Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History
Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History
by Rhiannon Stephens
Duke University Press, 2022 Paper: 978-1-4780-1882-7 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-2451-4 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1619-9 Library of Congress Classification HC870.S747 2022
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
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
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