Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana

Austin, Gareth

doi:10.1017/upo9781580466363

Cited by 9 publications

(28 citation statements)

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“…This has prompted a revision of how the system is viewed, as many institutionally oriented economists and economic historians currently claim that sharecropping provides an advantage to the landlord as it reduces risk (in the absence of a cropinsurance market) and minimizes supervision costs. 97 Was the transition towards the new form of exchange a strategy to reduce risk and supervision costs? The answer is partly yes.…”

Section: T O B a C C O A N D C E Rt I F I C At E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using the increased cash-crop production in Asante in Ghana during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an example, Austin has argued that reciprocity was a crucial institution in areas of labour scarcity and where everybody has access to land. 103 In addition, work parties also enabled farmers to access a relatively large amount of labour for a limited period of time. It made them very suitable for tasks where timing was central.…”

Section: T O B a C C O A N D C E Rt I F I C At E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

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State-Led Agricultural Intensification and Rural Labour Relations: The Case of the Lilongwe Land Development Programme in Malawi, 1968–1981

Green

2010

Int Rev of Soc His

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SUMMARY: This article deals with cash crop production and its impact on labour relations in postcolonial African peasant agriculture. The focus is on the Lilongwe Land Development Programme (1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981) in Malawi. The aim of the programme was to enable African farmers to increase yields and make them shift from the cultivation of tobacco and local maize to groundnuts and high-yielding varieties of maize. The programme failed to meet its goals, because of contradictory forces set in motion by the programme itself. The LLDP enabled a larger segment of farmers to engage in commercial agriculture, which caused a decline in supplies of local labourers ready to be employed on a casual or permanent basis. Increased commercial production was thus accompanied by a de-commercialization of labour relations, which hampered the scope for better-off farmers to increase yields by employing additional labourers. By using both written and oral sources, this article thus provides an empirical case that questions the conventional view that increased cash-crop production in twentieth-century rural Africa was accompanied by a commercialization of labour relations. It concludes that the history of rural labour relations cannot be grasped by simple linear models of historical change, but requires an understanding of local contexts, with a focus on farming systems and factors that determine the local supply of and demand for labour.

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Section: T O B a C C O A N D C E Rt I F I C At E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: T O B a C C O A N D C E Rt I F I C At E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

State-Led Agricultural Intensification and Rural Labour Relations: The Case of the Lilongwe Land Development Programme in Malawi, 1968–1981

Green

2010

Int Rev of Soc His

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“…In Ashanti, for example, cocoa income was often spent in food and other local markets, providing cash-earning opportunities for traders (mostly women) and food-farmers (very often women). 104 The inequalities of emancipation operated along space and ethnicity as well as gender. For a former slave participating in cash-crop production, much depended on whether they did so as a local citizen, or as a stranger.…”

Section: T H E C a S H -C R O P '' R E V O L U T I O N '' A N D T H Ementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This gave migrant labourers opportunities not only to sell their labour -if they did not have the right kind of land in the right place to sell their produce -but also later to renegotiate and improve their contracts. 108 What of the masters? Those whose slaves stayed generally had to accept reduced economic returns on slave ownership; and even those returns were in long-term decline.…”

Section: T H E C a S H -C R O P '' R E V O L U T I O N '' A N D T H Ementioning

confidence: 99%

Cash Crops and Freedom: Export Agriculture and the Decline of Slavery in Colonial West Africa

Austin¹

2009

Int Rev of Soc His

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SummaryThis article argues that the greatest economic and social transformations of the early colonial period in West Africa, the “cash-crop revolution”, and “the slow death of slavery” and debt bondage, had stronger and more varied causal connections than previously realized. The economic circumstances of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century West Africa delayed and diluted abolitionist measures. Indeed, the coercion of labour, through the exercise of property rights in people, contributed to the speed with which the cash-crop economies developed. Conversely, however, the scale and composition of cash-crop expansion did much to determine that the slave trade and pawning would be replaced by a consensual labour market. They also shaped the possibilities for peasant versus larger-scale organization of production, and the distribution of income by gender and between communities.

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“…Muir's figure may have had the opposite bias, as Ashanti included a higher proportion of the relatively new cocoa-growing areas. 71 Table 3 presents the results in three forms: taking Muir's and Beckett's extreme figures, and then the mean of the two.…”

Section: A Shifting Factor Ratiomentioning

confidence: 99%

Labour and Land in Ghana, 1874–1939: A Shifting Ratio and an Institutional Revolution

Austin

2007

Aust Econ Hist Rev

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The Second Industrial Revolution created markets for new products for Ghana, rubber and then cocoa beans. Mechanised transport spurred the spread of cocoa planting. The paper estimates the resultant shift in factor ratios, and synthesises the data for prices of landuse rights and wages as the economy moved from land abundance to localised land scarcity. The consequences for factor markets were institutional rather than simply quantitative. For the first time markets in land use rights became widespread, while hired labour and farm pledging replaced slavery and debt bondage, as cocoa income made it possible for farmers to offer labourers sufficient inducement to enter the labour market.JEL categories: N37, N57, N77, J43, F54

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Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

State-Led Agricultural Intensification and Rural Labour Relations: The Case of the Lilongwe Land Development Programme in Malawi, 1968–1981

State-Led Agricultural Intensification and Rural Labour Relations: The Case of the Lilongwe Land Development Programme in Malawi, 1968–1981

Cash Crops and Freedom: Export Agriculture and the Decline of Slavery in Colonial West Africa

Labour and Land in Ghana, 1874–1939: A Shifting Ratio and an Institutional Revolution

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