The uses and transformations of the concept of land use, occupation, and possession in West Central Africa from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century are examined. Rather than stressing the concept of wealth in people, this chapter explores how people exercised land rights and control and displayed wealth. In West Central Africa, as elsewhere in the continent, claims over land, people, and things were based on and shaped by notions of kinship, community membership, and the broader social context. The distinction between the public and the private was blurred. Recognition of claims and rights was the result of political and economic competition among rulers, subjects, and neighbors. All actors, some with more power than others, engaged in the definition of land use, rights, occupation, and inheritance, retaining control of goods and wealth that could be expressed in a variety of ways. With the arrival of Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, more actors engaged in the principle of territorial occupation and subjugation to make bold claims of sovereignty based on the idea that land was unused or unoccupied. Since different ideas of possession and jurisdiction were at the center of these interactions, clashes between conceptions of land use, access, and occupation are analyzed.

Chapter 2 focuses on the fixing and transformation of property rights during the nineteenth century. Possession claims and inheritance practices change over time, and in many ways the available historical evidence hid these changes, reprojecting a nineteenth-century understanding of land regimes. The imposition of land titles and land charts crystallized processes that were fluid until then. Yet the long list of vassalage treaties, inventories, and disputes between African rulers, their neighbors, and the Portuguese analyzed in the chapter provides a clear example of how all actors engaged in a continued negotiation over possession, jurisdiction, rights, and claims. The Portuguese misunderstandings about land use and rights are examined in detail, exploring the consequences for African historiography.

In 1992, the UK 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 $22bn yet failed to save the pound. Britain left the ERM and stopped managing the pound altogether. The focus was now on inflation targeting, no longer exchange rates.

In December 1951, the London foreign exchange market reopened. Now, London was again connected with international capital markets. But capital controls remained, and sterling was not yet integrated into other capital markets. Data from alternative markets show that sterling in London was still isolated from international crises.

As long as people could be used as economic pawns, freedom was an ambiguous status. While legal recognition of property rights over land and goods expanded in the nineteenth century, the morality regarding ownership of human beings was challenged in courts, parliaments, and newspapers for centuries. Chapter 5 explores the experiences of freed people in a context of change related to property recognition and rights along with freed people’s access to property in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although semantics suggest otherwise, there was very little distinction between the experiences of enslaved or freed people in Angola. Accumulation of free and enslaved bodied, known as wealth in people, has been a fundamental framework for understanding West Central African societies’ understandings about wealth and accumulation. But ownership rights over people were contested within a context of juridical changes in all kinds of property rights in Angola. Coerced, unfree labor persisted, even as Portugal introduced gradual means to emancipate slaves in its possessions. Any efforts to regulate and end ownership rights over individuals had a public and a private sphere of debates, where slavers resisted the end of commodification while enslaved individuals rejected amelioration and gradual abolition projects.

In 1967, the inevitable happened. Sterling was devalued. But the currency did not fall alone. It took along with it the international price of gold. The gold price surged, and this put doubts on the stability of the Bretton Woods system. The Gold Pool also collapsed.

This chapter examines the commodification of people during the nineteenth century. The records available in the colonial archive expose the extent of people’s commodification. The brutality of property claims over human beings is unambiguous in inventories, registers, bills of sale, and waybills, paper documents created to deny humanity and protect the interest of owners. These documents continue to reproduce the violence and legal and extra-legal exclusion that enslaved individuals experienced in the past by limiting their historical existence to records that categorized them solely as commodities. The records were created to facilitate control of property, and their survival discloses the commitment to register people’s exclusion and dispossession.

Chapter 3 focuses on the strengthening of the bureaucracy and written culture that, by the early nineteenth century, created an ersatz historical proof and solidified territorial and political claims. After two centuries of conquest, by the turn of the nineteenth century, new forms of official records, such as land registries, deeds, and inventories, and the expansion of surveys and reports led to an association between individual ownership, written registration, and property recognition. As in other colonial experiences, paper records represented authenticity and legitimation in the eyes of colonizers and also brought changes in the perceptions of governance. Ndombe, Kilengues, Kakondas, and Bienos embraced written evidence and paper power as providing proof of ownership. The existence of the paper created a new reality, that is, the idea that occupation and possession could be proven, that an individual was a landowner, a farmer, and a respectable resident of the colonial town. The establishment of written records and venues for petition such as courts allowed colonial subjects to make use of the colonial law and bureaucracy to strategically survive the new legal order and claim rights.

The events of 1949 changed exchange rates across Europe. It was initiated in the United Kingdom. The crisis burst because of speculation through leads and lags, a hidden form of speculation. Expecting a devaluation, importers and exporters changed their terms of trade.

The Bank spent most days on the foreign exchange market. In the early years of the Bretton Woods system, it still had complete control over the exchange rate. This chapter shows how successful the Bank's interventions were. It also gives an idea of the strength of the Bank compared to the size of the market.

Far from improving the situation of sterling, the 1967 devaluation made things worse. Currency dealers were now more nervous. There was more volatility and stress on London currency markets. The Bank was also running out of reserves and decided to creatively hide its reserves losses using window dressing.

This book looks at the people managing sterling, the Bank of England's foreign exchange dealers. They were at the forefront of all currency crises sterling went through from 1944 to 1992.

After officially floating sterling, the Bank was still managing the pound behind the scenes. The Chancellor wanted sterling lower. The Bank therefore nudged the pound downwards with a surprise dollar purchase on 4 March 1976. This intervention was orders of magnitude from usual Bank operations. Private currency dealers got scared and started to follow the Bank and sell sterling. While the Government welcomed the fall at first, it quickly turned into a full-blown currency crisis. And just a few months later, the Government had to beg the IMF for money to prevent the pound collapsing.

The history of wealth accumulation and dispossession in Angola has been intertwined with the consolidation of liberal notions of progress, private property rights, land enclosure, and civilization. This is not a history of progress, but an account of dismantling – dismantle of communal rights and values that ordered societies. West Central African societies did not move progressively from one type of wealth, in people, to private property. In fact, West Central African communities valued both: territory and kinship. Wealth in people cannot exist in isolation from land control. An alternative interpretation of the past is necessary, moving away from earlier arguments that placed West Central Africans as primitive or backward and reifying colonialism and land grabbing. This is an effort to problematize recent interpretations of the Angolan past that understood territorial occupation, population removals, and dispossession as inevitable. As it is clear in local archives, West Central Africans valued land since 1600 – perhaps even earlier.

1964 marked the election of Labour. It also marked the beginning of a long currency crisis that would culminate in the 1967 devaluation. The crisis was progressive. It showed American policymakers that a sterling crisis could very well lead to a gold crisis. This would threaten the international monetary system. The United States started to take the fate of sterling seriously.