Ewout Frankema

Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880-1965

Recent studies on African economic history have emphasized the structural impediments to African growth, such as adverse geographical conditions and extractive colonial institutions. The evidence is mainly drawn from cross-country regressions on late 20th century income levels, assuming persistent effects of historical causes over time. But to which extent has African poverty been a persistent phenomenon? Our study sheds light on this question by providing new evidence on long-term African growth-trajectories. We show that slave trade regressions are not robust for pre-1970s GDP per capita levels, or for pre-1973 and post-1995 growth rates. We calculate urban unskilled real wages of African workers in nine British African countries 1880-1965, adopting Allen’s (2009) subsistence basket methodology. We find that real wages were above subsistence level, rose significantly over time and were, in major parts of British Africa, considerably higher than real wages in Asian cities up to, at least the 1930s. We explain the intra-African variation in real wage levels by varying colonial institutions concerning land alienation, taxation and immigration.

METROPOLITAN BLUEPRINTS OF COLONIAL TAXATION? LESSONS FROM FISCAL CAPACITY BUILDING IN BRITISH AND FRENCH AFRICA, c. 1880–1940

The historical and social science literature is divided about the importance of metropolitan blueprints of colonial rule for the development of colonial states. We exploit historical records of colonial state finances to explore the importance of metropolitan identity on the comparative development of fiscal institutions in British and French Africa. Taxes constituted the financial backbone of the colonial state and were vital to the state building efforts of colonial governments. A quantitative comparative perspective shows that pragmatic responses to varying local conditions can easily be mistaken for specific metropolitan blueprints of colonial governance and that under comparable local circumstances the French and British operated in remarkably similar ways.

Endogenous processes of Colonial Settlement : The success and failure of European settler farming in sub-Saharan Africa*

This paper comments on studies that aim to quantify the long-term economic effects of historical European settlement across the globe. We argue for the need to properly conceptualise «colonial settlement» as an endogenous development process shaped by the interaction between prospective settlers and indigenous peoples. We conduct three comparative case studies in West, East and Southern Africa, showing that the «success» or «failure» of colonial settlement critically depended on colonial government policies arranging European farmer’s access to local land, but above all, local labour resources. These policies were shaped by the clashing interests of African farmers and European planters, in which colonial governments did not necessarily, and certainly not consistently, abide to settler demands, as is often assumed.

An Economic Rationale for the African Scramble: The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1845-1885

This is the first study to present a unified quantitative account of African commodity trade in the long 19th century from the zenith of the Atlantic slave trade (1790s) to the eve of World War II (1939). Drawing evidence from a new dataset on export and import prices, volumes, composition and net barter terms of trade for five African regions, we show that Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a terms of trade boom that was comparable to other parts of the ‘global periphery’ from the late 18th century up to the mid-1880s, with an exceptionally sharp price boom in the four decades before the Berlin conference (1845-1885). We argue that this commodity price boom changed the economic context in favor of a European scramble for Africa. We also show that the accelerated export growth after the establishment of colonial rule deepened Africa’s specialization in primary commodities, even though the terms of trade turned into a prolonged decline after 1885.

Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History – A Review Essay

Abstract In Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History, 11 leading economic historians explore whether East Asias pathway into modern economic growth can be meaningfully characterized as a trajectory of ‘labour-intensive industrialization’, a route distinct from the North Atlantic capital-intensive path as well as the more diffuse paths of industrialization in the labour scarce regions of the Southern hemisphere. This review essay situates this collective volume in the wider literature on modern economic growth to stake out its main arguments. It proceeds with an integrated overview of the main chapters to discuss some of the shared conclusions as well as some of the internal disagreements. It concludes with some critical reflections on the viability of the concept of labour-intensive industrialization, as well as the possible implications for areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, which have largely remained outside the global diffusion of modern manufacturing.

An Introduction to the African Commodity Trade Database, 1730-2010

Related data set “African Commodity Trade Database” with URL https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xt9-fzkw in repository “ DANS ”. The African Commodity Trade Database ( ACTD ) aims to stimulate and deepen research on African and global economic history. The database provides export and import series at product level for more than two and a half centuries of African trade (1730–2010). This article introduces potential users to some of the major questions that can be explored with African commodity trade data, as well as the sources, structure and limitations of the dataset. The current version of the ACTD is downloadable from the data repository of the African Economic History Network (www.aehnetwork.org/data-research) and will be regularly updated with new data.