Bianca Murillo

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African History

Ph.D. 2009
Ph.D., University of California Santa Barbara

My research examines how foreign capital, colonial and postcolonial governments, and groups of African retailers and consumers shaped a particular West African consumer society and its interaction within a larger global economy. (more...)

My dissertation, “Market Relations: Retailing, Distribution, and the Politics of Consumption in Ghana, 1930-75” focuses specifically on the United Africa Company (UAC), one of the largest trading firms in twentieth-century West Africa. It argues that the persistence of older marketing systems and cultural understandings of wealth and accumulation, as well as deep-rooted critiques of colonial trading policies limited the UAC’s attempts to control local markets. In addtion, the activities of intermediaries--African storekeepers credit customers--played a crucial role in company-consumer relationships by mediating between older and newer ways of selling.

My research also focuses on how postcolonial governments in Ghana--civilian and military--mobilized ideologies of consumerism as political, economic, and social tools. Following independence in 1957, the country’s first Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah linked consumerism to notions of freedom, equality, modernization, and development. He hoped that a flourishing consumer society, among other things, would help legitimize Ghana as a new independent nation. In the mid-1960s, a declining economy, outstanding foreign debts, and increased militarization of the state challenged the idea that consumerism would equal greater freedom or improve standards of living. Government-imposed import and price controls echoed colonial attempts to control the market. Coercive state measures increased black market trading and local retailers created their own marketing systems where they operated, like they always have, on their own terms.