Polly Hill (14 June 1914 – 21 August 2005) was a British

social anthropologist Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...

of West Africa, and an Emeritus Fellow of

Clare Hall, Cambridge Clare Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. Founded in 1966 by Clare College, Clare Hall is a college for advanced study, admitting only postgraduate students alongside postdoctoral researchers and fellows. It ...

.''

Who Was Who ''Who's Who'' is a reference work. It is a book, and also a CD-ROM and a website, giving information on influential people from around the world. Published annually as a book since 1849, it lists people who influence British life, according to i ...

Life and career

Hill came from a family of distinguished academics – her father,

A. V. Hill Archibald Vivian Hill (26 September 1886 – 3 June 1977), known as A. V. Hill, was a British physiologist, one of the founders of the diverse disciplines of biophysics and operations research. He shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Me ...

, had earned a

Nobel prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...

physiology Physiology (; ) is the scientific study of functions and mechanisms in a living system. As a sub-discipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ systems, individual organs, cells, and biomolecules carry out the chemical ...

. Her mother Margaret Hill was a daughter of the economist

John Neville Keynes John Neville Keynes ( ; 31 August 1852 – 15 November 1949) was a British economist and father of John Maynard Keynes. Biography Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, Keynes was the child of John Keynes (1805–1878) and his wife Anna Maynard Neville ...

, and sister of the economist

John Maynard Keynes John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in ...

and the surgeon

Geoffrey Keynes Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes ( ; 25 March 1887, Cambridge – 5 July 1982, Cambridge) was a British surgeon and author. He began his career as a physician in World War I, before becoming a doctor at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where h ...

. Her own brothers were the physiologist

David Keynes Hill David Keynes Hill FRS (23 July 1915 – 18 August 2002) was a British biophysicist. Hill was the son of Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Vivian Hill and his wife Margaret Hill, the daughter of John Neville Keynes and sister of Jo ...

and the oceanographer Maurice Hill, while her sister Janet married the immunologist John Herbert Humphrey.http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/DO/filmshow/hill1_fast.htm Polly Hill interviewed by Alan Macfarlane, 20 July 1996 She graduated with a 2:1 in Economics from Newnham College, Cambridge University in 1933. In 1938 she was a research assistant at the Fabian Society, publishing a book on British unemployment. Hill spent eleven years (1940–51) as a civil servant in London, in the statistics department of the Colonial Office. She lived for a period during the war in Henry Moore's studio. After an interlude in journalism (1951–53) for the weekly ''West Africa'', she spent nearly eleven more years as a Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow at the

University of Ghana The University of Ghana is a public university located in Accra, Ghana. It the oldest and largest of the thirteen Ghanaian national public universities. The university was founded in 1948 as the University College of the Gold Coast in the Br ...

(initially University of the Gold Coast) between 1954 and 1965. She had an interlude as a Fellow at Cambridge, 1960–61, after which she returned to Ghana and shifted from Economics to the Centre for African Studies as a colleague of Thomas Hodgkin and

Ivor Wilks Professor Emeritus Ivor G. Wilks (19 July 1928 – 7 October 2014)"Professor Ivor Wilks is dead"
, Star ...

. In 1963, she published her magnum opus, ''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. She left Ghana 1965 as her daughter was at risk from malaria, moving back to Cambridge and became an unpaid research fellow at Clare Hall. She never held a permanent position in the UK. From 1965-73 she did fieldwork in Hausaland in Northern Nigeria supported by small research grants. In 1967, she received a PhD in

social anthropology Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...

from the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

, supervised by Joan Robinson. It was based on her work on migrant cocoa farmers. She was then appointed as fixed-term Smuts Reader in Commonwealth Studies from 1971 to 1979. In 1976-77, dissatisfied with economic anthropology at Cambridge, she lived in Sri Lanka and India and was able to produce a major comparative study with Nigeria (Hill 1982). She completed her last fieldwork at the age of 67. Hill published many other influential books, among them the famous ''Development Economics on Trial'' (1986). She examined economic aid to developing nations, arguing that aid often went to programmes designed to fit the donor's interests. In her latter years she wrote two books about her family and people of the Fens. She died in her daughter's home in Isleham, Cambridgeshire after suffering for 3 years with senile dementia. Her daughter is Susannah Burn, and Polly had 3 grandchildren, William, Matilda and Florence Burn.Hart, Keith (26 August 2005).
Polly Hill.
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Honours

Honorary doctorate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1996.

Main publications

* Hill, Polly. ''Two Sleepwalkers: Not an Autobiography''. Poems. Date unknown. * Hill, Polly. 1992. Who were the Fen People? ''Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society'' Volume LXXXI *Hill, Polly. 1992. ''Fante villages in southern Ghana : migration and the 'hopelessness' of food farming''. Cambridge : African Studies Centre, University of Cambridge. *Hill, Polly. 1990. ''The History of the Isleham Fen in the 1930s''. privately published. *Hill, Polly and Richard Keynes (ed.). 1989. ''Lydia and Maynard: letters between Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes''. London : Andrâe Deutsch. (reprint 1992, Papermac) *Hill, Polly. 1986. ''Development economics on trial: the anthropological case for a prosecution''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 0521271029 *Hill, Polly. 1986. ''Talking with Ewe seine fishermen and shallot farmers''. Recording and editing by Polly Hill. Cambridge: African Studies Centre, University of Cambridge. Cambridge African monographs v6 *Hill, Polly. 1984. ''Indigenous trade and market places in Ghana 1962-64''. material collected and edited by Polly Hill. Jos :Department of History, University of Jos *Hill, Polly. 1982. ''Dry grain farming families: Hausaland (Nigeria) and Karnataka (India) compared''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press *Hill, Polly. 1977. ''Population, prosperity, and poverty : rural Kano, 1900 and 1970''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press *Hill, Polly. 1972. ''Rural Hausa: a village and a setting''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Study with special reference to the village of Batagarawa) *Hill, Polly. 1970. ''The occupations of migrants in Ghana''. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan. Museum of Anthropology. Anthropological papers, no. 42 *Hill, Polly. 1970. ''Studies in rural capitalism in West Africa''. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press *Hill, Polly. 1963. ''The migrant cocoa-farmers of southern Ghana: a study in rural capitalism''. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press *Hill, Polly. 1956. ''The Gold Coast cocoa farmer : preliminary survey''. London : Oxford University Press 9889002495X *Hill, Polly. 1940. ''The unemployment services: a report prepared for the Fabian Society''. London: Routledge & sons. Bibliography: In ''Cambridge Anthropology'' journal, Vol 26, No 1 2006

References

External links

* http://groups.google.co.uk/group/alt.obituaries/browse_frm/thread/50f9603002011bc2/eca8f508fd5e8044?lnk=st
Interview of Polly Hill by Alan Macfarlane 20 July 1996 (film)
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hill, Polly (Economist) 1914 births 2005 deaths Keynes family Social anthropologists British Africanists 20th-century British women writers Members of the Fabian Society British women anthropologists Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge 20th-century British writers 20th-century British scientists 20th-century anthropologists