| Title | Chapter 2: A history of international trade in Lesotho |
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| DOI | https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2025.BK536.02 |
| Landing page | https://books.aosis.co.za/index.php/ob/catalog/book/536 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Denis Nfor Yuni & Tsotang Tsietsi (eds.). Licensee: AOSIS (Pty) Ltd. The moral rights of the editors and authors have been asserted. |
| Publisher | AOSIS |
| Long abstract | This chapter examines the history of international trade in Lesotho. It compares three major epochs that frame the rise and fall of Lesotho’s economic development, which is important in understanding the roots and trajectories of Lesotho’s participation in international trade. Historical evidence used to chronicle this history demonstrates that Lesotho moved from a state of economic significance in emergent international trade networks in the first half of the 19th century to an insignificant player since the second half of the 19th century. This shift began with the exploitation of minerals in southern Africa. The post-colonial development models of the developmental state and neoliberal economic organisation between the 1960s and 1990s could hardly reverse or advance Lesotho’s economic fortunes and symmetrical participation in international trade. |
| Print length | 16 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
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Noah Echa Attah is a professor of African Economic History and Development in the Department of Historical Studies at NUL, Lesotho. Attah holds a PhD and a Master of Arts (MA) in History from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, as well as a BA in History from Lagos State University, Nigeria. Attah’s research focuses on agrarian studies, environmental studies, natural resource conflicts and peacebuilding. He received the 2012 African Humanities Programme (AHP) research grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the African Peacebuilding Network (APN) Individual Research Grant from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 2017. From 2020 to 2022, Attah served as the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at the Federal University of Kashere, Nigeria. Attah is currently the principal investigator of a research project, ‘Policing and security provisioning in Nigeria: Exploring the policy and practice of non-state actors’, supported by the NRF of Nigeria’s Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund). Attah has published numerous scholarly papers in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and has successfully supervised both MA and PhD candidates.
Sean Maliehe is a senior lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at NUL, Lesotho. Maliehe holds a PhD in Economic History from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Maliehe’s research focuses on the history of enterprises in Lesotho, the development of mobile money in South Africa, the history of the Southern African Customs Union, and colonial currencies in the British High Commission Territories. He is also a research fellow at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Additionally, Maliehe has completed two postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pretoria’s Human Economy Programme within the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies. Maliehe is the author of Commerce as Politics: The two centuries of struggle for Basotho Economic Independence (Berghahn Books, 2021).