H-Empire Review: Thompsell on Falola, Brownell, and Hopkins, 'Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins'

From: "Charles V. Reed" <cvreed@mail.ecsu.edu<mailto:cvreed@mail.ecsu.edu>> List Editor: "Kelly, Jason" <jaskelly@IUPUI.EDU> Editor's Subject: H-Empire Review: Thompsell on Falola, Brownell, and Hopkins, 'Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins' Author's Subject: Review: Thompsell on Falola, Brownell, and Hopkins, 'Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins' Date Written: January 3, 2012 1:48:56 PM EST Date Posted: Fri, 05 Jan 2012 12:38:40 -0500

 Of possible interest...   -----Original Message----- From: Charles V. Reed Sent: Tue 1/3/2012 1:45 PM To: H-EMPIRE@H-NET.MSU.EDU<mailto:H-EMPIRE@H-NET.MSU.EDU> Subject: Review: Thompsell on Falola, Brownell, and Hopkins, 'Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins'  From: Charles V. Reed <cvreed@mail.ecsu.edu<mailto:cvreed@mail.ecsu.edu>> Subject: Review: Thompsell on Falola, Brownell, and Hopkins, 'Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins'  Toyin Falola, Emily Brownell, A. G. Hopkins, eds.  Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins.  Durham  Carolina Academic Press, 2011.  xxiv + 657 pp.  $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-59460-915-2.  Reviewed by Angela Thompsell (The College at Brockport, SUNY) Published on H-Empire (January, 2012) Commissioned by Charles V. Reed  Political and Economic Forces: Regional, Imperial, and Global  The impressive scholarly contributions of A. G. "Tony" Hopkins are engagingly celebrated in the thirty-two original articles presented in this anthology. As with Hopkins's work, the essays are wide-ranging, collectively spanning not only from Lagos to London, as one might expect, but also from Jim Crow Little Rock to Calcutta and Canton and from the early modern period to the present day. The volume includes fresh studies of primary source material as well as broad syntheses of existing scholarship. Like Hopkins, the contributors have also succeeded in presenting important arguments in ways that are easily accessible to non-specialists. The individual chapters are of interest to historians of Africa, imperialism, and globalization, and by bringing together relatively disparate topics, the volume has the potential to accomplish the oft-stated goal of scholarly cross-pollination.  The volume opens with a chapter by the editors that summarizes Hopkins's fifty-year career to date and considers how each of the contributions articulates with his work. The text is then divided into three sections based on the major foci of Hopkins's work: the economic history of West Africa, the form and impetus of British imperialism, and globalization. The first section, "Africa," begins with a useful historiographic essay by Gareth Austin, in which he evaluates Hopkins's contributions to the historiography of West African economies and considers why economic history has been "marginalized of late among historians of Africa" (p. 76). He calls for research that integrates political and economic histories, returns to the question of poverty in Africa, and identifies "concepts based on African experience" rather than ideas imported from Europe or India (p. 77). Gwyn Campbell makes a similar suggestion in his chapter, when he highlights six Eurocentric "paradigms" that need to be "seriously questioned" if we are to understand Africa's place in the precolonial Indian Ocean world (p. 89).  The remaining five chapters in this section provide case studies based on original research, including work on the trans-Saharan trade and commercial rivalries in colonial Africa. Two of the chapters engage with Hopkins's concept of a "crisis of adaption," which refers to the political and economic tensions in West Africa following the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and the shift to "legitimate commerce." In their contribution, Yacine Daddi Addoun and Paul Lovejoy refine the concept by showing that elite merchants in what is now Northern Nigeria did not experience a crisis due to the irrelevance of the coast to their financial networks. Robin Law's article, on the other hand, confirms that abolition undermined coastal elites' socioeconomic position and contributed to unrest in Yorubaland, though not as directly as Hopkins had argued.  The chapters in the second section focus on the form and political economy of imperialism, and, in particular, Peter Cain and A. G. Hopkins's groundbreaking concept of "gentlemanly capitalism." Cain and Hopkins's argument asserted that economic interests, rather than diplomatic or political crises, were the driving force behind British imperial expansion, and that finance and economic services were behind the wheel rather than industry or manufacturing.[1] This concept has been contested for nearly twenty years, and while some contributors to this volume apply it to new arenas, namely environmental history and the Chartist movement, others seek to challenge or refine it. Among the latter is Joseph Inikori, who demonstrates the influence manufacturing interests had on Britain's little-known Senegambia colony between 1757 and 1783. Anthony Webster uses a sophisticated "'network'-based model of pressure group activity" to argue that British industry and economic interests from the periphery also influenced imperial policy between the 1810s and 1840s, when, he argues, City interests regained ascendancy (pp. 277, 290). By contrast, Shigeru Akita's chapter furthers Cain and Hopkins's argument by contending that in the interwar period Britain functioned as an "Imperial Structural Power" in Asia that maintained its interests by relying on the continued dominance of its "financial and commercial sectors" rather than its declining military strength (p. 431).  The analysis of imperialism is not limited to the concept of "gentlemanly capitalism," however. The volume includes contributions on social imperialism and "free merchants" in India, as well as on the depressions of 1873 to 1896, the manipulation of market demand, and the economic calculations behind Britain's withdrawal from Burma. In a complex article that repays careful reading, Gerold Krozewski compares the decisions and agency of the British, Italian, and Nazi German states. He concludes that "states reproduced themselves via their exposure to the international economy" and those with a "high degree of global economic exposure attempted to carve out control realms," which included "transient" territorial empires (pp. 374, 375). His analysis demonstrates the importance of the global for understanding the national and that any attempt to "account" for empires must take a broad sociopolitical perspective to comprehend state rationales.  The final eleven chapters focus on globalization, a question Hopkins took up in 2002 with the edited collection,_ Globalization in World History_, and has continued to address in his comparative studies of the American and British empires.[2] In the opening chapter in this section, Patrick Karl O'Brien agrees with Hopkins that researching and teaching global history is a "morally significant and politically necessary academic mission" that can be accomplished while meeting the "standards for theoretical rigor set by the social sciences" (pp. 447, 448). This is amply demonstrated in the subsequent chapters, which address questions including the adaptive strategies of multinational corporations under Malaysia's "New Economic Policy," the international and anti-imperial politics behind the 1947 United Nations' vote to partition Palestine, and the interplay between Pan-Africanism and national political cultures. Brian McNeil calls for scholarship that contextualizes the Nigerian Civil War within the global shifts of the 1960s, while Mark A. Lawrence considers the United States' efforts to resist globalization and "prop up a fading geopolitical order" in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 567).  The last three chapters consider the economic position of Africa _vis-a-vis_ globalization. Patrick Manning proposes a multifaceted assessment of the economic impact of imperialism on Africa at the regional, imperial, and global level, and Okpeh O. Okpeh Jr. argues that foreign aid has furthered underdevelopment and that African nations need to craft an indigenous and Pan-African path to development. Toyin Falola agrees with Okpeh that collaboration is needed across Africa and the African Diaspora if black communities are to enjoy the benefits of globalization. He adds, though, that better functioning democracies and responsible improvements in technology are also essential.  Like Hopkins, the contributors to this collection primarily approach their studies from the perspective of economic forces, politics, and the interplay between the two, but there are some notable exceptions. Tom McCaskie uses an 1821 skirmish on the Gold Coast to highlight the tensions surrounding Britain's shift from "mercantilist commerce to interventionist presence" and to suggest that the British never transcended the "view from the beach" that marked early traders' understandings of Africa (p. 271). Peter Cain examines Charles Pearson's 1893 text _National Life and Character, _which predicted that Europe would turn to socialism, lose its empires, and relinquish its global dominance to a resurgent China, and Richard Roberts considers the unintended effects of the civilizing mission.  As can be seen, this is a wide-ranging collection, but despite this breadth, there is relatively little engagement with "new" imperial histories. For instance, while several articles refer to families or women's economic roles in passing, only a few consider the effects of gendered relationships or power struggles on economic and political calculations. The issue of race is also fairly marginal in the first two sections; it figures more prominently in the globalization chapters. To be sure, these are not the questions Hopkins is known for, which explains their relative absence here, particularly as many of the contributors have published outstanding texts incorporating gender analysis elsewhere.[3] There seems to be a missed opportunity, however, to incorporate some of the insights from feminist, postcolonial, and cultural scholars into the innovative work coming from economic and political historians, to "[reintegrate] the sub-disciplines that currently divide historical practice," as Hopkins recommended in his 1999 proposal for reinvigorating imperial scholarship.[4] That said, this is a challenge for all historians of empire, and the desire to find more of it in this volume is largely a reflection of the excellent and diverse scholarship it contains and the ideas that it inspires.  In the final analysis, this is an important volume and a fitting tribute to the work of A. G. Hopkins. It brings together rich case studies, broad works of synthesis, and far-reaching calls to arms, and nearly every chapter is written in an engaging style; the anthology may look and feel like a tome, but it is a delight to read. The breadth of topics and careful scholarship should ensure this collection receives a broad readership and stimulates further debates over Africa, empire, and globalization.  Notes  [1]. This argument was most famously put forward in their two-volume, 1993 text, _British Imperialism, 1688-1914. _The work was updated and reissued in a single volume in 2002. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, _British Imperialism, 1688-2000_ (London: Longman, 2002).  [2]. See, for example, A. G. Hopkins, "Comparing British and American Empires," _Journal of Global History _2 (2007): 395-404.  [3]. Gareth Austin, "Human Pawning in Asante, 1800-1950: Markets and Coercion, Gender and Cocoa," in Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola, eds., _Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa _(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003): 187-224; Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Miller, _Women and Slavery, _2 volumes (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007); Okpeh Okpeh, _Gender, Power, and Politics in Nigeria _(Makurdi, Nigeria: Aboki Publishers, 2007); Richard Roberts, Emily Burrill, and Elizabeth Thornberry, _Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa _(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Schmidt, _Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958 _(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005); and Elizabeth Schmidt, _Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 _(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992).  [4]. A. G. Hopkins, "Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History," _Past & Present_ 164 (August 1999): 242.  Citation: Angela Thompsell. Review of Falola, Toyin; Brownell, Emily; Hopkins, A. G., eds., _Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins_. H-Empire, H-Net Reviews. January, 2012. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33884  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 
 

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