
'There's nothing grows in the West Indies but will grow here': European projects of plantation agriculture on the Gold Coast, 1650s-1780s - Robin Law
The origins of 'legitimate commerce' - Christopher Brown
Friederichsnopel: A Danish project of commercial agriculture on the Gold Coast, 1788-1793 - Per Hernaes
'The Colony has made no progress in agriculture': Contested perceptions of agriculture in the colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia - Bronwen Everill
Church Missionary Society projects of agricultural improvement in the 19th century: Sierra Leone and Yorubaland - Kehinde Olabimtan
Agricultural Enterprise and Unfree Labour in Nineteenth-Century Angola - Roquinaldo Ferreira
Commercial agriculture and the ending of slave-trading and slavery in West Africa, 1780s-1920s - Gareth Austin