13
Keele Management School News
Life
after KMS five years on
Peter Lawrence, Professor Emeritus,
Development Economics, who retired from KMS in 2010
“As is well known, when academics
retire, they don’t stop working. It is
impossible to stop thinking about all
the questions you have taught and
researched for over 40 years.
Peter Lawrence addressing the
Colloquium in Cape Town October
2014. Sitting by the fire with pipe and
slippers is clearly not his style!
In my case I continue to be concerned
with African development issues,
but have become more interested
and involved with the trajectory of
the global economic and financial
system, with emphasis on alternative
strategies to those of the currently
dominant neo-liberal orthodoxy.
This has resulted in invitations to
participate in conferences, colloquia
and meetings on the African continent
and nearer home, and to contribute to
publications on these issues.
In 2011, I was invited to speak at a
seminar in Accra, Ghana, organised
by the Third World Network both
on industrialisation in Africa and
on the financial sector and its role
in shaping African economies. In
2012, I was invited to a colloquium in
Pretoria, South Africa, marking the
70th birthday of ex- President Mbeki,
whom I had known since we were
fellow university students at Sussex
in the 1960s. I spoke on neo-liberal
economics and its alternative, as well
as taking part with the other speakers
in a grand session commemorating the
50th anniversary of the Organisation
of African Unity, now the African
Union. Later that year I was back in
South Africa, this time to take up
a Mellon Visiting Fellowship at the
Centre for African Studies, University
of Cape Town.
The following year took me to Dar
es Salaam, where I had taught in the
1970s, and to the 5th Julius Nyerere
Intellectual Festival held in memory
of the first President of the country.
This was a festival of ideas, very
intensely debated, about development
paths and the issues facing a country
in the face of global capital and its
relentless pursuit of mineral wealth
and land for large scale commercial
farming. A year later the Tanzanian
connection took me to Bradford
University as an invited speaker at
a conference commemorating the
50th anniversary of the formation
of Tanzania out of Tanganyika and
Zanzibar. My contribution was an
analysis of Tanzania’s manufacturing
industrialisation from the perspective
of African industrialisation in general
and a book of the papers is on its
way. The wider issue of manufacturing
in Africa was something I had been
invited to write about 10 years before
for Development and Change and I
was in the process of updating for
the Routledge Handbook of Industrial
Development, published last month.
Then, in October last year, I was back
in Cape Town giving a keynote address
to a colloquium organised