Poverty and Wealth in East Africa

“This is conceptual history at its best. Rhiannon Stephens has gotten under the skin of her sources and has created a living document that will be of interest not just to Africanists but to world historians as well. It is a blazingly original longue-durée history.” - Kenda Mutongi, author of Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi

“Rhiannon Stephens affords us a rich story of ideas about the social, material, and affective dimensions of life accorded to the poor and to the rich. Poverty and Wealth in East Africa upends two key assumptions about small-scale African societies before the imposition of colonial rule: that such societies had no understandings of relative wealth or poverty, and that any such understandings were the unchanging results of static political or economic systems. With Stephens’s book, we have firm footing in the deeper histories needed to rethink the content of moral arguments associated with modern histories of capitalism, colonialism, independence, and development as dependent on European and African concepts with equally deep historical roots.” - Kathryn de Luna, Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor, Georgetown University

"Poverty and Wealth in East Africa is a significant book: lucid and meticulous, yet ambitious and imaginative. From the viewpoint of African studies, this work stretches significantly the time span of studies on African poverty. . . . Historians of economic thought without a scholarly interest in sub-Saharan Africa would also significantly benefit from reading this book. . . . Poverty and Wealth in East Africa should not be received just as a solid work of Africanist conceptual and linguistic history but also as a catalyst of important questions about our discipline, its 'canon,' and its methodological conventions." - Gerardo Serra, Journal of the History of Economic Thought

“Stephens’s book is an enrichment for the economic and social history of Africa, demonstrating the possibilities of going beyond the colonial archive. It also offers new possibilities for conceptual history in general, because her approach allows us to access the everyday realities of life even of historical subjects who have left  us no written sources.” - Dörte Lerp, Contributions to the History of Concepts

“Stephens is excellent at explaining the logic and limits of historical linguistic analysis.” - Daren Ray, H-Africa, H-Net Reviews

“Poverty and Wealth in East Africa is an extensive and meticulously researched work that sheds light on the multifaceted nature of poverty and wealth in eastern Uganda . . . this book offers a nuanced and holistic view of economic inequality in the region, providing a valuable resource for scholars and researchers interested in African history, anthropology, and development studies.” - Addis Gedefaw, Research Africa Reviews

"Stephens is highly successful in her goal of destroying any remaining pretence of precolonial egalitarianism and presenting a convincing argument that wealth and poverty are key parts of the human condition." - Andrew Crawford, Anthropos

"Poverty and Wealth in East Africa significantly contributes to understanding the conceptualization of poverty and wealth in East Africa over the past two millennia." - Hariasda Rikardus, Mario Sani, Muhammad Naufal Hamdani Nurmitananda, Reski Putra Utama, African Identities

"Poverty and Wealth in East Africa presents a groundbreaking investigation of the concepts of economic difference by East African societies, especially those in Uganda, over the past two millennia." - Syaifullah, Umaima, Sahrani & Juirah, African Identities

This is an impressive and thought-provoking book, a productive departure from the tradition of historical linguistics applied to what is now Uganda... [Stephens] has distilled a staggering amount of work into these 200 pages." - Felicitas Becker, African Studies Review

"African scholars can appreciate this historical understanding of value in this longue durée. Stephens offers African ideas of people with material excess, those who lack in more than material ways, whether material wealth must be distributive, and how these ideas develop in different environments over a very long period." - Rebecca Rwakabukoza, Makerere Historical Journal