Social History of Alcohol in East Africa, 1850-1998

The main aims of this project were:<br> To re-examine the historical patterns of change in the making and drinking of alcohol in East Africa, and to use this history of change as a tool for studying wider debates concerning control of resources within the household, and for exploring ideas of what constitutes proper 'moral' behaviour.<br> To improve the current understanding of economic change in East Africa, with particular regard to conflicts over resources, along lines of gender and age.<br> To explore changing notions of obligation and morality, and of the family.<br> To produce new data on current patterns of domestic alcohol production and consumption in East Africa.<br> The study was undertaken within the context that newspapers, officials and religious leaders in East Africa often talked of how the consumption of alcohol had increased, and changed in the last 150 years. They described a past of 'integrated' alcohol consumption in which liquor was given and consumed in limited, culturally-defined settings and in which drinking was not problematic. They compared this with a present which they characterised as one of widespread excess and moral breakdown, in which alcohol had become a commodity and social relationships had been fractured. This image of change has been taken up by several academic writers. This 'crisis' model has developed alongside a quite different school of academic literature on alcohol in Africa as a whole, which has been largely the work of historians and which has, for the colonial period in particular, been built around a simple control-resistance model which celebrates the sale of locally-made alcohol as a field for economic and social challenges to state and capital.<br> <br>