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| Title: | The Persistence of Subsistence and the Limits to Development Studies: The Challenge of Tanzania |
| Author: | Waters, Tony |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Periodical: | Africa: Journal of the International African Institute |
| Volume: | 70 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Pages: | 614-652 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Tanzania |
| Subjects: | subsistence economy economic development Development and Technology Economics and Trade Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Bibliography/Research |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1161475 |
| Abstract: | There are two general approaches to assessing what is known as 'development'. First, there are classical accounts focussing 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. A major consequence is that today all Europeans are dependent on the modern capitalist system. The second (more common approach) to development focusses on the modern Third World. This approach assumes that, as with Europe, the entire Third World is dependent on the modern capitalist system. Discussion is typically reduced to comparisons between neoclassical economics and world systems theory. The government of Tanzania has used standard policies grounded in neoclassical and world-system assumptions since independence. But both policies have 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, 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 labour or cattle. App. (theorizing the domain of wealth in Tanzania, Lesotho and the US), bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. |
