The Ground Records: What the Ledger Leaves Out Economic history is usually written in ledgers, tariffs, and commodity flows. But markets also leave traces on the ground: in the placement of factories,...
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The financial sector and decolonisation in East Africa Recent scholarship on East African financial history has highlighted the growing political, economic and social importance of the financial sector in the decades following...
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The story of early modern globalization is usually told from the perspective of European expansion. Trading companies like the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the English Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) are...
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Commercialization and the Rise of Rural Capitalists A long-standing view in the literature holds that commercialization in so-called peasant economies produced relatively egalitarian outcomes compared with settler colonies (Bowden et al., 2008)....
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Introduction Every December at the Castle of Good Hope, a ritual played out. The Governor and his Council of Policy would appoint four men to serve as heemraden in the Stellenbosch–Drakenstein district...
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Theoretical Blind Spots in Slavery's Economics Classic models of slavery’s persistence, particularly those developed by Nieboer (1900) and Domar (1970), rely on land abundance and labor scarcity as determining variables. In our...
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Introduction Historical scholarship often links trade booms with rising coercion, from Eastern European serfdom to plantation slavery in the Americas. Yet many societies operated with more than one coercive labor system simultaneously....
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It Didn’t Happen at Berlin Our recent article (Paine, Qiu and Ricart-Huguet, 2025) overturns two important pieces of conventional wisdom about border formation in Africa. First, the claim that borders in Africa...
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Introduction: A Crisis Decades in the Making As South Sudan’s political crisis deepens in early 2025, many fear another civil war is imminent. As I illustrate in a recent article, South Sudan’s...
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Labour scarcity and coercion In a recent discussion of her book Africonomics, Bronwen Everill highlighted the tensions between European settlers and Africa's indigenous populations, rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of Africa's factor...
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