Economic Inequality and Rural Entrepreneurship: Polly Hill on Rural Capitalism in West Africa

Abstract

The relationship between economic inequality and entrepreneurship has received the attention of scholars who have advised researchers to ‘use new data and seek new methods to study economic inequality.’ We examine a neglected source of such data and methods, Polly Hill’s The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana (1963) and Studies in Rural Capitalism in West Africa (1970), which stressed the agency of rural entrepreneurs. According to Hill, economic inequality is synonymous with rural tropical economies. Hill highlights inequality between richer and poorer farmers ignored by development economists. Her approach was cross-disciplinary, with an economics BA and anthropology PhD (supervised by economist Joan Robinson). She was a fellow in African Studies in Ghana and reader in Commonwealth Studies at Cambridge. In keeping with Hill’s cross-disciplinarity, this paper is jointly written by an economist and by an entrepreneurship professor.

Keywords:

• Polly Hill
• economic inequality
• rural entrepreneurship
• rural capitalism
• West Africa

Notes

1 Hill (e.g. 1986, p. 135) later expressed some reservations about having used the phrase ‘rural capitalism’ in the subtitle of Hill (1963) and title of Hill (1970), emphasizing that she had ‘meant to convey that the “migratory process” as such had many capitalistic features, not that every individual participant was “a capitalist”.’ The only mention of Polly Hill by Jerven (2015, p. 82) is a passing remark that ‘the cocoa boom was fueled by the labor of African peasants, or capitalists, as Hill (1970) calls them’ without acknowledging Hill’s careful and forceful argument that the cocoa farmers were not peasants (however, Jerven (2013, pp. 77–78) gave attention to Hill (1986) on the problems with official statistics in Africa). Franklin Obeng-Odoom (2020, pp. 23–27, 45) discusses Hill (1986) and endorses her critique of neoclassical economics but criticizes her book’s inattention to ecological sustainability, inclusive urban development and ‘energy-space-rent and stratification interlinkages’, topics analyzed by Obeng-Odoom (2013, 2014).

2 The 40 articles surveyed by Bruton et al. (2021, Table 2) include only one published before 2000, a 1994 study of Hungary.

3 In 1989, Polly Hill and her cousin Richard Keynes edited the letters of John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, their uncle and aunt. Polly Hill lived with them in 1940–41 and was dining with them when a bomb exploded opposite the house.

4 Szereszewski (1965) estimated Gold Coast imports of goods and nonfactor services, at constant 1911 prices, at £872,000 in 1891 and £3,612,000 in 1911.