Botswana – A Modern Economic History: An African Diamond in the Rough

244 Pages·2018·3.33 MB·English

by  Ellen Hillbom

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ECONOMIC HISTORY
BOTSWANA – A MODERN
ECONOMIC HISTORY
An African Diamond in the Rough
Ellen Hillbom & Jutta Bolt
Palgrave Studies in Economic History
Series editor
Kent Deng
London School of Economics
London, UK
Palgrave Studies in Economic History is designed to illuminate and
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past. The series covers a vast range of topics including financial history,
labour history, development economics, commercialisation, urbanisa-
tion, industrialisation, modernisation, globalisation, and changes in
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More information about this series at
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Ellen Hillbom • Jutta Bolt
Botswana – A
Modern Economic
History
An African Diamond in the Rough
Ellen Hillbom Jutta Bolt
University of Lund Lund University
Lund, Sweden Lund, Sweden
University of Groningen
Groningen, The Netherlands
Palgrave Studies in Economic History
ISBN 978-3-319-73143-8 ISBN 978-3-319-73144-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73144-5
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Preface/Acknowledgements
Why write the economic history of Botswana? Behind every rational aca-
demic answer to the question of why a certain case or country has been
picked for in-depth studies, there is often a more personal story. This is
our personal story about how this book project came to be.
In the autumn of 1994 Ellen was a bachelor student at the Department
of Anthropology at Lund University looking for a topic for her thesis. She
was asked by a childhood friend if she wanted to join in on a fieldwork
trip to Botswana and as any eager student with a sense of adventure she
said yes. She was in luck because her thesis supervisor, Professor Kajsa
Ekholm Friedman, had some money left over in a research project and
paid for the air fare and off she went. These chance circumstances would
determine her ongoing interest in the African region. Previously she did
not have any specific plans to spend her life within academia, but the
experience of trying to figure out the rationality behind small-scale cattle
holders’ market integration woke her curiosity. Figuring out the sched-
ules for the minibuses in Gaborone, bunking with friends and research
assistants in local clinics in small villages in Kgatleng District, being
burned by the hot African sun, and visiting cattle kraals on the vast graz-
ing range by jeep and by foot all added to the experience.
Later on Ellen moved to the Department of Economic History at
Lund University and combined the study of Botswana with that of other
African countries. Over the years there have been numerous research
v
vi Preface/Acknowledgements
projects, several funded by the Swedish International Development
Agency and the Swedish Research Council. The outcome has been
numerous publications in journals and books on a range of topics such as
long-term changes in property rights to agricultural resources, small-
holder farming and agricultural growth, natural resource dependency,
economic diversification and structural transformation, development of
state structures, and long-term inequality trends.
Meanwhile, Jutta studied Economics at the University of Groningen.
After an internship at the Ministry of Finance to write her master thesis
on the real economic effects of debt reductions in various African coun-
tries, she decided that she was not yet prepared to leave academia and
continued as a PhD student in Groningen. Initially she worked mostly
on long-term development in a comparative perspective. As a proper
economist, she was trying to understand the general mechanisms and
draw general lessons about development issues. Increasingly, however, she
felt that the average lessons, although useful perhaps in unfolding pat-
terns, concealed a lot of underlying diversity. What does an average tell us
about individual stories? By incorporating both comparative and case
study perspectives in her work, Jutta became an exponent of using long-
term correlations between certain factors at various points in time to be a
point of departure for asking interesting questions and investigating
those questions in in-depth case studies.
Eventually Ellen and Jutta met at the Economic History World
Congress in Stellenbosch in 2012 and saw the potential for future col-
laborations. At the time Ellen was involved in a project on colonial
extraction headed by Professor Christer Gunnarsson. Within the frame-
work of that project Ellen and Jutta started to work on constructing social
tables and calculating Gini coefficients for Botswana for the colonial era.
The combination of Ellen’s background in anthropology and almost 20
years of research on Botswana and Jutta’s training as an economist proved
to be dynamic.
Since we started our collaboration we have published together on the
development of the formal sector during the colonial era as well as on
long-term inequality trends. Currently we are working on a large project
on long-term inequality, economic growth, and sectorial change in vari-
ous African economies in which we use social tables to measure inequality
Preface/Acknowledgemen ts vii
and capture sectorial transformation. In our work, Botswana has served
as a pilot for initiating theoretical thinking about inequality and develop-
ing methods to measure it, but studies on Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia,
Zimbabwe, Malawi, Uganda, and Mauritius are also being conducted.
The research is currently funded by the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius
Foundation and the Marcus and Marianne Wallenberg Foundation. In
the project we are inspired by collaborations with several colleagues—
Prince Aboagye, Michiel de Haas, Erik Green, Morten Jerven, and Sascha
Klocke.
This book is an output of our current inequality project, but it is also
a collection of over two decades of reading, visits to archives in London
and Gaborone, interviewing cattle holders and village leaders, waiting for
government officials, presenting at conferences, publishing, and thinking
about the development path of Botswana. Over the years many more col-
leagues and friends have contributed to the process, and although all of
them cannot be named here, the colleagues at the Department of
Economic History in Lund as well as Ewout Frankema, Branko Milanovic,
and Jeffrey Williamson deserve to be mentioned. We would also specifi-
cally like to extend our gratitude to Prince Aboagye, Tobias Axelsson,
Erik Green, and Sascha Klocke for taking time to read and comment on
the book manuscript itself. Their critical eyes were a significant help, and
all the remaining flaws are our responsibility.
Further, we have also enjoyed the practical support of our joint depart-
ment and, in the last stages, our research assistant, Mesfin Araya. We
would also like to thank the team at Palgrave Macmillan—Kent Deng,
Laura Pacey, and James Safford—for their feedback.
Finally, as all academics know, we are all at a loss without the love and
support from our families. Our husbands and children have patiently
seen us spend summer holidays, weekends, evenings, and ridiculously
early mornings working on the manuscript. Niklas, Saga, Joel, Herbert,
Luuk, and Emilie—we owe you for your understanding. Unfortunately,
we cannot promise that it will not happen again.
Lund, Sweden Ellen Hillbom
Lund University and University of Groningen Jutta Bolt
viii Preface/Acknowledgements
Contents
Part I Part 1 1
1 An African Diamond in the Rough 3
2 Precolonial Economy and Society, c. 1850–1930 25
Part II Part 2 49
3 Colonial Policies and the Cattle Economy, c. 1930–1975 51
Part III Part 3 85
4 Growth, Incomes, and Development, c. 1940–Present 87
5 Trapped by Diamonds, c. 1975–Present 129
6 Inequality of Incomes and Opportunity, c. 1920–Present 165
ix