This is an amazing book whose original theory of an indigenous trajectory of non-capitalist accumulation driven by a collective moral obligation of polygynous marriage and care for dependent others is presented in wonderful ethnographic depth, drawing on empirical data obtained from 1976 to 1998 in Marmara, a southern Katsina hamlet, northern Nigeria. Clough’s empirically grounded study of economic growth ‘regulated’ by a value system of moral responsibility (hidima) breathes new life into the economic history and anthropology of Hausaland. The chapters on regional markets, credit and loans, and investment in agrarian production and social consumption are path-breaking in their detailed documentation and analysis in terms of an indigenous theory and praxis of accumulation.
The study shows ways in which, over two decades, conversion to Islam in the context of government farm inputs promoted community capacity to accumulate capital through extensive trading networks supported by ‘a society of borrowers and lenders’ (p. 186). In Marmara thought, Muslim farmer-trader men are co-parcenors within an Islamic ummah that motivates household production of profitable grain surpluses by abstinence from millet beer. Such morally infused practices, echoing Bohannan (1955), drive farmer-traders to convert money upwards into culturally valued and obligatory polygynous marriages, clients and trading friends. Thus, ‘accumulation refers to both moral evaluations and material process’ (p. 72, original emphasis).
The author documents in a commercialised district of Hausaland how, contrary to his initial view of traders as brokers of capitalist agrarian change, an indigenous trajectory of non-capitalist accumulation ‘heavily influenced by Islam, is generating productive expansion while at the same time ensuring the social security of small farming households’ (p. xviii). A moral code of responsibility (hidima), interpreted as mandatory, ensures that pious farmer-traders continue to convert material gain due to increased grain, cotton and off-farm production into higher local value of polygynous marriage, wives and children. Men’s shared interpretation of hidima shapes an historically specific, long-term trajectory of economic growth through non-capitalist accumulation. It explains why in rural Hausaland the transition to capitalism is not taking place – though, as Clough demonstrates, capital accumulation sustaining economic growth has occurred, and is occurring.
In Marmara hamlet, Hausa men cultivate grains (guinea corn and maize) and cotton on the fertile clay soils of Malumfashi division, northern Nigeria. In 1976–79 farmer-traders and their families constituted 120 households (total population 813), interconnected through trade and credit networks with grain and cotton markets across Nigeria and southern Niger. Household demographic composition and economic organisation are studied through male members, because in a pious Muslim community practising women’s seclusion, an unrelated male is unable to access women. Indeed, women’s significant economic contributions, including house-trade and loans to husbands and male kin, are noted and comparisons drawn with Hill’s (1972) pioneering study in Batagarawa, northern Katsina. Beneath differences in wealth and occupation Marmara hamlet shared a ‘community of value’ about right action and the nature of God (p. 12). This moral code encouraged men to invest profit (riba) obtained by exploitation of capitalist factors of production – labour, technology, exchange, credit – in economic growth and in support for dependent kin, affines, clients, trading and gift exchange friends. Farmer-traders thus convert capital into social ‘wealth’ (dukiya) in interlocking ways exemplified in case studies and biographies of ‘responsible’ (hidima) men. Trusted by others in the Muslim cultural economy, these men strive to increase their household size by investing profit from trading ventures in more wives for themselves and their sons, more children, more clients and creditors. Economic differences in land-holdings, income and expenditures among ‘Big’, ‘Middling’ or ‘Small’ households are cross-cut and muted in the sociality of interaction with fellow farmers, traders, clients and creditors mutually obliged to break off ‘business’ to pray five times a day and/or attend mosque.
Overall, the book questions the validity of Western universalising (formalist) theories of capitalism and marginal utility, some of which overemphasise the ‘highly individual quality of good fortune … here today and gone tomorrow … men struggling in lonely combat with natural and market forces’. The analysis also stands apart from such ostensibly substantivist models as those of Guyer (2004), Berry (1993) and Grégoire (1992). We need, Clough argues, to distinguish the prevailing neoliberal praxis of the market from a Muslim Hausa praxis in which individuals form alliances of interpersonal dependence to seek mutual income growth in the moral long term. As Clough contends, ‘The rural Hausa with whom I worked were embedded in moral practices whose regularity and coherence make possible individual (and collective) enrichment’ (pp. 57–58). In fact, Marmara and its trading networks comprise a ‘society of lenders’ and borrowers.
Clough is wonderfully clear about his methodologies, e.g. participant observation, total and partial surveys, biographies and case studies. He integrates empirical data and theory through a series of indices presented in tabular, chart and figure format. In his view statistical data in tabular form present a theoretically exciting argument about accumulation, production and morality. For example, indices of married men’s households’ farm and off-farm production, income and loans in 1978 and 1997, include the following variables: household size; number of wives; frequency of households in gandu, that is, households headed by married men with control over the labour of married sons as well as unmarried male relatives; land distribution compared to other village studies (1949–79); labour-output ratios, farm outputs per acre/hectare and household costs and revenues; grain trading profits and losses; six types of loans and repayments; farmer trader assets on a spectrum of liquidity. This impressive array of tabulated data describes interlocking dimensions of an indigenous trajectory of non-capitalist economic accumulation and social investment in polygynous marriage, children’s naming ceremonies, trading friends and clients: tables are not an appendix but the pivot on which the argument turns.
Data compilation by household indices also sets the framework for further potential analysis – in the book as well as in other areas of Hausaland – of differences and similarities in Small, Middling and Large Farmer-Traders’ access to, and use of, major factors of production, credit, and exchange. If the key conditions and causal interconnections specified in the study are found elsewhere, then Clough believes his study’s theory and methodology may be more widely applicable.
Chapters 1 and 3–7 focus on households, land distribution, labour practices, credit relations and marketplace transactions as well as produce marketing (Ch. 6) and rural trading operations (Ch. 7). Chapter 8 extends the analysis to 1996–98, while Chapter 9 tests the indigenous trajectory of non-capitalist accumulation model by reviewing change and continuity between 1976 and 1998 in various household indices.
Serious readers will recognise this study as the new gold standard of anthropological field research on African economies simultaneously in interaction with, but culturally largely independent of, global agro-industrial capitalism’s models and praxes of self-sufficient acquisitive ‘man’ whose greatest ‘moral’ achievement is to exploit and accumulate for self-enrichment. However, in the West African ‘dry’ savanna and sub-humid zones, we find villagers engaging, as do Marmara’s farmer-traders, in production, trade, credit, and investment organised through non-capitalist, family work units where men labour for profit whilst subordinating material gain to hidima, the moral responsibility to convert profit into upwards into ‘wealth’ by polygynous marriage. Further field work sensitive to cultural praxes may indeed demonstrate the development elsewhere of historically specific indigenous trajectories of non-capitalist accumulation that sustain economic growth when people respond creatively to population pressure by sourcing off-farm income streams. The latter moderate inter-household inequality in the distribution of polygynous marriage, fertility, land-holdings, credit, income, clients and followings.
Assuredly this highly welcome monograph will become a classic text. University librarians in Nigeria, West Africa, Europe and America will find this well-bound book an essential acquisition. It will be invaluable for courses on economic anthropology, African agrarian systems, rural sociology, Islamic studies, economic history and development studies. Post-graduate students, lecturers and researchers will all find this monograph a ‘must-have’ acquisition for use in field research and literature analyses.