Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Discourse on anthropological political economy provides several overlapping genealogies (Rose-berry 1988; Vincent 1990; Moore 1993). All agree, however, that the juxtaposition of ‘political’ with ‘economy’ came with the invention of the concept of *capitalism by eighteenth-century ideologues such as James Steuart: what ‘economy’ was in a family, political economy was in a *state. Nation-states became actors in a worldwide drama. Thus political economists considered as a single project, for example, the colonization of India, the rise of the textile industry in Britain, and the status of Egypt within what they called the cosmopolitical economy.
Bifurcation set in early in the development of political economy as scholars began to question whether the state ought to act as paterfamilias. Increasingly the moral and governmental aspects of political economy were set aside and a separate discipline, economics, came into existence. In opposition to the classical focus on the *market and *consumption, popular political economists developed theories of *property and labour.
Based on experience with expanding industrial capitalism, they argued that capitalism did not simply adjust to, but positively required, crisis. The term political economy was thus revitalized and transformed into a rallying point for those critical of rampant capitalism.
Several features of classical and popular political economy have been assimilated into anthropology. When, in Ancient Society (1877), *Lewis Henry Morgan deplored what he called the property career of mankind, †Engels suggested that Morgan’s ethnology validated †Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism. The idea that what was thought of as ‘natural’—the family, the difference between men and women, women’s work, for example—was interlinked and connected with the political economy of the society and the existence of the state, did not gain wide circulation until the 1970s when feminism began to contribute critically to anthropological political economy.
Nineteenth-century German economists and historians developed a substantive critique of British political economy, questioning its focus on homo oeconomicus. Arguing the inapplicability of the British model of capitalism to agrarian Germany, they focused instead on cultural otherness. This, too, entered anthropology when political economists within the discipline began to question even more broadly whether neoclassical economics could be applied to non-Western, non-capitalist societies. This was taken up initially as a *formalist-substantivist debate between economic historians and anthropologists and was later revived in connection with *modernization theory and the analysis of capitalism’s impact on the non-Western world.
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