The persistence of subsistence and the limits to development studies: The challenge of Tanzania

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

There are two general approaches to assessing what is known as 'development'. First, there are classical accounts focusing on Europe's development during the industrial revolution. They describe how urban areas expanded at the expense of the social and economic resources of the rural areas, disrupting an independent subsistence peasantry. A major consequence is that today all Europeans are dependent socially, politically, and economically on the modern capitalist system. The second (more common) approach to development focuses on the modern Third World. This approach assumes that, as with Europe, the entire Third World is dependent on the modern capitalist system. Development studies focus on the assessment of how Third World countries can most effectively engage world capitalism. Discussion is typically reduced to comparisons between world systems theory and neoclassical economics. The Tanzanian government has used standard policies grounded in neoclassical and world-system assumptions since independence. But both policies failed to produce the predicted economic growth. This article argues that both policies failed because the Tanzanian peasantry, like the early modern European peasantry, is not dependent on the operation of world capitalism for basic subsistence. In fact, as studies have shown, rural Tanzania is only weakly incorporated into the capitalist world system, and in consequence has not been an easy target for what world-system theorists call 'peripheral integration'. What makes Tanzania different is the fact that the rural peasantry do not use market mechanisms in the distribution of the 'means of production', especially arable land for swidden agriculture, or, for that matter, labour or cattle.

Original languageEnglish
JournalAfrica
Volume70
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)613-651
Number of pages39
ISSN0001-9720
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2000
Externally publishedYes

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. An Unusual Encounter with Oneself
  2. The erosion of relational values resulting from landscape simplification
  3. Case study: The development of a multi-material heat sink by Additive Manufacturing using Aerosint technology
  4. Controlling a Bank Model Economy by Using an Adaptive Model Predictive Control with Help of an Extended Kalman Filter
  5. Employing A-B tests for optimizing prices levels in e-commerce applications
  6. The Open Anchoring Quest Dataset: Anchored Estimates from 96 Studies on Anchoring Effects
  7. A generalized α-level decomposition concept for numerical fuzzy calculus
  8. Where do the data live?
  9. Instruments for research on transition. Applied methods and approaches for exploring the transition of young care leavers to adulthood
  10. Proxy Indicators for the Quality of Open-domain Dialogues
  11. Failing and the perception of failure in student-driven transdisciplinary projects
  12. Fallstudie
  13. Repräsentation oder Gebrauchsort?
  14. Analysing Positional Data
  15. Action rate models for predicting actions in soccer
  16. Mining product configurator data
  17. Putting Architecture in its Social Space: the Fields and Skills of Planning Maastricht
  18. Timing matters: Distinct effects of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer application timing on root system architecture responses
  19. Pushing the Boundaries
  20. Principled Interpolation in Normalizing Flows
  21. A Stacked Planar Sensor Concept for Minimally Invasive Plasma Monitoring
  22. Facing Up to Third Party Liability for Space Activities
  23. Trainingsqualität durch Trainingsquantität?
  24. Using Principal Component Analysis for information-rich socio-ecological vulnerability mapping in Southern Africa
  25. Integratives Gendering in der Lehre
  26. The Framework for Inclusive Science Education
  27. The polarity field concept
  28. Effectiveness of a Guided Internet- and Mobile-Based Intervention for Patients with Chronic Back Pain and Depression (WARD-BP): A Multicenter, Pragmatic Randomized Controlled Trial
  29. Ensuring the Long-Term Provision of Heathland Ecosystem Services—The Importance of a Functional Perspective in Management Decision Frameworks
  30. A highly transparent method of assessing the contribution of incentives to meet various technical challenges in distributed energy systems
  31. Actuator- and/or sensor element for sleeve in medical field e.g. limb or joint fracture treatment, has nano-wires comprising nano-fibers, where element deforms and acquires dimensional change of nano-fibers via electrical signal
  32. From temporal myopia to foresight: Bridging the near and the distant future through temporal work