What happened to the theory of African capitalism?

Abstract

I examine the reasons for the impressively consistent disinterest in African economics that runs through all the schools of comparative political economy that Economy and Society has published over the last three decades. These theoretical movements can be helpfully arranged in reverse chronological order: Callon's economization, Soskice and Hall's varieties of capitalism (VoC), Boyer and Jessop's regulationism and Foucault's governmentality. Each of them shows an intriguing indifference to the question of whether African evidence matters for their arguments. What makes this interesting was that in its first decade, between 1971 and 1981, Economy and Society was obsessed with the problem of the comparative theorizing of the African economy and its transformation. Indeed, it is not too strong to say, as I show, that theorizing African capitalism was the journal’s raison d’etre. What happened to kill off that curiosity? Reconstructing debates within the journal, the paper explores the shifts, in comparative political economy and in African studies, between 1970 and 1990 that account for the collapse of comparative interest in the features of capitalism on the continent.

Keywords:

• Africa
• capitalism
• political economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keith Breckenridge

Keith Breckenridge is a 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.