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02 Growth and Poverty Reduction >
Ethnic Diversity and Economic Instability in Africa >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/10685/40
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| Title: | Ethnic Patriotism and Markets in African History |
| Authors: | Lonsdale, John |
| Keywords: | Moral economy
Moral Ethnicity
Patriotism
Political Tribalism |
| Issue Date: | 5-Oct-2010 |
| Series/Report no.: | 20 |
| Abstract: | African economic and social history since 1800 suggests that the relationships between ethnic
consciousness and market transaction is very varied and largely unpredictable. The early
twentieth century was a period of important change. Before 1900 labour was scarce and land
abundant: inter-ethnic relations were relatively flexible, thanks to a general demand for mobile
labour supplies. By 1960 population growth meant that property had become more valuable
than labour: inter-ethnic relations became harder, thanks also to the way in which the colonial
imposition of state structures had tended to institutionalise ethnic groups as units of political
competition.
Against this broad periodisation of social, economic, and political change, this
chapter's case studies illustrate widely differing contexts and processes across African time and
space. Much has depended on economic geography and on highly contingent historical
circumstances, as also on the nature of the commodity traded in Africa's markets, whether
labour (slave or free, skilled or unskilled), foodstuffs, cash crops, property, and political
influence.
While analysis of ethno-market relations in Africa has generally focused on
'horizontal' inequalities between ethno-regional groups, this chapter places equal, if not more,
emphasis on changing 'vertical' social inequalities between persons or categories (gender,
generation, class) within ethnic groups as a source of social unrest and political pressure.
Internal, intra-ethnic tension over the 'moral economy' between the strong and the weak, rich
and poor, can provoke a crisis of 'moral ethnicity', a sense of loss of moral community. This
may provoke a crisis of 'political tribalism', as internal tension is dissipated in external
competition. The contrast between the relative degree of internal tension within the Kikuyu
and Luo peoples of Kenya provides an instructive case study of these possible connections
between internal and external ethnic patriotisms.
The chapter ends by proposing that Africa's history suggests that economists must look
for more flexible, more agent-based, more class-conscious, models of possible ethnic relations
with market economy than those that are currently relied upon. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/10685/40 |
| Appears in Collections: | Ethnic Diversity and Economic Instability in Africa
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| Ethnic Patriotism and Markets in African History.pdf | | 286Kb | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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