In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa, HistoryProfessor Rhiannon Stephens, offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past 2,000 years. This book serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region, and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write about societies without written records before the 19th century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras by using comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. By showing the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in the region long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about economic and social inequality.