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Title: | A Collaboration of History and Anthropology: The Synergy of Economic History and Ethnoeconomy in Illuminating Colonial African Moneys |
Author: | McCarthy, Dennis M.P. |
Year: | 1996 |
Periodical: | African Economic History |
Volume: | 24 |
Pages: | 91-107 |
Language: | English |
Geographic terms: | West Africa Tanzania Great Britain |
Subjects: | colonialism money economic history Economics and Trade History and Exploration |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3601846 |
Abstract: | This article discusses the synergy of economic history and ethnoeconomy in illuminating colonial African moneys. Economic history has drawn valuable techniques from mathematics and statistics. This infusion has enabled economic historians to deal with one of history's two missions: to determine what scholars think happened in the past. History's second task - the appreciation of what people living in the past thought happened - is perceptual and as such does not lend itself to study through the econometric methods associated with the 'new economic history'. A perceptual approach that merits consideration from economic historians is ethnoeconomy, an offshoot of ethnoscience. Integrating approaches from ethnoeconomy and economic history, the author first constructs a number of taxonomies for money in colonial Africa, one applying to the Wahi Wanyaturu of west-central Tanganyika in 1959-1960, one to Tanganyika (Tanzania) in the 1930s, and another to colonial British West Africa. He then builds upon these taxonomies to analyse money within the context of a universal economic logic. Notes, ref. (Comment by Jan Hogendorn, p. 109-113.) |