Nonwaged peasants in the modern world-system: African households as dialectical units of capitalist exploitation and indigenous resistance, 1890-1930

Wilma A. Dunaway ()
Additional contact information
Wilma A. Dunaway: Virginia Tech University

The Journal of Philosophical Economics, 2010, vol. 4, issue 1, 19-57

Abstract: Colonialism did not transform African peasants into waged labor. A majority of peasants worked as forced laborers, often unpaid, and they returned to their agricultural household labor as soon as they completed work assignments mandated by the colonizers. Colonial Africans resided in mixed livelihood households in which nonwaged labor forms (both free and unfree) predominated, and very few became dependent on wages. For a majority of colonial Africans, informal sector activities, tenancy, sharecropping, and subsistence production on communal plots were not temporary nonwaged forms on an inevitable path toward proletarianization. Wage earning was not the primary mechanism through which these households were integrated into the modern world-system. Instead, these households primarily provided nonwaged labors to capitalist commodity chains that, in turn, extracted surpluses from them and externalized costs of production to them.

Keywords: Africa; African colonialism; African peasants; indigenous resistance; forced labor; nonwage labor; households; proletarianization; semiproletarians; modern world-system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: P19 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://jpe.ro/pdf.php?id=2891 (application/pdf)
http://jpe.ro/?id=revista&p=141 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bus:jphile:v:4:y:2010:i:1:p:19-57

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Philosophical Economics is currently edited by Valentin Cojanu

More articles in The Journal of Philosophical Economics from Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, The Journal of Philosophical Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Valentin Cojanu ().