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POVERTY'S PASTS: A CASE FOR LONGUE DURÉE STUDIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2019

RHIANNON STEPHENS
RHIANNON STEPHENS*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

This article examines how historians have approached the history of poverty in Africa before European colonisation. From an earlier focus on the emergence of class difference to more recent studies on the emergence of poverty, scholars have demonstrated the longevity of economic inequality in Africa. This historiography counters a linear view of the growth of economic inequality and the idea that poverty is a necessary corollary of wealth. The article then considers how historians have studied the meanings of poverty within particular societies to the nineteenth century allowing us to move beyond the inadequacy of quantitative data. It ends by arguing for more longue durée studies of poverty in Africa with a focus on the qualitative and on the internal dynamics of particular societies. This will improve our knowledge about how colonial rule changed the experience and reality of poverty for people across the continent and form a basis for comparative studies.

Keywords

economichistoriographyinequalitypovertyAfrica
Type
Forum on Poverty
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 399 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

This forum piece owes much to the participants in the conference I organised at Columbia University in March 2014 on ‘The History of Poverty in Africa: A Central Question?’ and to the students who have taken my course on ‘Histories of African Poverty’. I also acknowledge debts to Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Gregory Mann, and Jarod Roll, an anonymous reviewer and the editors of The Journal of African History, who all read and commented on earlier versions and pushed me to clarify my thinking and writing on this topic. Email: r.stephens@columbia.edu.

References

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19 Parsons and Palmer, ‘Introduction’, 10. This argument was based on a combination of archaeological data and ethnographic projection into the deeper past, as was also the case for the other chapters about the deeper economic history of the region. For example, see D. Beach, ‘The Shona economy: branches of production’, 37–65; and S. Young, ‘Fertility and famine: women's agricultural history in southern Mozambique’, 66–81.

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