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Home › Summaries

Summaries

Historical Legacies and African Development
Elias Papaioannou and Stelios Michalopoulos - 15 November 2020 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Scholars, opinion makers, and journalists hold polarizing views on Africa's development prospects. Likewise, professionals and global investors appear either bearish or bullish on Africa's economic potential. These diverging views stem from how...
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Tax Bargaining, Fiscal Contracts, and Fiscal Capacity in Ghana: A Long-Term Perspective
Prince Young Aboagye and Ellen Hillbom - 21 October 2020 in Frontiers in African Economic History

In 2016, the average tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) was 26.15 percent for OECD countries, but only 15.47 percent for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Some scholars attribute SSA...
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The Rise and Fall of the Bureaucratic Bourgeoisie: Public Sector Employees and Economic Privilege in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania
Rebecca Simson - 22 June 2020 in Frontiers in African Economic History

In the 1960s, one of Africa’s economic and political predicaments was thought to be its overdeveloped public sector elite, which dwarfed the few members of a genuinely African commercial elite. Scholars argued...
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Labour market formation in post-slavery Africa: Ruanda-Urundi migrants and Buganda’s low wage economy
Michiel de Haas - 1 June 2020 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Introduction Analyzing post-slavery labour markets in sub-Saharan Africa, economic historians have stressed the abundance of land relative to labour (e.g. Austin 2019). In such conditions, if an employer wanted prospective labourers to...
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Covid-19 and African History: Editor’s Introduction to the Virtual JAH Special Issue “Epidemics and Public Health”
Shane Doyle - 16 May 2020 in Frontiers in African Economic History

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...
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Long-Run Effects of Forced Resettlement: Evidence from Apartheid South Africa
Martin Abel - 3 March 2020 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Long-run Effects of Forced Resettlement Under Apartheid South Africa's minority white population elected the Afrikaner-led National Party in 1948, marking the official start of the apartheid regime that would be in power...
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From Market to Exchange: Early Regulation and Social Organisation on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 1887-1892
Mariusz Lukasiewicz - 22 July 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

African stock exchanges Despite the continued resurgence in African economic history, the output of business and corporate historiography on Africa’s financial infrastructure lags considerably behind the actual contribution of the financial sector...
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Labour Control and the Establishment of Profitable Settler Agriculture in Colonial Kenya, c. 1920-45
Maria Fibaek and Erik Green - 3 June 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

European settlement and African living standards Ongoing scholarly debate cites extractive colonial institutions as a root cause of Africa’s comparatively low economic development. The role of institutions is emphasized particularly in historical...
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The Land–Labour Hypothesis in a Settler Economy: Wealth, Labour and Household Composition on the South African Frontier
Jeanne Cilliers and Erik Green - 26 April 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

A large body of research has identified a negative correlation between fertility levels and population densities in pre-industrial societies – past and present (Doveri 2000). Fertility declines as land becomes scarce. A...
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The Long-Term Effects of Extractive Institutions: Evidence from Trade Policies in Colonial French Africa
Federico Tadei - 30 January 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Trade Monopsonies and African Economic Development Under French colonial rule, trade monopsonies were often established to reduce prices paid to African agricultural producers below competitive prices and increase the profit margin of...
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Financing the African Colonial State: Fiscal Capacity Building and Forced Labor
Marlous van Waijenburg - 21 October 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Fiscal capacity and forced labor Ongoing scholarly debate about the connections between taxation, state building, and long-term economic development, has revitalized and globalized the study of historical tax systems (Bräutigam et al....
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African Agricultural Productivity and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Evidence from Senegambia in the Nineteenth Century
Klas Rönnbäck and Dimitrios Theodoridis - 21 September 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

The level of agricultural productivity in Africa has been an almost perennial topic in academic research. Scholars that have analyzed the historical productivity of African agriculture have generally believed that the prospects...
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An Economic Rationale for the West African Scramble? The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1835–1885
Ewout Frankema, Jeffrey Williamson and Pieter Woltjer - 13 July 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

The scramble for Africa stands out as a remarkable feat of European imperialism, and its motives and timing have been long debated (Pakenham 1992). In less than two decades (1884–1898), the lion’s...
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‘Changing Grounds’. The Development of Coffee Production in the Lake Kivu Region (1918-1960/62)
Sven Van Melkebeke - 28 May 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

This PhD thesis analyzes and compares the development of the coffee sector on both sides of Lake Kivu, in the Eastern Congo and Western Rwanda, during the colonial period. The Kivu region...
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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
Kazuo Kobayashi - 29 January 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

One of the central questions in African and global economic history is how West Africa contributed to economies outside the region. The debate has often focused on West Africa’s contribution to the...
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Social Mobility among Christian Africans: Evidence from Anglican Marriage Registers in Uganda, 1895-2011
Felix Meier zu Selhausen, Marco H. D. van Leeuwen and Jacob Weisdorf - 1 January 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

The arrival of Christian missionaries and the receptivity of African societies to formal education prompted a genuine schooling revolution during the colonial era. The bulk of primary education in the British colonies...
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Colonialism or Supersanctions: Sovereignty and Debt in West Africa, 1871-1914
Leigh Gardner - 19 October 2017 in Frontiers in African Economic History

In 1924, John Maynard Keynes complained that ‘perhaps the limit of the absurdity to which the Trustee Acts can lead, was reached early in this year when £2,000,000 was borrowed by Southern...
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Colonial State Formation Without Integration: Tax Capacity and Labour Regimes in Portuguese Mozambique (1890s–1970s)
Kleoniki Alexopoulou and Dacil Juif - 22 September 2017 in Frontiers in African Economic History

The capacity of the state to collect taxes determines the scope for public goods provision, which in turn has consequences for economic development and well-being. Many post-colonial states in Africa, including Mozambique,...
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European Trade, Colonialism, and Human Capital Accumulation in Senegal, Gambia and Western Mali, 1770-1900
Gabriele Cappelli and Jörg Baten - 18 June 2017 in Frontiers in African Economic History

The impact of European trade and colonialism on the economic development of West Africa has been long debated. According to Moitt (1989), peanut production in the regions of Cayor and Baol (Senegal)...
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Slave ship provisioning in the long 18th century. A boost to West African commercial agriculture?
Angus Dalrymple-Smith and Ewout Frankema - 30 May 2017 in Frontiers in African Economic History

There is a big debate in African Economic History on the long-term economic consequences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Did it only impede growth, distort trust and retard state formation, or did...
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Long-term trends in economic inequality: Lessons from colonial Botswana 1921–1974
Jutta Bolt and Ellen Hillbom - 29 March 2017 in Frontiers in African Economic History

In recent years, there has been a revived interest in the study of historical inequality (Milanovic 2016, Piketty 2014). This paper contributes to the literature with a study of long-term trends in...
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Weather Shocks and Agricultural Commercialization in Colonial Tropical Africa: Did Export Crops Alleviate Social Distress?
Kostadis J. Papaioannou and Michiel de Haas - 8 March 2017 in Frontiers in African Economic History

In recent years, a proliferation of studies has emerged that aim to quantify and assess the effects of weather extremes on various social and economic outcomes, including conflict, crime, hunger, and mortality...
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From Coercion to Compensation: Institutional Responses to Labour Scarcity in the Central African Copperbelt
Dacil Juif and Ewout Frankema - 2 February 2017 in Frontiers in African Economic History

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...
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Measuring rural welfare in colonial Africa: did Uganda’s smallholders thrive?
Michiel de Haas - 21 November 2016 in Frontiers in African Economic History

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...
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The data revolution in African Economic History
Johan Fourie - 7 November 2016 in Frontiers 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...
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Was the wage burden too heavy? Profits and wages on European settler farms
Jutta Bolt and Erik Green - 17 October 2016 in Frontiers in African Economic History

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...
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Intra-household labor allocation in colonial Nigeria
Vellore Arthi and James Fenske - 26 September 2016 in Frontiers in African Economic History

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...
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The trans-Atlantic slave trade and local political fragmentation in Africa
Nonso Obikili - 12 September 2016 in Frontiers in African Economic History

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...
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Monetary practices and currency transitions in early colonial Uganda
Karin Pallaver - 18 July 2016 in Frontiers in African Economic History

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...
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How Colonial Railroads defined Africa’s Economic Geography
Rémi Jedwab, Edward Kerby and Alexander Moradi - 9 May 2016 in Frontiers in African Economic History

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...
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Witchcraft Beliefs and the Erosion of Social Capital
Boris Gershman - 21 April 2016 in Frontiers in African Economic History

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...
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