Africa and the World Economy

Few review articles could claim to have the impact of Cooper’s “Africa and the World Economy.” Originally published in 1981, Cooper’s article surveyed the literature in and outside of Africa on capitalism and the world economy, covering theories across the disciplines and every era and theme that scholars were then writing about in detail. Nearly four decades later, the article has become a reference for historians looking to understand African economies and their place in the world, and the different ways that other scholars have theorized local, regional, and global relationships.

In “Africa and the World Economy,” Cooper argued that the various theories of African economies made for elegant models but bad history, and that only a historical analysis could explain how and why the continent had become part of the global periphery. Cooper took on neoclassical economics first, insisting that the conventional models were theoretical where they should have been historical and generally unable to account for power in economic relations. Neoclassicists had their differences about the historic potential of the market, with the free-marketeers splitting from development economists and others who saw a role for the state. But for Cooper, the debate was beside the point historically, as the key question for historians “is not whether markets are good or bad but whether the market mechanism explains very much of what actually happened in Africa.”^{Footnote 8}

Yet in Cooper’s analysis, the dependency theorists, the foes of the neoclassicists, emerged no better for many of the same reasons. Dependency theory, according to Cooper, was too abstract as a framework, too functional in its explanations, and too remote from historical processes in general. Cooper argued that the fulcrum of the dependency approaches, the concept of unequal exchange, was an “inversion of the dogma” of conventional economics – instead of perfect competition, there was permanent inequality in international trade. And so “like most inversions,” Cooper argued, unequal exchange “actually goes right back to the most basic assumptions of the opposition.”^{Footnote 9}

The neo-Marxists earned some praise but plenty of criticism as well. Neo-Marxists were interested in the historical emergence of and interaction between modes of production, a concept encompassing the economic, social, and political order of a society. The theory of the articulation of modes of production inspired rigorous work on the structure of non-capitalist societies, both to explain historical change and how colonial capitalism could have later latched on to and reproduced local forms of inequality. However, like the dependency theorists with whom they frequently sparred, the neo-Marxists often turned to abstraction when history did not cooperate. “Modes of production,” Cooper observed, “become actors, and the seemingly necessary requirements for their reproduction become causes.”^{Footnote 10}

One might say that the theorists encountered in “Africa and the World Economy” had lost sight of the historical peculiarity of capitalism. Each theorist began from the idea of a capitalism triumphant – as a model for the neoclassicists, as core and periphery for the dependentistas, and as the dominant mode for the neo-Marxists. Under each approach, capitalism functions both as a question and an explanation for Africa’s unequal place in the world economy. For Cooper, this circularity was clearest in the case of dependency theory, in which the “functionality” of labor systems in the periphery and semi-periphery to the developed core “substitutes for analysis of historical processes.”^{Footnote 11} To explain why capitalism took on different forms in the core and periphery, we have to ask “both what capital did and what it encountered.”^{Footnote 12}

Having dispatched with the prevailing frameworks, Cooper offered a different set of concepts for historians to consider. Theories of capitalism and the world economy as systems had drifted from the conflicts they were meant to explain. Cooper proposed that historians “return to the central but neglected aspects of the old Marxism – primitive accumulation, the labor process, and class struggle.”^{Footnote 13} His early work on the East African coast demonstrated what this kind of conceptually-informed history could look like. In From Slaves to Squatters, we can see what the concepts of the labor process and class struggle can do for the history of capitalism in Africa. The story on the East African coast is as much about what capital or colonial officials did with free labor as it is about the struggle of the formerly enslaved to define the terms of their freedom. Struggles over land and labor did not make colonial Zanzibar and coastal Kenya any less peripheral to the world economy. However, as Cooper argued, this “backwardness” was not a function of unequal exchange, but rather “an economic structure that stifled increased productivity, investment, innovation, and capital formation, and a social structure that made economic stagnation a necessity for social stability.”^{Footnote 14}

In both “Africa and the World Economy” and his work on East Africa, Cooper shifted the study of capitalism back to history, back to conflicts over rights and control, back to the links to foreign capital and global markets, and back to how struggles on the ground shaped economic ideas on high. Along the way, Cooper demonstrated the possibilities of African history itself. In his work on political economy, Cooper consistently placed Africanist ideas and themes in conversation with Latin American studies and with debates on the transition to capitalism on a world scale. His historical and conceptual breadth helped make African history a field for scholars who wanted to think expansively about the continent and the world. The intellectual generosity of Cooper’s work offers a reader many places to start.

Malawi and the World Economy

The insights of “Africa and the World Economy” have continued to inform work on the economic history of Africa, including my own study on Malawi and the history of tobacco capitalism. Malawi has long been a country on the margins of the world economy, similar in some ways to the early colonial East African coast described by Cooper. British colonial authorities and white settlers referred to colonial Malawi as “backward.” Critics of colonialism often turned the charge around, arguing that British imperialism was to blame for “underdevelopment.” In the past few decades, the language might have softened, but the image of Malawi remains much the same.

However, Malawi did not always seem economically marginal, at least from the perspective of Malawians themselves. In the years before independence in 1964, future president Kamuzu Banda pledged that his Malawi Congress Party (MCP) would transform the country into a “Central African Denmark.”^{Footnote 15} Ordinary Malawians understood what Banda meant. Denmark, to Banda, was an example of a small, agrarian country that through hard work and technological innovation had made itself into a modern, developed nation. MCP insisted that Malawi could do the same – if Malawians were willing to work for it and if Britain was willing to set the country free.^{Footnote 16}

“Central African Denmark” evokes an unrealized vision from more hopeful times. This Danish dream faded quickly and definitively in early independent Malawi. Banda charged fees and imposed taxes to balance the budget, not to expand services. Popular protests for economic reforms were either ignored or beaten back, most violently during the Cabinet Crisis of 1964.^{Footnote 17} Development, such as it was, benefitted mainly Banda and his inner circle, who enriched themselves through a sprawling network of personal and nominally public businesses. Malawi enjoyed what some considered a growth “miracle” from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, due in large part to tobacco exports. But the Malawian economy went tumbling down with the rest of the continent from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, hitting ordinary Malawians hardest of all.^{Footnote 18}

This story of colonialism-to-corruption is familiar to scholars of Malawi (and to scholars of many other places), but recently historians have started to tell it differently. The story is too simple, for one thing. The fact of Banda’s personal grip on key industries does not itself explain when and why the Malawian economy boomed and went bust in the early postcolonial era. The story also flattens rich histories of agrarian change into a narrative of rural poverty, as Elias Mandala has shown.^{Footnote 19} Furthermore, the colonialism-to-corruption story passes over the political possibilities of African independence, to which Cooper called our attention in his other work and about which Malawians reminisce in conversations about the Banda era.^{Footnote 20} Documentary evidence and oral histories prompt a different question about the history of decolonization-era Malawi: Why do we see continuities between the colonial and postcolonial economy when everyone – from the villages of Chitipa to Chikwawa and from boardrooms in Lilongwe to Washington – was committed to economic diversification and social change in the early independence era?

Cooper’s approach in “Africa and the World Economy” and the East Africa trilogy suggests an answer. Cooper demonstrated that the idea of “backwardness” tells us more about the limits of capitalism – both in terms of where capital went and what it was able to do – than it does about the limits of a people or a place. So rather than begin with what Banda failed to do, one should consider what the rest of the world wanted to do with Malawi. We should move away from an approach that started from the notion of a failure of capitalism, or of state-directed development. Instead, following Cooper’s lead, it would be more productive to ask why capital had historically flocked to some sectors and not others, how local rights and relations shaped the way that capital accumulation worked, and what this meant for livelihoods, politics, and growth.

In Malawi, the history of capitalism is arguably a history of tobacco.^{Footnote 21} The country is one of the world’s largest producers of raw tobacco, specializing primarily in varieties of cheap leaf that are uneconomical to grow elsewhere. Tobacco is even more important to Malawi itself – the crop consistently constitutes around 50 percent of the country’s annual exports.^{Footnote 22} Every year, the whole country keeps an anxious watch on global tobacco prices, knowing that even the slightest decline could have an immense impact on rural livelihoods.

Malawi was not supposed to become an African outpost of tobacco capitalism. In the mid-1960s, the conversation between the Malawian government and foreign donors was about how to steer small farmers into new crops and diversify the national economy.^{Footnote 23} Officials wanted out of tobacco for many of the same reasons that experts worry about it now: tobacco harms both growers and consumers, and that harm has led to an international regulatory system that has hemmed in the global market. On the advice of the World Bank, the Malawian government upheld deeply unpopular colonial-era legislation that concentrated the industry into the hands of wealthy small farmers and big planters, whose ranks had expanded since independence to include Banda and other prominent politicians.^{Footnote 24} Meanwhile, local officials pushed small farmers to adopt new project crops such as hybrid maize and groundnuts.^{Footnote 25}

Diversification did not go as planned. As Malawian officials and the World Bank talked over alternatives to tobacco, multinational tobacco corporations came calling to Malawi. In the 1960s, the United States tobacco industry, the world’s largest by a wide margin, was in the throes of a decades-long contraction brought on by mechanization, changing consumer tastes, and monopoly buying practices by powerful firms.^{Footnote 26} Tobacco multinationals hoped that Malawian producers could expand their presence in the bottom rungs of the global market.^{Footnote 27} Chasing dollars and economic growth, the Malawian government decided to ramp up tobacco production, hoping to capitalize on the market in the short term.

Despite efforts to consolidate and cordon off the tobacco industry from the wider rural economy, the steady demand for cheap leaf meant that officials only selectively enforced crop laws. On paper, the tobacco industry was the most tightly regulated in the country, keeping pace with strict global production standards. But in practice, the industry developed an accordion-like system of production that expanded or contracted with the capricious demands of the global tobacco market. In the villages, thousands of growers squeezed to the margins of the industry were either cut in or cast out each year depending on industry needs.^{Footnote 28} On the estates, planters held down costs and expanded production by relying on tenant farmers, entrenching a colonial labor system that the Malawi Congress Party had promised to outlaw.^{Footnote 29}

Nothing about this history of tobacco in Malawi recalls the independence-era hopes of a Central African Denmark. But it should remind us of what Cooper said about the peculiarities of capitalism. Malawian officials and the World Bank saw an opportunity in tobacco and tried to turn colonial legacies – the laws, the licenses, and the estates – into comparative advantage in an expanding global market. Clientelism and corruption can explain some of this transition, but the tobacco multinationals, which dictated prices and production standards that were only profitable under conditions of intense exploitation, both started and sustained it. The colonial character of the Malawian economy should be understood as part of the encounter with global capital.^{Footnote 30}

Here, too, a return to the concerns of the East Africa trilogy is in order. A balance sheet of tobacco capitalism would certainly favor the planters. However, small farmers and tenants were constantly at odds with local officials and overseers over their rights as growers. The conflicts were clearest in the villages, where growers defied crop laws by illegally planting without licenses and selling without market cards.^{Footnote 31} Though officials regarded the issue as a new problem, “illegal growers” had in fact been a feature of the local industry since the 1920s, as John McCracken has shown.^{Footnote 32} Rather than think of these growers as marginal, one should consider how farmers with limited means were able to impose themselves on the industry, asserting their right to grow. The industry counted illegal growers in boom times, and could not force them out entirely in the bad times. The result was a flexible, globally-linked system of production that brought short-term profit but became unsustainable in the long-run.