It is assumed that the prevailing currency in the Colony of Lagos was the British Sterling. Depending of the economic agents involved and the type of transactions involved, currency preferences and usages will vary among the British and other European expatriates and merchants, the Saros and Returnados (Yorubas from Sierra Leone and Brazil, respectively) and the indigenous populations. Georg Simmel believed that money appears as the embodiment of the social bond between men and universal dependency relationship. Karl Polanyi refuted the myth of the 19th century that the money was an invention, whose appearance inevitably transforms society by creating markets, forcing the pace of the division of labour, etc. Pierre Vilar added that the currency would express a general relationship between individual and society, an expectation of that one towards it.
Given that monetary creation was not centralised in the Colony of Lagos and the concept of central banking was quite new in the Western world of the 19th century, this paper aims to i) understand the economic structure of the Colony of Lagos, ii) how the different economic agents would express their daily monetary usages based on their country of “birth”, iii) why the indigenous population of the Colony of Lagos was so reluctant to adopt the British Sterling in spite of regulatory rules and iv) how the colonial authorities shaped the progressive territorialisation of the Colony with its monetary (and colonial) policy.