Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History

by Rhiannon Stephens

Overview

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478024514
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/24/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Rhiannon Stephens is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, author of A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900, and coeditor of Doing Conceptual History in Africa.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction  1
1. Methodologies and Sources for a Conceptual History of Economic Difference over the Longue Durée  22
2. Excavating Early Ideas about Poverty and Wealth  45
Interchapter. Overview of Climate Developments  64
3. The Bereft and the Powerful: Greater Luhyia Concepts of Poverty and Wealth through the Nineteenth Century  72
4. Gender and Honor: North Nyanza Concepts of Poverty and Wealth through the Nineteenth Century  99
5. Orphans and Livestock: Nilotic Concepts of Poverty and Wealth through the Nineteenth Century  120
6. Wealth, Poverty, and the Colonial Economy: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries  144
Conclusion  167
Appendix. Reconstructed Vocabulary  171
Notes  207
Bibliography  254
Index 277

What People are Saying About This

Kathryn de Luna

“Rhiannon Stephens affords us a rich story of ideas about the social, material, and affective dimensions of life accorded to the poor and to the rich. Poverty and Wealth in East Africa upends two key assumptions about small—scale African societies before the imposition of colonial rule: that such societies had no understandings of relative wealth or poverty, and that any such understandings were the unchanging results of static political or economic systems. With Stephens’s book, we have firm footing in the deeper histories needed to rethink the content of moral arguments associated with modern histories of capitalism, colonialism, independence, and development as dependent on European and African concepts with equally deep historical roots.”

Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi - Kenda Mutongi

“This is conceptual history at its best. Rhiannon Stephens has gotten under the skin of her sources and has created a living document that will be of interest not just to Africanists but to world historians as well. It is a blazingly original longue—durée history.”

Editorial Reviews

"Poverty and Wealth in East Africa is a significant book: lucid and meticulous, yet ambitious and imaginative. From the viewpoint of African studies, this work stretches significantly the time span of studies on African poverty. . . . Historians of economic thought without a scholarly interest in sub-Saharan Africa would also significantly benefit from reading this book. . . . Poverty and Wealth in East Africa should not be received just as a solid work of Africanist conceptual and linguistic history but also as a catalyst of important questions about our discipline, its 'canon,' and its methodological conventions."

-- Gerardo Serra Journal of the History of Economic Thought

“Poverty and Wealth in East Africa is an extensive and meticulously researched work that sheds light on the multifaceted nature of poverty and wealth in eastern Uganda . . . this book offers a nuanced and holistic view of economic inequality in the region, providing a valuable resource for scholars and researchers interested in African history, anthropology, and development studies.”
-- Addis Gedefaw Research Africa Reviews

"Stephens is highly successful in her goal of destroying any remaining pretence of precolonial egalitarianism and presenting a convincing argument that wealth and poverty are key parts of the human condition."
-- Andrew Crawford Anthropos

"Poverty and Wealth in East Africa significantly contributes to understanding the conceptualization of poverty and wealth in East Africa over the past two millennia."
-- Hariasda Rikardus, Mario Sani, Muhammad Naufal Hamdani Nurmitananda, Reski Putra Utama African Identities

"Poverty and Wealth in East Africa presents a groundbreaking investigation of the concepts of economic difference by East African societies, especially those in Uganda, over the past two millennia."
-- Syaifullah, Umaima, Sahrani & Juirah African Identities

This is an impressive and thought-provoking book, a productive departure from the tradition of historical linguistics applied to what is now Uganda... [Stephens] has distilled a staggering amount of work into these 200 pages."
-- Felicitas Becker African Studies Review

From the Publisher