Home › Frontiers in African Economic History

Frontiers in African Economic History

Frontiers in African Economic History – AEHN’s blog – diffuses research-based content and promotes discussion concerning the study of long-term African development. The blog provides authors a platform to disseminate easily accessible summaries (700 words) of their recently published research (articles, book chapters, book reviews, theses), publishes interviews with key scholars in the field, and discusses relevant developments. We welcome blog contributions and suggestions. Please contact the editors (Rebecca Simson, Jeanne Cilliers and Abel Gwaindepi) to discuss possible posts.

What about the widows? Widowhood and households in Cape Town 1938/1939

Amy Rommelspacher - 20 December 2024
Although there are usually more widows in the world than widowers, little is known about the economic impact of the death of a spouse in different historical contexts. This paper asks the question, what did the death of a spouse mean for women of different races living in Cape Town? A household survey from 1938/9 provides insights into the lived experiences of these widows just before World War II.
Read more

Firm profitability and forced wage labour in Portuguese Africa: Evidence from the Sena Sugar Estates

Sam Jones and Peter Gibbon - 23 October 2024
During the colonial period in Mozambique, forced wage labor (FWL) was used extensively to ensure a consistent supply of male workers to plantations and other industries. Using archival records from the Sena Sugar Estates, we estimate that coerced laborers earned about 40% less than their free-market counterparts; and while FWL reduced wages and boosted short-term profits in an accounting sense, it hindered long-term productivity gains.
Read more

Regulatory capture in the British Empire: The British South Africa Company and the redefinition of property rights in Southern Africa

Klas Rönnbäck and Kondwani Happy Ngoma - 17 September 2024
What role did corporations play in redefining property rights during colonisation? This article studies one of the most important and infamous companies in the British Empire, the British South Africa Company (BSAC). The article shows how this company exerted influence in the political processes and successfully got dubious claims to land and mineral rights in Southern Africa legitimized by the British Imperial Government.
Read more

African Time Travellers: What can we learn from 500 years of written accounts?

Edward Kerby, Alexander Moradi and Hanjo Odendaal - 17 September 2024
In this paper we study 500 years of African economic history using traveller accounts. Applying modern day computational linguistic techniques in combination with domain knowledge of African economic history, we analyse how first-hand accounts evolve across space and time. We illustrate how this database can be used, by showing how it sheds light on the effect of quinine adoption on European expansion in Africa, and how it allows us to trace the diffusion of New World crops in Africa, particularly maize.
Read more

Elite persistence in Sierra Leone: what can names tell us?

Rebecca Simson and Yannick Dupraz - 17 September 2024
Is elite persistence weaker in Africa than in other parts of the world? In the absence of linked intergenerational data we use name analysis to engage with this question. Using surnames associated with two historical elites in Sierra Leone, the Krio descendants of settlers and members of chiefly lineages, we measure elite persistence in politics, education and business since 1960 and discuss the social reproduction strategies of these two communities.
Read more

The Manufacturing Industry in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1979

Victor Gwande - 31 July 2024
How did Zimbabwe become the second-most industrialized country in sub-Saharan Africa by 1980? A new book sets out to answer this question, tracing colonial Zimbabwe´s manufacturing sector, focusing on business interest groups and Southern Rhodesia's autonomy in driving industrialization, challenging traditional narratives centered on external factors. Despite initial neglect, manufacturing grew through organized lobbying and internal pressures. Shifts in policy, especially during Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and subsequent sanctions, spurred domestic industrial expansion. By 1979, manufacturing had become a significant contributor to Zimbabwe's economy, showcasing resilience and adaptability.
Read more

Income inequality and export-oriented commercialization in colonial Africa: Evidence from six countries

Ellen Hillbom, Jutta Bolt, Michiel de Haas and Federico Tadei - 5 June 2024
Using evidence from 33 social tables, we investigate the relationship between export-oriented commercialization and income inequality in six predominately agricultural African colonial economies between the 1910s and 1960s. We find that, overall, inequality rose over time, and differences between colonies were linked to the presence of non-Africans and the capital intensity of different export commodities.
Read more

The Development of Colonial Health Care Provision in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, 1900-1955

Arlinde Vrooman - 15 May 2024
How did colonial health care provision develop over time, and what similarities and differences can be observed between different colonizers? Using a newly constructed dataset on colonial health care expenditure, facilities, medical staff and patients in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, a new paper shows how two similar countries (apart from their colonizer) can have different colonial health care trajectories.
Read more

The Side Effects of Immunity: Malaria and African Slavery in the United States

Elena Esposito - 12 April 2024
Why did slavery flourish in some American regions and not in others, and why were specific groups of Africans extensively transported to the New World? Our novel empirical evidence reveals that the introduction of malaria triggered a demand for malaria-resistant labor, which led to a massive expansion of African enslaved workers in the more malaria-infested areas. Further results document that among African slaves, more malaria-resistant individuals—i.e., those born in the most malaria-ridden regions of Africa—commanded significantly higher prices.
Read more

Sindhi Businessmen and Postcolonial Industrial Development in Ghana

Tracy Mensah - 12 March 2024
What roles did Indians immigrants play in the economic history of sub-Saharan Africa’s first independent nation? From 1951-1966, Sindhi businessmen engaged with Kwame Nkrumah’s industrialization agenda for Ghana and established various manufacturing companies that constituted one aspect of the nation’s local industry. The extent to which they were involved in retail and wholesale trade from the 1930s and industry from the late 1950s shows that they were more than commercial intermediaries in Ghana’s economic history.
Read more

Colonial Origins and Quality of Education: Evidence from Cameroon

Yasmine Bekkouche and Yannick Dupraz - 22 January 2024
Do the colonial origins of education systems matter for student performance today? To answer this question, we study Cameroon, a country where a Francophone education system with French colonial roots coexists with an Anglophone system with British colonial roots. We find that students in the Francophone system perform better in mathematics in Grade 5. Although we find that Francophone schools have better classroom equipment and that their teachers use more vertical teaching methods, we fail to fully explain the Francophone advantage.
Read more

Inequality Regimes in Africa from Pre-Colonial Times to the Present

Michiel de Haas, Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg - 5 December 2023
We chart the long-run patterns and drivers of inequality in Africa from the slave trade era to the present. Our analysis dismantles mainstream narratives about the colonial roots of persistent high inequality in post-colonial Africa and shows that existing inequality concepts and theories need further calibration to account, among other things, for the role of African slavery in historical inequality regimes.
Read more

Malthus in the Middle East

Yuzuru Kumon and Mohamed Saleh - 5 December 2023
Using the 1848 and 1868 Egyptian population censuses, this paper shows that Egyptian rural families were barely regulating fertility in the mid-19th century, and that the rural population was controlled instead via (very) high child mortality rates. Rural middle-class men (mainly village headmen) had higher fertility than unskilled workers, because of their higher polygyny rates, and not because of greater fertility within marriage.
Read more

Leader Selection and Why it Matters: Education and the Endogeneity of Favoritism in 11 African Countries

Laura Maravall, Jörg Baten and Johan Fourie - 7 September 2023
Are leaders randomly selected? Could the presence of colonial schools in a region increase the likelihood of producing leaders in that particular region? Analyzing the birthplace of 33 post-independence leaders across 11 countries between 1930 and 1970, we argue that leaders predominantly emerge from regions with superior colonial-era education. Our results confront the implicit assumption within favoritism studies that leaders are randomly drawn from the population.
Read more

Education and Polygamy: Evidence from Cameroon

Yannick Dupraz and Pierre André - 19 June 2023
Has secular education contributed to the decline of polygyny in Africa? To answer this question we study a wave of public school construction in late colonial Cameroon. We find that school openings simultaneously increased education and the chances of being in a polygynous union for men and, more surprisingly, for women. The reason is not that educated women preferred polygyny, but that they married more educated men, who were more likely to take additional wives.
Read more

Local Advantage in a Global Context. Competition, Adaptation and Resilience in Textile Manufacturing in the ‘Periphery’, 1860-1960

Kate Frederick and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk - 1 June 2023
Deindustrialization theories have long purported that industrial production in sub-Saharan Africa and most other parts of the Global South fell into rapid decline by the nineteenth century due to rising competition – and often coercion – by industrializing nations in the Global North. In contrast, we find that domestic textile manufacturers across sub-Saharan Africa and Java wielded certain advantages during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which allowed them to compete and even flourish amid globalization and colonization. Chief among these was their ability to cater to complex and diverse local consumer tastes.
Read more

What about the Race between Education and Technology in the Global South?

Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg - 11 May 2023
Historical research on the race between education and technology has focused on the West but barely touched upon ‘the rest’. We created a new occupational wage database for 50 African and Asian economies which allows us to compare long-run patterns in skill premiums across the colonial and post-colonial eras (c. 1870–2010). Our paper takes a first step to explain the origins of the Africa–Asia gap and the drivers of global skill premium convergence, paying special attention to the colonial context that shaped demand, supply, and labour market institutions.
Read more

Legacies of Loss: The Health Outcomes of Slaveholder Compensation in the British Cape Colony

Igor Martins, Jeanne Cilliers and Johan Fourie - 3 April 2023
Can wealth shocks have intergenerational health consequences? This paper explores the wealth-health gradient among Cape Colony slaveholders using a shortfall produced by the compensation scheme following the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire in 1834. We find that wealth losses have a small but statistically significant effect on later-life outcomes and that intergenerational transmission is unlikely to play an important role in this relationship.
Read more

The Economics of Missionary Expansion

Rémi Jedwab, Felix Meier zu Selhausen and Alexander Moradi - 16 February 2023
How did Christianity expand in sub-Saharan Africa to become the region’s dominant religion? Christian missions in the 19th and early 20th centuries were established in healthier, more accessible, and richer places before expanding to economically less developed areas. Christianization did not leave any benign legacy on macro-economic development during colonial or contemporary times but continues to affect human capital formation.
Read more

Migration in Africa: Shifting Patterns of Mobility from the 19th to the 21st Century

Michiel de Haas and Ewout Frankema - 3 February 2023
This edited volume introduces readers to the “age of intra-African migration”. In stark contrast to preceding centuries of intercontinental slave trading, the long-distance migration of Africans turned decisively inward from 1850 onwards. Rapidly shifting patterns of both forced and voluntary mobility within the African continent were driven by expanding commodity exports, military and political upheaval and significant changes in demography and labor markets. Since the 1960s, there has been a gradual resurgence of Africans on the global migration scene. Viewed in a long-run historical perspective, this does not signify an overall increase in African mobility, but rather a gradual shift towards destinations outside the continent which are increasingly sought out by, and within reach of, prospective migrants.
Read more

Washington Consensus Reforms and Economic Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from the Past Four Decades

Belinda Archibong, Brahima Coulibaly and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala - 6 December 2022
Over three decades after market-oriented structural reforms, termed "Washington consensus" policies, were first implemented, we revisit the evidence on the effects of these policies in sub-Saharan African countries. Following initial declines in per capita economic growth over the 1980s and 1990s, reform adopters experienced notable increases in per capita real GDP growth in the post 2000 period, but we also find that the ability to implement pro-poor policies alongside market-oriented reforms played a central role in successful policy performance.
Read more

The ILO and the Making of Labour Policies in Colonial Nigeria

Damilola Adebayo - 1 March 2022
To what extent were labour policies in late colonial Africa influenced by the activities of the International Labour Organisation (ILO)? By analysing Nigeria from 1930-1960, as opposed to the empire-wide or regional focus of the extant literature, this article finds that the ILO, despite its institutional constraints, exercised indirect influence on labour relations in Nigeria through the trade unions. Thus, the article emphasises the significance of local contexts to a more nuanced understanding of the ILO’s influence in colonial Africa.
Read more

Fiscal Capacity in ‘Responsible Government’ Colonies: the Cape Colony in Comparative Perspective, 1865-1910

Abel Gwaindepi - 14 February 2022
To assert their self-rule and autonomy, settlers in settler colonies have often proved willing to shoulder unusually high tax burdens. Was this generalized through the British Empire, or was South Africa different? I argue that the Cape Colony’s fiscal path diverged from those of other British settler colonies already in the late 19th century. This was a consequence of a larger indigenous population and economic policies that discriminated against this population, resulting in weaker fiscal capacity.
Read more

Educational Gender Inequality in Sub‐Saharan Africa: A Long‐Term Perspective

Jörg Baten, Michiel de Haas, Elisabeth Kempter and Felix Meier zu Selhausen - 10 February 2022
To what extent did sub-Saharan Africa's 20th century schooling revolution benefit boys and girls equally? Analyzing consecutive birth cohorts in 21 sub-Saharan African countries over the 20th century, we find that gender gaps first rose and then declined as education expanded. Gender gaps are lower in southern Africa and in districts with early 20th century missionary presence and which are more accessible (located on the coast, or connected to railroads).
Read more

Historical Experiences and Demand for Health: The Legacy of Colonial Medical Campaigns in Central Africa

Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero - 10 November 2021
Between the 1920s and 1950s, the French colonial governments pursued medical campaigns in former French Equatorial Africa (present day Gabon, Chad, Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic) and Cameroon to treat and prevent sleeping sickness. These campaigns forced individuals to receive treatment or prophylaxis for sleeping sickness. We find that these campaigns led to mistrust in medicine, lower vaccination rates, and lower success of World Bank health projects.
Read more

Colonizer Identity and Trade in Africa: Were the British More Favourable to Free Trade?

Federico Tadei - 1 November 2021
What influenced the structure of export trade between Africa and Europe during the colonial period? Were the British more favorable to free trade than the French? New estimates of monopsonistic profit margins for colonial trading companies suggest the extent of free trade in colonial Africa was determined much more by local conditions - in particular, whether local producers were African farmers or European settlers and plantation companies - than by formal colonial trade policies (British vs. French).
Read more

Reconstructing Income Inequality in a Colonial Cash Crop Economy: Five Social Tables for Uganda, 1925–1965

Michiel de Haas - 22 September 2021
Few doubt that colonialism generated new economic cleavages in African societies. Yet we know little about the extent of such economic inequality in different African colonies and across time. In this article, I measure income inequality in Uganda in five benchmark years between 1925 (mid-colonial period) and 1965 (just after independence). I find that overall income inequality was low compared to other African colonies, but sharp fault lines existed, especially along racial lines.
Read more

The Colonial Legacy of Corruption Among Local Elites in Africa

Merima Ali, Odd-Helge Fjeldstad and Abdulaziz B. Shifa - 19 July 2021
1 comment
Corruption is considered one of the main contributors to Africa’s development challenges. Less is known about the determinants of corruption and its variation between countries. We find empirical evidence that British colonial rule in Africa has fostered the corruption of local elites (chiefs), with the lasting effect of undermining society's trust in them.
Read more

Fiscal Capacity and Dualism in Colonial States: The French Empire 1830-1962

Denis Cogneau, Yannick Dupraz and Sandrine Mesplé-Somps - 11 July 2021
We examine fiscal extraction and public goods provisioning in colonial French Africa and Indochina using a new dataset on revenue and expenditure, covering 21 present-day countries, between 1830 and 1962. Fiscal extraction by French colonial states was rather high, but capacity to provide public goods and services was low because of wage costs that remained a strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.
Read more

The Origins of Colonial Investments in Former British and French Africa

Joan Ricart-Huguet - 19 April 2021
What led colonial states to invest much more in some districts than others? This study shows that natural harbors and capes led some places to become centers of pre-colonial trade. These areas, in turn, attracted the lion’s share of colonial public investments not only in infrastructure but also in health and education. Public investments were considerably lower in places further away from the centers of pre-colonial trade.
Read more

African Long-term Inequality Trends – AFLIT

Maria Fibaek and Ellen Hillbom - 11 August 2020
African Long-term Inequality Trends, AFLIT, is a research network dedicated to the advancement in constructing and analysing historical inequality trends in sub-Saharan Africa using the social tables approach. Currently, we lack both the empirical and theoretical understanding to explain the historical underpinnings of the development in inequality. The researchers in AFLIT are committed to filling this gap.
Read more

The Rise and Fall of the Bureaucratic Bourgeoisie: Public Sector Employees and Economic Privilege in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania

Rebecca Simson - 22 June 2020
Do public sector employees in Africa form a disproportionate share of the richest ranks of society? In the early independence era, many scholars argued that an oversized bureaucratic elite was a hindrance to development as it crowded out entrepreneurial and commercial activity. This piece examines this charge in the Kenyan and Tanzanian contexts, and traces how the relative economic standing of public sector employees declined over the course of the postcolonial era.
Read more

Labour market formation in post-slavery Africa: Ruanda-Urundi migrants and Buganda’s low wage economy

Michiel de Haas - 1 June 2020
Between 1920 and 1960, every year tens of thousands of people migrated voluntarily and on their own initiative from Ruanda-Urundi to Buganda. In this blog post I explain why migrants were willing to work for low wages in Buganda’s thriving cash crop economy by highlighting the exceptional labour abundance in the migrant sending regions and the benefits of circular migration.
Read more

Factor Endowments on the ‘Frontier’: Algerian Settler Agriculture at the Beginning of the 1900

Laura Maravall - 31 October 2019
This article examines rural settlement in colonial French Algeria at the beginning of the 1900s. By taking into account the timing of settlement for almost 100 municipalities in the département of Constantine, it shows how colonial land policy and settler farming changed as fertile land grew scarcer on the settlement ‘frontier’. The results highlight the importance of including intra-country heterogeneities concerning the local conditions of the colonized regions in the assessment of settlement processes.
Read more

The Blessings of Medicine? Patient Characteristics and Health Outcomes in a Ugandan Mission Hospital, 1908-1970

Shane Doyle, Felix Meier zu Selhausen and Jacob Weisdorf - 22 September 2019
Using missions hospital patient registers we study the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial rural Uganda. Christian conversion was associated with superior cure rates and shorter length of stay and with less frequent diagnosis of skin diseases and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
Read more

French and British Colonial Legacies in Education: Evidence from the Partition of Cameroon

Yannick Dupraz - 31 August 2019
This paper uses the partition of German Cameroon between the British and the French after World War I to study colonial legacies in education. A British advantage emerged in the 1930s, disappeared in the 1950s as the French started investing in education, but re-emerged more recently, likely because of the French legacy of high repetition rates and their detrimental effect on dropout.
Read more

From Market to Exchange: Early Regulation and Social Organisation on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 1887-1892

Mariusz Lukasiewicz - 22 July 2019
This investigation provides new insights on the early local, regional and global development of Africa’s oldest existing stock exchange. Founded in November 1887, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) was not an isolated stock exchange in the South African Republic (ZAR), but an increasingly global financial institution attracting members and capital from beyond southern Africa’s expanding colonial frontier. Confronted by an uncertain political environment, the JSE’s first five years of operation tested the institution’s ability to balance the needs of regulation and promoting access to its international capital market.
Read more

Labour Control and the Establishment of Profitable Settler Agriculture in Colonial Kenya, c. 1920-45

Maria Fibaek and Erik Green - 3 June 2019
This study links the expansion of settler agriculture with the introduction of policies that repressed African agricultural earnings. We do not find support for the ‘classical’ theory that declines in African agriculture combined with taxation can explain the observed rise in settler agriculture in colonial Kenya. Instead, we argue that an emerging labor control regime enabled settlers to raise their profit share.
Read more

The Land–Labour Hypothesis in a Settler Economy: Wealth, Labour and Household Composition on the South African Frontier

Jeanne Cilliers and Erik Green - 26 April 2019
It has been argued that reduced land sizes in pre-industrial rural societies caused a decline in fertility through lower demand for family labour. This paper uses newly transcribed data to investigate this relationship in a closing land frontier context: the Graaff-Reinet district in the eastern Cape Colony, 1800-28. In contrast to previous research, we find that the number of children present in the farming households increases as land availability shrinks.
Read more

Africa’s Clientelist Budget Policies Revisited: Public Expenditure and Employment in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, 1960–2010

Rebecca Simson - 26 February 2019
Did independent African governments prioritize job creation in the public sector to the detriment of economic growth? Newly assembled data on public expenditure and employment in three East African countries since 1960 sheds light on external constraints to fiscal space, and suggests that employment growth was short-lived and to a large extent ‘financed’ through a reduction in real wages.
Read more

The Long-Term Effects of Extractive Institutions: Evidence from Trade Policies in Colonial French Africa

Federico Tadei - 30 January 2019
This article investigates the long-term effects of colonial trade monopsonies on the subsequent economic development of French Africa. Using the gap between prices paid to African producers and competitive prices as a measure of rent extraction via monopsonistic policies, I show that the areas of French Africa that suffered larger reductions in producer prices during the colonial period are now relatively poorer.
Read more

Africa Rising in Economic History

Felix Meier zu Selhausen - 19 November 2018
2 comments

Africa is rising in Economic History. The discipline has seen impressive growth over the past decade. Africa has emerged to become a new frontier in research on the historical roots of global inequality. This growing wave seeks to reconstruct various dimensions of long-term development...
Read more

Financing the African Colonial State: Fiscal Capacity Building and Forced Labor

Marlous van Waijenburg - 21 October 2018
The rapidly expanding literature on historical tax systems has largely overlooked the “invisible” revenue from forced labor practices. Based on a unique dataset for the French African corvée system, I show that the labor tax component of African colonial budgets was often as large as the total cash contributions during the early stages of colonial rule. These pioneering findings underline the central place of forced labor in the fiscal development of colonial Africa.
Read more

African Agricultural Productivity and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Evidence from Senegambia in the Nineteenth Century

Klas Rönnbäck and Dimitrios Theodoridis - 21 September 2018
This study constitutes a first attempt to compare agricultural productivity on the two sides of the Atlantic during the early modern period, based on a case study from Senegambia. We find agricultural productivity of five studied key commodities to have been significantly lower in this region than in the Americas and elsewhere in the world.
Read more

‘Hail the Census Night’: Trust and Political Imagination in the 1960 Population Census of Ghana

Gerardo Serra - 27 August 2018
Using the first population census of independent Ghana, this article interrogates the role of statistics in the process of imagining the postcolonial nation-state. It argues that the 1960 population census ‘re-made’ the nation-state by acting as a catalyst of collective practices, visual images and textual representations that reconfigured the relationship between United Nations statistical standards, political iconographies and authoritarian rule.
Read more

An Economic Rationale for the West African Scramble? The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1835–1885

Ewout Frankema, Jeffrey Williamson and Pieter Woltjer - 13 July 2018
This paper uses a new trade dataset showing that sub-Saharan Africa experienced a terms of trade boom in the five decades (1835–1885) preceding the European “scramble for Africa” which was comparable to similar export booms in other parts of the “global periphery”. This study revises the view that the scramble for West Africa occurred when its major export markets were in decline and argues that the comparatively larger weight of West Africa in French imperial trade strengthened the rationale for French instead of British initiative in the conquest of the interior.
Read more

Disease and Gender Gaps in Human Capital Investment: Evidence from Niger’s 1986 Meningitis Epidemic

Belinda Archibong and Francis Annan - 18 June 2018
This research studies the impacts of sudden exposure to climate induced disease on gender gaps in human capital investment, by examining the effects of a 1986 meningitis epidemic in Niger. The epidemic reduced years of education for girls relative to boys. A primary mechanism explaining the results is early marriage of girls in exchange for a bride price to manage increased household costs from the epidemic.
Read more

The Territorial Expansion of the Colonial State: Evidence from German East Africa 1890–1909

Jan Pierskalla, Alexander De Juan and Max Montgomery - 21 March 2018
This article investigates the processes of state penetration in the former colony of German East Africa (1890-1909). Contrary to previous studies – which largely emphasize factors like disease environments, extractive potential or pre-colonial political centralization – we find that geographical patterns of state penetration have been driven by the state’s strategic imperative to solidify control over territory and establish political stability.
Read more

Interview: Emmanuel Akyeampong

Emmanuel Akyeampong and Michiel de Haas - 12 February 2018

Professor Akyeampong, first of all, thank you for delivering a rich and thought-provoking keynote lecture on ‘African Socialism’ at the Annual Meeting 2017 of the AEHN last October in Stellenbosch. You mentioned that this lecture relates to a research project that will culminate in...
Read more

Indian Textiles and Gum Arabic in the Lower Senegal River: Global Significance of Local Trade and Consumers in the Early Nineteenth Century

Kazuo Kobayashi - 29 January 2018
This paper uses a new set of data to address one of the central questions in African and global economic histories: how West Africa contributed to economies outside the region. From a consumer-led perspective, it argues that, in the first half of the 19th century, consumer behavior in Senegal not only determined a part of the global trade networks that extended from South Asia through Western Europe and reached Africa, but it also influenced textile production in Pondicherry and Western Europe.
Read more

Social Mobility among Christian Africans: Evidence from Anglican Marriage Registers in Uganda, 1895-2011

Felix Meier zu Selhausen, Marco H. D. van Leeuwen and Jacob Weisdorf - 1 January 2018
This paper uses new evidence from Anglican marriage registers to explore Christian African male intergenerational social mobility and elite formation in Uganda. It shows that the colonial era opened new labor opportunities for African converts, enabling them to take large steps up the social ladder regardless of their social origin. A surprisingly fluid labor market, based on meritocratic criteria, gradually undermined traditional chiefs’ social advantages.
Read more

Colonialism or Supersanctions: Sovereignty and Debt in West Africa, 1871-1914

Leigh Gardner - 19 October 2017
This paper uses new evidence from West Africa to re-examine the ‘empire effect’ in sovereign borrowing before 1914. It finds that British colonies in Africa could indeed borrow at lower cost than independent Liberia. This was not because investors treated all colonies equally, but rather because of a range of imperial interventions which independent countries could not access.
Read more

Colonial State Formation Without Integration: Tax Capacity and Labour Regimes in Portuguese Mozambique (1890s–1970s)

Kleoniki Alexopoulou and Dacil Juif - 22 September 2017
1 comment
Portuguese Mozambique consisted of three distinct zones, which fit Samir Amin’s (1972) categorization into 'regions of colonial influence'. Different labour systems operated in the three geographic zones since early colonization, and these differences were maintained and exploited under colonial rule, also for the purpose of tax collection.
Read more

European Trade, Colonialism, and Human Capital Accumulation in Senegal, Gambia and Western Mali, 1770-1900

Gabriele Cappelli and Jörg Baten - 18 June 2017
This paper shows that the development of human capital in today’s Senegal, Gambia, and Western Mali between 1770 and 1900 was linked to European trade, slavery, and early colonialism. The Atlantic slave trade increased regional divergence, but this pattern was reinforced by the response of West Africans to the economic incentives provided by peanut trading since the mid-19th century.
Read more

Slave ship provisioning in the long 18th century. A boost to West African commercial agriculture?

Angus Dalrymple-Smith and Ewout Frankema - 30 May 2017
This paper investigates whether the provisioning of slave ships provided a boost to West African commercial agriculture. It finds that European ships took on board far more foodstuffs from their home ports than has previously been suspected, meaning that with one possible exception, the slave trade did not stimulate the development of export agriculture in the region.
Read more

Interview: Paul Lovejoy

Paul E. Lovejoy and Felix Meier zu Selhausen - 14 December 2016

Prof. Lovejoy, you held the keynote at the 2016 Meeting of the AEHN hosted by the University of Sussex. It was also your first attendance of the Annual Meeting of the AEHN. What was your impression of the AEHN and the conference? Have you been involved...
Read more

Interview: Patrick Manning

Patrick Manning and Kate Frederick - 21 June 2016

Patrick, you began your illustrious career in African economic history in the late 1960s. How has the field evolved over time? I completed my PhD in 1969 and published my first book, on Dahomey 1640-1960, in 1982. The field was then small, interdisciplinary, and...
Read more

Witchcraft Beliefs and the Erosion of Social Capital

Boris Gershman - 21 April 2016

Belief in witchcraft, broadly defined as the ability to use supernatural techniques to harm others or acquire wealth, is a deep-rooted cultural phenomenon which still represents a salient feature of daily life in many parts of the African continent and beyond. While witchcraft beliefs...
Read more

Interview: Ewout Frankema

Ewout Frankema and Michiel de Haas - 10 April 2016
1 comment

Ewout, you were trained as a historian and economist and wrote your PhD thesis on inequality in Latin America. What made you invest so much of your professional energy in African economic history? A better understanding of the nature and historical origins of global...
Read more