Money, value and the state: sovereignty and citizenship in East Africa
Colin Leys
What the paper says
Money, Value and the State is about how currency management was used in the first years of independence in East Africa to try to shape people's economic behaviour to help meet the state's aims, and the ways in which people resisted these measures when they felt their best interests were not served by them.During the initial years of independence, the global economic context was relatively favourable, but even then, there was always a gap between what the state wanted people to want and what they actually wanted.A central issue was the newly independent state's need to maximise agricultural exports and to control the use of the foreign exchange these exports earned, enabling it to pay producers less than the exports earned on foreign markets and using the difference to run the country and pay for development projects.Producers resented this, but so long as prices were buoyant and the ideology of nation-building had some traction their resistance remained largely legal and manageable.But the crises of the 1970s -the end of fixed exchange rates, the OPEC oil price shock and the eventual imposition of structural adjustment -led to widespread resistance in the shape of hoarding, overpricing, smuggling and various ways of illegally acquiring foreign currency, aggravated by corruption in the state and the parastatal sector.Donovan's approach is anthropological and historical: his interest is in the way citizens respond to states' attempts to impose a set of values on their economic activity which at best correspond to only some of the values they themselves hold.First, however, he highlights the prime importance for genuine independence of simply having a national currency.He illustrates this with the story of how, to get control of the economy and end the drain of Tanzania's investible assets to London, President Julius Nyerere led the drive to establish national central banks and national currencies, and commercial banks to compete with the dominant British banks in East Africa.Donovan got access to the records of Barclays Bank, including the personal diary of Barclays' then-chairman, and has taken full advantage of this to provide a fascinating account of the eventual nationalisation of the banks in Tanzania, ending with a brief comment on the consequences of the country's ill-fated experiment with
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.