Book excerpt: Periodic cycles and waves are characteristics of global capitalism. The contraction in world trade during the Great Depression of the 1930s stands out as the strongest adverse shock to international trade in modern history. This book uses the Nigerian cocoa industry’s encounter with the world economy of the 1930s to knit together a gamut of themes ranging from the social formations of production to the forces of demand and supply, and price fluctuations and stabilization, as well as the protest movements against monopoly capitalism. It examines the Nigerian cocoa industry within the international economy of the inter-war years, in order to demonstrate how the dynamics of the international capitalism of the 1930s such as the Great Depression and the fluctuations in commodity prices affected the cocoa industry and the peasant cocoa producers in colonial Nigeria. It provides an interesting case study of the impact of international capitalism on the periphery economy, as well as the consequences of economic dependence on the external market. This book will be an indispensable resource for historians, economists, anthropologists and the general reader with an interest in the areas of international political economy, depression economics, world commodity trade, and agriculture and its related industries.