2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
In Buin, shell currency could secure pigs, pigs could furnish feasts, and feasts could turn wealth into standing. Richard C. Thurnwald’s 1934 article follows these connections to ask how calculation and profit operate within relationships of kinship, dependence, and reciprocal obligation. Drawing on fieldwork in Bougainville and comparison with his earlier observations, he describes chiefs who lend valuables, households reluctant to slaughter their own pigs, and wealthy men whose exchange skills challenge hereditary rank. The tension is concrete: circulation sustains authority but also gives others the means to contest it. His account lets readers examine the transactions behind his proposed pig-based standard of value, while distinguishing those observations from his more conjectural explanations of currency’s origins and social development.
Imperial conquest can advance even as imperial authority enters a crisis. In this 1936 article, Richard C. Thurnwald locates that contradiction partly in colonial education: schools train subordinates but also equip intellectuals to demand independence. His East African analysis follows less conspicuous transformations, as taxation, wages, missions, and administrative appointments reshape chiefly authority, kinship obligations, and social prestige. Political sovereignty, he argues, would not by itself undo dependence on distant markets or resolve conflicts over cultural inheritance. The article’s distinctive tension lies in its conjunction of support for African cultural autonomy with paternalistic judgments about African readiness for independence. Its concrete institutional observations allow readers to examine both the reach of colonial restructuring and the limits of Thurnwald’s attempt to treat imperialism as a process of cultural contact.