Historical Studies

According to Marx, "The essence of a free colony . . . consists in
this, that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every
settler on it can therefore turn part of it into his private
property and his individual means of production, without preventing
later settlers from performing the same operation."1 Such a
situation typified the early economic development of North America.
The subsequent rise of the United States to world supremacy as an
industrial and financial power suggests the prospect of a specific
"colonial path" to capitalist development.

The violent military struggles and acute partisan conflicts that engulfed the population of Missouri during the U.S. Civil War present something of a paradox to scholars seeking to fit this "border" state neatly into political-economic explanations of the mid-nineteenth century U.S. crisis. If the war was indeed the consequence of a growing divergence between the free-labor North and the slave-labor South, why did the conflict take on its most markedly "civil" form precisely in Missouri, a state where the social formation largely failed to exhibit the sharp dichotomy that characterized the nation-state as a whole?

How have African cultural and intellectual institutions worked under conditions of austerity? Through what acts of remediation and choreographies of survival have university faculty, staff and students, playwrights, artists, publishers, journalists and curators made up the gap between ambition and deficit, between the state of the art and material scarcity? In this part issue we expose the often unacknowledged labour and expertise of African intellectuals, administrators and artists whose commitments and sense of vocation have made institutions work in spite of crippling social and economic challenges. We study how universities, archives, research centres, museums and publishing houses have been reorganized and redistributed in response to hardship, shortage, cuts and constraints, as people work to market cultures and make history in times of deprivation. In its contemporary definition, austerity does not reflect a cohesive economic doctrine: it refers to general ideas about the consequences of the withdrawal of the ‘state in the economy’ (Blyth 2013: 17). In fact, the term has a much longer and more complex genealogy than conventional understandings acknowledge. In Eastern and Southern Africa, over many generations, the majority have confronted bleak economic and institutional predicaments that realized a surplus for the few. Whereas roads, railways and harbours attracted extractive colonial investments (Rodney 1972; Vail and White 1980), the infrastructures of culture – schools, libraries, universities, archives – have been bitterly under-resourced for a century, particularly beyond the central precincts of capital cities. In this introductory article we unpack this longer history of austerity.

This article explores the austere labour regime of Safaricom – Kenya's largest telecommunications firm and financial services provider – from the perspective of the women and men who work as ‘human ATMs’ for Safaricom's breakout service, M-Pesa. Far from women and men simply acting as ATMs, I argue that the affective and social labour of these people working at sites across the country constitutes a form of maintenance work that, while essentially free in Safaricom's accounts, critically underwrites the success of M-Pesa and Safaricom. In making this argument, I draw on the insights of feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser, who has pushed Marx's key insight that behind the sphere of exchange lies the ‘hidden abode’ of production. In contrast, Fraser argues that behind the ‘hidden abode’ of production lie domains more hidden still that constitute the ‘backstory’ of contemporary forms of accumulation. I argue that the work of ‘human ATMs’ constitutes both the ‘front...

English : Kenya is a frontier market for ‘financial technology’, or FinTech. This industry – which merges mobile telephony and digital data with commercial lending – has grown spectacularly, with millions of Kenyans borrowing for household, emergency, and commercial expenses. This industry’s frenzied growth has been fuelled by not merely the pursuit of profit, but also a decidedly more developmental aspiration, namely ‘financial inclusion’. This article analyzes the curious merger of public good and private gain, the technological innovations, and sorts of knowledge work that undergird this field. It particularly examines the novel manner in which digital lenders capitalise on intimacy, converting practices of kinship and entrustment into frontiers of extraction. Personal and social data are translated into credit scores, extended family networks are mediated by financial services, and interpersonal relations subsidise risky lending decisions. In contrast to a view of capitalism as ...

This article explores the incremental privatization of what is today East Africa's largest corporation, communications and finance firm Safaricom. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, British multinational Vodafone became a partial shareholder of Safaricom, with the government of Kenya retaining the majority stake in the company. This was followed by the company going “public” in 2008 through an Initial Public Offering (IPO). In exploring these transformations, this article demonstrates that privatization was not a singular event but turned on the production of divisibility: a discursive, epistemological, and material process whereby seemingly “classificatory wholes”—a corporation, an infrastructure, a state asset—were first presented and then rendered as partible entities. As the lines between the public and the private were being redrawn, another conceptual series—“citizenship,” “development,” the “public”—were similarly transformed into partible objects subject to division. Unr...