The Central African Copperbelt offers a fascinating case for a comparative study of colonial institutional development. After the discovery of copper deposits in the first decade of the twentieth century, European investors...
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Recent studies have uncovered long-term trends in welfare development in sub-Saharan Africa. But what do we know about the living standards of the large majority of rural dwellers in colonial Africa? Do...
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A few years ago, I took my graduate Economics students to the Cape Town Archives. Most of them had never been there, and it was fun to show them the original manuscripts...
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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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How have households in developing countries historically coped with shocks to their labor supply? Time is often the most valuable resource available to poor households, and its allocation across labor and other...
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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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Introduction When discussing currency matters, colonial officials often observed that Africans had no pockets as an explanation for Africans’ use of strings of cowrie shells or beads as money carried around their...
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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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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...
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