Books in the African Society Today series

This 1985 book highlights important attributes of farm labour, how it is mobilised and controlled, and places it within a context of historical change. International trade, colonialism, the growth of towns and transport have all exerted a powerful influence on rural Africa; yet agriculture is still dominated by small-commodity producers.

First published in 1985, Migrant Laborers addresses the controversies as to the origins of migrancy and its effects on the rural economy, emphasizing the differences in the response of various African pre-capitalist societies to wage labor, and the regional variations in the effects on the rural economy and on the division of labor within the rural household.

Neopatrimonialism in post-colonial Africa is essentially an adaptation of colonial-inspired political institutions to peculiar historical and social conditions. This book focuses on the political factor as an important cause of Africa's economic ills.

Drawing upon material from a number of countries and a range of academic disciplines, this 1988 book, provides an analysis of African capitalism which offers a much more positive view of its role than the prevailing view of its dependence on state and foreign capital.

This 1988 analysis shows how the colonial legacy, the contemporary global economic system, and the ruling elites' policies of co-opting labour, favouring urban areas, distributing benefits communally, and spending on education to maintain inter-generational class exacerbate discrepancies between regions, urban and rural areas, and bourgeoisie and workers, even under 'African socialism'.

This 1988 book introduces the reader to the literature on the African working class and the main theoretical and social issues that have arisen from it. The history of the emergence of a wage-earning class is outlined and its various cultural, social and political forms are discussed.

This 1990 text goes behind the crises of famine and poor agricultural production to examine the forces and pressures that can affect peasant farming communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, the book shows that peasant farmers have ways of defending their interests.

All over Africa the number of liberal democracies is growing. But can they survive and are they compatible with renewed economic growth? Richard Sandbrook answers these questions, and assesses the feasibility of the new political programme in reinforcing Africa's economic recovery.