Keith Hart

Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana

This article originated in the study of one Northern Ghanaian group, the Frafras, as migrants to the urban areas of Southern Ghana. It describes the economic activities of the low-income section of the labour force in Accra, the urban sub-proletariat into which the unskilled and illiterate majority of Frafra migrants are drawn. Price inflation, inadequate wages, and an increasing surplus to the requirements of the urban labour market have led to a high degree of informality in the income-generating activities of the sub-proletariat. Consequently income and expenditure patterns are more complex than is normally allowed for in the economic analysis of poor countries. Government planning and the effective application of economic theory in this sphere has been impeded by the unthinking transfer of western categories to the economic and social structures of African cities. The question to be answered is this: Does the ‘reserve army of urban unemployed and underemployed’ really constitute a passive, exploited majority in cities like Accra, or do their informal economic activities possess some autonomous capacity for generating growth in the incomes of the urban (and rural) poor?

Money in an unequal world

Humanity is caught between the institutions of agrarian civilization and a machine revolution whose implications we barely understand. In consequence, the world is becoming rapidly more unequal as we grow closer together. As a result of digitalization, the dominant economic form of the 20th-century, state capitalism, is giving way to a new phase, virtual capitalism. The struggle for value on the internet is analysed with reference to the categories of classical political economy. The key to economic democracy is to focus on the money instruments themselves, which are changing in response to the repersonalization of economic life in a world of cheap information. The article reviews the evidence for such change and considers the future of money. If we are to displace the old regime of agrarian civilization, the middle-class revolution with which the modern age began needs to be revitalized.

Indian Business in South Africa after Apartheid: New and Old Trajectories

We consider here what has happened to one segment of South African capital since the demise of apartheid, of the Indian businessmen of KwaZulu Natal,1 and especially of its principal port city, Durban. During the long nightmare of apartheid, South Africas Indians, a small minority constituting only three percent of the national population, suffered many restrictions on their development. Indians originally came to Natal a century and a half ago. Although they were victimised as non-whites for almost all of their time in South Africa (if not on the same terms as indigenous Africans), they nonetheless managed to build up a thriving commerce within the limits of the inward-looking apartheid economy. Our investigation of some leading Indian businesses in the post-apartheid period shows how Indians have responded to this dramatically new situation, as well as to the changing conditions of a world economy entering a major restructuring phase. Our case study has its origin in the unique confluence of two streams of migrants from Europe and Asia, whose movement defined the formation of the modern world economy. Over a century ago, poor whites and Indian labourers, along with some British and Indian merchants, came in roughly equal numbers to live together in Natal. The discriminatory measures subsequently taken in Natal foreshadowed the racial segregation of the late twentieth-century apartheid regime. In a change almost as impressive in its way as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the apartheid system in South Africa has recently been replaced by a democratic government dedicated to serving the interests of the black majority. The barriers separating rich and poor, black, brown, and white, have come tumbling down, at least in theory. South Africas strategy for navigating this abrupt transition carries global implications. Divisions of wealth, race, age, and gender are juxtaposed at close quarters here: the social insulation of geographical distance, which might otherwise permit indifference to global inequality, does not exist.

Introduction: learning from Polanyi 1

Market and society Markets are networks constituted by acts of buying and selling, usually through the medium of money. For most of history they were kept marginal to the mainstream institutions on which societies were built. But not long ago, and at first only in some parts of the world, markets came to be accepted as central to society, leading to a vigorous political debate, which is ongoing, about the appropriate relationship between the two. It is widely acknowledged that the publication of Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations in 1776 provided a charter for “the market” (now often singular) to assume its place as the dominant institution of modern societies. The idea of economy, which started out as a principle of rural household management, now became closely identified with markets, as did the profession of economics which grew up to study them. One man, however, made the modern history of the relationship between market and society his special concern: Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), whose The Great Transformation , published during the Second World War, remains the most powerful indictment of what he considered to be the utopian and ultimately destructive attempt to build society on the basis of self-regulating markets. Our authors therefore consider the relevance of this Central European polymath for their work.

Marcel Mauss’s economic vision, 1920–1925: Anthropology, politics, journalism

Marcel Mauss took some time to resume his academic and political duties after the Great War, but the period 1920–1925 was one of intense activity and achievement on all fronts. He assumed Durkheim’s responsibility as leader of a depleted Année Sociologique group and relaunched the journal. He was optimistic that his international socialist politics would bear national fruit and it did. He was also a prolific financial journalist at this time, writing about the exchange rate crisis of 1922–1924. He maintained a Chinese wall between these compartments of his life, briefly combining them in the last chapter of The Gift, which is only a tentative synthesis. This separation of his intellectual and political commitments makes it easier for anthropologists to ignore his politics and, worse, to perpetuate in his name that opposition between market contracts and gifts as economic principles that he wrote his famous essay to refute.

A history of South African capitalism in national and global perspective

Keith Hart and Vishnu Padayachee locate the development of South African capitalism in the context of global developments in the long twentieth century, arguably the first time that such an analysis has been attempted. This paper grapples with multiple relationships, including that between the local and the global, the universal and the particular, and the historical and the present. The durable features of South African capitalism since its modern inception, it is argued, are mining, racial domination and an uneven relationship between the state, finance and industry. Although the national economy went through long swings between an external and internal orientation, each of the main periods highlighted in their analysis has been marked by both.

Models of statistical distribution A window on social history

This article focuses on a historical shift in the scientific attention given to two statistical models, the ‘normal’ distribution, which dominated ‘parametric’ statistical inference for a century from the 1880s, and the ‘power-law’ distribution, which is now seen as being much more commonplace than it once was. Each measures the relationship between the size and frequency of a variable, but the assumptions brought to that process differ considerably. Where one emphasizes equality and a typical form, the other highlights inequality and no form is representative. Where one is bounded, static and random, the other is open, dynamic and may reveal preferences. The analysis of social networks provides a case study. Drawing on Durkheim and Mauss’s essay on ‘primitive classification’, it is argued that a shift from national to world society may partly account for the relative prominence attached to these two models over time.

Cattle as capital

Livestock have been seen either as a source of subsistence or as commodities in a process of capital accumulation. Is the association of cattle with capital just a poetic metaphor or the grounds for a serious analysis of third world herding communities? Economists are divided between an orthodox notion of capital as physical equipment and a Marxist emphasis on social relations dominated by money. Nevertheless, some anthropologists assert that herders should be conceptualised as capitalists. The key elements in the Western folk concept of capital are: increase, money, physical stock and preoccupation with future time. Despite the plausible link between herding and some of these ideas, we conclude that, as an analytical category, ‘capital’ is too loaded and diffuse for fruitful application to the analysis of pastoralist production.

Jack Goody: The Anthropology of Unequal Society

In almost four decades Jack Goody has published a score of books seeking to explain the divergence of Africa from the Eurasian continent, and latterly to refute historical claims of western superiority to Asia. Since the millennium, he has sought to clarify his own vision of modern capitalism at a time when western hegemony is coming under pressure from globalization. Yet this achievement has not received the recognition from anthropologists that it deserves. This article, in reviewing six books published during the last decade, makes a case for reassessing Goodys project from the mid-1970s until now. It singles out two books for special attention, The Theft of History and his latest volume, Metals, Culture and Capitalism. A consistent theme of his recent work is to juxtapose his own account of the history of western capitalism with those of Marx, Weber and other writers in the classical tradition of social theory. Jack Goody remains to this day an anthropologist whose sensibility was formed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork. But he knew that, if he aspired to throw light on the human predicament as a whole, he would have to become a world historian too.

Decentralized development in the Scottish Highlands

The Scottish Highlands and Islands (henceforward, ‘the Highlands’) are of considerable interest for development studies. The region’s experience of a brutal internal colonialism (Hechter, 1978) has few parallels anywhere. Moreover, this took place relatively recently, with feudal private property, enclosures and bureaucratic planning all being imposed in quick succession on an indigenous people who traditionally refused the state (clan society). An unrelieved history of depopulation, poverty and exclusion from the general trend of economic development in Britain eventually led to ‘the highland problem’ (Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB), 1967; Munro and Hart, 2000) being recognized as an affront to the modern state’s claim of democratic legitimacy. Accordingly, for over a century but especially since the 1960s, special laws and administrative bodies have been devised to intervene in the region’s economic and social development, making of the Highlands an extended experiment in regional planning from which others might learn. Scotland’s history as a nation is closely tied to the fate of the Highlands, which contain half the country’s land area and only 7% of its population (Devine, 1999). The Highlanders became a pan-European symbol of romantic rejection of commercial industrialism in the eighteenth century, a remote people in a wild landscape, near to nature and speaking an unintelligible language. And, despite the efforts of the British state to eradicate local cultural forms, these paradoxically furnished the content of a militant Scottish identity. Today the UK’s creeping constitutional crisis shows signs of speeding up. To Scotland’s recently granted claims (along with Wales) for a national parliament of its own may be added the approaching reunification of Ireland, continuing uncertainty over British membership of the European Union and the need for reform of a parliament that retains the features of absolutist monarchy.