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Despite its fuzziness, the term middle class has become increasingly attractive in the past two decades, not only among social scientists and market analysts but also as a term of self-description employed by upwardly mobile individuals. Research on middle classes in the Global South, and especially in Africa, confronts us with particular challenges. First, while conventional class theories take the nation-state as the obvious framework for defining class boundaries, African examples point to the importance of sub-national (as well as transnational) dimensions of class formation. Secondly, marriage ties and kin relations of upwardly mobile individuals in African societies often cut across class boundaries, resulting in ‘multi-class’ families and competing loyalties. The paper addresses these challenges by looking at the emergence of a national middle class in Ghana. More specifically, we discuss how social mobility and class formation play out in two different regions of what is today Ghana: a coastal region that since the seventeenth century has been drawn into global networks and was highly stratified by the end of the nineteenth century; and a marginalized savannah region with an egalitarian society until chieftaincy and education were introduced by the British colonizers in the early twentieth century. These regional disparities and resulting sub-national memberships intersect with the emergence of a national middle class. However, we argue that despite distinct regional trajectories, we are currently witnessing a certain ‘synchronisation’ of social stratification and the formation of a broader middle class that understands itself not only in regional, but national terms.

Across regional disparities and beyond family ties: A Ghanaian middle class in the making