Colonial Peasantries in Africa, India and the Caribbean: Political Economy, Moral Economy, Postcolonial Consequences

* Prof. Dr. Ralph A. Austen, Professor of African History, University of Chicago

The colonial systems established in much of tropical Africa at the end of the nineteenth century have been characterized as “peasant states” (Spittler 1981) or “étatist-peasant regimes” (Austen 1987). The smallholder agricultural base of such economies emerged in large part as a market response to the conditions created by linkages to the global economy through colonial infrastructure; however, it received significant reinforcement from political and social concerns (“moral economy”) within both rural African communities and European colonialist circles. Can a similar model be applied to India and the Caribbean? The former region had a very different development from that of Africa up to the nineteenth century but appears to have been “peasantized” under colonial rule (in contrast to far more capitalistic colonial economies in neighbouring Southeast Asian). In the Caribbean, the shift from plantation to peasant economies may have been more a matter of thwarted moral economy than of political economy, but not entirely so. Finally the postcolonial situation for these three regions may be traced to a continuing “articulation” of conservative rural economies with an ever more powerful global market system. How much of this situation is due to colonialism?

The African Study Centre and the faculty of Cultural Anthropology of the University of Leiden have jointly organized this seminar.