ABSTRACT
Cooperation is an age-old organisational strategy for humans and fellow social beings. However, the dominant framing of cooperatives, as captured in the movement’s founding myths and accepted uncritically in scholarship, policymaking and advocacy, presents it as an organisational form pioneered, or at least ushered into modernity, in Western Europe from the mid-to-late 19th century, from when it spread to the rest of the world. This chapter questions and rejects this Europe-centre framing, illustrating that it is predicated on distortions of imperialist logic. It outlines cooperative epistemologies from the rest of the world obscured by the Europe-as-centre orthodoxy, providing a detailed account of the cooperative model implicit in the African philosophy of ubu-ntu to highlight that these marginalised cooperative epistemologies contain important differences that can broaden and correct the dominant paradigm. It concludes that the cooperative field needs a new research agenda built on reparative theories and methodologies to overcome its historical missteps and develop a multi-regional account of cooperative economics, ultimately enriching and making the field more globally relevant.
