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Traditional Contracts in German East Africa: The Transition from Pre-Capitalist Forms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Extract

The material which forms the subject matter of this article constituted a chapter of a PhD thesis presented to London University in 1980. The thesis was based largely on the answers to Kohler's questionnaire which was distributed by the German colonial authorities throughout what was then German East Africa in 1909. A recent article in the Journal of African Law describes these questionnaires in detail. Bibliographical references in the following text to the answers to the questionnaires follow the numbers assigned to them by Ankermann (1929) and used in the list in Redmayne and Rogers' article. Some answers were published at the time and these are referred to in the same way as normal bibliographical entries Some use has also been made of Post's earlier questionnaire which, together with the answers, was published under the editorship of Steinmetz (1903). Post's questionnaire was written in 1895 and distributed throughout the German colonies. The thesis dealt with land tenure and contract and so covered the field of the answers in the questionnaires dealing with those topics. It also set out a typology of African societies at the time the questionnaires were distributed, based on what could be discovered of their economic and social relations. As it turned out this typology proved rather more useful in establishing connections between economic relations and forms of land tenure than it was in establishing connections with such relations and contractual liability.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1986

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