This thesis investigates the emergence of a modern currency system in the Gold Coast and Ghana. It analyses financial events from 1825, the year when the ‘Trade Ounce’, a unit in commerce on the Guinea Coast during the Atlantic slave trade, ceased to be widely used in the Gold Coast and other parts of West Africa, to 1966, by which time a central bank had been established and was operating in Ghana. It covers the establishment of the first indigenous bank in the Gold Coast and the debate associated with the attempt by Gold Coast and Ghanaian nationalists to convert the institution into a modern central bank. The context of the analysis is the history of the concept of central banking as it evolved in Britain and its empire; different models of central banking are also considered, including one that was promoted by Bank of England (‘BoE’). This model was promoted against the wishes of Gold Coast nationalists of different political persuasions and against advice dating back to the introduction of a central bank in India and Ceylon from such theorists as John Maynard Keynes and Richard S. Sayers, that a more actively developmental central banking model should be adopted by territories with less sophisticated financial markets. Conversely, the study analyses the failed attempt by the African nationalists who took control of the Gold Coast administration to create a central bank that did not follow the model promoted by BoE but featured commercial banking operations recommended by such unconventional economists as Thomas Balogh.

The thesis draws on a wide range of primary sources, including internal Bank of England correspondence, archival material held at the Bank of Ghana and Ghana Commercial Bank archives and at the Public Records and Archives Administration Department’s collections in Accra, Kumasi, and Cape Coast and the National Archives at Kew Gardens in London. Also consulted were several collections of private papers including those of Balogh, Arthur Lewis, Oliver Sprague, Andrew Brimmer, Nicholas Kaldor, and Paul Warburg. The analysis was helped by studying newspaper and press articles, British Parliamentary and Colonial Office records and consulting records held at the Balme Library and the Institute of African Studies, both at the University of Ghana. It places these primary sources in the context of a wide secondary literature on the wider use of coinage in West Africa, the development of the concept of central banking and the establishment of the West African Currency Board.