Money and Currency in African History Page 1 of 29 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, AFRICAN HISTORY (africanhistory.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). date: 25 May 2018 Summary and Keywords African peoples have managed multiple currencies, for all the classic four functions of money, for at least a thousand years: within each society’s own circuits, in regional exchange, and across the continent’s borders with the rest of the world. Given the materials of some of these currencies, and the general absence of formalized denominations until the colonial period, some early European accounts defined certain transactions as barter. The management of multiplicity is traced through four eras: a) the precolonial period, with some monies locally produced and acquired, and others imported through intercontinental trades, such as the Atlantic slave trade, and eventually under the expansion of capitalism to Africa; b) the colonial period, when precolonial monies, in some places, still circulated with official monies; c) postcolonial national monies for the new African states; and d) the most recent phase of multiplicity in use, due to migration and sales across borders as well as to the use of new technologies, such as mobile money. The management of multiplicity thereby has a long history and continues to be an inventive frontier. History and ethnography meet on common ground to address these dynamics through empirical study of money in practice, and broader scholarship has drawn on a large variety of original sources. Keywords: multiplicity, local monies, regional trade, transcontinental trade, colonial currencies, independence, informal sector, exchange rates The goods, concepts, and practices with respect to money, or in some works currency, have a very long and geographically broad history, with varied and shifting meanings, going back at least a millennium in Africa. The specific contribution of African sources, as the field of monetary history has developed, has become an expanded understanding of the empirical intricacy and careful conceptualization of monetary multiplicity: within self- governing societies, in their trade networks over time and space, at interfaces with neighboring peoples and with outsiders who brought goods in from other continents to purchase changing commodities in Africa. Then the transactions based on multiplicity were subjected to colonial rule, during which precolonial currencies persisted in some places, for some purposes, but for a limited time. In the postcolonial condition of national Money and Currency in African History Jane I. Guyer and Karin Pallaver Subject: Cultural History, Economic History, Political History Online Publication Date: May 2018 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.144 Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History