Frontiers in African Economic History – AEHN’s blog – diffuses research-based content and promotes discussion concerning the study of long-term African development. The blog provides authors a platform to disseminate easily accessible summaries (700 words) of their recently published research (articles, book chapters, book reviews, theses), publishes interviews with key scholars in the field, and discusses relevant developments. We welcome blog contributions and suggestions. Please contact the editors (Rebecca Simson, Jeanne Cilliers and Abel Gwaindepi) to discuss possible posts.
Regulatory capture in the British Empire: The British South Africa Company and the redefinition of property rights in Southern Africa
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African Time Travellers: What can we learn from 500 years of written accounts?
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Elite persistence in Sierra Leone: what can names tell us?
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The Manufacturing Industry in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1979
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Income inequality and export-oriented commercialization in colonial Africa: Evidence from six countries
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The Development of Colonial Health Care Provision in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, 1900-1955
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The Side Effects of Immunity: Malaria and African Slavery in the United States
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Sindhi Businessmen and Postcolonial Industrial Development in Ghana
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Colonial Origins and Quality of Education: Evidence from Cameroon
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Inequality Regimes in Africa from Pre-Colonial Times to the Present
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Malthus in the Middle East
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Leader Selection and Why it Matters: Education and the Endogeneity of Favoritism in 11 African Countries
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The Fiscal State in Africa: Evidence from one Century of Growth, 1900-2015
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Education and Polygamy: Evidence from Cameroon
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Local Advantage in a Global Context. Competition, Adaptation and Resilience in Textile Manufacturing in the ‘Periphery’, 1860-1960
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What about the Race between Education and Technology in the Global South?
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Legacies of Loss: The Health Outcomes of Slaveholder Compensation in the British Cape Colony
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The Economics of Missionary Expansion
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Migration in Africa: Shifting Patterns of Mobility from the 19th to the 21st Century
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Washington Consensus Reforms and Economic Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from the Past Four Decades
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Colonial Legacies, Ethnicity and Fertility Decline in Kenya: What has Financial Inclusion got to do with it?
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Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1885-2008: Evidence from Eight Countries
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The ILO and the Making of Labour Policies in Colonial Nigeria
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Fiscal Capacity in ‘Responsible Government’ Colonies: the Cape Colony in Comparative Perspective, 1865-1910
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Educational Gender Inequality in Sub‐Saharan Africa: A Long‐Term Perspective
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Elite Violence and Elite Numeracy in Africa from 1400 CE to 1950 CE: Evidence from an African Game of Thrones
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Historical Experiences and Demand for Health: The Legacy of Colonial Medical Campaigns in Central Africa
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Colonizer Identity and Trade in Africa: Were the British More Favourable to Free Trade?
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Reconstructing Income Inequality in a Colonial Cash Crop Economy: Five Social Tables for Uganda, 1925–1965
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The Colonial Legacy of Corruption Among Local Elites in Africa
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Fiscal Capacity and Dualism in Colonial States: The French Empire 1830-1962
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Colonialism and Female Empowerment: A Two-Sided Legacy
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Continuity or Change? New Evidence on (In)Direct Rule in British and French Colonies
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Things Fall Apart? Missions, Institutions, and Interpersonal Trust
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The Origins of Colonial Investments in Former British and French Africa
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The Influence of Colonialism on Africa’s Welfare: An Anthropometric Study
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How Africans Shaped British Colonial Institutions: Evidence from Local Taxation
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Numeracy Development in Africa: New Evidence from a Long-Term Perspective (1730-1970)
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Mineral Beneficence in Developing Regions: Insights from the Cape’s Public Finance Policies, 1820-1910
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Historical Legacies and African Development
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Tax Bargaining, Fiscal Contracts, and Fiscal Capacity in Ghana: A Long-Term Perspective
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African Long-term Inequality Trends – AFLIT
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The Rise and Fall of the Bureaucratic Bourgeoisie: Public Sector Employees and Economic Privilege in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania
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Labour market formation in post-slavery Africa: Ruanda-Urundi migrants and Buganda’s low wage economy
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Covid-19 and African History: Editor’s Introduction to the Virtual JAH Special Issue “Epidemics and Public Health”
Currently Africa, accounting in May 2020 for only 0.8% of confirmed cases and 0.6% of deaths worldwide, is marginal to global analysis of coronavirus. This situation seems likely to change, given the fragility of African health systems, the prevalence of underlying health conditions such...
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COVID-19 in Africa: Navigating Short- and Long-term Strategies
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Long-Run Effects of Forced Resettlement: Evidence from Apartheid South Africa
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Writing Economic History with the Archives Nationales du Sénégal
The richness and professionalism of the Senegalese national archives has long been acknowledged by historians of West Africa. Unlike several other countries in West Africa, where political upheaval or civil war have inflicted considerable damage on archival institutions, the Senegalese archives have been well-preserved...
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Interview: Antony Hopkins
Professor Antony Hopkins, your revised, 2nd edition of An Economic History of West Africa (Routledge, 2019) was published this autumn. Why do you think this book has stood the test of time, and remains a reading list staple for students of African economic history,...
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Interethnic and Interfaith Marriages in Sub-Saharan Africa
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Factor Endowments on the ‘Frontier’: Algerian Settler Agriculture at the Beginning of the 1900
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The Blessings of Medicine? Patient Characteristics and Health Outcomes in a Ugandan Mission Hospital, 1908-1970
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French and British Colonial Legacies in Education: Evidence from the Partition of Cameroon
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From Market to Exchange: Early Regulation and Social Organisation on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 1887-1892
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Mining, Paternalism and the Spread of Education in the Congo since 1920
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Labour Control and the Establishment of Profitable Settler Agriculture in Colonial Kenya, c. 1920-45
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The Land–Labour Hypothesis in a Settler Economy: Wealth, Labour and Household Composition on the South African Frontier
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Family Planning and Fertility in South Africa Under Apartheid
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Africa’s Clientelist Budget Policies Revisited: Public Expenditure and Employment in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, 1960–2010
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The Long-Term Effects of Extractive Institutions: Evidence from Trade Policies in Colonial French Africa
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LEAP Lecture by A.G. Hopkins: “50 Years of African Economic History”
In his lecture, Professor Hopkins shines his light on ideological, methodological and topical trends in African economic history over the past 50 years. The full lecture will appear in the journal Economic History of Developing Regions in several months. For those who can’t wait...
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Africa Rising in Economic History
Africa is rising in Economic History. The discipline has seen impressive growth over the past decade. Africa has emerged to become a new frontier in research on the historical roots of global inequality. This growing wave seeks to reconstruct various dimensions of long-term development...
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Financing the African Colonial State: Fiscal Capacity Building and Forced Labor
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African Agricultural Productivity and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Evidence from Senegambia in the Nineteenth Century
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‘Hail the Census Night’: Trust and Political Imagination in the 1960 Population Census of Ghana
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An Economic Rationale for the West African Scramble? The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1835–1885
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Disease and Gender Gaps in Human Capital Investment: Evidence from Niger’s 1986 Meningitis Epidemic
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‘Changing Grounds’. The Development of Coffee Production in the Lake Kivu Region (1918-1960/62)
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Trickle-down Ethnic Politics: Drunk and Absent in the Kenya Police Force (1957-1970)
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The Territorial Expansion of the Colonial State: Evidence from German East Africa 1890–1909
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Interview: Emmanuel Akyeampong
Professor Akyeampong, first of all, thank you for delivering a rich and thought-provoking keynote lecture on ‘African Socialism’ at the Annual Meeting 2017 of the AEHN last October in Stellenbosch. You mentioned that this lecture relates to a research project that will culminate in...
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Indian Textiles and Gum Arabic in the Lower Senegal River: Global Significance of Local Trade and Consumers in the Early Nineteenth Century
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Social Mobility among Christian Africans: Evidence from Anglican Marriage Registers in Uganda, 1895-2011
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Colonialism or Supersanctions: Sovereignty and Debt in West Africa, 1871-1914
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Colonial State Formation Without Integration: Tax Capacity and Labour Regimes in Portuguese Mozambique (1890s–1970s)
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European Trade, Colonialism, and Human Capital Accumulation in Senegal, Gambia and Western Mali, 1770-1900
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Slave ship provisioning in the long 18th century. A boost to West African commercial agriculture?
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From the Archives: experiences of doing historical demography in Northern Ghana
African historical demography has received comparatively little attention with respect to the wider field of historical demography. In 1977, the Centre for African Studies at the University of Edinburgh devoted its annual seminar to African historical demography. The co-convenors at the time, Christopher Fyfe...
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Long-term trends in economic inequality: Lessons from colonial Botswana 1921–1974
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Weather Shocks and Agricultural Commercialization in Colonial Tropical Africa: Did Export Crops Alleviate Social Distress?
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From Coercion to Compensation: Institutional Responses to Labour Scarcity in the Central African Copperbelt
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 and mining companies were confronted with the problem of labour recruitment in...
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Interview: Paul Lovejoy
Prof. Lovejoy, you held the keynote at the 2016 Meeting of the AEHN hosted by the University of Sussex. It was also your first attendance of the Annual Meeting of the AEHN. What was your impression of the AEHN and the conference? Have you been involved...
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Measuring rural welfare in colonial Africa: did Uganda’s smallholders thrive?
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 we have data of sufficient precision and quality to reconstruct economic activity...
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The data revolution in African Economic History
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 that contained the information some of them had used in essays and...
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Was the wage burden too heavy? Profits and wages on European settler farms
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 to open up farms in Africa faced the challenge of securing access...
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Intra-household labor allocation in colonial Nigeria
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 tasks is a crucial coping mechanism used by the poor in response...
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The trans-Atlantic slave trade and local political fragmentation in Africa
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 and influence, in their turn, can be significantly affected by major events...
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Doing Economic History in Africa: experiences from the archives in Uganda
The field of African Economic History is flourishing. The rising number of participants at the annual meeting of the AEHN, the increasing flow of articles in mainstream economic history journals and thriving research groups in Lund, Wageningen and Stellenbosch, just to name some of...
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Monetary practices and currency transitions in early colonial Uganda
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 necks. The dichotomy between pocketed and strung currencies brings to light different...
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Interview: Patrick Manning
Patrick, you began your illustrious career in African economic history in the late 1960s. How has the field evolved over time? I completed my PhD in 1969 and published my first book, on Dahomey 1640-1960, in 1982. The field was then small, interdisciplinary, and...
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How Colonial Railroads defined Africa’s Economic Geography
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 16 km of road per 100 km2 of land surface, which is...
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Witchcraft Beliefs and the Erosion of Social Capital
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 in many parts of the African continent and beyond. While witchcraft beliefs...
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Interview: Ewout Frankema
Ewout, you were trained as a historian and economist and wrote your PhD thesis on inequality in Latin America. What made you invest so much of your professional energy in African economic history? A better understanding of the nature and historical origins of global...
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The launch of Frontiers in African Economic History
We are delighted to launch the AEHN’s new blog, Frontiers in African Economic History. The editorial team consists of Michiel de Haas, Kate Frederick (both Wageningen University) and Felix Meier zu Selhausen (University of Southern Denmark & University of Sussex). The aim of this...
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