Polly Hill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Polly Hill, (June 14, 1914-August 21, 2005) was an economic historian of West Africa, and an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
She came from a family of distinguished academics – her father, A. V. Hill, had earned a Nobel prize in physiology. Her mother Margaret Keynes was a daughter of the economist John Neville Keynes, and sister of the economist John Maynard Keynes and the surgeon Geoffrey Keynes. Her own brothers were the physiologist David Keynes Hill and the oceanographer Maurice Hill, while her sister Janet married the immunologist John Herbert Humphrey.
Her own academic contribution was on the economics of development and began to take shape only after she had spent eleven years as a civil servant and then a nearly equal amount of time at the University of Ghana, with an interlude in journalism (1951-53) for the weekly West Africa. She was at the University of Ghana between 1954 and 1965, at a time when many African nations broke out from colonial rule.
She examined the preconceptions with which the Western world understood and approached economic assistance to developing nations. In 1963, she published The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana, which portrayed and documented the emergence of a class of dynamic indigenous entrepreneurs, who developed as they grew a complex infrastructure that the colonial government could not provide.
In 1967, she received a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge and was appointed as Smuts reader in Commonwealth studies from 1971 to 1979. She became a Fellow of Clare Hall and published many influential books, among them the famous Development Economics on Trial (1986).
Even today, economic aid to developing nations too often takes the form of loans that pay for consultancies and contracts provided by the donor nation, indebting the receiver for projects that are designed to fit the donor's interests, with the predictable distortions on the local economy and government. This way of doing things and its supporting tenets in the early economy of development, however, have come under increasing scrutiny and can no longer be legitimised under the guise of sound economic principles. Polly Hill, bringing a rich intellectual heritage to fruition, was one of the first to ask disquieting, but productive questions.
