I study the impacts of exposure to one of Africa’s largest circular migration flows using an arbitrary border within Mozambique that, from 1893 to 1942, separated areas where young men were either...
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JEL Code: N3
Economic History → Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy
We investigate the well-being of urban workers in Angola under colonialism. Using a newly compiled dataset derived from archival and secondary sources, we construct welfare ratios for both skilled and unskilled workers...
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Institutions of justice, like prisons, can be used to serve economic and other extra- judicial interests, with lasting deleterious effects. We study the effects on incarceration when prisoners are used primarily as...
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Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concerning female education in Africa. Using a new dataset of 5,212 Protestant brides born between 1880 and 1945 from urban and...
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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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Recent studies on colonial public finance have pointed to the severe constraints to fiscal capacity building Sub-Saharan Africa, and to the inclination of colonial governments to avoid direct taxes when revenue from...
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The majority of Africans in the colonial era pursued composite livelihood strategies of which commercial and subsistence agriculture were crucial components. So far, however, evidence on the contribution of these sources of...
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I trace the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on the evolution of political authority in West Africa. I present econometric evidence showing that the trans-Atlantic slave trade increased absolutism in pre-colonial...
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This paper aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent wide data set on African population extending into the pre-1950 era. We investigate the reliability and...
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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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While Ghana is a classic case of economic growth in an agricultural-export colony, scholars have queried whether it was sustained, and how far its benefits were widely distributed, socially and regionally. Using...
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In this paper we evaluate the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the world context, colonialism had very heterogeneous effects, operating through many mechanisms, sometimes encouraging development sometimes retarding...
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The partition of German Togoland after WWI provides a natural experiment allowing to test what impact colonial policies really had. Using a data set of recruits to the Ghana colonial army 1908-1955,...
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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 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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