Polly Hill (1914-2005)

Robert W. Dimand and Kojo Saffu

Introduction

The economist and anthropologist Mary Eglantyne Hill (always known as Polly) was a leading figure in development studies and outspoken critic of development economics. Her work crossed disciplinary boundaries between economics, economic and social anthropology, entrepreneurship studies, and development studies: her first degree (at Cambridge) and first academic position (at what became the University of Ghana) were in economics, her doctorate was in social anthropology but supervised by the economist Joan Robinson, and her later appointments were in African Studies at the University of Ghana and in Commonwealth Studies at Cambridge (see Austin (1997), Hart (2005), Gregory (2006), Hammond and Mwanasali (1994), and especially the interview by Macfarlane (1996)).

Polly Hill was born in 1914, the eldest of four children of the Cambridge physiologist A.V Hill, later winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology

R.W. Dimand (*)

Professor of Economics, Department of Economics,

Brock University, Canada e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

K. Saffu (*)

Professor of Entrepreneurship, Goodman School of Business, Brock University, Canada e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_38

or Medicine and one of the founders of operational research (see A.V. Hill 1960), and of Margaret Hill, nee Keynes, active in social work and later a Royal Commission member. Polly read economics at Newnham College, Cambridge, but did not study directly with her uncle Maynard Keynes, despite her wish to be supervised by him (Skidelsky 2003: 527). She graduated with a 2.I, that is, in the upper half of a Second Class Honours degree at a time when a First Class Honours degree was required to proceed to doctoral study (Joan Robinson, later Hill’s dissertation adviser, was exceptional in achieving a Cambridge chair in economics despite a Second Class degree—see Aslanbeigui and Oakes 2009). Hill’s first employment after graduation was as editorial assistant to her uncle Maynard, the editor of the Economic Journal. From 1938 to the end of 1939, she was a researcher for the Fabian Society, writing a book-length report on The Unemployment Services (Hill 1940), concerning ‘the changes that should be made in the unemployment insurance scheme and the Unemployment Assistance Board in a Labour Government’s next term of office’ (ibid.: xi). Although by its terms of reference the book was ‘concerned with the relief and not the cure of unemployment’, Hill (ibid.: 182) sounded a characteristically Keynesian note that ‘[e]ven so it should be emphasised as strongly as possible...that a Labour Government would endeavour to keep unemployment within manageable limits through a policy of public loan expenditure (and rearmament would not be the only possible form of peace-time public loan expenditure as under the National Government)’ (ibid.). Contrary to Sir William Beveridge (then chairman of the Unemployment Insurance Statutory Committee), Hill supported proposals to improve the position of women by equalizing unemployment insurance contribution and benefit rates, noting that in 1936 men received unemployment benefits equal to 72% of their contributions to the insurance fund while women received benefits amounting to only 41% of their contributions.

From 1940 to 1951, she was a civil servant in London, first at the Treasury, then at the Board of Trade, and finally in the statistics department ofthe Colonial Office. From September 1940 to May 1941 she lived in the basement of 46 Gordon Square, the home of Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova (whose letters she later co-edited, Hill and Keynes 1989), and later during the war in the studio of the sculptor Henry Moore. ‘On 18 September [1940] he [Keynes], Polly, Fred Woollard (their chauffeur), Mrs. Stephens [Keynes’s secretary] and Mary (their maid) were eating a duck from Fortnum and Mason for supper when a landmine burst opposite their house. The shutters saved them from injury, but all the windows were broken and the front door unhinged’ (Skidelsky 2003: 604). Hill wrote a volume of poetry (Hill 1945) but later told Alan MacFarlane (1996) that she ‘languished’ as a civil servant.

In 1951, Hill became commercial editor ofthe weekly magazine, West Africa, which posted her to the Gold Coast (independent as Ghana from 1957) the following year. For eight years, from 1953, she was married to Kenneth Albert Curwood Humphreys, registrar of the West African Examinations Council, but always published under her maiden name. Their daughter Susannah was born when Polly was 42. In 1954, she became a Research Fellow in economics at the University College of the Gold Coast (later the University of Ghana), with a grant from the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research to study cocoa farmers. Ten field surveys distributed in the 19541955 crop year, nine of them distributed with the assistance of co-operative societies associated with the Gold Coast Co-operative Marketing Association, provided the material for The Gold Coast Cocoa Farmer: A Preliminary Survey (Hill 1956): ‘The survey technique was unorthodox, and much is tentative and conjectural; but I hope that the book will be received in the spirit it was written in—as a first contribution towards the understanding of the social organization of a fascinating industry’ (ibid.: v). Hill was a Research Fellow, and later Senior Research Fellow, at the University of Ghana until 1964 (see Hill 1957-1960), after spending the 1960-1961 academic year on leave from the University of Ghana as a Smuts Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University’s Department of Social Anthropology at the invitation of Professor Meyer Fortes (who wrote the foreword to Hill (1963), and, as ‘one of my two great teachers in the two disciplines’, shared with Joan Robinson the dedication to Hill (1986a)).

When she returned to the University of Ghana in 1961, she moved from Economics to the Institute of African Studies. As Fortes remarked in his foreword to Hill (1963), ‘Miss Hill calls herself a “field economist” to distinguish her methods from those of the more normal variety of economist who nowadays swoops down upon an “underdeveloped country” for a week or a month, peruses the files and the blue books, and presently produces a plan or a treatise’ (Fortes 1963: v). Contrasting Hill (1963) with W.H. Beckett’s Akokoaso: A Survey of a Gold Coast Village (1944), ‘still the most authoritative description of the social organization of cocoa-farming available to students’ (Fortes ibid.), Fortes wrote that

[w]hile he [Beckett] confined his attention to one long-settled village, she ranges extensively over a large area of the hinterland of Accra where cocoa was first established at the turn of this century; where Beckett’s interests are those of the agricultural economist concerned with the statistics of finance, production, acreages, labour and marketing, hers are closer to those of the economic anthropologist concerned with such matters as the leadership, enterprise, social composition, legal framework and historical development of cocoa-growers’ undertakings. Her principal sources are the people themselves, interviewed, as in anthropological fieldwork, in their villages; but she also draws brilliantly on the scattered documentary material she has been able to ferret out to give the historical depth to her narrative which clinches the case for her main thesis (ibid.).

As Beckett (1944) studied a single, long-settled village, it was he who discovered the role of migrant farmers.