Polly Hill (14 June 1914 – 21 August 2005) was a British social anthropologist of West Africa, and an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
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 Ivor Wilks.
[citation needed] In 1963, she published 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.
Hill left Ghana 1965 as her daughter was at risk from malaria, moving back to Cambridge and became an unpaid research fellow at Clare Hall.
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).