Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy

by Karl Polanyi, Paul Bohannon (Foreword), Abraham Rotstein (Collaborator)

The death of Karl Polanyi in 1964, at seventy-seven, curtailed a productive life in the fields economic history and economic anthropology. Some of his students-impressed with his erudition and disregard for the ordinary-described him as "otherworldly". He was founder of the Galilei Society in Budapest, the cradle of the liberal revolutions in Hungary in the first decades of the 20 th . century. In the first World War, he was a cavalry officer and after that war he went to Vienna. There he became a columnist and commentator for the  Oesterreichische Volkswirt,  in charge of analysis of international affairs. For years he read daily  The Times, Le Temps,  the  Frankfurter Zeitung,  all the Vienna papers and those from Budapest and others as they were relevant.  He emigrated to England where he became a tutor for Oxford University and the University of London and wrote re-analysis of English economic   The Great Transformation. After World War II, Polanyi came to Columbia University to teach economic history. His courses were always popular and well attended. During his last years at Columbia, and during his early years of retirement, Polanyi was joined by Conrad Arensberg in heading a large interdisciplinary project for the comparative study of economic systems. The volume that resulted was  Trade and Market in the Early Empires,  a landmark in economic anthropology and economic history. Polanyi's interest in Dahomey stems from one of his students who had contributed two papers on Dahomey to  Trade and Market.  Polanyi grew interested and, with characteristic thoroughness, read the literature on that West African kingdom. The present book resulted from these last years of productive scholarship. Dahomey and the Slave Trade  was prepared for the press by his widow, Ilona Duczynska Polanyi. Foreword  vii This book is of vital importance to anthropology for several reasons, the most compelling being that the concerns of history and of anthropology are overlapped in it. Besides making available the economic history of one of the great West African kingdoms, it sets forth some new theory for economic anthropology-particularly Part III, in which Polanyi makes sense of the intricacies of trade between a people with a fully monetized economy, and one without, and those passages in which he adds "house-holding" as a concept to his ideas about the principles of economic integration. Polanyi's position in economic anthropology-not to mention the status he achieved as economic historian, translator of Hungarian literature, man of action, and inspiring teacher-is secure. He has enabled anthropologists to focus their studies of economy on processes of allocation rather than on processes of production, thereby bringing the studies into line with economic theory without merely "applying" economic theory to systems it was not designed to explain. The "release" that resulted from this great stride forward can be compared, for economic anthropology and studies in comparative economics, with the importance of the discovery in the late nineteenth century of the price mechanism itself. The more we know about the workings of other, and strange, economies, the more we can know of our own. Polanyi's work will stand as a major source of comparative insight-the core of anthropological purpose.

Genres: History, Economics, Anthropology

204 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1988

About the author

Karl Paul Polanyi was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher. He is known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and for his book, The Great Transformation, which argued that the emergence of market-based societies in modern Europe was not inevitable but historically contingent. Polanyi is remembered today as the originator of substantivism, a cultural approach to economics, which emphasized the way economies are embedded in society and culture. This view ran counter to mainstream economics but is popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science.

Polanyi's approach to the ancient economies has been applied to a variety of cases, such as Pre-Columbian America and ancient Mesopotamia, although its utility to the study of ancient societies in general has been questioned. Polanyi's The Great Transformation became a model for historical sociology. His theories eventually became the foundation for the economic democracy movement. His daughter, Canadian economist Kari Polanyi Levitt (born 1923 in Vienna, Austria), is Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal.

Reviews

[Nia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly, it has been a long time since I read this book for my PhD work, in Bath, but I recall feeling annoyed with Polanyi, for the first and only time, as I read this book. His other work, especially his masterpiece, The Great Transformation, was magistral. This one, however, left me feeling that he had a certain level of contempt for the Archaic Economy of Dahomey, and for those who built that economy. I may have had some mixed feelings due to difficulty ongoing at the time and also the topic of the slave trade, which hits me hard for personal and family reasons, but none of his other work feels this way, and it often touches these topics, as well. Time to read this one again, but it is still useful in terms of seeing the history of economics and those key connections, as I work on Project Do Better, building a holistic proposal for socioeconomic change over the next several decades. The very fact that Polanyi took the time to research so much history, and tie in the social, political and economic aspects of events reminds us how important the long term is in any situation.

[S. H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

( personal note)

Read 30 yeas ago and finding one example to cite.

[Thomas Ray]

Library-of-Congress HC547 D3 P6 Memorial Library