The growth and decline of African agriculture in central Angola, 1890–1950

Abstract

Within the last decade or so, historians have devoted considerable attention to problems of economic development of areas of colonial Africa where large European settler communities developed. The most recent studies of these areas have highlighted the continuity and diversity among African agricultural producers despite the land and labour demands of settler sectors as well as the constraints on the production of African smallholders imposed by the policies of colonial states. 2 This contrasts substantially with the earlier view, advanced by Arrighi and subject to considerable debate in the 1970s, which held that colonial policies and seLtler demands undermined African producers and led to 'underdevelopment' and to 'rural poverty'. I Newer historiography suggests that some rural producers did very well and a prosperous group of small and middling peasants flourished even as many former peasants were forced into marginal production and wage labour as migrants or rural workers. 4