The Culture of Entrepreneurship, Cross-Cultural Visions, and the Construction of African-American Standards of Inheritance

Olutayo Adesina

The basic substrata of African-American cultures of entrepreneurship and inheritance in the New World were Anglo-Saxon in origin. Although African slaves retained and held tenaciously to some of their traditional beliefs and cultural practices, the attitudes associated with commercial capitalism, plantation agriculture, and economic advancement, which were the dominant forces in early American development, enthroned a social division of labor based on the capitalist ethos. This made the adoption of capitalist philosophy a foregone conclusion. This study offers an analysis based on conditions that existed in Africa; from that baseline it evaluates the steady development within the slave society of an economically acquisitive mentality compatible with Anglo-Saxon traditions. The implications of this for the sociocultural and economic development of the African-Americans also receive attention. The study draws on a corpus of published works, written archival materials, and oral interviews to enhance the texture of the research. The study reveals a progressive diffusion of cultures and the African-American peoples’ heritable adaptation to new sociocultural contexts. [WP # 98018]