Measuring the revival of African economic history
Research on the economic history of Africa has experienced an unprecedented surge since the turn of the 21st century. This is not surprising given the rising role of Africa on the global stage, as the continent’s share in global population grows, climate change takes a particularly large toll on Africa’s economies, and the region is increasingly becoming a critical supplier of energy transition minerals. Understanding the historical nature and origins of the continent’s present-day economic and demographic development is therefore key. African Economic History (AEH henceforth) experienced a surge during the early post-colonial decades, but scholarly interest dwindled between the 1980s and early 2000s (Hopkins 2009). However, ten years ago, the introduction to the first, and hitherto only, special issue on AEH published in a general economic history journal proclaimed a “renaissance of African economic history” (Broadberry and Austin 2014) which caused the peak in AEH publications observed in Figure 1.
We introduce a 2nd special issue on this subfield with a reflection on scholarly developments over the past 25 years through a bibliometric analysis of the top five international economic history journals: Economic History Review, Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, European Review of Economic History, and Cliometrica. Specifically, we analyse 114 articles on Africa’s economic and social past (out of 3,089 articles published in the five journals), written by 104 distinct authors. From this publication dataset, we outline the key features of the evolution of AEH in terms of quantity and impact of publications, research topics, historical period, African geographical area, type of sources and data, analytical methods and author characteristics (affiliation and gender).
An expansion in publications on African economic history
We find that the field has indeed seen an impressive expansion in publication output from zero or one in the early 2000s to on average 6.8 published articles per year after 2009 (Figure 1). This trend is also reflected in an almost four-fold rise in the number of participants at the African Economic History Network conference, the main annual meeting of scholars studying AEH from across the globe. The growth of AEH has not only occurred at the extensive margin but also at the intensive margin when only counting the first article of authors publishing in the top five journals. This indicates that AEH generates and integrates new participants into the discipline. While this rise is impressive, Africa is clearly underrepresented in leading economic history research. The continent, home to 18 percent of the world’s population in 2024, accounted on average for 0.5 percent of articles in 2000–2009 and around 5 percent in 2010–2024 (something similar can be said for Asia). Moreover, we find that both women and authors affiliated with African universities remain underrepresented in our dataset of AEH publications, despite their increasing engagement in the field.
To uncover alternative outlets for AEH research, we also extracted the top ten most-cited papers on AEH per annum in a selection of leading journals in (i) economics, (ii) development, and (iii) history published between 2009 and 2023. We find that these journals are important venues for AEH publications, with high citation rates that exceed even the most-cited papers published in the top five economic history journals. We note distinctions in methods used and research questions. For example, economics journals mostly publish “persistence studies”, while economic history journals – which have seen a rise in the use of econometric methods – still mostly publish “reconstructive” studies.
Figure 1. Articles on “Africa” in the top-five economic history (EH) journals, 2000–2024
Note: For the current year, 2024, we omit two of the four issues of the Journal of Economic History and one of the European Review of Economic History that were not published at the time of writing.
New research themes
Growing cross-disciplinary interest in AEH research has been supported by an impressive expansion in the temporal, geographic, and methodological scope of studies that has unlocked the potential of untapped sources. For example, while the Atlantic slave trade dominated earlier AEH research, the past 15 years have seen growing interest in colonial history, accompanied by a proliferation of the topics explored. Possibly because European countries have grown increasingly critical of the effects and legacies of their colonial rule in Africa, there has been growing interest in issues such as the fiscal burden of colonial rule on local populations, the workings of colonial labour and commodity markets, and nature of colonial investments in health, education, and infrastructure (see Figure 2). There is still room to expand, however, as studies overwhelmingly focus on British and French Africa, neglecting regions colonised by other European powers.
Figure 2. Articles by topic in top-five economic history journals, 2000–2024
Data and methods have also become more varied in a field generally characterized by a scarcity of conventional (printed and written) sources. Within a previously documented “data revolution” (Fourie 2016), AEH researchers have made creative use of a wide range of new sources and data, including country-level or subnational-level data derived from colonial state statistical returns, censuses and surveys; data at the ethnicity level from ethnographic literature; company-level data; and individual-level data from mission churches, tax inventories and the like. These data can now be analysed and visualized using an array of new tools such as digital photography, statistical and geographical software, or computational linguistic techniques. The use of more sophisticated data analysis techniques is reflected in a documented increase of articles using econometric techniques from roughly 30 percent in 2000-2007 to more than half in 2016-2024.
There has been considerable development in AEH over the past two decades, but the proclaimed renaissance is still fragile. Our analysis of publications reveals that the revival of AEH has leveled off since 2014, with little further growth in volume, impact, geographical variety, number of authors publishing or integration of Africa-based scholars outside of South Africa. In terms of impact, the number of yearly citations per article experienced a rise until 2009 but leveled off thereafter (see Figure 3). But there is reason to be optimistic. The field has much scope for further expansion, with large knowledge gaps awaiting fresh research into underexplored geographic areas (former Portuguese, Italian, and German colonies especially) and periods, particularly the postcolonial era (Simson 2020).
Figure 3. Average per annum citations of top-five EH journal articles, 2000–2023
Note: The spike in 2008 is caused by one publication (Austin 2008). Average per annum is derived from total citations in Google Scholar divided by the years since publication.
References
Austin, Gareth. 2008. ‘Resources, Techniques, and Strategies South of the Sahara: Revising the Factor Endowments Perspective on African Economic Development, 1500–2000’, The Economic History Review, 61 (3): 587–624.
Austin, Gareth, and Stephen Broadberry. 2014. ‘Introduction: The Renaissance of African Economic History’, The Economic History Review, 67 (4): 893–906.
Fourie, Johan. 2016. ‘The Data Revolution in African Economic History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 47 (2): 193–212.
Frederick, Katherine, Dacil Juif and Felix Meier zu Selhausen. 2024. The Revival of African Economic History in the 21st Century: A Bibliometric Analysis, Revista de Historia Industrial – Industrial History Review, 33 (92): 11–48.
Hopkins, Antony G. 2009. ‘The New Economic History of Africa’, The Journal of African History, 50: 155–177.
Simson, Rebecca. 2020. ‘Statistical Sources and African Post-Colonial Economic History: Notes from the (Digital) Archives’, Economic History of Developing Regions, 35 (2): 143–154
Feature image: Tarr and McMurry, “New Introductory Geography”, MacMillan Co., 1916, p. 182., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84969379