Race and Rurality in the Global Economy

Michaeline A. Crichlow, Patricia Northover, Juan Giusti-Cordero, Michaeline A. Crichlow, Patricia Northover, Juan Giusti-Cordero

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438471327
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Rural Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Issues of migration, environment, rurality, and the visceral "politics of place" and "space" have occupied center stage in recent electoral political struggles in the United States and Europe, suffused by an antiglobalization discourse that has come to resonate with Euro-American peoples. Race and Rurality in the Global Economy suggests that this present fractious global politics begs for closer attention to be paid to the deep-rooted conditions and outcomes of globalization and development. From multiple viewpoints the contributors to this volume propose ways of understanding the ongoing processes of globalization that configure peoples and places via a politics of rurality in a capitalist world economy, and through an optics of raciality that intersects with class, gender, identity, land, and environment. In tackling the dynamics of space and place, their essays address matters such as the heightened risks and multiple states of insecurity in the global economy; the new logics of expulsion and primitive accumulation dynamics shaping a new "savage sorting"; patterns of resistance and transformation in the face of globalization's political and environmental changes; the steady decline in the livelihoods of people of color globally and their deepened vulnerabilities; and the complex reconstitution of systemic and lived racialization within these processes. This book is an invitation to ask whether our dystopia in present politics can be disentangled from the deepening sense of "white fragility" in the context of the historical power of globalization's raced effects.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7136.

1

Global Economies and Historical Change

Rethinking Social Struggles and Transformations in Africa’s Zones of Rurality (1500–1800)

Ray A. Kea

History is nothing but the activity of [men and women] pursuing [their] aims.

—Karl Marx, The Holy Family

Introduction

I would like to begin with an observation. The consolidation of a new stage of generalized monopoly capitalism (neoliberalism), the emergence of religious and market fundamentalisms, the interventions of subaltern studies, world-system analysis, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism are factors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that have produced a new conjuncture for theoretical work on the contradictory worlds of the African past and present (Ahluwalia 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Kea 2012a; Idahosa and Shenton 2004). What does theoretical work on the African past mean?

The aim of the present study is to uncover dimensions of social class, rebellion, revolution, and societal antagonisms in western/Atlantic African history between 1500 and 1800. It proposes a method for assessing evidence and for understanding how cumulative socioeconomic changes, or changes in the composition and sociocultural weight of rural communities, can erupt into mass social transformations.

On the whole, Africanist historiography excludes any notion of collective subaltern class experiences and the dynamics of social (class) conflict and revolution as part of a longue durée. The dialectical relationship between continuity and societal order and stability, on the one hand, and discontinuity and rupture and instability, on the other, is conceptualized in terms of noncapitalist modes of production and exchange, as well as in terms of political, social, ideological, and cultural issues. In line with this theoretical approach the following discussion pursues alternative ways of thinking about the sites and subjects of western/Atlantic African historicity.

In revisiting African historicity between 1500 and 1800, I draw upon David Wallace’s insight that “differentiation of human experience stems above all from questions of scale” (Wallace 2004: 189). There are different temporal scales, such as the event, the conjuncture, and the long duration and different spatial scales, for example, global, regional, subregional, and local (Braudel 2009). The discussion pays particular but not exclusive attention to western/Atlantic African zones of rurality and their mediated relationship to local and regional political economies, different sociopolitical and sociocultural focal points or institutional complexes, and more broadly the European Atlantic mercantile-capitalist global economy and the ancient Afro-Eurasian tributary global economy (Amin 2013). Here the emphasis is placed on the fact that the demands and needs of dominant, urban-based elites of western/Atlantic Africa (in particular the Upper and Middle Niger basins and Senegambia)—those who owned and/or controlled access to the means of production/destruction and exchange and who organized regimes of surplus extraction—required, among other strategizing projects, the subjugation or at least the allegiance of a differentiated countryside with its divisions of labor and its cultural, social, and professional organizations and networks and affiliations (Monroe and Ogundiran 2012; Kea 2012b; Kea 2003; Robion-Brunner 2013; Meillassoux 1991). A pivotal fact of social life was the rural-urban division of labor, a matter that pertains to forms of social appropriation and labor’s relationship to land.

The following discussion employs the category “institutional complex” as a basic unit of analysis. It carries definable features as a power structure and as a site of collective sovereignty, a site of agency, a site of mediation, a site of resistance, and a site of centrality or social appropriation. Four institutional complexes are considered: (1) the fandugu (“town of power, wealth, and fame”) or political-administrative capital of the political-military aristocracy; (2) the markadugu or town of merchants (and artisans); (3) the moridugu (also morikunde; bilad al-fuqaha) or town of cleric-scholars or jurisconsults (s. alim, pl. ulamā; s. faqih, pl. fuqaha) and their students and clients, and (4) the zawiya, a rural settlement of Sufi-scholars and their students, disciples, and followers. Each complex possessed its own set of practices, its particular forms of cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and its own relations to the means of production, exchange, and consumption.

Recent studies readily acknowledge the layered complexities of the African past in their scrutiny of disease, historical demography, institutions and governance, the impact of the export slave trade, colonialism, cultural conservatism, and ethnic formations/identities without however delving into analyses that specify which factors were necessary (or structural) and which were contingent (Richard and MacDonald 2015; Akyeampong et al. 2014). The present analysis operates in terms of the structural and the contingent in its investigation of the historicity of social relations of production (social appropriation) and forces of production (appropriation of nature) and the conflictive processes they generate, for example, in the rural-urban division of labor and in the interactions of different institutional complexes. Social relations of production and institutional complexes were always the result of the praxis of historical subjects (“social selves”) who were individuals as well as members of localities, classes, status groups, associations, and factions. In their praxis they embodied different degrees of agency and identity.

The period under review is divided into two temporalities—the late imperial era, which falls between the mid-thirteenth and the late sixteenth centuries, and the post-imperial era, which falls in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A justification for this periodizing strategy is that each era has distinctive characteristics. Specifically, the late imperial period is defined by the unifying imperial suzerainty of the Mali Sultanate under the Keita Dynasty (1230–1464) and the Songhai Sultanate under the Sunni Dynasty (1420–1493) and its successors, the Askiya Dynasty (1464–1591) and Askiya Caliphate (1498–1591) or Askiyate.

The Mali and Songhai imperial regimes can be described as tributary-mercantile systems of class and power relations. Both embraced a political theology that identified each domain as a universal empire (for a discussion of the emergence of this idea across Afro-Eurasia, see Subrahmanyam 1999). In the case of the Mali Sultanate, the ruling dynasty drew upon an indigenous, non-Islamic cosmology. In 1498 the Askiya Dynasty redefined itself in the caliphal tradition of dar al-Islam. According to a seventeenth-century chronicle, the inceptive matrix of the Askiya Caliphate’s power and wealth had three components: urbanism, commerce, and religion (Hunwick 1999). These power configurations maintained a substantial institutional, cultural, and political presence in the Askiyate, constituting a complex sociopolitical totality of dynastic rule through interacting networks and the institutional complexes and praxis of political-military, merchant/artisan, and clerical-scholarly elites.

The end of Askiyate ascendancy has a global dimension. The dynasty’s collapse is to be understood against the backdrop of international geopolitics and complex and contingent local events, including internecine conflict and insurrections. The Moroccan invasion and conquest of the Askiyate heartland in 1591 is to be seen in the global, geopolitical context of competing and contending Mediterranean-Saharan political formations and the multilateral processes of interaction between an expanding modern mercantile-capitalist system and an ancient tributary-mercantile system (Dramani-Issifou 1982). In the 1580s the Askiyate core zone experienced violent factionalism among the ruling classes, which led to a divisive and bitter civil war. At the same time and extending into the early 1590s, rebellions of enslaved subalterns occurred on royal estates and other landed estates of the core zone.

The late imperial epoch is conventionally viewed in Africanist historiography as a West African Golden Age. Indeed, the period is construed in contemporary epic literature as a time of the triumphant and heroic horseman whose life—defined by chivalry, warfare, and martial skills—symbolized adventure, power, prestige, and wealth. The hero’s world always included a landscape of fortifications (Iliffe 2005: chapters 1–2; Conrad 1990; Courlander 1982; Tymowski 1974; Cissiko 1969). A contrasting historiography interprets the post-imperial era as a time of catastrophes (famines and epidemics), crises, disorder, insecurity, and social regression; a time of reform, rebellions, and revolutions, as well as banditry and warlordism across rural landscapes. The agency, interplay, and rivalries of institutional complexes, which privileged coherence and control, were crucial elements in shaping the era’s geopolitics. In this matrix the political theology of universal empire was no longer sustainable.

A Materialist Approach to African History

The writings of Amilcar Cabral are instructive for this historical study. In the middle of an anticolonial and liberation struggle in Portuguese Guinea (today Guinea Bissau) in the 1960s, he pronounced that history was a theoretical enterprise that could elucidate and guide this struggle. He established the intellectual status and the relevance of Marxist theory to the aims of the mass struggle and to the analysis of the historical processes and conjunctures that created the struggle’s conditions of existence. His thesis is that any given trajectory of political and social development is a product of a society’s own immanent dynamics. The motive force behind the dynamics is, he argues, the class struggle that develops as a “function of at least two essential and interdependent variables—the level of productive forces and the pattern of the ownership of the means of production” (Cabral 1969). A mode of production, as Cabral views it, refers to the varied material and nonmaterial ways that human beings collectively produce the means of subsistence in order to survive and enhance social being. The method of producing the necessities of life requires the unity of the productive forces (unity of the means of production and labor), the relations of production (social conditions of production), and property ownership. Cabral’s materialist understanding is relevant to an understanding of the economic, ideological, and social conditions under which the struggles and resistance of the countryside were conducted. The revolution in Guinea-Bissau, a recent chapter of western/Atlantic African history, had deep roots in the trajectories of its wider region.

Revolutionary consciousness and armed struggle for social justice and the creation of alternative power structures were very much part of the socio-historical horizon in post-imperial zones of rurality in the Middle and Upper Niger basins and the Senegambia region (Kea 2012b; Robinson 2000; Barry 1992; Boulègue and Suret-Canale 1985; Rodney 1970). The socio-historical horizon was itself a result of the productivity of collective rural labor. An archaeological study considers the scale of this productivity in a survey of the extensive ruins of fortifications (tatas), which stretched from the Atlantic to the Lake Chad basin, were constructed by “millions of man [-woman] hours in the stoneless soils where most people farmed and … where most people lived” (Darling 1998: 17). From the perspective of the ruling classes, “consumers” of fortifications, the countryside was not the site of conscious social subjects but was rather an object of social appropriation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rural initiatives carved out of the fortified landscapes, spaces for banditry and warlordism, on the one hand, and millenarianism, rebellion, Islamic proselytizing, and revolution, on the other.

Different kinds of non- (or pre-) capitalist modes of production represent abstract typologies denoting forms of social development and the possibilities of historical multilinearity (as opposed to a preconceived chronological linearity or evolutionism leading to capitalism). In western/Atlantic Africa noncapitalist tributary, slaveholding, mercantile, and domestic/household relations of social production prevailed, and use-value, not exchange-value, was a preeminent feature of the political economy. Infrastructural social organization and networks of administration, gift exchange, reciprocity, social power, and commodity exchange reveal the inter-linkages of the different social production modes, which can be read horizontally in geographical space and vertically in social-institutional space. The tributary mode of production was dominant in the sense that it subjected the dynamic and functions of other modes of production to the requirements of its own reproduction.

In The Structure of World History, Kojin Karatani provides a novel view of the long-term history of humanity in terms of four autonomous types of exchange (Verkher: “intercourse,” “traffic”): reciprocity/gift-return, plunder-redistribution, commodity exchange, and associationism. Exchanges are differentiated as either reciprocal or nonreciprocal and as either free or unfree. Each had its own systemic logic or dynamic. Only the first three have predominated in particular periods of human history, according to Karatani (Karatani 2014). The fourth, free mutual exchange or association, prefigured in religion, millenarian movements and utopian imaginaries, has never been dominant in any historical society. Societies of different historical periods and geographies involve specific articulations of these modes of exchange, the fourth mode of exchange excepted. Fandugus (plunder-redistribution), markadugus (commodity exchange), moridugus (reciprocity/gift-return), and zawiyas (commodity exchange; reciprocity gift-return) are to be understood in their geographical and sociopolitical contexts. In Cabral’s terms the central driving force of history is the continual, ever-present dynamic of struggle between classes, status groups, and factions, which were involved in one or more institutional complex.

Institutional complexes were embedded in contradictory social processes according to ...