The Moneychanger state

Decolonization in East Africa was more than a political event: it was a step toward economic self-determination. In this innovative book, historian and anthropologist Kevin P. Donovan analyzes the contradictions of economic sovereignty and citizenship in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, placing money, credit, and smuggling at the center of the region’s shifting fortunes. Using detailed archival and ethnographic research undertaken across the region, Donovan reframes twentieth-century statecraft and argues that self-determination was, at most, partially fulfilled, with state monetary infrastructures doing as much to produce divisions and inequality as they did to produce nations. A range of dissident practices, including smuggling and counterfeiting, arose as people produced value on their own terms. Weaving together discussions of currency controls, bank nationalizations, and coffee smuggling with wider conceptual interventions, Money, Value, and the State traces the struggles among bankers, bureaucrats, farmers, and smugglers that shaped East Africa’s postcolonial political economy.