This panel explores how new African states and multinational businesses wrestled with the problems and possibilities of a postcolonial Africa. Our focus is on state directives and policies and the people, communities, institutions that shaped the relationship between new nation states and the global economy. British multinationals, lobbyists, private businessmen, African politicians, foreign investors, and international agencies such as the I.M.F. and World Bank drive our narratives and allow us to engage in debates about economic autonomy and freedom, the meanings of value and wealth, and the slippery border between decolonization and neocolonialism. We especially focus on states in East and West Africa that had been part of the British Empire and consider how intermediaries, such as lobbyists, shaped the economic and cultural understandings of decolonization. Between the 1940s and 1970s Nigeria, Ghana and Zambia were similarly wrestling with the value of their cultural and economic ties and British businesses desperately wanted to maintain a foothold and extract wealth from Africa. We look at this relationship from both the perspective new African elites who attempted to define or brand themselves to the world in and beyond Britain and from the viewpoint of British multinationals who developed programs and tools to maintain a foothold in postcolonial nations. Drawing on government, business, family, and financial archives in Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia and the UK, we explore new questions about Africa’s economic past that include: how individuals and communities have interacted with local and global flows of capital and wealth, how shifting relationships of power have shaped and often hindered economic opportunities and possibilities, and how financial relationships and practices become embedded within global and state-making processes.