A DIVISIBLE CURRENCY BRINGS UPHEAVAL

THE SMALL, LIGHT SHELLS FROM ASIA SPREAD THROUGHOUT WEST AFRICA, TOWARD 1780-1850

They allow small vendors to challenge control of primitive economies, and authorities may oust traders who try to impose them.

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They coincide with the expulsion of Hausa are expelled from Macina (Mali), Oyo (southern Nigeria) and Ashanti (Ghana), toward 1800. 

-- Expelled from Macina: Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 2nd ed., London, 1865, III, p. 368.

The sources do not give a reason, but in Ashanti they are driven away because "They did not know how to used the weights for weighing gold. So the Ashanti told them, if you don't want to learn how to use them, you can go." "

-- Atta Kwadwo, Keeper of the Royal Stool, Kumasi

The Hausa have traded in Ashanti for half a century and of course know how to use the weights. But demanding cowries defies the king, whose weights are one-third heavier than others.

They appear after civil wars bring stronger political control.

In Bornu, cowry use coincides with overthrowing the most ancient nobility (in 1846), as Heinrich Barth explicitly states.

-- Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1855, II, 55

Such direct information is rare

because explorers do not understand its importance. 

One grasps it by connecting 

different parts of their narratives, 

or by comparing accounts of the same place 

at different times.

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Next:

Introducing a pattern of change