Economic Dependency After Decolonization

Kwame Nkrumah gave the clearest contemporary formulation of this problem in his 1965 book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, arguing that a state could possess "all the outward trappings of international sovereignty" while its economic system, and consequently its political policy, remained directed from outside. Nkrumah's argument drew directly on his own experience: Ghana had won political independence in 1957 but remained heavily dependent on cocoa exports whose world price it did not control, a vulnerability that contributed to the economic crisis and military coup that removed him from power in 1966.