Category: The African Revolution
Revised version of 'A liberal revolution for Africa?' below. From Pan-Africanism to national capitalism I consider here Africa’s development prospects in the coming half-century, viewed in the light of the century that has just passed. Africa has seen extraordinary urban growth in the twentieth century and this, rather than the conventional view of the continent […]
(Public lecture, 'The African Revolution: urban commerce and the informal economy', given at the University of Ghana in Accra, 8th January 2007) I spent over two years, 1965-68, living mainly in an Accra slum area, Nima 441. Not long afterwards and drawing on that research, I was credited with being the source of the ‘informal […]
The term ‘informal economy’ became current in the 1970s as a label for economic activities that take place outside the framework of bureaucratic public and private sector establishments. It arose in response to the proliferation of self-employment and casual labour in Third World cities; but later the expression came to be used with reference to […]
A memorial celebration of Polly Hill’s life took place in Clare Hall, Cambridge on 28th May 2006. She died peacefully on 21st August 2005, aged 91. Chris Gregory, who partly owed his own conversion from economist to ethnographer to Polly Hill, provided the continuity; her grandchildren read poetry; Mark Hill and Caroline Humphrey made short […]
Fred Cooper’s Colonialism in Question is mainly about changing fashions among the people who study colonial and post-colonial societies. But its third section, ‘The possibilities of history’, opens up larger questions, particularly in the essay, ‘States, empires and political imagination’ (the longest in the book). Here FC argues persuasively against the tendency to read modern […]
Colonialism in Question: theory, knowledge, history This book is about people who study colonialism. In particular, it asks why there should now be a mini-boom in colonial studies, when once it was virtually unknown. Beyond that, Fred Cooper is clearly fed up with much of this work and especially the conceptual language of recent colonial […]
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
