ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the challenges of writing African economic history and examines the challenges of spatial and temporal scales. It looks at themes and theories and focuses on the challenges of drawing intra- and intercontinental comparisons and connections. The chapter presents personal and theoretical reflections on the challenges of writing an economic history of Africa that is integrated in thematic, spatial, and temporal terms. It is an argument for an inclusive methodology, for interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary analysis. An integrated economic history of Africa must show the existence of intracontinental linkages. African history in general, let alone African economic history, has yet to find a satisfactory periodization. The teleological tales of modernization theory, with its evolutionary assumptions and irreconcilable dualisms of "traditional-modern" societies, "subsistence-market" economies, and "formal-informal" sectors, seemed particularly uninformative. Development theory began to fall from its ideological pedestal in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to internal and external critiques and profound transformations in the world political economy.
