African Capitalisms through Evolutionary Economics

African Capitalisms through Evolutionary Economics invites the reader to understand African economies on their own terms, challenging lazy assumptions about what capitalism ‘should’ look like. Drawing on comparative research across Ethiopia, Ghana, and Tanzania, the book develops the concept of economic durability to explain how different capitalisms persist and transform under pressure, who enables that durability, and who pays for it.

Building on evolutionary economics research, the book treats capitalism as a historically evolving order shaped by experimentation, adaptation, conflict, path dependence, and power. Arrangements that look fragmented or inconsistent against an ideal model can still sustain a workable economic order, but often at a cost. Who bears that cost, who benefits, and whose interests shape adaptation are all questions of power. Moving between national institutions and the lived experience of households, enterprises, and communities, the book shows how economic actors negotiate, reproduce, contest, and reshape institutions through everyday economic life. The book considers administrative alignment in Ethiopia, institutional multiplicity in Ghana, and procedural embedding in Tanzania as examples of different approaches, demonstrating how an evolutionary perspective on economic development can highlight the diversity of capitalism.

As capitalisms around the world continue to evolve in the face of complex global and local challenges, this book offers an important framework for understanding how different institutional configurations navigate these pressures, why some endure while others unravel, and how power shapes both adaptation and its costs. This framework of economic durability will be important for researchers across the fields of economics, development studies, public policy, and African studies.