Showing papers in "African Economic History in 1984"

The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860-1930

Abstract: List of Maps Preface Abbreviations Introduction 1. The political economy of Pondoland in the nineteenth century 2. Crops, cattle and the origins of labour migrancy, 1894-1911 3. Rural production and the South African state, 1911-1930 4. Chiefs and headmen in Pondoland, 1905-1930 5. Rural differentiation, alliance and conflict, 1910-1930 Postscript Tables Notes Select bibliography Index.

Capitalism, Kinship, and Gender in the Lower Tchiri (Shire) Valley of Malawi, 1860-1960: An Alternative Theoretical Framework

Abstract: During the past two decades Africanist scholars have come to recognize the importance of changes in gender relations in the larger process of class formation and, in particular, have examined Engels' attempt to locate the dynamics of sexual subordination in the rise of capitalism and the state (see, for example, Robertson, 1984; Sacks, 1979) Thus, while noting the prior existence of various forms of female oppression in precapitalist Africa, these scholars emphasize the different implications for women and men of such developments as the decline in the importance of kinship organization, the introduction of private property in land, the separation of domestic from social production, and the rise of new classes They have questioned the validity of such categories as kinship and chieftaincy that stress continuity rather than change They have sought to replace these categories and derivative models with others that can better illuminate the reality of change under the impact of the world economy One concept borrowed from peasant studies has become increasingly popular and has aroused considerable debate: household (Friedmann, 1980; Guyer, 1981; Vaughan, 1983) Critics of the household model have pointed out that rural Africa has not experienced a "complete shift from one type of system to another" and have therefore rejected the concept of household (Guyer, 1981: 88-98) They underscore the "openendedness" of historical change in Africa, arguing that categories derived from peasant studies overlook the "implicit and explicit contracts between households" and the ways in which "family labor is controlled under different circumstances" (Ibid, 88, 102) Other commentators have posited as a major methodological problem the tendency among oral informants to contrast the past with the present along the dichotomy between kinship solidarity and its breakdown They further caution against falling victim to the evolutionist biases of colonial observers who interpreted every change in domestic organization

The 'Labor Aristocracy' Debate in Africa: The Copperbelt Case, 1924-1967

Abstract: Scholars of the working class in both developed and less developed countries have long recognized that certain members of the working class sometimes behave in ways that subvert the best interests of the class as a whole. In order to explain this behavior, scholars have turned to the concept of a labor aristocracy. First developed by Marx and Engels to explain English labor's lack of revolutionary zeal in the mid-nineteenth century, this concept asserts that certain relatively privileged workers are more interested in maintaining their advantageous position in the workforce than in improving the conditions of the working class as a whole. Engels initially identified artisans in the great trade unions as the aristocrats of labor, but later added trade union leaders and even the entire British workforce to his

State, Merchant Capital, and Gender Relations in Southern Mozambique to the End of the Nineteenth Century: Some Tentative Hypotheses

Abstract: This paper represents a tentative reformulation of ideas that have been taking shape over a number of years in the course of my research and writing on the history of nineteenth century eastern Africa.1 While some of these are embedded almost unconsciously in my earlier work on the Yao, most have only begun to emerge more distinctly in my more recent writing on Muqdisho and Tanzania, some of which has yet to appear or is still in progress.2 The present essay has served me as an intellectual bridge between these two roughly delineated points and has gone through several major transformations since it was first presented in 1977. Since then successive drafts have reflected both the rise and decline of the modes of production debate and the wider collective effort to integrate Marxist theory and historical data in the reconstruction of the history of precapitalist African societies.3 My interest in testing these ideas for southern Mozambique, which was not at that time included in the literature of this debate, was both to provide a check against the interpretation that I was deriving from my understanding of more familiar terrain and simply to make myself learn more about an area which I felt I needed to know. The fact that southeast Africa has recently been the focus of some excellent detailed scholarship which raises certain of these issues for the nineteenth century has provided an invaluable additional control for ideas that I had initially based on much less complete data, modifying some and confirming others. My canvas for this essay is unusually large, both in time and space. I begin by identifying a cluster of societies that flourished over some seven centuries in southern Mozambique. These societies were part of neither a common cultural nor political tradition, nor were they strictly sequential to one another. Yet they all shared a common set of fundamental characteristics from which I have developed the organizing hypotheses for this paper.

Export Production in Western Libya, 1750-1793

Abstract: Western Libya is in many respects typical of the Middle East. Its topography is defined by a low range of mountains, just inland and roughly parallel to the Mediterranean coast, which separates a narrow coastal plain from a vast interior sprinkled with oases. Its climate, fundamentally hot and dry, is tempered by rainfall from off the Mediterranean, which causes the coastal plain and parallel mountain range to be relatively more fertile and prosperous than the interior. The mountain range, known as the Jabals Nafusa, Gharian, Tarhuna, and Msellata, is the domain of a cultural minority group, the Berbers, who historically have been able to maintain some degree of independence and distinctiveness in their upland fastnesses. The coastal plain, on the other hand, as well as some of the oases and the vast inland plain, the Sirte, which lies in the rainshadow of the mountains and receives their surface runoff, is the homeland of the dominant Arabs, who brought Islam to the country in the early centuries A.H. The Arabs were traditionally divided between settled, town-dwelling agriculturalists in the coastal plain and oases, and segmented, dispersed nomads on the Sirte. At the farthest reaches of the inland plain, the nomadic Arabs have come into contact with indigenous peoples who are strongly influenced by, but not completely assimilated into, Arabo-Islamic culture: the black African agriculturalists of the Fezzan oasis region, and the Tebu and Tuareg nomads of the far southwest and southeast. While specifics naturally vary, geographical, climatic, cultural, and historical characteristics very similar to those of western Libya can be found in many other regions of the Middle East and North Africa.