ABSTRACT
For most modern historical study, there is something pivotal about the beginning of World War I. Before the war, Europeans were imposing colonial order on Africa and people long outside the world economy were being drawn into it. For most of Africa and Asia, World War II was important in its role of moving the colonial world more rapidly toward independence. After the war, Britain was under international pressure to develop its colonies and provide them the basis for independence. Economic prospects would brighten for many during the years of World War II, but the situation of dependence on a world market for peanut prices and imported goods would not go away in the waning years of colonial rule. When European powers took African colonies in the last decades of the nineteenth century, development was not on their agenda. They spoke loftily about ending slave trading, opening Africa to commercial opportunity, and bringing the "light of civilization" to backward peoples.
