Histories of African Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The relationship between capitalism and Africa’s long-term economic development has been of interest to economic historians since the 1960s. After a long hiatus, following the 1990s postmodernist turn towards social history, African economic history is experiencing a resurgence.¹Within that current is a rekindled interest in the African entrepreneur as a legitimate historical actor and an economic development agent.²  This review essay examines the work of two economic historians who began their careers at opposite ends of the history of African economic history writing and have written books that examine African entrepreneurship. Both tomes, written by Antony Hopkins and Sean Maliehe, draw on their PhD research. In 1960, Hopkins initially wanted to study for his PhD on Lagos’ African entrepreneurs, but, unsure of the sources, he settled for “a safe, pedestrian economic history of the port between 1880 and 1914” (p. xiii). With Capitalism in the Colonies, Hopkins returns to the subject, building on more than half a century of producing benchmark scholarship on African economic history.3 For Maliehe, Commerce as Politics is his first undertaking, a book that follows the now- established early career researcher’s pathway into academia, based on his PhD thesis. Their case studies are just as contradictory, located on either side of the equator of the African continent. While Hopkins examines the West African port city of Lagos, connected to global commerce via the Atlantic Ocean, Maliehe studies the tiny Kingdom of Lesotho, a landlocked country encircled by South Africa.