Africa and Capitalism: Repairing a History of Omission

Abstract:In the past two decades, economic history has been marked by an increasing turn toward global frameworks and analyses, but these still tend to omit the African continent prior to the nineteenth century. This article explores this omission beginning with an examination of the historiographical roots of this absence from the perspective of both economic history and African history. From its inception, economics depended on the displacing of African economic actors from global frameworks. Meanwhile, the emergence of African history as a discipline in the 1960s also saw the displacement of indigenous economic actors from precolonial frameworks. Linking African economic activity to new perspectives on capitalism—focusing on the connection of enslaved and wage labor in precolonial manufacturing—this article seeks to repair this striking omission. It argues that the history of capitalism cannot be fully global until African frameworks are properly included.