Guide to the seven files in the economy section, covering Yoruba market systems, trade routes, cowrie currency, esusu credit, craft guilds, cocoa agriculture, and internal labor systems including iwofa pawnship and slavery.
The spatial organization, periodic cycles, political hierarchies, and regulatory institutions of Yoruba marketplaces.
Precolonial Yoruba commerce operated through structured long-distance corridors, caravan logistics, toll systems, and coastal-savanna commodity exchanges.
An analysis of precolonial Yoruba monetary systems, cowrie inflation mechanics, credit institutions, and the colonial transition to British sterling.
The structural mechanics, social governance, diaspora survival, and colonial transformation of the Yoruba rotating savings and credit association.
The institutional organization of Yoruba artisanal crafts, commercial associations, lineage production, apprenticeship systems, and the colonial transition from kinship workshops to territorial guilds.
How the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century expansion of cocoa farming restructured Yoruba land tenure, labor arrangements, gender roles, and intergenerational wealth accumulation.
An examination of Yoruba domestic servitude, the iwofa debt-pawnship system, internal legal categories, and the complex impacts of nineteenth-century wars and colonial abolition.