Dear Colleagues: if there have indeed been too many personal attacks
recently, and not enough discussion of real WSN issues, then I hope the
following short text will provoke some response, either to me or to the
network. What follows is a very abbreviated version of a longer article,
but I hope it can be understood without the masses of empirical data which
buttresses the main points. It is a brief contribution to the problem of
delineating world-economies before capitalism.
Early Modern East Africa and the World-Economy
Wallerstein's joint piece with Palat [Palat, Ravi Arvind, and
Immanuel Wallerstein, "Of What World-System was Pre-1500 'India' a Part?"
in S. Chaudhuri and M. Morineau, eds., Merchants, Companies and Trade
forthcoming] raises, at least implicitly, several questions about the place
of Africa in the early modern world. It is claimed that the cores in
Gujarat and Coromandel fed on lowly-remunerated laborers in other areas,
and even caused deindustrialisation in the Middle East and southeast Asia.
However, they do include "the eastern coasts of Africa" as part of "an
evolving world-economy" centered on Gujarat and Coromandel. This leaves
the position of the African interior obscure, but we must assume that it is
not to be included.
This point must be made clear. In his own major work and smaller
pieces devoted to Africa he finds no exploitation while an area is external
to the modern world-system, and the exchange is only in luxuries. But in
the Palat and Wallerstein piece they write more fully about the situation
before the modern world-system, and find that in this India-centered world
economy there can, even though there is no capitalism, still be inequality
and unequal trade. The coast of east Africa is included here as part of
this precapitalist world-economy. The interior is implicitly to be seen as
external to this world-economy, just as both it and the coast were to the
evolving modern world-system until the nineteenth century. The key
questions are the precise position of the east African coast in this
world-economy, and then the coast's relations with the interior: Palat and
Wallerstein, at least implicitly, leave out the interior, which then must
be external, while Chase-Dunn and Hall [Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Thomas
D. Hall, eds, Core/Periphery Relations in Precapitalist Worlds, Boulder,
1991] imply that it is included. In their list of world-system types they
follow Wolf's three modes of production, and find the Indian Ocean to be an
example of "commercializing state-based world-systems in which important
aspects of commodification have developed but the system is still dominated
by the logic of the tributary modes." In the core of these commercializing
world-systems, in which the core seems to be an empire, there is more use
of money, of credit and interest, of wage labor, and of price-setting
markets. In the core-empires the rulers use sophisticated means to tax
merchants, "and outside the bounds of empires, in interstitial
semiperipheral regions, autonomous city-states controlled by merchant and
production capitalists created and sustained market relations between
empires and peripheral regions." They say these centralised empires will
be more exploitative towards peripheries than earlier empires, as they are
better at concentrating resources at the center. A host of empirical data
helps to flesh out the discussion.
I have accumulated much data about the huge profits which foreign
traders made in East Africa. This of course rings a bell with dependency
theorists: surely the Indians and Arabs and Portuguese who are making
these profits are exploiting someone? Add to this the fact that the
exports are primary products - gold and ivory - while the imports are
manufactures - cloths and beads - and we seem to have a classic first
world-third world situation, as noted by authors such as Rodney, Sheriff
and Alpers. The reality is rather different. We need to say more about
the three main products traded, and introduce the notion of relative
values. We may then find a very different result, a rather Panglossian one
where it seems everyone did well, a confirmation of Abu-Lughod in fact.
This is primarily because of the notion of relative values. A
society can export products which it does not value, but which are valued
in other areas. Goods then have a cultural as well as a material value.
This would seem to account for the massive profits which the traders,
nearly all foreigners, made. In the case of gold, it was little use in a
non-monetised society, but in one like India which in the early modern
period was monetising rapidly it had an obvious demand. So also with
slaves, essential for west Indian and Brazilian plantations, but not in
great demand in Africa except for some domestic and minor agricultural
work. And so also for beads, produced in massive quantities in India for
little cost, but highly prized in Africa.
The concept of relative values applies most clearly to the trade in
ivory. From an Indian point of view, when an African killed an elephant he
was gaining a tusk which could be sold. But from the African point of view
it was much more than this. A dead elephant provided an important source
of protein. Killing an elephant got rid of a pest that damaged crops. And
a dead elephant produced two tusks. One went to the local ruler, but the
other could be exchanged for some other product of more use or prestige
value than ivory, such as cloths or beads.
Overall the advantage lay with Africa. Most of the products they
received were discretionary rather than necessities in their agricultural
and hunting lives, except for cloth on the plateau, though even for this
there were local substitutes. For the trader however a sale or exchange
was obviously essential, for this was his raison d'=EAtre. Thus Africans
could work as much or as little as they wanted. Faced with this situation,
the traders in effect tried to create a market, or force one on the African
producers. It seems then that this trade was, from the African
point of view, a benign one. Differing use values and the autonomy of the
African hunter or peasant faced with mercantile capitalism meant that the
notion of exploitation or any more general detrimental impact is hard to
sustain.
Cloth imports merit a more extended discussion, for it has been
claimed that African production was undercut by imports from India based on
more advanced productive techniques. If so, we have a clear reinforcement
of Palat and Wallerstein's finding of deindustrialisation, or more general
claims that foreign trade exploited Africa. The question is whether these
imports undercut an existing textile industry in the area, that is
deindustrialised it. The evidence is frankly a little confusing;
certainly blanket claims that either Indian competition or the activities
of the Portuguese destroyed an indigenous industry seem to be wide of the
mark. David Beach in several works has summed up this matter. Africans
had learnt to spin and weave by copying the techniques used in imported
Indian cloth, and by the sixteenth century the growing of cotton and
weaving of cotton cloth was well established. However, their methods were
slow as compared with their Indian competitors, and weaving interfered with
the dominant crop cycle. Thus it made good rational economic sense to
import cloth, given the nature of Shona society. This was a stratified
society, and when it was possible they collected gold and ivory to get
beads and cloth which in turn could "buy" grain or cattle.
If long-distance trade, especially that to the coast, was
peripheral for both producers and rulers in the interior states, though for
different reasons, it then seems that we do indeed have a benign situation
where trade produced no exploitation. Valuable goods were taken from
Africa, but these were valued in the receiving areas around the Indian
Ocean but not in the producing areas, where their production, from the
peasant point of view, and their taxation, from the view point of the
state, were marginal to more central concerns to do with food production
and animal husbandry for the peasant, and politico-military matters for the
elite. The labor to produce export goods was surplus labor, not labor
extracted from say food production. Nor was it labor which otherwise would
have been used to "develop" Africa, claims by Sheriff and Alpers to the
contrary. On the other hand Indian products - beads and cloths especially
- found an extra market, though probably not one of very great comparative
size, for east Africa was a minor outlet for Gujarat's total production.
The Swahili port cities played a vital connective role, a
compradorial one no doubt, but one which needs to be seen as not
exploitative but rather as facilitative in their relations with the
interior. Unlike the interior, these city states were closely linked to
the world economy. As classic semi-peripheries they suffered from this.
Their fates often were determined by forces beyond their control, not the
activities of the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but
rather far distant forces which affected them within the world economy. In
general terms, producers and consumers at either end of the far flung
network determined kinds, quantities and values, and the Swahili had to
adapt to this. For example, levels of gold production in the Zimbabwe
plateau determined Sofala's gold exports and hence Kilwa's prosperity. But
consumption at the other end of the network also affected Kilwa, that is
competition from new gold supplies from the Americas and Japan, and the
varying demand for gold in the various consuming countries. For example,
as India monetised its demand for gold rose.
The coast then played a very different role in the world-economy as
compared with the interior. It seems that these ports were
semi-peripheries, but for a series of unique reasons they did not interact
with an interior which was a periphery. Rather the interior must be seen
as external to this world economy. We seem then to need to modify a little
what Chase-Dunn and Hall have claimed: "outside the bounds of empires, in
interstitial semiperipheral regions, autonomous city-states controlled by
merchant and production capitalists created and sustained market relations
between empires and peripheral regions." It seems to me that Palat and
Wallerstein are much nearer the mark. It is not clear if their notion of
deindustrialisation in the Middle East and southeast Asia as a result of
more advanced techniques in Gujarat and Coromandel is meant to apply to
east Africa also, but in fact we can show that this was the case on the
coast in some products and some areas. More generally, in this world
economy where the core was parts of India, we can clearly locate the
Swahili coast in a semiperipheral position, and follow them in their
implicit exclusion of the interior from the system. In terms of
world-system theory we have, in short, a pre-capitalist world-economy where
a core is connected by a semiperipheral area to an external area.
These findings seem to reinforce doubts about the utility of the
standard world-system distinction between luxuries and necessities. Here,
and in many other areas, the notion seems to be of little use in
determining when relations between two areas move from being external to
systemic. The key to understanding the nature of exchange between India and
east Africa is the concept of differing use values in these two very
different economies. Indeed, in fairness we must note that Wallerstein
himself is aware of this, for when writing of the luxury-necessity
dichotomy he noted that "each side tends to have different cultural
definitions of value." [I. Wallerstein, "The Ottoman Empire and the
Capitalist World-Economy: Some Questions for Research," Review, II, 3,
1979, pp. 390-1]
The final question is to ask whether this is really very useful
anyway. Presumably my findings add something to the large body of
world-system writing, but maybe fitting east Africa into a particular box
is not really very rewarding, except in a completely academic way. One
could sketch a quite different analysis, one which concentrates on
production rather than exchange, and which ignores the world-system
terminology of cores and peripheries, the existence or otherwise of coerced
labor (this of course being important in defining which areas belong in
which category of core, periphery and semi-periphery), and whether the
trade was in luxuries or necessities. If we follow Eric Wolf's analysis we
can see both India and the interior east African states as being tributary
modes of production, though the African ones were much more disaggregated
than were the Indian states, to the extent indeed that "state" may not be
the best term to use for the Mutapa "authority structure". In both areas
merchants provided the crucial linkages to keep exchange and production
going, and to link up the state and the producer. In both labor was
coerced to the extent that in Africa it had to pay tribute, in India taxes
in the form of land revenue. But the real point is that in neither area
was labor subsumed by capital. To use the world-system model is really
just to say that goods were being exchanged across the Afrasian Sea. This
is of course a very familiar statement. Indeed there was exchange, and due
to differing use values this involved no exploitation or assymetrical
extraction of resources from the less developed, primary producing African
side. We have two sorts of systems of production which intersect rather
nicely, with benefit to all involved. Perhaps the central point is that
this was not really unequal exchange, as is characteristic of any
world-system. There are real problems with using the level of remuneration
of labor to explain unequal exchange anyway, especially before capitalism,
but more concretely we can say nothing definite about the levels of
remuneration of laborers in Africa as compared with India anyway. No doubt
producers in India profited from the sale of their manufactures to less
developed areas, of which east Africa was a minor part, yet this does not
ipso facto set up a relationship of exploitation.
Michael Pearson
Adjunct Professor
=46aculty of Arts
Southern Cross University
PO Box 157 Lismore 2480
Phone: (066) 20 3946 Fax: (066) 22 1683
Email: mpearson@scu.edu.au