AN ECONOMIC FOCUS BRINGS A DIFFERENT STORY

"FOLLOW THE MONEY"... BENEATH THE SURFACE 

Karl Marx's premise that the underlying economy determines long-term change was almost taken for granted in the U.S. from the 1930's to the Cold War, and in France from the Collaboration's defeat in 1944 to the rise of multinationals in the 1980's. 

Then narrations that stressed political, philosophical or individual factors replaced it. 

Showing how societies that have nothing but their economic base in common react to similar economic change in similar ways  reintroduces that approach. My experience leads to comparing societies of preindustrial France and precolonial Africa, but the method applies anywhere.

 

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The pages on Africa come from my doctoral thesis for Columbia University, 1975. 

"Growth and Violence in the Precolonial Sudanic Belt began with economic data in explorers' accounts of  West and Central Africa. I then consulted the archives of Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, Bamako, Ouagadougou and Accra, conducted interviews in those towns and in Segu (Mali) and did three months of field work in Djimini,  in the northeastern Ivory Coast, in 1973.

The thesis was published as Croissance économique et violence dans la zone soudanienne in "Guerres de lignages et guerres d'état en Afrique" ("Wars of Lineage and Wars of State in Africa").* 

*Ed. by Jean Bazin and Emmanuel Terray, Paris, Éditions des Archives, 1982, pp. 423-500, translated by Emmanuel Terray, Director of Studies at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences).

I had married a Frenchman and lived in Paris. University doors stayed closed. As the late Emmanuel Terray wrote in another context, 

In spite of the quality of her work, Catherine Aubin could not find a place in the French university system. That will not surprise those that know how deeply that system turns inward and is reserved to an "elite," pre-selected by the important schools ("Ecoles Normales Supérieurs") and administrative competition (the "Agrégation"). Even if Catherine Aubin had published her thesis in the United States, even if she had published numerous articles — beyond her contribution to the collective work Guerres de lignages et Guerres d'Etat en Afrique ) that I published with Jean Bazin in 1982 — the situation would not have changed and she would not have been able to obtain a university position in France; her case is far from unique: no matter what her qualities and value of her work — and they are considerable — it is practically impossible for a foreign man, and perhaps even more for a foreign woman, to integrate the French university network of which the access is, de facto, solidly locked off from the start.  

--Emmanuel Terray, January 8, 1991, by then Director of the EHESS

So I became a Paris tour guide.

That led me to French history,

 and to the comparisons that follow.

     The Sheik of Bornu in Clapperton's narrative, 1824  / Louis XIV by M. Leloir in G. Toudouze, Le Roy Soleil, 1931

Railings emphasize and isolate kings in 19th-century Northern Nigeria and 17th-century France.

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Why choose Africa?