In the first half of the Nineteenth Century, Europeans vastly increased their purchases of palm oil, and also continued to buy tropical hardwoods, while Africans received the products of Europe's industrial revolution: cotton and woolen textiles and iron. 1 It was only as direct European influence began to increase that economic conditions were gradually modified. The introduction of cocoa by European missionaries in the 1860s, led to its becoming a major cash crop and primary export by the earliest period of European colonial domination, around 1900. Gold and coca were the mainstays of the economy in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). To keep up with their seemingly insatiable demands for these and other products, the British, French, and other others, introduced more modern techniques of production. In particular, they employed industrial methods of mining, and built railroads and port facilities to enable a vastly increased flow of goods. 2 Yet it would be wrong to think that was no African response to changed economic conditions. Already, in the late 1800s, African merchant families, such as the Sarbahs, began to encourage rubber production: .

             In contrast to the palm oil trade, the rubber trade, because of a greater monetary return per unit of labour input and weight, drew into its orbit thousands of producers from the deep interior, including Sefwi, Kwahu, Asante and the distant states of Brong-Ahafo, all more than 100 miles from the coast. The rubber trade also gave rise to a new group of middle-men or broken from the Fanti states, Asin, Denkyera, and Akim, who carried the trade to the further limits of the forest zone and in so doing accelerated the extension of the cash economy. Rubber became a major export with shipments totalling well over one million pounds volume in 1886; and by 1893, the Gold Coast ranked first among the rubber exporting countries of the British Empire and third in the world.