This book was originally published in 1972 and relates to the Hausa-speaking people of West Africa. At the time of publication there were perhaps as many as 15 million Hausa-speaking people in the area, most of whom lived in the countryside in northern Nigeria and the neighbouring Niger Republic. This book is at once an examination of the socio-economic life of a small Hausa village and a study of the way of life of the rural Hausa generally. The book as a whole provides a wide-ranging survey both of what was known and of what was, and in some cases still is, little understood. Very few books...

Polly Hill's provocative book examines the disastrous gulf that separates development economics from its sister discipline, economic anthropology. Working with material from the rural tropical world, much of it collected at first hand in West Africa and South India, Dr Hill demonstrates in the first, polemical part of her book, how unreliable and western-biased assumptions most development economists base their theoretical work. She shows in particular that misleading official statistics are handled uncritically, that the significance of innate rural inequality is consistently ignored and the...

Anthropologists and economists have made persistent efforts to identify economic features of rural tropical economies in the simplest possible terms, in order to enhance their universality. This has resulted in the creation of doctrine on such matters as the causes of rural economic inequality and abysmal poverty. The doctrine is far too generalised to have any practical utility; it is ahistorical; and it usually involves the false belief that all cultivators in a community have similar economic responses. So firm is this orthodoxy that under-development studies have become deadlocked - to...

This book, which reports on fieldwork done in an exceedingly densely populated locality of rural Hausaland (Dorayi) in 1971 1972, is complete in itself. In it Dr Hill compares and contrasts Dorayi with the much less densely populated village of her previous study, with special reference to the consequences of high and persistent population density; she also attempts to interpret the present-day stability of this stagnating, impoverished, overcrowded community in terms of socio-economic conditions in rural Kano Emirate generally in very early colonial times, utilising archival as well as field...

This series of Classics in African Anthropology is primarily drawn from a distinct family of texts which dominated the academic analysis of society in mid-20th century Africa. The texts reproduced are significant yet often neglected, and have stood the test of time. Polly Hill's classic study was originally published in 1963. New edition published in association with the International African Institute North America: Transaction Books; Germany: Lit Verlag.

Originally published in 1970, this is a collection of studies of indigenous economies in Ghana and Nigeria by an author with an unusual interdisciplinary approach. In the opening section it is contended that most economists interested in underdeveloped countries have neglected the detailed study of economic organization and mechanism in the field, especially in rural areas, and that, as a result, there has been little testing of many conventional implicit assumptions that happen to be invalid. The subsequent chapters of the book are both a vigorous corrective to socio-economic generalisations...

This book was originally published in 1972 and relates to the Hausa-speaking people of West Africa. At the time of publication there were perhaps as many as 15 million Hausa-speaking people in the area, most of whom lived in the countryside in northern Nigeria and the neighbouring Niger Republic. This book is at once an examination of the socio-economic life of a small Hausa village and a study of the way of life of the rural Hausa generally. The book as a whole provides a wide-ranging survey both of what was known and of what was, and in some cases still is, little understood. Very few books...