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Home › Working Papers › N › N5 › N57

JEL Code: N57

Economic History  →  Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment, and Extractive Industries  →  Africa • Oceania

Is Africa too late for ‘late development’? Gerschenkron south of the Sahara

Gareth Austin

Posted in Working Papers

This essay presents an economic history perspective on prospects for industrialization in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Gerschenkron-Amsden ‘late development’/‘late industrialization’ approach has valuable insights for Africa, but is best set within Sugihara’s longer-term,...
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Colonial Origins of the Threefold Reality of Mozambique: fiscal capacity and labour systems

Kleoniki Alexopoulou and Dacil Juif

Posted in Working Papers

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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Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labour

Marlous van Waijenburg

Posted in Working Papers

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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Measuring Rural Welfare in Colonial Uganda: Why Farmers Would not Work for Wages

Michiel de Haas

Posted in Working Papers

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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Climate Shocks and Conflict: Evidence from Colonial Nigeria

Kostadis Papaioannou

Posted in Working Papers

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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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the Evolution of Political Authority in West Africa

Warren C. Whatley

Posted in Working Papers

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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Writing History Backwards or Sideways: Towards a Consensus on African Population, 1850-present

Ewout Frankema and Morten Jerven

Posted in Working Papers

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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Vent for surplus or Productivity Breakthrough? The Ghanian Cocoa Take-Off, c. 1890-1936

Gareth Austin

Posted in Working Papers

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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Future challenges in measuring Africa’s past: Lessons from estimating GDP for the Gold Coast, 1891-1954

Morten Jerven

Posted in Working Papers

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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Land Concentration, Institutional Control and African agency: Growth and Stagnation of European Tobacco Farming in Shire Highlands, c 1900 – 1940

Erik Green

Posted in Working Papers

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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Moving Forward in African Economic History: Bridging the Gap Between Methods and Sources

Morten Jerven, Gareth Austin, Erik Green, Chibuike Uche, Ewout Frankema, Johan Fourie, Joseph Inikori, Alexander Moradi and Ellen Hillbom

Posted in Working Papers

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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If you or your organisation would like to know more about the activities of the AEHN and how best to support these, please contact us for more information.

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Keywords

Africa African Union agriculture Botswana colonial economy colonial institutions Colonialism Commodities Commodity Trade Comparative History data development Economic blocs economic development Economic Growth Economic integration ECOWAS education fiscal capacity GDP gender health Human Capital inequality Institutions Intra-African Trade labour living standards long-term development marriage patterns missionaries monetary systems Mozambique political economy population Religion Sub-Saharan Africa taxation Terms of trade trade Trust Uganda Urbanization welfare ratio West Africa

JEL Codes

E62 F54 H5 H11 H20 I2 I25 I30 I32 J1 J12 J15 J16 J43 J47 N N1 N17 N25 N27 N37 N47 N57 N67 N77 N87 N97 O1 O10 O14 O18 O25 O33 O43 O55 P48 Q1 Q50 R11 R12 R40 Z1 Z10 Z12 Z13
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