AFRC589 - HISTORY OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY

This graduate student course takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of African Political Economy. While the course is grounded in the discipline of history, it seeks to prepare students to actively engage with the social sciences, in particular economics, political science and anthropology. The study of Africa's economic past has moved through many different waves, after an initial burst of scholarship, during the 1960s and 1970s, which dealt with questions such as how Africa was integrated into the world economy, and the causes of wealth and prosperity, the field began to grapple with questions of governance in the 1990s. These questions took two forms. The first approach from political science argued that an analysis of the behavior of political institutions held the key to understanding Africa's economic performance, and the second approach coming out of anthropology questioned the legitimacy of the development discourse itself. Within the last ten years economists have returned to the study of Africa's past, borrowing a focus on African states' institutions to tackle long running questions such as why Africa is poorer than other regions of the world.


The renewed interest in questions of Africa's long run economic performance has created new spaces for African historians to write economic and political history. It has also made it imperative for historians to investigate the production and nature of the economic facts we possess, in order to better assess what we do and can know about the economic past of Africa. This course seeks to introduce students to the main approaches to the study of political economy in Africa and at the same time to elaborate on the main thematic and temporal topics in pre-colonial, colonial and contemporary African history.