Some remarkable scholarship in and on various parts of the globe over the last thirty-five years or so has established ‘moral economy’ as one of the most fruitful concepts to emerge from the historiography, as a tool for analysing the interactions between economy, culture and politics. ‘Moral economies’ are defined ...
(Show more)Some remarkable scholarship in and on various parts of the globe over the last thirty-five years or so has established ‘moral economy’ as one of the most fruitful concepts to emerge from the historiography, as a tool for analysing the interactions between economy, culture and politics. ‘Moral economies’ are defined here as beliefs about what constitutes just economic behaviour: about the proper purposes, forms and boundaries of economic activity. A moral economy may be said to exist - or to exist in a form which makes a difference, culturally and socially and perhaps politically and economically - where violation of such a belief provokes disapproval which exceeds what can be accounted for by the material outcome itself. While the concept is potentially of very wide application, so far it has been used primarily to analyse a particular category of historical setting: those characterised by powerful pressure towards an extension of market relations in economic activity. This was true of the two prime exponents of the idea: its originator E. P. Thompson, writing on eighteenth-century England, and James Scott, who extended it in a much-cited study of colonial Southeast Asia. The specific ‘moral economies’ identified by Thompson and Scott were ‘countercapitalist’ (in Ralph Austen’s phrase) in the sense that they disapproved of, and legitimated resistance to, the primacy of market forces in the allocation of market resources. This characterisation of the setting, and of the content, of particular moral economies applies also to most subsequent historical applications of the notion, including in Africa.
This paper considers whether, and if so how, ‘moral economy’ can help us examine the history of colonial-period Asante (Ashanti), in what is now Ghana. Asante had been a major independent kingdom for 195 years before its occupation by Britain in 1896 (studied by Wilks, McCaskie, Arhin and others). Soon afterwards, Asante farmers began to adopt cocoa cultivation on an increasingly wide scale, making the region ultimately the largest contributor to Ghana’s status as the world’s largest producer of cocoa beans. The process of accumulation at the centre of this paper is this expansion of investment and output for export. In examining social attitudes to self-enrichment in this context, the paper focusses on Asante perceptions of money-lenders, and on witchcraft accusations. The primary sources include testimonies in court cases and early ethnographic surveys and reports. We will see that there is indeed evidence that a ‘moral economy’ existed; but also (and contrary to recent work by W. Olsen) that it was not a countercapitalist one. On the contrary, it supported certain forms of self-enrichment. The paper goes on to investigate the specific characteristics of the Asante moral economy of accumulation, and the particular historical path which produced it, and to discuss the implications of the findings for comparative history, theory, and methodology. It is concluded that the moral economy of accumulation in colonial Ghana had more in common with, for instance, that of early modern England (Thomas) than that of equatorial Africa (Geshiere).
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