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I have to say that yesterday, when I listened to all the talks, I felt slightly alienated simply because I'm an historian of Africa.

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I'm not an economic historian and I work on the 20th century and I have to say that

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the debate about the Great Divergence has had not many effects on African economics,

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of course, got us. Austen was one of the few historians of Africa who felt inspired by this debate, William as well.

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But William works on all kinds of topics and all over the world, so I wouldn't consider him as an historian of Africa only.

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But otherwise, this debate did not really attract a too many people.

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On the other hand, there has been, at the same time, a certain rise again of economic history of Africa.

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But I think not very closely connected to the Great Divergence debate,

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and also fuelled very much by economist hijacking African history and writing or producing a lot of peer reviewed nonsense in my context.

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I'm talking here is more on global labour history. That's another story of Africa branch that started to grow at around 2000.

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And what I'm looking here despite my title, which I had to give far too earlier and later, I thought about what I could say.

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And so I would talk mainly about the relationship of capita and labour at the example of Africa,

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20th Century Africa and two elements of the relationship of capitalism and labour stand out.

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I think that on the ground,

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relations between power and ideology and the starting point for analysing both is the writing of the concept of this gentleman.

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Maxwell, I think, is still an important figure when we talk about capitalism and we share the same hairdresser, by the way.

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And what I want to talk about here, especially, is Mark's concept of primitive or as one has to say,

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in our original accumulation because it's Drummond, but user-friendly means original and primitive as a kind of slightly disorienting translation.

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And then the twenty first twenty five first chapters of Carpenter and Marx portrayed a powerful,

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systemic logic built on the assumption that Labour was fully commoditized.

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And then in Chapter 26, you argued that these assumptions had notably, in the case of Great Britain,

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been met by the forceful removal of most cultivators from land and the legal and administrative structure that enforces political,

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social and coercive process and and led to an expropriation that was written, as he put it, so nicely in letters of blood and fire.

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How this came to be, how this came to be could not be explained on the basis of capital logic,

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primitive accumulation was contingent process located at the intersection of different historical trends,

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including the relationships of Crown and there was autocracy in Britain,

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the changing legal framework in which event lots and different categories of tenants operated the extensions of British commerce overseas,

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including the slave trade and plantation aquaculture and the West Indies,

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and into imperial rivalries that shape the capacity of the state and financial institutions to reinforce each other's influence.

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And all these points have been the subject of considerable scholarly investigation and questioning ever since,

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and some people in the room have been part of that debate.

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The other side of the story of primitive or original accumulation was the way it was written out of elite ideology.

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Despite much effort on the part of its victims,

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what Marx termed the fetishism of commodities treated the human story of how labour became an object as if it was a natural condition,

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a relationship of things rather than the relationship of people.

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As most recent scholarship has shown, employer workers relationships even in the British case,

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where nested in layers of state regulation, political enforcement and outright coercion.

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But if free and coerced labour were anything but dichotomous,

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the representation of labour in Iran defined by the legal control of property or lack thereof and the neutrality

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of the market relationship was crucial to the development of an ideological basis for capitalist development.

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The anti-slavery movement, as Thomas you hold and others have shown, however diverse the motivations of leading actors were,

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had the effect of defining a ram of an ethically defensible form of labour distinguished from others and such a political structure.

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The working class movements could still make claims as they did,

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but the domain of claim making was defined by the acceptance of the wage relationship itself.

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I think, and a number of people start to think that again,

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that the concept of original accumulation is extremely useful beyond the paradigmatic English case, which of course has its own complexities.

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And I don't dare to delve into that. Of course not, because it can be applied as a template, but exactly because it cannot.

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One can focus on specific processes in Africa by which people are quite productive resources and excluded others from them land productive trees,

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noted points on trade routes, for example. The concept encourages us to us exactly what resources were commanded by whom,

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on what basis and who was excluded from them on what basis and was what effects.

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These are by all means empirical questions and will give rise to diverse answers.

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And, of course, a couple of cases when you talk about capitalism in Africa and the first cases always South Africa,

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because in South Africa land, the elimination of land went further than any place.

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It's complicated by the racialised nature of the process and the fiction that Africans maintain the integrity of free capitalist societies,

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the mineral discoveries, the second half of the 19th century and subsequent expansion of the industrial sector of the economy.

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That to the emergence of an industrial workforce that included thousands of European immigrants and a large number of Africans,

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and for short appeared also Chinese workers. And Indian workers, the workforce in the South African mines was divided along racial lines,

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whereby Europeans were assigned to supervisory positions by Africans were relegated to unskilled and menial tasks.

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A crucial legal step was the Land Act of 1913 that consolidated the policy of depriving the vast majority of black South Africans of land ownership.

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This act was crucial in driving down black real wages.

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We talked about real wages yesterday for two reasons and not only reserved 93 percent of the land for whites,

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but also prohibited African tenancy on white owned land.

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Before that time, sharecropper tenancy had probably been the most important way in which black farmers

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could still sell produce to the market rather than selling the Labour Party.

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The key to the capitalist character of South African development can be located in agriculture.

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Since the 17th century and culturally and socially distinct land owning class has been

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emerging on the one that tightening its grip on land in the context of industrialisation,

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forcing tenants to become wage labourers and bringing about this African proletariat in the process.

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Elsewhere, there were specific regions where such an took place,

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but there were many more regions where differential access to land and other resources

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took farms more complicated than a dichotomy of land alienation and community land tenure.

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The classic case a case goes No Sowell is West African cocoa producers.

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Whether people was a prior claim to land migrants who planted the cocoa, the cocoa,

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bushes and kinsmen, clients, labour tenants and other workers who did the labour.

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Mark, a system of relations that brought about innovation and relative prosperity without corresponding to the elite norms of freehold property,

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basically to both Marxists and neoclassical economies.

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And still, other instances, Africans were able to straddle this varying degrees of autonomy and security.

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And over the individual life cycle and all the family unit between wage, labour and agriculture in the context of family and community.

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In recent decades, governing elites and foreign investors have been buying up land, not necessarily using its productivity,

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but leaving many people without either the security that access to land through kinship and community had once provided,

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or any realistic possibility of supporting themselves through wage labour.

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The sentiment of land grabbing, as this is called, is widely discussed for a number of years.

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In the 1970s and 80s, when African labour history was at its height,

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scholars were keen on words like proletarian ization or to show that the good Tanzanians the making of an African working class.

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The stories of millenia of capitalism spreading steadily over the globe.

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The story didn't just get the future wrong, that something historians as often as economists.

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But it got the past wrong as well. The growth of a labour force was con. Conjuncture, not an evolutionary phenomenon and state policy,

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at least in the French and British African colonies in the years following World War Two, was not geared towards proletarian ization.

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But as it was called at that time, towards stabilisation.

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Oops. It recognised that which labour and strikes had become issues in cities whereby lines, mines and ports,

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and that the best way of making those workers productive was to stop treating them at tribesmen temporarily at work.

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But as a budding working class that could and should be separated from the vast majority of Africans who lived in the countryside

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and whose relationship to the means of production could only slowly be transformed and only was in their own social media.

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By defining and separating out a working class from the rural masses, that class could be that was at least a fantasy.

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That class could be reproduced under the watchful eyes of doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers and labour officers.

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Civilisation implied a particular state directed programme to reconfigure the life cycle and intergenerational relations.

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The post-war doctrine of stabilisation looked to some Africans becoming a cultural modern men,

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but kept in place older stereotypes of the rule or rather tribal African.

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The dichotomous view, papered over the historical record of colonial regimes,

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had lacked the power to bring about systematic transformation that is, to bring about a version of primitive original accumulation.

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Africans could engage in wage labour without given the totality of that time to their beings, add to it or the beings to it.

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They could find nieces and colonial economies for themselves that allowed them to stave off capitalist discipline.

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Space could be place against time. Mobility was the defence against the rhythms of that marks described in this chapter on the working day.

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The consequences of such forms of struggle were beyond what either side could anticipate from one point of view.

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Africa was an unexplored continent and the of a sense that the quantity of surplus

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value that could be extracted was limited by the ability of so many Africans.

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Until recent decades, to avoid complete subordination to the one that mattered in capitalism and the classic sense.

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That meant a wide variety of social relations of production coexisted in time and over space.

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And it makes sense to analyse them, not in relation to the individual work at any point in time,

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but to the worker over the life course and each life course in relation to kinship groups, networks, pets and client relations and so on.

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And one can go to argue that this complexity,

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this overlapping of social forms over the life course and other different kinds of social connexions was both a protection and over time constraints.

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As Mark Jennings argued a few years ago, the West faced and Covenant Society perhaps is to be unexploited.

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What I'm suggesting here is that by turning the model of capitalism, a model of capitalist development into a set of questions,

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one can develop a set of perspectives that take us away from single stories of the ever extending reach of proletarian ization.

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The stories are about time, life cycle and growth, but more than linear time, and they are about space.

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But, so to speak, lumpy space. Uneven space.

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Not the infinitely connected space of the book globalisation implies.

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So if we look at the trajectory of Africa, of labour in Africa in the 20th century,

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we see that colonial regimes for all the advantages and technology and communication face limits on the capacity to harness African labour power.

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Islands of labour exploitation and mines, port cities and settler farms were surrounded by vast labour catchment areas,

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which supply labour power was producing a working class. But the category game was still being played.

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Mission knows that humanitarian groups campaign to define and exercise forced labour from the repertoire of colonial power,

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even if they usually defined forced labour rather narrowly as the use of official coercion for private profit.

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All the abuses of government recruitment and did not penetrate the patterns of land seizure and power that actually shaped the condition of labour.

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The tendency to treat free labour as a fetish in colonial circles or amongst free market purists today should not lead us

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to invert these conceptions and treat the labour questions in Africa as if a single category of racialized subordination,

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the efforts of Africans, as individuals and as communities to defend themselves against subordination need to be taken seriously,

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as does in some places, the ability of some Africans to create a modest prosperity for themselves.

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Africans were often trying in their own ways to put family life together.

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Women might provide much of the labour that kept the wage labour force alive, play a bigger role in agricultural labour than regimes intended,

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and participate in migratory initiatives to get away from forced labour and

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to try to establish a more family oriented pattern of work and social life.

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It wasn't this content that's a category game as played by France and Britain could use a stabilisation concept.

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This is that this would further fragment. African society was considered a positive step towards modernising Africa.

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Family allowances and other welfare programmes did not necessarily produce the kind of bold and working class

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officials wish to see the made between my juices wages to support his wife's engagement and put it straight.

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Or perhaps his own move out of which labour he himself might be more intend to become a big man in the sense practised by his ancestors and relatives,

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rather than the cultural worker and urbanites of the colonial imagination.

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The relationship of the categories of gender and labour were much more complicated in practise than the divisions of colonial reformers.

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The line between those included in this colonial vision and those excluded was never very clear.

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So in any case, sterilisation was not proletarian position.

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post-World War to Africa in this specific and somehow bounded way was part of the 20th century trend towards

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providing a measure of security to working classes as myself and the Lyndon and others have pointed out,

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this was not a linear trend, but a conjunction was in the longer term pattern of capitalist development,

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which depends on the precariousness of the worker's position to enforce labour discipline.

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The protections afforded to workers in Europe and to a significantly lesser extent, the United States are, according to this interpretation,

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a product of special circumstances of the 20th century, not least of power and potential threats of labour movements,

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fear of socialist alternatives, the rise of mass consumption and attempts by elites, especially in democratic societies,

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to blue cross class conditions and foster something like the French are fond of calling solidarity.

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This model is now, as we all know, under threat.

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More and more labour contracts are short term and benefits are called into question in the name of austerity and flexible labour markets.

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And Africans moment of this welfare moment or the Tom Glorious as the French call it, was particularly brief.

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And Jim Ferguson has eloquently described in the case of Zambia,

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what it meant for the gains which destabilised workers of the 1950s and 60s had

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made in the copper belt that made to be eroded by hostile government policies,

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the undermining of trade unions, inflation and the decline of commodity prices.

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Ferguson has since gone gone on to argue that precarity is no longer needed to drive people into the labour market.

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Rather, precarity reflects the decreased need for labour in the work market.

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Perhaps more acute in Africa than in any other places rather than unemployment.

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Being a temporary condition within the life course, producing certain disciplining effects, but also requiring certain kinds of social interventions.

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It is becoming a permanent condition. South Africa, for example, has come to grips, has to come to grips with the importance of the non-working class,

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which has been excluded from much of the gains of post-apartheid South Africa.

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Indeed, the low paid worker and the migrant worker are likely to be regarded as less than true citizens for citizenship.

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And indeed,

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human worth is in the minds of South Africans governing elites linked to productive work that is available only to a fraction of the population.

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Some argue that the South African states should get away from the equation of both livelihood and dignity of this work.

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And think of mechanisms like basic income grants that allow people to get by independent of whether they work.

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But even such an argument presumes that the only work that needs to be done is that forbids capitalists

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willing to pay more over the premise that capital in Africa no longer needs so many workers.

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It's questions, but some questioned by some authors who argue that multinational capital is finding new uses of workers as long as they are cheap,

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particularly to reach customers of modest means.

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Though this was a kind of rather a tour de force, so 20th Century African labour history and what I tried to emphasise is,

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in fact, that the relationship of capitalism and labour is neither homogenising nor linear.

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So if capitalist developments makes development, makes it possible to imagine labour as a universal construct across across a space.

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In reality, capitalism has homogenised neither space nor time, but has produced great unevenness.

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This lumpiness is not necessarily optimising for capitalist accumulation,

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nor does it produce a community between economic practises and ideological representations of them.

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Thank you very much.