Abstract
This project uses money as a lens through which analyse the social and economic impact of colonialism on East African societies and institutions. The innovative approach that it proposes is to put African and European currencies, in their various forms and denominations, at the centre of the analysis, and to follow their circulation, in order to understand how economic and social relations were transformed by the imposition of colonial rule. The research focuses on East Africa as a region where monetary and trade systems, both on a regional level and in terms of their connection to the wider Indian Ocean and Red Sea worlds, had emerged and developed well before the establishment of colonial rule. The imposition of colonial financial and economic institutions partly transformed them, creating new interconnected and hybrid socio-economic spaces. This project explores the nature and circulation of pre-colonial currencies in the East African region, the ways in which colonial money was accepted, rejected or transformed by African communities, the impact of the introduction of colonial money on wages, taxes, price levels and social payments, and the effect of the creation of colonial territorial borders on long-distance trading networks within Africa.
Project duration
05/02/2017-05/02/2020
Unibo Team Leader, Coordinator
Karin Palaver
Partnership
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna (Italy) University of Tokyo – Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (Japan)
Università degli Studi di Parma – Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Aziendali (Italy)
Università di Roma La Sapienza – Dipartimento Metodi e Modelli per l’Economia, il Territorio e la Finanza (Italy)
Contribution
68.000 euro
2nd level ERC sectors
“SH6 The Study of the Human Past: Archaeology and history”:
SH6_8 Colonial and post-colonial history
SH6_7 Modern and contemporary history
SH6_10 Social and economic history