By the second decade of independence, Uganda’s economy groaned under the pressures of domestic misrule and international turbulence. This chapter traces the variety of popular and state reactions as price inflation and commodity shortages came to prevail. Some Ugandans experienced shortages as an affront to their ethical expectations about merit and redistribution; they accused their compatriots of misdeeds and demanded their government better manage the economy. In response, large domains of economic life were criminalized as the state tried to redirect trade toward avenues more easily taxed or regulated, including through an Economic Crimes Tribunal that indicted innumerable Ugandans. Yet, smuggling, hoarding, and overcharging proved especially bedeviling to the state, Drawing on a range of police investigations, trial records, and petitions, this chapter details the sorts of opportunistic exchanges and engagements that characterized Uganda in the 1970s, an improvisational mix of dissidence and claims-making, acquiescence and rebuke that radically challenged sovereignty and citizenship.

For many postcolonies, a national currency—like a constitution, flag, or passport—was a necessary accompaniment to independence. Money and credit were more than potent symbols of decolonization; they were means of constituting a new political order. This Introduction argues that the monetary regimes established in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania aimed to remake their independent societies, turning savings, loans, and other financial instruments into the infrastructure of citizenship and statecraft. These instruments tried to create a “government of value” in which personal interest and collective advance were aligned through mechanisms that were simultaneously ethical and economic, cultural and political. They did so because colonial subjects experienced empire as not only political domination but also a constraint on economic liberties. Yet, the ensuing decolonization was at best partial, not least because the value of national currencies depended on the accumulation of foreign money. Moreover, the independent political economy of East Africa created new inequalities and divisions. Struggles over money, credit, and commodities would animate a series of struggles between bankers and bureaucrats, farmers and smugglers in the coming decades. By detailing the notion of the “moneychanger state,” this chapter provides the conceptual frameworks to understand these conflicts in new ways.

This chapter reconstructs the ethical ambiguities and popular anxieties that emerged during a spectacular period of coffee smuggling in the 1970s, centered in Chepkube village near the border of Kenya and Uganda. The criminalized trade provided residents with newfound wealth and consumptive possibility; magendo, as it was known, also was a stark challenge to the Ugandan state’s ability to monopolize the valuation of its most important export. However, participants’ unease did not reflect the illegality of magendo. Rather, the excessive and rapid riches acquired through coffee smuggling challenged prevailing ideas of propriety, respectability, and morality. In other words, existing ideas about how proper value should be morally produced—through laborious effort and familial networks—were undermined by the sudden revaluation of coffee. Smuggling is a form of arbitrage, a style of economic action premised on the capitalization on disjunctures of jurisdiction, of measurement, and of appearance. Magendo participants actively worked to produce such differences in order to acquire wealth; yet arbitrage generated an ambiguous mix of desire and disdain. Based on oral histories and fieldwork on both sides of the border, this chapter reveals how the careful orchestration of social relations and material goods is at the heart of valuation, and it emphasizes how popular valuation practices change and conflict with state projects of governing value and defining citizenship.

Beginning in the late colonial period, banking and money became a central interface between the state and its subjects, with Ugandans demanding greater access to credit. In the years after independence, the government responded to expectations of commercial liberty by using savings and loans to turn colonial subjects into credible citizens—dutiful producers of export value whose personal “banking habit” would serve the nation as a whole. Whether through the Bank of Uganda’s national currency or the Uganda Commercial Bank’s vans circling the countryside, economic citizenship tried to sidestep the nation’s lack of affective solidarities by weaving together monetary ties. For many, this was welcome, but simultaneously, these financial interdependencies limited exchange across territorial borders. As a result, some people—among them, Asians, migrants, and residents of the border regions—were cast as suspicious subverters of the nation-state. Rather than a question of merely inclusion or exclusion, this chapter shows that postcolonial citizenship worked through “enforced membership,” as national currency imposed inclusion within the state’s monopoly on valuation, sometimes with violent implications (as in the case of the 1972 expulsion of Ugandan Asians).

In 1967, Tanzania nationalized many foreign companies as part of the Arusha Declaration’s effort to create socialism and self-reliance. Among the most important were the dominant British banks that shaped investment and exported capital. Building on transcripts, private diaries, correspondence from Barclays Bank, as well as other sources, this chapter analyses how politically independent Tanzania endeavored to remake finance. Economic self-determination depended, in part, on the negotiations between Barclays and Tanzania over how much compensation government would pay for the 1967 expropriation. At stake was not merely a final price; instead, the struggle for economic sovereignty depended on the ability to determine the accounting protocols through which price would be calculated and even to define the bundle of different assets that would be subject to valuation. It was on these technicalities that postcolonial statecraft depended, meaning formulas and figures were imbued with political importance and ethical significance. Yet, ultimately, Tanzania found its authority to govern value was stymied by the enduring inequalities of the global capitalist order.

This chapter explores Angang and Northeast China during the economic reforms following Mao’s death in 1976. As the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) developmental strategy shifted its focus to export-oriented light industry, regions with a greater presence of heavy industry such as Northeast China fared worse than light industry regions such as East China. Despite a series of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms including privatization, the PRC further integrated larger SOEs such as Angang into the party-state bureaucracy. The final echo of the Maoist era emerged in the form of SOE workers protesting for job security and social welfare benefits by appropriating the socialist discourse of the state. As China moved away from socialist industrialization, the legacies of this period in Northeast China transformed the region into a rust belt filled with ageing, unprofitable SOEs in heavy industry.

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

Chapter 5 turns to elite consumption of foreign luxury goods. This detour from the book’s narrative of Plebeian consumption is necessary in order to question the historiography that has equated “foreign goods” with “luxury goods.” This chapter looks at how nineteenth-century Colombian elites incorporated European luxury consumer goods – clocks, books, umbrellas, clothing, and musical instruments – into practices of social distinction and cultural expression in a reaction against ordinary people’s way of life. In this way, the chapter highlights that, when it came to their own consumption, the category of “foreign commodities” in nineteenth-century Colombia was flexible for the members of the upper classes, with particular political and social ramifications.

Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project, based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. It explores how for those in power as well as for those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity. By so doing, the chapter reveals that in nineteenth-century Colombia, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.