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.

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.

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