Western internationalization did not begin as a twentieth-century phenomenon. While the first wave of globalization began in the 1870s, the foundations of the modern global economy were laid in the 1500s. At this time, Africa was being incorporated into the global economy mainly as a source of slave labour. By the 1780s to the 1800s, when the First Industrial Revolution gained steam and abolitionist movements gained success, several visions for strengthening the position of Africans in the global economy emerged.

Paul Cuffe, America’s ‘first wealthy negro’, envisioned Sierra Leone as the basis for Black-led commercial ventures that would help uplift Black people economically in both Africa and the Americas. Dr Martin R. Delany, described as ‘America’s first Black Nationalist’, envisioned Lagos as being the great metropolis of this quarter of the world and dreamed of a trans-continental African railway running from the East African coast to the West African coast, which would integrate Africa with the trade of the West Indies and North America. Hillary Teague (former Secretary of State of Liberia) and Edward Blyden (pan-African thinker and writer) looked forward to a United States of Africa or West African empire centred on Liberia. The Gold Coast (Ghanaian) lawyer, Casely Hayford, argued for an Imperial West Africa. However, these pan-African visions were only held by elites in the few coastal settlements, and many held derogatory views of interior populations. Moreover, contact between these coastal settlements and interior territories was limited.

On the other hand, in this century, as Yekutiel Gershoni, a professor of Middle Eastern and African History, notes, there was ‘not one Muslim thinker or spokesman who envisioned a “modern trans-tribal West African nation.”’ In fact, some coastal West African elites and merchants welcomed Western colonial encroachment. Relations between north, south, east and west of the continent ranged from thin to non-existent. Even Ethiopia, where Emperor Tewodros II rose to power in 1855 to unify the country, looked to Europe to seek partnership in building his state. North Africa was already under pressure from European machinations, and the political approach to their southern neighbours tended to be either ambivalent or aggressive. For instance, Yusuf Pasha Karamanli of Libya sought to invade the Bornu Empire, while Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt invaded Sudan.

These all occurred under a multipolar but aggressively expansionary world order. Participation at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which set the stage for the Concert of Europe, was limited to ‘great powers’, and, as economic historian Patrick O’Brien notes, it established ‘mutual recognition of existing empires and spheres of influence in Asia, Africa and the Americas.’ When Western multipolarity and the aggressive component of first-wave globalization culminated in the Scramble for Africa, the continent was not in a position to forge closer partnerships for withstanding the barrage of colonial encroachment.

The anti-globalization trend that began in 1914 and continued during the inter-war period allowed only some independent or semi-autonomous African countries to pursue industrial development, chief of which was South Africa from 1924. Most African countries were under colonial rule at the time. Moreover, these African colonial territories largely remained secluded, save for the interaction of elites in Dakar, France and Britain for education and a relatively small number of coastal elites involved in institutions like the National Congress of British West Africa. In the late colonial period, when contact among African elites became more visible, the continent became divided horizontally (between elites who wanted immediate political unification and those who did not, referred to as the Casablanca and Monrovia blocs, respectively) and vertically (between Africans who had achieved independence and those who had not).

The first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, warned that Africa’s position in the global economic order was marginal and precarious, and only by federating could the continent improve its bargaining power relative to global capital, as well as improve the size of its internal market to make industrialization more viable. The few efforts to coalesce into larger nations failed (including the Mali Federation between Senegal and Mali and the Senegambia Confederation between Senegal and Gambia). Yet the lure of commodity export rents, the aspiration of achieving industrial development independently and the erroneous gamble that under a bipolar world order where the US and the Soviet Union could be played off each other, permitted African elites to pursue development independently and to gain legitimacy for this strategy by observing the results of Africa achieving some economic growth in absolute terms.

However, in the absence of deeper African integration, countries struggled to advance their economic positions and improve their bargaining power in relation to foreign direct investors, aid agencies and foreign diplomats. In fact, intra-African trade and the share of manufactured goods in this trade declined from 7 per cent in 1955 to 4.3 per cent in 1977 and from 26 per cent in 1955 to 18.3 per cent in 1976, respectively. The demands for a New International Economic Order, made by developing countries under the auspices of the United Nations, were not operationalized or successful. Moreover, while South Africa was the first African country to achieve sustained industrial growth (starting in 1924) and had the largest manufacturing share of national output by 1960, it remained under Afrikaner minority rule until 1994. Therefore, despite having closer intra-African relations than in the nineteenth century and greater political independence than in the first half of the twentieth century, horizontal and vertical cleavages undermined African unity.

By the time the debt and macroeconomic crises of the Global South hit in the 1980s and 1990s, despite an initial attempt to envision a continental developmental response through the 1980 Lagos Plan of Action for the Economic Development of Africa, each country ultimately dealt with its problems by itself.