Capitalist redux: the scramble for Africa’s workers

I haven’t normally used the language of capitalism in my research on African informal economies – I’ve tended to stick to terms like ‘market economy’ or ‘market society’. This is not because I feel capitalism is not relevant, but because the conventional blueprints of capitalist analysis have not been well adapted to the processes of labour informalization, ethnic and religious networking, and hybrid governance on which my research has focused.