Polly Hill (economist)

Polly Hill (14 June 1914 – 21 August 2005) was a British social anthropologist of West Africa, and an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Hill 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.

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 (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. 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.

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