Chapter 5 explores the construction of women, especially young women, as dubious and untrustworthy figures in male discourse, a source of cynicism and doubt about kinship’s future. It captures men’s fears about ‘greedy’ women and ‘gold diggers’ who only want to marry men in order to expropriate their wealth. At the same time, the chapter explores counter-discourses of young women getting by in a world of male failure, their relations with their male kin, and their ambitions to become successful ‘hustlers’ in their own right. Speaking to regional literature on love, marriage, and youth relationships, it explores the gendered tensions created by a world of masculine destitution, illuminating male fears about the capacity of women to exploit their ‘in-betweenness’ to acquire patrilineal land.

This chapter goes inland, looking for a good measure of travel time to the nearest international slave port as a measure of societal exposure to international slave traders on the coast. It quantifies African transportation technology, accounting for the effects of ground cover (rainforest versus desert, for example), terrain (uphill or downhill), river velocity, headload, and local knowledge about the best path forward. In seeking a good measure, we visit early nineteenth-century Metropolitan Asante, where “location marked time.” We then catch passage to Europe during the Industrial Revolution, where innovation in clock technology allowed “time to mark location,” especially valuable at sea but eventually miniaturized enough to become the most valuable instrument an explorer could carry. Then, back to Africa, where we use the latest technology of the Industrial Revolution to measure travel time again. We learn how a mosaic captures history, feel the burden of headload, see how rivers unite and mountains divide, and appreciate the importance of relying on local knowledge about the best path forward. We can know all of this now thanks to modern GIS computer software.

Chapter 1 introduces the region of Kiambu in detail, establishing the stakes of moral debate over wealth amongst men in the region. While an older generation preaches the labour ideology (the notion that hard work will bring success) that allowed them to prosper in the aftermath of independence, it has been undermined by dwindling land holdings and opportunities for ‘off-farm income’, creating a crisis of hopelessness as young men wonder if they will ever reach the ‘level’ of their elders. Framing the study of masculine destitution to follow, the chapter discusses the legacies of the ‘Kenya Debate’, a regional debate in political economy about the relative prosperity of Kenya’s peasantry after independence. It argues for a processual, non-static approach to economic change in central Kenya, allowing us to see how class divides have been opened across generations due to population pressure on land. Its subdivision within families exerts stronger pressure on young family members who find themselves in the situation of being virtual paupers – land poor and ‘hustling’ for cash.

This chapter begins by describing the mirror image between Africa and Europe and what it looked like on the dawn of colonial occupation, as described by Western anthropologists. In Europe, we find freedom, monogamy, the rule of law, patrilineal descent, and WEIRD people (Western, educated, industrialized, reading, and developed). In Africa, we find the opposite: slavery, polygyny, customary law, matrilineal descent, and not WEIRD. The proposed explanation for the difference, and the one that also explains the mirror image quality of the comparison, is freedom as a widespread social norm in Western Europe and slavery as a widespread social norm in Africa. The chapter then presents the conceptual framework behind the historical explanation. It highlights the difference between norms and institutions; discusses slavery and freedom as social norms; defines the institutions that preserve slave wealth; highlights the distinctions between “freedom” and “liberty”; and describes the inefficiencies of slavery and how its abolition unleashes freedom dividends.

This chapter contains four sections. The first uses the myth of Prester and the diary of Vasco da Gama’s 1497 voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to suggest counterfactuals of what could have been. The second section offers two solutions to the matrilineal puzzle and why matriliny survives in Africa today. The third section places King Cotton in historical perspective, highlighting similarities between the United States as a “republic” of slaveholders and medieval Germanic tribes as “assemblies” of slave holders. It argues that King Cotton was the wealthiest slave system in human history. The fourth section discusses how reparations for slavery can expand freedom and development. In the United States, reparations could end the racial blame game on both sides of the culture wars and simultaneously unleash new freedoms and development by financing universal baby bonds. In Africa, the raid-or-be-raided equilibrium weakens internal claims and strengthens external claims. Indirect colonial rule strengthened aristocratic slave authorities and persists today as customary law, rendering them susceptible to local reparations claims for expanded freedom and economic development.

Chapter 4 turns towards the role of women’s work in reproducing the household, focusing on the labour of relation-making in the neighbourhood as a means of creating economic networks through which material assistance can be sought. Commenting on anthropological literature that frames African contexts as ones of ‘mutuality’ and ‘obligation’, the chapter discusses the difficulty of finding assistance for aspirational projects (especially school fees) in an atomised neighbourhood where families compete for the prestige of economic advancement. It remarks upon the possibilities and limits of caring labour as a means through which women enter into economic relations of mutual support with others.

New evidence requires a reinterpretation of Africa’s precolonial economic history, which can now be extended back to the thirteenth century. During this period, Africa became the hunting ground for the slaves of both Christian and Muslim empires, not because African slave markets were already well developed, but because environmental constraints on agricultural productivity imposed severe limitations on the ability to accumulate wealth, including slave wealth. Regional divergence follows the spread of “freedom” in Europe and “slavery” in Africa. The penetration of international slave markets, especially capitalist ones in the eighteenth century, often evolved into a region-wide arms race of “raid or be raided” that few Africans could escape, even if they wanted to. Institutions spread that were better suited for capturing people and transporting them to the coast – slavery, polygyny, matrilineal descent, and weak political institutions: the mirror image of Europe.

Chapter 3 shows how older men, established patriarchs, wrestle with the temptation to sell their land and live lives of ‘fun’, abandoning their obligations to pass on wealth to future generations. Speaking to a rich regional literature on fatherhood and provider masculinity, it unveils a local politics of masculine responsibility, focusing on the question of land sale and fatherly obligation. Adult men from the Ituura neighbourhood who work for wages in the informal economy to support their families are shown to condemn other ‘bad’ men who sell their family land to live ‘comfortable’ lives of short-term consumption. The discourses of self-styled moral men valorise their self-disciplined control of a desire to consume wealth against the grain of immorality they perceive in the neighbourhood and beyond, especially by retaining their ancestral land. Complicating these heroic narratives of economic striving, the chapter explores the life circumstances that force land sale, as well as a growing cynicism amongst working-aged men towards the obligations of patrilineal kinship.

This chapter integrates the economic history of capitalism, with its emphasis on freedom and innovation, and the new history of capitalism, with its emphasis on slavery and exploitation. It uses a general equilibrium model of the British Triangular Trade to identify when and where slave or free sectors drove economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British Empire. Price movements imply that the expansion of West Indian sugar slavery drove the expansion of British sugar manufacturing in the early eighteenth century; that manufacturing expansion and the industrious revolution in sugar consumption patterns drove the expansion of West Indian sugar slavery in the middle of the eighteenth century. Sugar slavery returns to the driver’s position as Britain approached the abolition of its slave trade in 1807. Price movements also imply that cotton US slavery drove the expansion of British textiles manufacturing between Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1794 and the expansion of American textiles following the establishment of the Boston Manufacturing Company in 1813.

Chapter 6 shows how the history of land reform in central Kenya, dating back to the late colonial period, has shaped a situation of scarcity in which access to land, and contestation over it, has become highly gendered. Engaging with regional literature on land, kinship, and economic change, it discusses the micro-politics of ‘intimate exclusion’ that plays out in inheritance disputes, with young men trying to exclude their sisters from inheriting precious land. Meanwhile, older men try to argue for their daughters’ ability to inherit, citing wider legal change and the rising rates of divorce. The chapter discusses the intimate politics of envy and competition, exploring ‘zero-sum’ family disputes over wealth, demonstrating the moral arguments for ‘inclusion’ that are made by senior men, and attempts to control and mitigate greed-fuelled conflicts in the future through fair distribution.