State capacity is important for economic development, but the economic history of state building is understudied and until recently, it disproportionately represented Western Europe and Western offshoots. In recent years, new research...
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Keyword: Africa
Although it is undeniable that overall welfare was reduced because of colonialism, the evolution of some dimensions of welfare such as education, health or income has given rise to some debate. The...
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Historical events are fundamental determinants of economic performance (Allen 2011). However, until recently, research in quantitative economic history has mainly focused on today’s high- and middle-income economies. This lack of research is...
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This chapter describes the external slave trades out of Africa. It discusses how the slave trades developed over time, and factors that contributed to the growth of the slave trades out of...
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Africa is the world’s poorest region in terms of income and material living standards. This chapter re-evaluates and explains how poverty rates are measured and how they are made comparable over time...
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The African Commodity Trade Database (ACTD) aims to stimulate and deepen research on African and global economic history. The database provides export and import series at product level for more than two and a half centuries of African trade (1737-2010). The ACTD consists of three main parts which are continuously updated as we retrieve additional sources. Currently data for the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century is available below. The data from the ACTD is freely available as long as reference is made to: Frankema, Ewout, Jeffrey Williamson and Pieter Woltjer. “An Economic Rationale for the West African Scramble? The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1835-1885.” The Journal of Economic History 78, no. 1 (2018): 231-267.
Trade database (latest versions)
Part I – Quantities and official prices, 1737-1808: ACTD_1737t1808_volumes_v1_0
Part II – Prices, quantities and values, 1808-1939: ACTD_1808t1939_database_v1_3 [updated]
Supplemental material
– Notes on the ACTD: ACTD_1808t1939_notes
– British Customs Records, 1697-1808, unprocessed: ACTD_1697t1808_raw_data
Future updates
– Market prices African commodities, 1730-1808
– Coastal prices African commodities French colonies, 1885-1939
– Values and quantities African trade, 1945-2010
Contact
The data was collected by the Rural Environment History Group at Wageningen University. For comments and suggestions please send an email to Pieter Woltjer ([email protected]) or Felix Meier zu Selhausen ([email protected])
Historically, natural resources such as coal and iron played a critical role in the industrialisation of the western world. Yet, more recently resource rich countries, including many in Africa, have performed worse...
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About 30% of people in sub-Saharan Africa have access to grid electricity, the lowest of any major region in the world. Per head, Africans consume only one fifth the energy of the...
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African history in the first half of the 20th century is largely a history of colonialism and decolonisation. In this chapter, I will consider the national movements that led the struggle against...
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Effective monetary and financial institutions are a key to economic development. This chapter reviews the history of African monetary systems during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracking the shift from commodity currencies...
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This chapter discusses how Africans acquired new skills, in the past and in the present. We begin with a short review of the economic benefits of education and then proceed to a...
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This chapter describes the process of the partitioning of the African continent at the end of the 19th century into the countries we still know today. We start by discussing the technological...
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Many of the goods and services that we consume are not produced by ourselves. We rely on others to provide these goods. We trade. This is truer, the more complex and more...
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This chapter deals with economic development in pre-colonial Africa. Was the continent underdeveloped or developing? In this chapter we will see that it was both. Pre-colonial history shows us evidence of progress...
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This chapter discusses various definitions of the term ‘development’. It explains how ‘human development’ is conceptualized in the development literature and how it differs from economic, political or cultural developments. The chapter...
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