Economic Inequality and Rural Entrepreneurship: Polly Hill on Rural Capitalism in West Africa

Abstract The relationship between economic inequality and entrepreneurship has received the attention of scholars who have advised researchers to ‘use new data and seek new methods to study economic inequality.’ We examine a neglected source of such data and methods, Polly Hill’s The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana (1963) and Studies in Rural Capitalism in West Africa (1970), which stressed the agency of rural entrepreneurs. According to Hill, economic inequality is synonymous with rural tropical economies. Hill highlights inequality between richer and poorer farmers ignored by development economists. Her approach was cross-disciplinary, with an economics BA and anthropology PhD (supervised by economist Joan Robinson). She was a fellow in African Studies in Ghana and reader in Commonwealth Studies at Cambridge. In keeping with Hill’s cross-disciplinarity, this paper is jointly written by an economist and by an entrepreneurship professor.