During the Scramble for Africa, European colonization relied on private concessionary companies that established distinctive institutional frameworks. This paper provides new empirical evidence suggesting that colonial corporate governance produced divergent long-run development...
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JEL Code: N37
Economic History → Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy → Africa • Oceania
South Africa represents a paradigmatic case in international literature on racial discrimination, illustrating a deeply institutionalised system that affected all aspects of daily life. Black, Coloured, and Asian populations were systematically relegated...
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In recent years, German colonialism has received growing public attention - a history long overshadowed by the World Wars. Due to its short-lived character, a long-term comparative view of German colonialism has...
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I study the impacts of exposure to one of Africa’s largest circular migration flows using an arbitrary border within Mozambique that, from 1893 to 1942, separated areas where young men were either...
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We investigate the well-being of urban workers in Angola under colonialism. Using a newly compiled dataset derived from archival and secondary sources, we construct welfare ratios for both skilled and unskilled workers...
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Institutions of justice, like prisons, can be used to serve economic and other extra- judicial interests, with lasting deleterious effects. We study the effects on incarceration when prisoners are used primarily as...
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What can we learn from studying intermarriage shares? The shares of intermarriages have long been used to study the salience of cleavages within societies (Kalmijn 1998). Looking at marriage patterns gives us...
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Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concerning female education in Africa. Using a new dataset of 5,212 Protestant brides born between 1880 and 1945 from urban and...
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The question whether institutions in Africa were shaped by the metropolitan identity of the colonizer or by local conditions is lively debated in the African economic history literature. In this paper we...
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Recent studies on colonial public finance have pointed to the severe constraints to fiscal capacity building Sub-Saharan Africa, and to the inclination of colonial governments to avoid direct taxes when revenue from...
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