The History of Business in Africa: Introduction

Africa evokes an image of poverty and underdevelopment. The painful emigration of millions of people annually underlines this. Africa also evokes a dramatic distant history from slave trade to colonisation. Africa is nevertheless full of contradictions. Across its vastly diverse regions, in a process of non-linear growth, enterprises or groups of enterprises have emerged, actors able to mobilise the most advanced technical and organisational resources. It is the enterprise, both private and state-owned, being able to act effectively on the market, to be the protagonist of modernisation and development, that rose in response to market opportunities and that has put Africa on the post-liberalisation trajectory to global engagement. This book is the first systematic study on African enterprise in its different typologies of size and organisation. This book underlines the geographical differences, the dynamically changing policy and the institutional context volatility of African business development. Using a longue durée approach, it wants to explain the reality of the present.