Introduction: A Crisis Decades in the Making As South Sudan’s political crisis deepens in early 2025, many fear another civil war is imminent. As I illustrate in a recent article, South Sudan’s...
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Labour scarcity and coercion In a recent discussion of her book Africonomics, Bronwen Everill highlighted the tensions between European settlers and Africa's indigenous populations, rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of Africa's factor...
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Measuring the Revival of African Economic History Research on the economic history of Africa has experienced an unprecedented surge since the turn of the 21st century. This is not surprising given the...
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Understanding widowhood is an important part of understanding society; the lives of widows offer insights into how households and families are organized and what responses there are to those in need. The...
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During the colonial period, European powers established various coercive economic institutions in their African territories. These included monopolies and monopsonies on trade, price controls, taxation, and forced labour. It is widely recognized...
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Previous research on the changing property rights associated with colonialism has focused on three groups of agents: colonial governments, indigenous populations, and settlers. The role of corporations in redefining property rights during...
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Over the past two decades, African Economic History research has surged. Many studies focus on the colonial period when bureaucratic apparatuses became developed enough to produce government documents. The precolonial period, in...
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Measuring elite persistence Rising inequality in the latter part of the 20th century has brought questions of class and social mobility solidly back onto the academic research agenda. Sub-Saharan Africa remains on...
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Zimbabwe’s industrial development has been well-studied with scholars showing opportunistic and exogenous factors such as the Great Depression, the outbreak of the Second World War, the establishment of the Central African Federation...
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Today, Africa is characterized by substantial variation in within-country income inequality covering a spectrum from relatively equal economies in West and North Africa to highly unequal countries in Central, Eastern, and especially...
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Colonial administrations introduced various social infrastructure in Africa. Scholars have studied their effects on education (Brown, 2000), and health care (Lasker, 1977; Patterson, 1981; Huillery, 2009; Lowes & Montero, 2021). A recent...
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Why slavery was practised in certain US regions and not in others and why specific groups of Africans were transported in such great numbers to the New World is both a historically...
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Indians and African Economic History Literature on the economic history of West Africa has privileged European, and especially British, multinational companies who conducted different types of trade in goods and raw materials...
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Colonial history has left its mark on the education systems of many developing countries. In Africa, the British colonial legacy on education has been more benign than the legacy of other colonisers,...
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Inequality regimes in the African context In recent years, the study of economic inequality has taken on a more global and historical perspective. Scholars such as Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic, and Walter...
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A common explanation for the transition to modern economic growth is the fertility transition, which lead to greater investment in children, lower population pressures, and increased female labour force participation. Therefore, capturing...
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Addressing endogeneity in favoritism studies A large literature on favoritism in Africa argues that leaders favor their own ethnicity or administrative birthplace. This narrative of nepotistic bias posits that leaders often channel...
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Economic development requires a state that can provide basic public goods to support the operation of markets, including courts of law and infrastructure. It therefore seems natural to blame the apparently sluggish...
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Polygyny, the practice of a man marrying more than one woman, is a common practice in many parts of the world, particularly in the African “polygyny belt”, stretching from Senegal to Tanzania,...
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For decades, the link between manufacturing, economic development, and colonialism during the globalizing nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been subject to considerable debate. Dependency-school theorists have long argued that imperial ‘core’ countries...
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The Race between Education and Technology The historical co-evolution of technology, schooling, and labour market institutions, also known as the ‘race between education and technology’, is a central theme in the literature...
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Health and wealth are positively correlated across a range of dimensions, but the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This is because health and wealth are inextricably bound up with each other, making it...
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Among the world’s most powerful cultural transformations in modern history has been the rapid expansion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. While Christians made up barely 5% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population in 1900,...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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