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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JEL Code: N
Economic History
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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This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of living standards in Angola during the colonial period, with a specific focus on the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang), the largest and most...
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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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European settler expansion in Africa has been defined by Mosley as "colonisation of underdeveloped areas by European producers who became economically dependent on the indigenous population" (1983, p. 237). Europeans who decided...
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Political institutions and the balance of political power strongly influence the evolution of economic institutions, making them important for economic growth. The nature of political institutions and the distribution of political power...
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Do infrastructure investments have the potential to transform Africa’s economic geography? Today, Africa suffers a massive infrastructure deficit (Calderón and Servén 2010). The World Bank estimates that sub-Saharan Africa has fewer than...
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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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This essay presents an economic history perspective on prospects for industrialization in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Gerschenkron-Amsden ‘late development’/‘late industrialization’ approach has valuable insights for Africa, but is best set within Sugihara’s longer-term,...
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This study contributes to African state and fiscal history by presenting a detailed comparison of the evolution of fiscal capacity in four countries in francophone West Africa – Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger...
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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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In 1922, the British colonial administration in the Gambia demonetized the French five franc coin, which had been legal tender since 1843. The cost of the demonetization was equal to a year’s...
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The majority of Africans in the colonial era pursued composite livelihood strategies of which commercial and subsistence agriculture were crucial components. So far, however, evidence on the contribution of these sources of...
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This paper offers a historical micro-level analysis of the impact of climatic shocks on the incidence of conflict in colonial Nigeria (1912–1945). Primary historical sources on court cases, prisoners and homicides are...
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I trace the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on the evolution of political authority in West Africa. I present econometric evidence showing that the trans-Atlantic slave trade increased absolutism in pre-colonial...
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Given difficult to access pre-colonial forms of surplus extraction, African colonial governments faced severe constraints to raise revenue for incipient colonial state formation. This paper compares the ways in which the British...
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This paper aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent wide data set on African population extending into the pre-1950 era. We investigate the reliability and...
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Through a case-study of cocoa-farming in Ghana, this paper takes up the longrunning but recently neglected debate about the ‘cash crop revolution’ in tropical Africa during the early colonial period. It focuses...
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While Ghana is a classic case of economic growth in an agricultural-export colony, scholars have queried whether it was sustained, and how far its benefits were widely distributed, socially and regionally. Using...
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This paper addresses the long-term impact of Sub-Saharan Africa’s indigenous systems of slavery on its political and economic development, based on an analytical survey of the literature and data collected from anthropological...
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In this paper we evaluate the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the world context, colonialism had very heterogeneous effects, operating through many mechanisms, sometimes encouraging development sometimes retarding...
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The partition of German Togoland after WWI provides a natural experiment allowing to test what impact colonial policies really had. Using a data set of recruits to the Ghana colonial army 1908-1955,...
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There has been a recent surge in research on long term African development. For this research agenda to be fruitful and its theories, it is crucial to have consistent estimates of economic...
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The role of factor endowments and institutions as drivers of socio-economic change and development is a central theme in economic and agrarian history. The common approach is to identify either factor endowments...
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The field of African economic history is in resurgence. This paper reviews recent and on-going research contributions and notes strengths in their wide methodological, conceptual and topical variety. In these strengths there...
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