The problem in determining what areas of research should be discussed under the rubric of African economic history lies less in the definition of the term “economic” than in that of “African” and of “history.” For a subfield like this historians must lean to some extent upon the work of other Africanist social scientists. There does exist a considerable body of writing by economists and anthropologists about economic activities in Africa. However, the economists have concentrated their efforts upon those sectors of the contemporary African economy which, at least historically, are identified with alien enterprises. Anthropologists do write about economic systems rooted in the indigenous African past, but their focus has been almost entirely upon the arrival of “primitive”--that is, subsistence-oriented--levels of production and exchange within these systems, thus offering little insight into the dynamics of historical development.

Historians can, of course, learn a great deal from these studies and must consider the Impact of European enterprise and the role of subsistence sectors in their own work. But if economic history is to make a major contribution to African studies, it must attempt to explore the continuities between past and present; this requires attention to what one important recent contribution has called “an intermediate category” located “midway between subsistence and a fully-fledged market economy” (Gray and Birmingham 1970, pp. 4, 1). The only serious attempt to investigate such developments has been in the further subfield of precolonial trading history, which will be discussed first in this paper.