African Economic History Research Articles

African time travellers: What can we learn from 500 years of written accounts?

AbstractIn this paper we study 500 years of African economic history using traveller accounts. We systematically collected 2464 unique documents, of which 855 pass language and rigorous data quality requirements. Our final corpus of texts contains more than 230 000 pages. Analysing such a corpus is an insurmountable task for traditional historians and would probably take a lifetime's work. Applying modern day computational linguistic techniques such as a structural topic model approach (STM) in combination with domain knowledge of African economic history, we analyse how first‐hand accounts (topics) evolve across space and time. Apart from obvious accounts of climate, geography, and zoology, we find topics around imperialism, diplomacy, conflict, trade/commerce, health/medicine, evangelization, and many more topics of interest to scholarship. We illustrate how this novel database and text analysis can be employed in three applications (1) What views are introduced by travellers as a result of their occupational background? (2) Did the adoption of quinine as treatment and prophylaxis against malaria facilitate European expansion into Africa? (3) When and how did the diffusion of New World crops alter the African economic landscape?

Inequality Regimes in Africa From Pre-Colonial Times to the Present

ABSTRACT While current levels of economic inequality in Africa receive ample attention from academics and policymakers, we know little about the long-run evolution of inequality in the region. Even the new and influential ‘global inequality literature’ that is associated with scholars like Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic, and Walter Scheidel has had little to say about Africa so far. This paper is a first effort to fill that void. Building on recent research in African economic history and utilizing the new theoretical frameworks of the global inequality literature, we chart the long-run patterns and drivers of inequality in Africa from the slave trades to the present. Our analysis dismantles mainstream narratives about the colonial roots of persistent high inequality in post-colonial Africa and shows that existing inequality concepts and theories need further calibration to account, among others, for the role of African slavery in the long-run emergence and vanishing of inequality regimes.

Bridging the Gap with the ‘New’ Economic History of Africa

AbstractThis review article seeks to build bridges between mainstream African history and the more historically oriented branch of the ‘new’ economic history of Africa. We survey four central topics of the new economic history of Africa — growth, trade, labor, and inequality — and argue that the increased use of quantitative methods and comparative perspectives have sharpened views on long-term trajectories of economic development within Africa and placed the region more firmly into debates of global economic development. The revival of African economic history opens new opportunities for Africanist historians to enrich the interdisciplinary approaches they have taken to study questions of demography, poverty, slavery, labor, inequality, migration, state formation, and colonialism. These fruits, however, can only be reaped if the institutional boundaries between the fields of history and economic history are softened and both sides engage in greater mutual engagement. Our paper aims to move closer to a shared vision on the benefits and limitations of varying quantitative methods, and how these approaches underpin both more and less convincing narratives of long-term African development.

Ivo Obituary

The son of Mr Cletos Mhike and Mrs Christine Mhike, Ivo Mhike did his first degree at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) between 2002 and 2005, winning book prizes on two occasions for the Best Student. While working as a Teaching Assistant from 2006 onwards, he completed his Masters. Both degrees were in African Economic History. Ivo then lectured at UZ until the end of 2012, when, in the face of stiff international competition, he won a PhD studentship with the University of the Free State’s recently established International Studies Group (ISG). Research and writing for his thesis were finished in a little over three years, and at the June 2016 Graduation Ceremony Dr Mhike’s doctorate in Africa Studies was conferred.

Profile: Dr Adewumi Damilola Adebayo

Damilola Adebayo is a historian on the rise. With a recent PhD from Cambridge, he began his scholarly journey at the University of Ibadan, followed by an MA in Geneva. And with an interest in histories of infrastructure, he stakes his place on the frontiers not only of African history but other historiographies too. Coming out of the directions championed by the African Economic History Network (AEHN), his doctoral thesis was titled “A socioeconomic History of Electricity in Southern Nigeria, 1898-1972”.

Land distribution and inequality in a black settler colony: the case of Sierra Leone, 1792–1831†

AbstractLand distribution is considered to be one of the main contributors to inequality in pre‐industrial societies. This article contributes to the debate on the origins of economic inequality in pre‐industrial African societies by studying land inequality at a particularly early stage of African economic history. The research examines land distribution and inequality in land ownership among settlers in the Colony of Sierra Leone for three benchmark years over the first 40 years of its existence. The findings show that land inequality was low at the founding of the Colony but increased substantially over time. We suggest that this increase was enabled by a shift in the type of egalitarianism pursued by the colonial authorities, which was reflected in a change in the redistributive policy applied, which allowed later settlers to appropriate land more freely than had been previously possible.

Intra-European Trade in Atlantic Africa and the African Atlantic

As the transatlantic slave trade escalated in the eighteenth century, a secondary market of trade between European slavers emerged on the African coast. Intra-European trade enabled European-African trade as European slave ships rebalanced their cargoes in order to meet the tastes and preferences of African consumers and the demands of assortment bargaining—the repeated exchange of small bundles of diverse goods for small numbers of captives—that characterized the slave trade. But intra-European trade operated according to African trading norms, with the rules of assortment bargaining that governed European-African trade structuring trade between Europeans. This secondary marketplace also arose out of the combination of political economy in Europe and territorial reality in Atlantic Africa. For the British, intra-European trade became a way to leverage their position in forts on the African coast, while for the French it became a means of circumventing the restrictions of a mercantilist state. For all slavers, geopolitics in Africa and the political economy of African states shaped the way that the secondary market unfolded. Over time, intra-European trade evolved to include a service sector, anchored on the Portuguese islands in the Gulf of Guinea. These islands linked slave purchasing in the African Atlantic to the transatlantic crossing, connecting African economic history with global economic history.

Rural livelihoods and agricultural commercialization in colonial Uganda: conjunctures of external influences and local realities

Rural livelihoods and agricultural commercialization in colonial Uganda: conjunctures of external influences and local realities

Statistical sources and African post-colonial economic history: Notes from the (digital) archives

ABSTRACT While interest in African economic history has grown rapidly in recent years, the continent’s post-colonial past remains understudied. This is at least in part because of the decline and fragmentation in the publication of economic statistics after decolonization, which has limited the type and breadth of quantitative analysis that can be undertaken. Nonetheless, this note argues that there are comparatively untapped post-colonial data sources that could enrich the study of the continent's economic history. The note surveys some of these sources and data repositories and provides advice, based on the author’s own experiences, on how to utilize them.

Bianca Murillo. Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana.

Precolonial commercial networks, long-distance trade networks across ecological zones and oceans (Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans), and the “legitimate” trade that replaced the slave trade have all been studied as integral both to African economic history and in detailing the African as a producer, a laborer, and an organizer. But until barely a decade ago, who the African consumer was, and is, has not been a focal point of examination and analysis in any meaningful way. In the compelling study Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth Century Ghana, Bianca Murillo analyzes the importance of consumer politics in the period leading to independence and, after independence, during the time of both civilian and several military governments in twentieth-century Ghana. It provides a richly textured analysis of how colonial and neocolonial domination, wealth and its accumulation, state and political authority, and racial and gendered ideologies all help to explain the contours and dynamics of consumer markets and the conflicts that underlie access to the market in twentieth-century Ghana. The centerpiece of the work is a discussion of access to commodities and consumer markets at different times in the precolonial and postcolonial period, albeit mediated by “European managers and African market women, nationalist politicians and foreign investors, and military soldiers and chiefs” (5).

Who Writes African Economic History?

ABSTRACTMuch has been said about the rise, or ‘renaissance’, of African economic history. What has received far less attention is who is producing this research. Using a complete dataset of articles in the top four economic history journals, I document the rise in African economic history in the last two decades. I show that although there has indeed been an increase in papers on Africa, it has included little work by Africans. I then attempt to explain why this is so, and motivate why this should matter. The good news is that, mostly owing to efforts by the academic community, more is being done to encourage African inclusion. I conclude with a few suggestions on how to make more African scholars part of the renaissance of African economic history.

Fifty years of African economic history

ABSTRACTThe article summarizes the evolution of the study of African economic history during the past half century. It does so, not by attempting to assess the mountain of evidence that is now available, but by identifying the intellectual impulses that have shaped the contours of the subject. Six main phases have influenced several generations of postgraduate students who have been drawn to the study of Africa: modernization theory, the dependency thesis, Marxism, the Annales school, postmodernism, and, most recently, the new economic history. The discussion identifies the common features of these schools as well as their differences. Entrants to the subject, it is argued, should take encouragement from past achievements, which have opened frontiers of knowledge and set standards, but they should also be aware that the latest is not necessarily the best, nor is it always as novel as its advocates commonly suppose. Familiarity with historiographical trends enables newcomers to relate their own work to that of their predecessors. In this way, they can find room to express their own individuality and ensure that their creativity carries the subject forward.

Cliometrics in South Africa

African economic history is experiencing a renaissance, and South African economic history likewise. Combining newly transcribed large historical datasets with econometric techniques now standard in the economics literature, economic historians have greatly improved our understanding of South Africa's development over the centuries. Yet many questions remain. This paper reviews the most recent contributions, several of which are published in this special issue, and surveys the road ahead.

An Introduction to the African Commodity Trade Database, 1730–2010

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 (1730–2010). This article introduces potential users to some of the major questions that can be explored with African commodity trade data, as well as the sources, structure and limitations of the dataset. The current version of the actd is downloadable from the data repository of the African Economic History Network (www.aehnetwork.org/data-research) and will be regularly updated with new data.

Gender, ethnicity, and unequal opportunity in colonial Uganda: European influences, African realities, and the pitfalls of parish register data

AbstractThe renaissance of African economic history in the past decade has opened up new research avenues for studying the long‐term social and economic development of Africa. A sensitive treatment of African realities in the evaluation of European colonial legacies and a critical stance towards the use of new sources and approaches is crucial. In this article, we engage with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf to show how selection biases in, and Eurocentric interpretations of, parish registers have provoked an overly optimistic account of European influences on the educational and occupational opportunities of African men and women. We confront their dataset, drawn from the marriage registers of the Anglican Cathedral in Kampala, with Uganda's 1991 census, and show that trends in the literacy and numeracy of men and women born in Kampala lagged half a century behind those who wedded in Namirembe Cathedral. We run a regression analysis showing that access to schooling during the colonial era was unequal along lines of gender and ethnicity. We foreground the role of Africans in the spread of education, and we argue that European influences were not just diffusive but also divisive, and that gender inequality was reconfigured rather than eliminated under colonial rule.

African socialism; or, the search for an indigenous model of economic development?

ABSTRACTRalph Austen in African Economic History (1987) noted how few African countries explicitly choose capitalism on independence, and for those who did it was a default model or a residual pattern. ‘African socialism’ was popular in the early decades of independence and pursued by several countries, including Ghana, Guinea, Senegal and Tanzania, the cases considered in this paper. The term had multiple meanings, and its advocates were quick to stress that they were not communist, and some said they were not even Marxist. This paper explores the argument that African socialism was a search for an indigenous model of economic development for a generation that was justifiably ambivalent about capitalism, but wary of being put in the communist camp in the Cold War era. Importantly, advocates of African socialism often proposed bold and transformative visions for their countries. These visions might be worth revisiting, devoid of the paradigm of socialism.

Controversy, Facts and Assumptions: Lessons from Estimating Long Term Growth in Nigeria, 1900–2007

This article contributes to the debates surrounding New African Economic History by exploring the feasibility of constructing a time series of economic growth in Nigeria spanning the whole twentieth century. Currently most datasets for African economies only go back to 1960. The sources for their creation exist, but these valuable colonial data remain underutilized. This is an exploratory paper in a project aiming to create measures of economic growth through the twentieth century for a sample of African economies. The paper offers a systematic discussion of the different available datasets on population, agricultural production and income for the country. It finds that the existing data, often presented as facts, are more accurately described as projections based on assumptions. If these assumptions are already made in the production of the data, this precludes empirical testing of important questions. The main lesson is that any African economic history investigation must both begin and end with a critical analysis of the quantitative data, and must further be supported by careful qualitative evaluation.

The Challenge of Studying Inflation in Precolonial Africa by Klas Rönnbäck – A Response

Abstract:Following the article by Klas Rönnbäck, this article responds by stressing some key elements missing from the original article. These include the connection of African economic history to world economic history, the question of periodization and economic change, and the issue of currency devaluation in the period in question. The response concludes by posing several questions of the theoretical assumptions made by economists regarding data, and problematizes the applicability of such models to a distant pre-colonial African past.

From Extensive to Involutionary Growth: A Dialectic Interpretation of the Boom and Busts of Cocoa Production in the Gold Coast

African economic history has undergone impressive revitalization in the past decade. Much of the recent work is, quite naturally, inspired by developments in economic history at large, and increasingly – indirectly or directly – using markets as the organizing principle in understanding how economies evolve over time. More specifically, recent work assumes that markets create the possibility to use resources more efficiently, which, theoretically, enables economies to grow as long as institutions adjust and enable the population to exploit the arising opportunities. That is, the current works in African economic history are to a large extent grounded in Smithian growth models, labelled after Adam Smith's work on the mechanisms of long‐term growth. This paper critically discusses the explanatory value of the Smithian growth models for understanding the long‐term economic development in Africa. The latter is best described as recurrent growth episodes, and we argue that while Smithian models can account for initial periods of growth, they fail to explain why the growth was not sustained. We use the boom and busts of cocoa production in Ghana in the twentieth century as a case in point. We show that the decline in cocoa production was not caused by state policies distorting the functions of the markets, as the Smithian growth models suggest. Instead, the decline in production was an outcome of changes in the ecological and institutional conditions that caused the initial growth. The irony is that it was the initial growth in cocoa production that altered the conditions, making further growth in production impossible. We capture these changes – for the first time ever – by combining the concepts of forest rents and involutionary growth in an African case.

Africa: why economists get it wrong

Not so long ago, Africa was being described as the ‘Hopeless Continent’. Recently, though, talk has turned to ‘Africa Rising’, with enthusiastic voices exclaiming the potential for economic growth across many of its countries. What, then, is the truth behind Africa’s growth, or lack of it?In this provocative book, Morten Jerven fundamentally reframes the debate, challenging mainstream accounts of African economic history. Whilst for the past two decades experts have focused on explaining why there has been a ‘chronic failure of growth’ in Africa, Jerven shows that most African economies have been growing at a rapid pace since the mid-90s. In addition, African economies grew rapidly in the 50s, the 1960s, and even into the 1970s. Thus, African states were dismissed as incapable of development based largely on observations made during the 1980s and early 1990s. The result has been misguided analysis, and few practical lessons learned.An essential account of the real impact economic growth has had on Africa, and what it means for the continent’s future. (Less)