On Comparing Pre-Industrial African and European Economies

Abstract

John Thornton's essay has the great merit of forcing us to reconsider many of the comparative assumptions underlying our evaluation of economic capacity in precolonial Africa. However, I remain unconvinced by either the logic or the evidence of the alternative evaluation presented by Thornton himself and can thus only respond by what is, at best, a more nuanced restatement of arguments I have already made elsewhere. What I perceive as the greatest shortcoming in my own previous work is its emphasis on externally oriented aspects of the African economy. Thornton does make a number of assertions about the African domestic economy, but they are not supported by much new data and are framed entirely in terms of the very European models that ought to be dealt with more critically in an assessment of African internal development. This problem is most evident in Thornton's insistence on a point which should not be troubling any of us by now: African economic irrationality. Even in the most questionable arguments (on child-rearing) in my and Daniel Headrick's survey of African technological history, the operative term was not irrationality but conservatism. If my work has another general flaw, it is its tendency to fall back too easily upon the standard European liberal belief in a universal utilitarian rationality which interprets all human actions, institutions, and culture in market terms. If we are really to advance in our understanding of the African economic past it is necessary to recognize (without falling back into the simplistic formulations of Karl Polanyi or the excesses of Marxist metaphysics) that African economic behavior may be rational even when it does not replicate our own history.