"The rupee disease": Taxation, authority, and social conditions in early colonial Uganda

International Journal of African Historical Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 221-245

  Tuck, Michael W ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950269890     PISSN: 03617882     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. More substantial than Wild was D.A. Low, "The Making and Implementation of the Uganda Agreement of 1900," Part One of D. Anthony Low and R. Cranford Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule, 1900-1955 (London, 1960), which was produced at the East African Institute for Social Research (EAISR), Makerere, in the formative period of the academic study of Uganda.
2. The only other work directly on the agreement was an article (based solely on secondary sources): Viera E. Pawlikova, "Buganda and the Agreement of 1900," Asian and African Studies (Slovakia) IV (1968), 93-112.
3. J.A. Atanda, "The Bakopi in the Kingdom of Buganda, 1900-1912: An Analysis of the Condition of the Peasant Class in the Early Colonial Period," Uganda Journal, 33, 2 (1969), 151-62.
4. Atanda, "Bakopi in the Kingdom of Buganda," 155.
5. These archives were found in two sets. The first, from 1901 to 1906, were found among documents of the Mill Hill Missionaries. They had an observer taking notes at Lukiiko meetings in order for the mission to keep up to date on happenings in the Protectorate. The second set, from 1905-1909 and 1914-1917, were official Lukiiko records that were translated into English at MISR (Makerere Institute for Social Research) in the mid-1950s. See Michael W. Tuck and John A. Rowe, "Phoenix from the Ashes: Rediscovery of the Lost Lukiiko Archives," History in Africa 32 (2005), 403-14.
6. Jane I. Guyer, ed., Money Matters: Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities (Portsmouth, N.H., 1995), and especially the chapter by Kwame Arhin.
7. Kwame Arhin, "Monetization and the Asante State," in Guyer, Money Matters, 102.
8. Holly Elisabeth Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003).
9. Low, "Making and Implementation of the Uganda Agreement," 58, 74.
10. For the most recent analysis of the impact of long distance trade see Richard Reid, Political Power in Precolonial Buganda (Oxford, 2002), 149-71.
11. John Roscoe, The Baganda, (1911; reprint, London, 1965), 244.
12. I would like to thank Mikael Karlström for sharing his views about taxation and monetization with me, and for pointing out the regressive nature of the colonial taxes. For a discussion about regressive taxation and unequal distribution of revenues in Uganda which mainly focuses on a later period, see Vali Jamal, "Taxation and Inequality in Uganda, 1900-1964," Journal of Economic History, 38, 2 (June 1978), 418-38.
13. Apolo Kagwa, The Customs of the Baganda, ed. May Mandelbaum Edel, trans., Ernest B. Kalibala (1934; reprint, New York, 1969), 94-95.
14. Roscoe, The Baganda, 244.
15. J. Miti, "History of Buganda," translated by G. Rock (Makerere University Library, no date, Folder 2), 378.
16. This is not a quote from the treaty, which established a revenue board with the British Resident as president, but it evidently does reflect Ganda views of the circumstances. For the treaty see Wild, The Story of the Uganda Agreement, 45-50.
17. Miti, "History of Buganda," 414. I can find no information on what these taxes were, except for a mention in some Mill Hill papers of a "pole tax" of 200 shells;
18. Miti, "History of Buganda," 465-66.
19. Low, "Making and Implementation of the Uganda Agreement," 12.
20. Ham Mukasa, "Some Notes on the Reign of Mutesa," Uganda Journal 2 (July 1934), 69-70.
21. R.C. Pratt, "The Politics of Indirect Rule: Uganda, 1900-1955," Part Two of Low and Pratt, Buganda and British Overrule, 184.
22. Albert R. Cook, Uganda Memories (Kampala, 1945), 142.
23. "Uganda Under the New Treaty," Mengo Notes, I, VIII (Dec. 1900), 31-32.
24. In 1893 Gerald Portal had given some thought to a system of paper currency, but it was never introduced; Gerald Portal, The British Mission to Uganda in 1893, edited with a memoir by Rennell Redd, (London, 1894), 211.
25. For a general discussion of currencies and monetization in African colonies, see Ralph Austen, African Economic History (London, 1987), 134-36.
26. Cook, Uganda Memories, 238.
27. My thoughts on issues of culture and currency are based in part on my reading of Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, "Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange," in J. Parry and M. Bloch, eds., Money and the Morality of Exchange (New York, 1989), 1-32. Thanks to Mikael Karlström for referring this work to me.
28. L.P. Mair, An African People in the Twentieth Century (London, 1934), 81-83.
29. George Wilson to A.J. Tumbull, 5 March 1906, "National Bank of India: Proposed Branch at Entebbe," File 197/06, Item 2, Uganda National Archives, cited in Jan Jelmert Jorgensen, Uganda: A Modern History (New York, 1981), 50.
30. For a picture of an individual with such strands of shells see C.W. Hattersley, The Baganda at Home (1908; reprint, London, 1968), 61.
31. Hattersley, Baganda at Home, 42.
32. A Post Office Savings Bank was opened in Uganda after 1901, while the first comprehensive bank was opened in 1906; Cook, Uganda Memories, 153;
33. H.B. Thomas and Robert Scott, Uganda (Oxford, 1935), 355.
34. Hanson, Landed Obligation, 150.
35. Letter from J. Biermans, Buvuma, 12 October 1901, in Nsambya Diary, October 15, 1901, UGA Box 5, File a, Book 5, MHA-L.
36. For a discussion of gender and economic access in colonial Africa see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women: A Modern History, trans. Beth Gillian Raps (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 59-69.
37. Jan Kuhanen, Poverty, Health, and Reproduction in Early Colonial Uganda (Joensuu, 2005), 206-7.
38. For the broader context of forced labor in the colonial period see Michael Twaddle, "Slaves and Peasants in Buganda," in Leonie J. Archer, ed., Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour (London, 1988), 118-129.
39. Atanda, "The Bakopi in the Kingdom of Buganda," 151-62.
40. Atanda, "The Bakopi in the Kingdom of Buganda," 155.
41. Miti, "History of Buganda," 736.
42. Miti, "History of Buganda," 738.
43. Michael Twaddle, Kakungulu & the Create of Uganda: 1868-1928 (London, 1993), 205.
44. Lukiiko notes, 18 July 1904, Book 14, June 17, 1904 to 13 October 1905, MHA-L.