Jutta Bolt is an Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen. Her research focuses on understanding long-term comparative economic development patterns, with a special focus on Africa. Erik Green is an Associate...
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JEL Code: N17
Economic History → Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics • Industrial Structure • Growth • Fluctuations → Africa • Oceania
This study contributes to African state and fiscal history by presenting a detailed comparison of the evolution of fiscal capacity in four countries in francophone West Africa – Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger...
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The question whether institutions in Africa were shaped by the metropolitan identity of the colonizer or by local conditions is lively debated in the African economic history literature. In this paper we...
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In 1922, the British colonial administration in the Gambia demonetized the French five franc coin, which had been legal tender since 1843. The cost of the demonetization was equal to a year’s...
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This paper offers a historical micro-level analysis of the impact of climatic shocks on the incidence of conflict in colonial Nigeria (1912–1945). Primary historical sources on court cases, prisoners and homicides are...
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Through a case-study of cocoa-farming in Ghana, this paper takes up the longrunning but recently neglected debate about the ‘cash crop revolution’ in tropical Africa during the early colonial period. It focuses...
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This paper addresses the long-term impact of Sub-Saharan Africa’s indigenous systems of slavery on its political and economic development, based on an analytical survey of the literature and data collected from anthropological...
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There has been a recent surge in research on long term African development. For this research agenda to be fruitful and its theories, it is crucial to have consistent estimates of economic...
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The role of factor endowments and institutions as drivers of socio-economic change and development is a central theme in economic and agrarian history. The common approach is to identify either factor endowments...
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The field of African economic history is in resurgence. This paper reviews recent and on-going research contributions and notes strengths in their wide methodological, conceptual and topical variety. In these strengths there...
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