Prince Young Aboagye (Lund University): “Rural Capitalism and Income Inequality in Colonial Africa: Trends and Transitions."

Abstract:

The development of capitalist agriculture in colonial sub-Saharan Africa and its implications for income distribution have long been a subject of interest for anthropologists, economists, and economic historians. There is no more fundamental problem in the history of capitalism in the erstwhile export-producing colonies of Africa than the dynamics of inequality among export producers, and between export producers and their non-export producing compatriots (Austin, 2013:1). A study of the evolution of capitalist relations of production and its ramifications for income distribution are pertinent today for a comprehensive understanding of the strength of African capitalism and the prospects of rural development and poverty reduction (Oya, 2007; Austin, 2013). This paper contributes to understanding the processes of economic differentiation associated with the development of capitalism in colonial sub-Saharan Africa.

Recent studies on long-term income inequality show that there were not only significant and increasing economic inequality between Europeans and Africans in colonial Africa. But there was also growing income differences among Africans as various individuals and groups profited to a higher or lower degree from income generating opportunities (Bolt & Hillbom, 2016; Alfani & Tadei, 2017; Hillbom et al., 2021; De Haas, 2021; Aboagye & Bolt, 2021, Klocke, 2021). Against the popular notion of the “amorphous peasantry” long ago debunked by Hill (1968), income inequalities were much significant in colonial rural Africa. The commercialization of agricultural production led to the emergence of a group of African rural capitalists who gained disproportionately from the expansion of export-oriented agricultural development.

While there was much scholarly interest in this group of African rural capitalists in the 1960s and 1970s, we have limited knowledge about their historical roots and persistence over time and how their acquisition of capital, labour mobilization, access to and investments in means of production affected income distribution over time. In this paper, we identify and scrutinize the group of African rural capitalists during the colonial era in Botswana, Ghana and Tanzania and capture changes in their relative economic position over time. Specifically, we address the following research questions: first, who were the rural agrarian capitalists and under what conditions did they emerge; two, what were their incomes relative to other income earning groups; three, how did they affect inequality trends over time. Quantifying how the agrarian capitalists fared economically in the colonial era and studying the patterns of income developments are vital for understanding the relationship between the emergence of rural capitalism, and uneven and gradual rural differentiation and the various processes that have accompanied it in changing historical contexts.