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.

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9781478016199

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""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 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 *"

Author Information

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.

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