Reinventing the Wheel: The Economic Benefits of Wheeled Transportation in Early Colonial British West Africa

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One of the great technological puzzles of Sub-Saharan African economic history is that wheeled transportation was barely used prior to the colonial period. Instead, head porterage was the main method of transportation. Though early colonial o¢ cials regarded this is highly ine¢ cient, the consensus amongst historians is that rather this was a rational adoption to the underlying conditions and factor endowments. In this paper we undertake the rst systematic investigation of the relative costs of these di¤erent forms of transportation and calculate the net economic bene ts and ‘social savings’represented by the introduction of railway and motor transportation into British West Africa. While we nd that the net bene ts of the introduction of railways in the Gold Coast (Ghana) were positive, they are modest and rather similar as a proportion of national income to those calculated for the UK and US in the 19th century. Though these ndings reject the hypothesis that building railways was not economically rational in the Gold Coast, they can easily account for why it did not happen prior to the colonial period since African states were likely unable to enter international capital markets to raise the large amount of capital required for the initial xed cost of production. Very Preliminary and Incomplete Department of Political Science, 616 Serra St. Encina Hall West, Room 100, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-6044, email: ichaves@stanford.edu. yUniversity of Rochester, Department of Economics and Department of History, Harkness Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY14627, email: enge@troi.cc.rochester.edu. zHarvard University, Department of Government, IQSS, 1737 Cambridge Street N309, Cambridge, MA 01238; e-mail: jrobinson@gov.harvard.edu.