Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T06:41:54.587Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Paul Bohannan
Paul Bohannan
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It has often been claimed that money was to be found in much of the African continent before the impact of the European world and the extension of trade made coinage general. When we examine these claims, however, they tend to evaporate or to emerge as tricks of definition. It is an astounding fact that economists have, for decades, been assigning three or four qualities to money when they discuss it with reference to our own society or to those of the medieval and modern world, yet the moment they have gone to ancient history or to the societies and economies studied by anthropologists they have sought the “real” nature of money by allowing only one of these defining characteristics to dominate their definitions.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 1959 , pp. 491 - 503
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1959

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Einzig, Paul, Primitive Money in its Ethnological, Historical and Economic Aspects (London: Eyre and Spottisworde, 1949), pp. 319–26.Google Scholar

2 Polanyi, Karl, “The Economy as Instituted Process,” in Polanyi, Karl, Arensberg, Conrad M. and Pearson, Harry W., eds. Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press and The Falcon's Wing Press, 1957), pp. 264–66.Google Scholar

3 Sai, B. Akiga, Akiga's Story (London: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1939), p. 382 and passim.Google Scholar

4 Akiga, Akiga's Story, pp. 120–27. Laura and Paul Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria (London: International African Institute), pp. 69–78 and Paul, and Bohannan, Laura, Three Source Notebooks in Tiv Ethnography (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1958), pp. 384–444.Google Scholar

5 Bohannan, Laura, “Dahomean Marriage: A Revaluation,” Africa, XIX (1949), pp. 273–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Steiner, Franz, “Notes on Comparative Economics,” British Journal of Sociology, V (June 1954), 118–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar