Capitalism, Class, and African Colonial Agriculture: The Mating of Marxism and Empiricism (original) (raw)
1981, The Journal of Economic History
The maturation of African economic history can be charted as a movement from the study of the most visible but somewhat alien heights of international exchange-the "trade and politics" of several early titles and subtitles in the field-to study of the more obscure provinces of African agricultural production. To understand agriculture in economic as opposed to simply technological terms it must, of course, be linked to some concept of exchange. The major debates in the new historiography have centered around the means by which African production has been integrated into a world economy dominated by western capitalism.. The liberal interpretation of the process argues that the investments provided by European colonial regimes were essential to breaking down potential transportation and other barriers preventing Africans from directing their own resources and energies towards the market. African cultivators are presented as small-scale capitalists who take advantage of the new opportunities, mobilizing not only land and labor, but also social institutions such as kinship, sex-roles and patron-client networks. 1 In opposition to the liberal view, a variety of neo-Marxist scholars loosely grouped as "dependency theorists" have argued that colonial investment was designed to meet the needs of capitalist metropolises by restricting the possibilities for internal African development. The ostensibly independent African farmer becomes in this model a peasant, supplying export goods at a low cost because his traditional "mode of production" provides him with a means of subsistence (or "social reproduction") outside the market while reinforcing his inability to take up more advanced enterprises. 2 Until recently virtually all of the detailed historical studies of African entry into colonial export production were carried out by liberal scholars. 3 Marxists have generally come on to their subject from backgrounds of research in sociology, anthropology, or economics or historical work on precolonial economies which preceded their espousal of dependency theory perspectives. 4 This is not to say that liberals ended the debate. Their works have
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