Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T08:56:35.675Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Agenda for African Economic History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

David William Cohen
David William Cohen
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is frequently remarked that Africa is so diverse as to defy generalization. Perhaps one generalization that can legitimately be made is that today there exists in every sphere of government in every African country a “development consciousness,” preeminent within this consciousness a dependence on economic planning for growth. The historical lessons of Europe and America are proffered and the lessons are studied and more than occasionally applied in the African setting. The Euroamerican historical record is rich and ripe for study; the African record of economic history, on the other hand, nearly does not exist. The embarrassing lacunae of historical work on the economies of Africa is pronounced, whether one is speaking of the transitional economies which through increased trading links first bridged world and African communities in perhaps an irreversible way, or whether one is speaking of the colonial economies of increased dependence, or of the “development economies” of more recent years. And there is irony here, for when seen against the often thin character of the pre-colonial historical record, work on the economic features of pre-colonial Africa seems relatively more substantial than work on the colonial and post-colonial periods.

Type
Economic History: Retrospect and Prospect. Papers Presented at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 1971 , pp. 208 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1971

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Polly Hill, an unconventional economist who is critical of her discipline's approach to Africa, has taken a slightly different tack, arguing that the failure of economists to undertake careful field investigations before tendering economic studies on Africa results from acceptance of several general assumptions, including: a) that the “expatriate trader taught the West African … the elementary facts of economic life”; therefore, African “economic response [was] … essentially Western”; b) “that the basic fabric of economic life was so simple as to be devoid of interest to economists”;or c) that African society is so complex as to make their indigenous economies incomprehensible. Studies in-Rural Capitalism in West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) pp. 6–13Google Scholar.

2 A representative exposition of this ahistorical model is Dalton's, George essay, “Traditional Economic Systems,” The African. Experience, Paden, John and Soga, E. W., editors (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 61–79Google Scholar.

3 Dike, K. O., Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

4 Adelman, Irma, Dalton, George, and Morris, Cynthia Taft, “Society, Politics, and Economic Development in Africa,” Expanding Horizons in African Studies, Carter, Gwendolen M. and Paden, Ann, editors (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 210Google Scholar.

5 Fallers, Lloyd A., “Social Stratification and Economic Processes,” Economic Transition in Africa, Herskovits, Melville J. and Harwitz, Mitchell, editors (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 119Google Scholar.

6 See Harold K. Schneider, “A Formalist View of African Economic Anthropology,” Expanding Horizons in African Studies, Carter and Paden, editors, op. cit., pp. 243–255. Also, Miracle, Marvin, “African Markets and Trade in the Copperbelt,” Markets in Africa, Bohannan, Paul and Dalton, George, editors (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1962)Google Scholar. Miracle asks (p. 733), “… why do many who generalize about the behavior of Africans so readily and uncritically accept evidence that superficially suggests African behavior is basically abnormal?” Miracle raises this criticism again in a recent article (Miracle, Marvin and Fetter, Bruce, “Backward-sloping Labor-supply Functions and African Economic Behavior,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, XVIII, 2 (January 1970), p. 240)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “It was long held that economic man was not found among the indigenous populations of Africa.” A solid critique of the idea of non-economic man in Africa is contained in Jones, William O., “Economic Man in Africa,” Food Research Institute Studies, I (May 1960), pp. 107–137Google Scholar.

7 Karl Polanyi, a pioneer economic anthropologist, took an early interest in both the historical and structural aspects of early trading and market networks in Africa. His primary aim was to use the African findings as a mirror for examining more complex Euroamerican economic structures. Examples of syntheses of the available data are Bovill's, E. W.The Golden Trade of the Moors (London: Oxford University Press, 1958)Google Scholar, and Vansina, Jan, “Long Distance Trade-Routes in Central Africa,” Journal of African History, III, 3, pp. 375–390Google Scholar. Work on trade patterns in eastern Africa is considerably behind the West African work, though Gray, Richard and Birmingham's, DavidPre-Colonial African Trade (London: Oxford University Press, 1970Google Scholar) constitutes a beginning.

8 The conference (held December 1969) was arranged by the International African Institute, London, and was chaired by M. Claude Meillassoux of the Centre National de la Reserche Scientifique, Paris. The proceedings are to be: published by Oxford University. Press for the I. A. I. in their International African Seminar series.

9 Dreams and Deeds: Achievement Motivation in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 3Google Scholar.

10 Polly Hill, Studies in Rural Capitalism.

11 Hill, Polly, The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

12 To right this imbalance, Hill has pleaded for, and really founded, a new field of “indigenous economics,” a field which would be “…concerned with the basic fabric of existent economic life, with such economic activities as the production of export or other cash crops, subsistence farming, cattle raising, fishing (for cash or subsistence), internal trading in foodstuffs, transportation, economically motivated migration, indigenous credit granting systems …” Studies in Rural Capitalism, p. 3. Her “Plea for Indigenous Economics” was first published in Economic Development and Cultural Change, October, 1966, and is reprinted in the Rural Capitalism collection.

13 The era of “development through industrialization” is clearly at an end; new planning emphasis is being placed on agriculture as a generator of capital for development and as a means of containing the growth of “dual” and “enclave” economies. Appropriately, this shift in policy coincides with the coming of age of rural economics or indigenous economics exemplified by the work of Polly Hill and her colleagues.

14 Szereszewski, R., Structural Changes in the Economy of Ghana (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965)Google Scholar.

15 It is perhaps only in Nigeria that a new economic transformation is taking place, this is a result of crude oil overtaking agricultural exports in the last two or three years. This shift has given radically new shape and locus to the points of economic growth and is marginally comparable to the rapid transformation of the South African economy in the late nineteenth century based on gold and diamond mining.

16 Several such regional studies have been completed and point the way to further work. See E. R. J. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914; Berry, Sara S., “Cocoa in Western Nigeria, 1890–1940,” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1967)Google Scholar; Hogendorn, J. S., “The Origins of the Groundnut Trade in Northern Nigeria,” (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1968)Google Scholar. James Gosling is currently working on a study of the growth of cotton production in Sukuma, Tanzania.

17 Marvin Miracle, who has contributed a number of important studies on African markets and production, has remarked, “African traders could not withstand the competition [from European traders]. Europeans supplied, at reasonable terms, the mainstays of traditional commerce, or a substitute (and often one of superior quality). The African trader who formerly had made long expeditions on foot to buy hoes, salt, etc. not available at home was nearly extinct by the time European settlers, administrators, and missionaries came in numbers. It is not surprising that the reports most of them sent the world of this new land they were civilizing gave no hint of Africans having a mercantile bent.” “African Markets and Trade in the Copperbelt,” Markets in Africa, p. 705.

18 For example, Graham, James, “Changing Patterns of Wage Labor in Tanzania: A History of the Relations between African Labor and European Capitalism in Njombe, 1931–1961,” (Ph.D. Thesis, Northwestern University, 1968)Google Scholar; and Miracle and Fetter, “Backward-sloping Labor-supply Functions …” Economic Development and Cultural Change.

19 Baldwin, Robert E., Economic Development and Export Growth (Berkeley: University of California, 1966)Google Scholar.

20 Kilby, Peter, African Enterprise: The Nigerian Bread Industry (Stanford: The Hoover Institution, 1965)Google Scholar.

21 John R. Harris has explored a number of problems relating to the connection between entrepreneurship and economic development (“Some Problems in Identifying the Role of Entrepreneurship in Economic Development; the Nigerian Case,” Explorations in Economic History, VII, 3 (Spring 1970), pp. 347–369)Google Scholar, among them the capital versus project shortage debate and the social and psychological infrastructure necessary to stimulate the exercise of entrepreneurship. Nafziger, E. W. has done similar work on the Nigerian footwear industry: “Nigerian Entrepreneurship: A Study of Indigenous Businessmen in the Footwear Industry” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois, 1967)Google Scholar.

22 P.. Kilby, African Enterprise, p. 112.

23 The farmers of East Africa have begun to think of the stratification of earnings in class terms. They have coined the term “Wabenzi” to refer to those they associate with the Mercedes Benz way of life. They have not organized a holdback. President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania has, however, responded to the problem of the “Wabenzi” by bringing governmental salaries and perquisites under strict control.

24 Hopkins, A. G., “The West African Currency Board,” African Historical Review, III, 1 (1970), pp. 101–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Dumont's, ReneFalse Start in Africa (London: Andre Deutsch, 1966)Google Scholar has seeded a new generation of critical studies of development and neo-colonialism in Africa, though Dumont himself might be seen as belonging to an older lineage including J. A. Hobson, E. D. Morel, Leonard Woolf, and Franz Fanon, among others. One awaits the work being done under the aegis of the Africa Research Group.