The Gold Pool was an international gold control syndicated created in 1961. It brought together most western countries to defend the London gold price. The syndicate was secret to start with, but quickly rumours of its existence spread. And it helped stabilise the price of gold in London.

Regimes of property, whether held by African rulers or European administrators, were not transhistorical or total. The written regime of property in Angola emerged in specific contexts, articulated with imperialism, expansion of capitalism, and consolidation of the liberal notion of individual rights at the expense of collective ones. While Portuguese agents enforced a single model of property rights, local chiefs contested this model. Colonial property regimes altered the social order and allowed women, formerly enslaved people, and immigrants, often marginalized groups, to enjoy rights and subvert the economic and social order. The violence that exiled occupants from their own land also justified kidnapping and enslavement. This violence is almost erased in the colonial archives and scholarship that traces a linear progress from slave trade to legitimate trade and imperialism. Nonetheless, violence and appropriation pervade the histories of slavery, property, rights, consumption, and claims.

For most West Central African rulers, land was central to subsistence agriculture, meeting their population needs as well as guaranteeing access to future generations. Chapter 6 traces the discussion about land ownership, examining legal changes and the centrality of paper culture for its commodification. The chapter begins by stressing the role of twentieth-century jurists and colonial officers in defending the idea that no notion of possession and individual ownership ever existed in Africa, while simultaneously creating the narrative that individual property had always existed in Europe. Despite earlier evidence that demonstrates a clear perception of occupation and jurisdiction rights among local rulers and West Central Africans, jurists, missionaries, and later, anthropologists and historians claimed that such rights did not exist, emphasizing the centrality of wealth in people, not in land, as forms of accumulation and wealth. In many ways, ethnographers, jurists, and scholars provided evidence to support colonial claims and ideologies that non-Europeans were incapable of apprehending and protecting the basic concept of ownership. This has had lasting consequences on the scholarship on wealth and accumulation in Africa. The refusal to recognize West Central African possession rights sustained colonialism and legitimated occupation and alienation of land and other resources.

Chapter 7 focuses on the process that transformed West Central Africans from forced laborers into consumers of products manufactured elsewhere. The expansion of the colonial bureaucracy reveals the items West Central Africans collected during their lifetimes and the emotional and financial value associated with material culture. Their consumption patterns make it possible to explore the movement of goods, the role of commercial centers, and the changes in taste and fashion. Africans imported items that favored European industries at the expense of their local production, a clear demonstration of how colonial power, dispossession, and dependency have a long history and predate the twentieth century. Rulers and commoners desired material things beyond their basic needs and aspired to buy and collect a variety of goods. They consumed items that connected them to societies around the world and encouraged African political elites and warlords to engage in warfare and other strategies to enslave enemies, exacerbating violence, dispossession, and displacement. The expansion of the colonial bureaucracy reveals that African women not only acquired imported goods and transmitted them to loved ones but also made constant efforts to protect the assets they had accumulated during their lives.

The Fed was keen the cooperate with the Bank from early in the 1960s. The Bank on the other hand took time to warm up and share information with colleagues at the Fed. But progressively swaps became a key feature of the United Kingdom's exchange management strategy. They offered cheap and discreet short-term dollar loans. The Bank started to use and abuse these loans to manage sterling.

London and sterling were still protected from international capital markets until 1954. But once the official London gold market reopened, everything changed. Now London was a barometer for the health of the Bretton Woods system. And American policymakers would do everything they could to keep that barometer under control.

There was a new sheriff in town with the election of Nixon. Cooperation between the Fed and the Bank was now monitored from Washington. The Fed could no longer provide the Bank with generous loans. And then Nixon pulled the plug on the Bretton Woods system, ending almost two centuries of relatively stable fixed exchange rate systems to improve his political legacy. Sterling came out of this crisis surprisingly well and appreciated against the dollar.

1958 marked the introduction of convertibility. While still not completely free, transferring sterling across countries was easier. This led to the end of parallel markets in Zurich. These were now integrated into a global sterling market.

In 1992, the United Kingdom had reluctantly joined the ERM, mainly to help with inflation management at home. But in the wake of the Maastricht referendum in France, pressure mounted on sterling and other European currencies. The Government did not want to ease the pressure by increasing interest rates. This would have displeased mortgage owners that voted it in. The small tension turned into a full currency crisis. Following remarks by the Bundesbank president, the Bank had to spend $22 billion yet failed to save the pound. Britain left the ERM and stopped managing the pound altogether. The focus was now no longer on exchange rates but on inflation targeting.