Kevin P. Donovan, "Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

In his book, Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Kevin Donovan argues that East African decolonization was not coterminous with political sovereignty but rather consisted of a longer process of reorganizing how value was legitimately defined, produced, and distributed. It is an analysis of how postcolonial states tried to remake economic temporalities, space, and standards and how citizens pursued alternatives that subverted economic sovereignty. This is a story of central banking, national currencies, and coffee smuggling, as well as rites of initiation and econometric modelling. An article from the project -- on coffee smuggling, kinship relations, and measurement devices -- was published in Cultural Anthropology, and one on economic crimes, scarcity, and accusation was published in Journal of African History.

Kevin Donovan is an anthropologist and historian of East Africa. He works in the fields of economic and political anthropology, African history, and science & technology studies at the University of Edinburgh as a Senior Lecturer.

Sara Katz has a Ph.D. in African History from the University of Michigan, and is currently a Project Manager in the Office of Global Affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle.