Morality and economic growth in rural West Africa: Indigenous accumulation in Hausaland

Abstract

In the aftermath of the financial crash of the late 2000s, and in the face of routine economic fraud and political corruption around the globe, there is a rising scientific and public interest in matters of economy and morality, i.e. moral economy. A significant share of these debates, however, are not informed by empirical data on actually existing moralities in past or present economies. Instead, they are largely desk-based analyses, employing abstract moral philosophy and references to assumed-universal moral principles. The crude quality of many morality debates is an outcome of this near-absence (and low-use) of morality data related to economic activities. Any extensive and nuanced study that has tried to find out about on-ground moralities of economic actors is thus to be highly welcomed. Against this background, Paul Clough has made an invaluable contribution to a data-based debate on the moral underpinnings of economic relations and practices across time and space, i.e. comparative moral economy studies. His case study, draws on years of fieldwork in a village in Hausaland, northern Nigeria. His focus is on the land, labour, credit and trading institutions there as they operated in the petroleum-boom times in the late 1970s and the macro-economic years of decline from the mid-1980s to the mid to late 1990s. This study of the ‘collective mentality’ of a local economic system (and community/society), and the tissue of interpersonal relationships (p. 260), reveals the social and moral grammar of a local economy.