Return to Cambridge, Between Disciplines
Concerned that her daughter was at risk from malaria, Hill left Ghana in 1965, becoming a non-stipendiary Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and obtaining small research grants that funded her fieldwork in Hausaland in northern Nigeria from 1965 to 1973 (Hill 1972, 1977, 1982). Her major work, The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana (1963), was accepted by Cambridge in 1967 as a PhD dissertation in social anthropology supervised by Cambridge’s radical Keynesian economics professor, Joan Robinson (who had been cited, together with Keynes, by Hill (1940: 195, fn. 1); see Robinson (1979) for her views on development and underdevelopment). Hill held a prestigious, but fixed-term, appointment at Cambridge as Smuts Reader in Commonwealth Studies from 1973 to 1979, but never received a permanent academic position despite publishing nine books and 50 scholarly journal articles in anthropology and economics. Another student of West African trade and markets, Peter Bauer (1954), politically more conservative than Keynes, let alone Robinson (although he had been in Keynes’s Political Economy Club as a student), had gone on from the Smuts Readership to become a Professor at the London School of Economics, a Fellow of the British Academy and a peer, and receive several Festschrifts and, just before his death in 2002, the Cato Institute’s inaugural Milton Friedman Prize (worth $500,000) for ‘the advancement of liberty’ (see The Economist (2002: 76) deploring the failure to give Lord Bauer a Nobel Prize). However, no such academic appointments or honours followed Hill’s term as Smuts Reader, apart from an honorary doctorate from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 1996.
In his Foreword to Hill’s Studies in Rural Capitalism in West Africa (1970: xviii—xix), Yale development economist Stephen Hymer reported that
Polly Hill’s major discovery is that, contrary to the usual view of an amorphous peasantry, the accumulation of capital in indigenous West African economies has been accompanied by the emergence of specialists who own and manage the capital stock—a ‘class’ of rural capitalists. She has, therefore, concentrated on the behavioural characteristics of these capitalists; on the problems they face and their methods of solving them; on their attitude towards wealth and their notions of the correct ways to invest money, to manage labour, and to preserve capital through time
and especially
the rules of thumb used by businessmen to make decisions in an environment they only partially understand ... The analogy is not water running down a hill but mice running through a maze ... The major problem of capital accumulation in underdeveloped economies is not so much a shortage of savings but a lack of institutions to channel the existing or latent surplus into productive investment.[1]
Hill thus looked at subject matter that might be expected to interest economists rather than anthropologists, but asked questions of the material that would occur more naturally to anthropologists than to economists. Her academic career was not helped by not being easily recognizable as a practitioner of one discipline or the other. Her sharp criticism of economics and economists, illustrated by the title of her book Development Economics on Trial: The Anthropological Case for a Prosecution (1986a), did not endear Hill to economists, while her account of the migrant cocoa farmers as entrepreneurial wealth creators was ignored by writers in other social sciences who treated all migrants as victims of capitalism (e.g. Samers 2010, a volume surveying migration in the Key Ideas in Geography series). Hill stressed what Africans and other people in developing countries had and could achieve for themselves, whereas, in the words of Hart (2005: 31), ‘The economists have been too busy telling them what to do and the anthropologists prefer to be their self-appointed spokespeople’.
- [1] See Green and Hymer (1966) on the relations between Ghanaian cocoa farmers and foreign agriculturalexperts, and Rouch (1956) for a contemporaneous study of Gold Coast migration.
