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Migration in Africa: Shifting Patterns of Mobility from the 19th to the 21st Century
Michiel de Haas and Ewout Frankema - 3 February 2023 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Africans on the global migration scene: past and present African migration figures prominently in global headlines, and often not in a positive light. The massacre in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in...
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Washington Consensus Reforms and Economic Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa: Lessons from the Past Four Decades
Belinda Archibong, Brahima Coulibaly and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala - 6 December 2022 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Economist John Williamson coined the term “Washington Consensus” in 1989, in reference to a set of 10 market-oriented policies that were popular among Washington-based policy institutions, as policy prescriptions for improving economic...
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Colonial Legacies, Ethnicity and Fertility Decline in Kenya: What has Financial Inclusion got to do with it?
Maren Duvendack and Richard Palmer-Jones - 20 October 2022 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Linking fertility decline to financial inclusion Kenya experienced a steep decline in fertility from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s. Fertility reduction then stalled in the mid-1990s coinciding with a reduction in...
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Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1885-2008: Evidence from Eight Countries
Stephen Broadberry and Leigh Gardner - 19 March 2022 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Research on African economic performance has often focused on the question of why Africa has underperformed other regions. The only available data on Africa’s long-run economic performance began in 1950, and showed...
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Fiscal Capacity in ‘Responsible Government’ Colonies: the Cape Colony in Comparative Perspective, 1865-1910
Abel Gwaindepi - 14 February 2022 in Frontiers in African Economic History

South Africa’s development path is often regarded as unusual in both global and regional context, although scholars disagree on when and why it diverged. Some have argued that South Africa’s exceptionalism was...
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Fiscal Capacity and Dualism in Colonial States: The French Empire 1830-1962
Denis Cogneau, Yannick Dupraz and Sandrine Mesplé-Somps - 11 July 2021 in Frontiers in African Economic History

State capacity is important for economic development, but the economic history of state building is understudied and until recently, it disproportionately represented Western Europe and Western offshoots. In recent years, new research...
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Colonialism and Female Empowerment: A Two-Sided Legacy
Eleonora Guarnieri and Helmut Rainer - 20 June 2021 in Frontiers in African Economic History

The impact of colonialism on economic development has been a popular object of study across the social sciences. At the macro- and micro-level, scholars have linked colonial history to a variety of...
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Continuity or Change? New Evidence on (In)Direct Rule in British and French Colonies
Carl Müller-Crepon - 22 May 2021 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Much research in economic history has demonstrated that precolonial institutions continue to influence contemporary African development. In a pioneering study, Michalopoulos & Papaioannou (2013) have argued that areas with centralized pre-colonial institutions...
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Things Fall Apart? Missions, Institutions, and Interpersonal Trust
Dozie Okoye - 5 May 2021 in Frontiers in African Economic History

There has been renewed interest in the long-term effects of colonial-era Christian missionary activities on African economies today. Most of this work focuses on the long-run   effects of missionary activities on...
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How Africans Shaped British Colonial Institutions: Evidence from Local Taxation
Jutta Bolt and Leigh Gardner - 15 March 2021 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Studies investigating the impact of colonial institutions on African economic development have proliferated in recent decades. So far, much of the work has focused on either policies adopted in colonial capitals and...
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Numeracy Development in Africa: New Evidence from a Long-Term Perspective (1730-1970)
Gabriele Cappelli and Jörg Baten - 12 February 2021 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Historical events are fundamental determinants of economic performance (Allen 2011). However, until recently, research in quantitative economic history has mainly focused on today’s high- and middle-income economies. This lack of research is...
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Mineral Beneficence in Developing Regions: Insights from the Cape’s Public Finance Policies, 1820-1910
Abel Gwaindepi, Krige Siebrits and Johan Fourie - 21 December 2020 in Frontiers in African Economic History

The optimal way of using the proceeds from mineral discoveries continues to elude many developing countries. Because such discoveries can fuel rapid economic growth, one of the key challenges that emerge is...
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African Long-term Inequality Trends – AFLIT
Maria Fibaek and Ellen Hillbom - 11 August 2020 in Frontiers in African Economic History

The African Long-term Inequality Trends, AFLIT, is a new research network promoting interdisciplinary and collaborative research on historical inequality in Africa. It consists of scholars based at Lund University, Wageningen University, University...
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COVID-19 in Africa: Navigating Short- and Long-term Strategies
Marlous van Waijenburg and Ewout Frankema - 1 May 2020 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Note: The original version of this blog post was published by African Arguments - Debating Ideas on 22/04/2020.   The COVID-19 pandemic has reached Africa later than elsewhere, but it is clear...
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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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Interethnic and Interfaith Marriages in Sub-Saharan Africa
Juliette Crespin-Boucaud - 21 November 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

What can we learn from studying intermarriage shares? The shares of intermarriages have long been used to study the salience of cleavages within societies (Kalmijn 1998). Looking at marriage patterns gives us...
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Factor Endowments on the ‘Frontier’: Algerian Settler Agriculture at the Beginning of the 1900
Laura Maravall - 31 October 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Colonial settlement as a 'process' It is often claimed that the local conditions, such as the amounts of land and indigenous labour or the type of soil encountered by settlers in modern...
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The Blessings of Medicine? Patient Characteristics and Health Outcomes in a Ugandan Mission Hospital, 1908-1970
Shane Doyle, Felix Meier zu Selhausen and Jacob Weisdorf - 22 September 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

From the 1920s, and especially from the 1950s, recorded mortality levels across tropical Africa fell substantially, contributing to exceptionally high rates of population growth (Frankema & Jerven 2014). While this broad trend...
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French and British Colonial Legacies in Education: Evidence from the Partition of Cameroon
Yannick Dupraz - 31 August 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Why do colonial legacies matter today? Economists are increasingly convinced that history matters for economic development. Particularly widespread is the idea that former British colonies are today more prosperous, notably as a...
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Mining, Paternalism and the Spread of Education in the Congo since 1920
Dacil Juif - 29 June 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Formal education in Africa As education was the main reward missions used to lure Africans into Christianity, missionaries became the main provider of formal education on the continent particularly from the mid-19th...
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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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Family Planning and Fertility in South Africa Under Apartheid
Johannes Norling - 29 March 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

During the last half of the twentieth century, the total fertility rate in South Africa declined from 6 to nearly 3 children per woman, and the national government of South Africa established...
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Africa’s Clientelist Budget Policies Revisited: Public Expenditure and Employment in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, 1960–2010
Rebecca Simson - 26 February 2019 in Frontiers in African Economic History

One of the proximate causes of Africa’s poor growth performance – so the argument goes – is a government budget that favours patronage over growth-enhancing investments. African governments are thought to be...
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LEAP Lecture by A.G. Hopkins: “50 Years of African Economic History”
Antony G. Hopkins - 18 December 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

In his lecture, Professor Hopkins shines his light on ideological, methodological and topical trends in African economic history over the past 50 years. The full lecture will appear in the journal Economic...
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Africa Rising in Economic History
Felix Meier zu Selhausen - 19 November 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Africa is rising in Economic History. The discipline has seen impressive growth over the past decade. Africa has emerged to become a new frontier in research on the historical roots of global...
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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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‘Hail the Census Night’: Trust and Political Imagination in the 1960 Population Census of Ghana
Gerardo Serra - 27 August 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

As a landmark of ‘modern’ statecraft and nationhood, census-taking has been central in historical and sociological literature. Following in the footsteps of Foucault (2007) and Anderson (1991), many scholars have explored the...
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Disease and Gender Gaps in Human Capital Investment: Evidence from Niger’s 1986 Meningitis Epidemic
Belinda Archibong and Francis Annan - 18 June 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Climate change might worsen social inequity by widening gender gaps in human capital investment   What is the impact of climate-induced health shocks on gender inequality? In almost every country in the...
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Trickle-down Ethnic Politics: Drunk and Absent in the Kenya Police Force (1957-1970)
Oliver Vanden Eynde, Patrick M. Kuhn and Alexander Moradi - 30 April 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

The efficient provision of public goods relies on a well-functioning bureaucracy. But in many developing countries, the public sector suffers from absenteeism and poor performance (Banerjee and Duflo 2006). Our research argues...
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The Territorial Expansion of the Colonial State: Evidence from German East Africa 1890–1909
Jan Pierskalla, Alexander De Juan and Max Montgomery - 21 March 2018 in Frontiers in African Economic History

Why do states establish formal institutional presence in certain locations rather than others? While classic works of comparative politics and historical sociology have touched on the connection between the spatial unevenness of...
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The launch of Frontiers in African Economic History
Felix Meier zu Selhausen, Michiel de Haas and Kate Frederick - 24 February 2016 in Frontiers in African Economic History

We are delighted to launch the AEHN’s new blog, Frontiers in African Economic History. The editorial team consists of Michiel de Haas, Kate Frederick (both Wageningen University) and Felix Meier zu Selhausen...
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Keywords

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