Money, Value, and the State is an ambitious and deeply researched historical ethnography of money as a political order drawing on archival and ethnographic material across postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Kevin Donovan’s central claim is that decolonization was not only a political opening but an attempt to build a government of value: a project through which states sought to monopolize valuation to secure economic self-determination. He names this formation the ‘money-changing state’, or a fiscal model that monopolizes national currencies and the terms of exchange, especially the conversion of domestic currency into foreign exchange, to both hoard reserves and govern access to value (pp. 1–5). In this configuration, the borders of political inclusion were also economic because the question of who counted as a credible citizen hinged on demonstrating productive worth and accessing scarce monetary instruments.
One of the book’s major strengths is its consistent refusal to reproduce state-centric narratives. Donovan closely attends to dissident monetary practices, such as smuggling, counterfeiting and everyday arbitrage, and argues that these unsettle analyses that treat sovereignty as either coherent or totalizing. He presents sovereignty as a limited achievement, sustained less by coercion than by a ‘constellation of interests’ (p. 43), which made national currency useful, desirable and adoptable. This reframing complicates the still common presumption in African political economy that coercion is the dominant mode of postcolonial rule. Here, domination works through shifting and varying notions of valuation and access and the moral economy of everyday calculation.
The chapters are tightly argued and empirically rich. Donovan moves from the East African Currency Board’s demise and national central bank formation, before turning to the politics of bank nationalization in Tanzania. He then shifts to 1970s Uganda, where shortages and ‘essential commodities’ became sites in which the state’s capacity and legitimacy were tested. A compelling chapter on magendo (smuggling) reframes coffee smuggling along the Kenya–Uganda frontier as arbitrage across jurisdictions, or a moral and social order recalibrated by price gaps and the temporality of quick gain. Throughout, Donovan tracks how citizens claimed credibility by seeking credit, foreign exchange and recognition, while officials attempted to police leaks in the monetary border and related fiscal order.
The book is a welcome intervention within African economic history, which has often remained focused on statist explanations such as capacity, policy and growth at the expense of the lived experience of money and the everyday production of value. While Donovan’s conception of the money-changing state resonates with debates on fiscal capacity and gatekeeping, he roots these abstractions in detailed archival and ethnographic work. These include bank ledgers, compensation negotiations, currency rules, petitions and police files. His analysis shows how marketing boards, currency controls and exchange allocation were not merely developmental or economic ‘distortions’, but instruments through which states governed value and shaped citizenship.
Two interventions stand out. First, the analysis of currency as a bordering technique extends the work by Gustav Peebles and others by showing that the national border was not only a territorial enclosure but also a monetary one. Second, Donovan’s text sharpens understandings of how capitalist development can enrol citizens on unequal terms, broadening participation while deepening inequality, resulting in what has elsewhere been called ‘predatory inclusion’ (p. 39). Together, these insights expand understandings of how money is not a neutral infrastructure, but a dense political technology of rule.
The book also poses generative questions. While it opens in the 1940s, it ends in the early 1980s, arguing that structural adjustment sought to install a new government of value. Marketing boards, price controls and exchange allocation were dismantled even though they were the very tools postcolonial states built to acquire monetary sovereignty, in favour of market sovereignty, or ‘getting prices right’. Readers are left wanting this story to be carried into the present day, where fintech, currency swaps, dollarization challenges and wartime experiments with alternative currencies (as in Sudan) illustrate that value politics and sovereignty remain salient. The temporal cutoff is thus both an analytical limitation and an invitation for further research.
A second limitation is methodological. Donovan is clear that this is not a macro-economic or quantitative study. While the qualitative depth is a virtue, even brief inclusion of data on, say, black-market exchange rates in Uganda and Kenya during the 1970s would have sharpened Donovan’s critique of official narratives and enabled sharper challenges to mainstream economic narratives. There is also some geographic unevenness, with Kenya receiving comparatively less sustained discussion outside the borderlands material, although this reflects archival access.
These caveats do not diminish the book’s contribution. Instead, they map a promising research agenda tracing how valuation, not only taxation, constitutes rule and how citizens’ monetary practices shape state projects. It also illustrates how structural adjustment’s long shadow reconfigured sovereignty through markets making African states accountable to financial institutions as well as to their citizenry. Crucially, Donovan also shows that, despite the state’s harms and ambiguity, people continued to call upon it to seek credit and obtain other political, economic and social tools; the postcolonial African state remains both disruptor and conduit of opportunity.
Money, Value, and the State is a vital text that will reward scholars across economic history, fiscal sociology and anthropology. It belongs on syllabi precisely because it models how to integrate archives and conceptual development while centring everyday, rather than statist, practices. For policymakers and central bankers accustomed to treating money as neutral infrastructure, it is an instructive, and humbling, read.
