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....
Read more »
Year: 2025
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
Measuring the Revival of African Economic History Research on the economic history of Africa has experienced an unprecedented surge since the turn of the 21st century. This is not surprising given the...
Read more »