Jürgen Kocka and other historians of capitalism rarely discuss domestic capitalism in Africa before the period of European colonization, implicitly presenting capitalism as external to and imposed on Africa. Crislayne Alfagali and other Africanist scholars have shown, however, that in parts of Africa, returns-focused investment, the establishment of open markets for wage labor, and other features of capitalism predated colonization. One reason for this discrepancy is that historians of capitalism tend to focus on longitudinal economic data drawn from archival records, which do not exist for much of precolonial Africa.