Recentring the margins: Theorizing African capitalism after 50 years

Abstract

This introduction to our special issue addresses scholars’ failure, in recent times, to consider and analyse the forms of capitalism that have developed on the African continent. To redress the balance, it takes up the study of economic arrangements on the continent – property, infrastructure, debt, financialization, regulation – as well as exploring the history and politics of the scholarly field of African economics as an intellectual and institutional project. In the process it considers the advantages (and drawbacks) of seeing Africa as part of the ‘Global South’. Central to the special issue is the question of how to marry an analysis of intimate and smaller-scale economies centred on household, family and (often informal) labour regimes, on the one hand, with a recognition of large-scale processes such as the central banking systems imposed by states, the increasing prevalence of high-tech finance, the emergence of continent-wide regulation, and the influence of multilateral development agencies and the international publishing industry, on the other. How, we ask, can the importance of these institutions, so unlike in size and scale, be reckoned without assuming that the bigger and more powerful ones always prevail?

Keywords:

• African capitalism
• central banks
• development
• debt
• economics
• Global South

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keith Breckenridge

Keith Breckenridge is Professor of History and Deputy Director at WISER, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. His book, Biometric state: The global politics of identification and surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the present (Cambridge, 2014), shows how the South African obsession with Francis Galton's universal fingerprint identity registration served as a twentieth century incubator for the current systems of biometric citizenship being developed throughout the South. He is currently writing about the forms of biometric capitalism under development on the African continent.

Deborah James

Deborah James is Professor of Anthropology at LSE. Her book Money from nothing: Indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2015) explores the lived experience of debt for those many millions who attempt to improve their positions (or merely sustain existing livelihoods) in emerging economies. She has also done research on advice (especially debt advice) encounters in the context of the UK government’s austerity programme.