Short position paper for ‘The State of Economic History in the World’ lunchtime session,
EHES Conference, Geneva, 4 September 2009
POVERTY AND DEVELOPM ENT IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, c1450-c1900:
REFLECTIONS ON THE DEVELOPM ENT OF THE ECONOM IC
HISTORIOGRAPHY 1
GARETH AUSTIN ([email protected])
Department of Economic History
London School of Economics and Political Science
From the beginning of continuous professional study on the subject, over half a century ago, the
explicit or implicit focus of almost all research on the economic history of Sub-Saharan Africa
has been the (sub-)’s continent’s relative poverty and seemingly halting development. This short
paper is intended to outline the development of this extensive and diverse literature, and to
highlight and critique recent trends. Brevity requires extreme selectivity; I apologise to the many
authors unjustly neglected in what follows. Given the title of this session, there is a brief
postscript on the state of the subject in African universities.
Part I. Three generations of literature, c.1956-c.2000
This part analyses what may be described as three overlapping generations of research on
African economic history. Each was characterised by the dominance of a particular conceptual
framework (or set of related frameworks) and related research agendas.
The first ‘generation’, of the later 1950s and the 1960s, was predominately the era of the
‘market approach’. Starting with the work of the Nigerian historian K.O. Dike [1956], and best
represented by A.G. Hopkins’s creatively synthesising An Economic History of West Africa
(1973; see also Curtin 1973, 1975), this literature was characterised by the use of concepts from
the classical and neo-classical traditions to examine supply response, price formation and resource
allocation in before and during colonial rule (as in, among other examples, the vent-for-surplus
model of export-crop growth, formulated by Hla Myint and others [e.g. Myint 1958, 1977; Elliott
1969]). Historians, including economic historians, reacted against colonial images of Africa’s
past by emphasising African agency: that Africans as entrepreneurs and rulers, as well as
peasants, helped to make African economic history (an approach most emphatically represented
by Polly Hill [1963/1997]). Economists, including economic historians, insisted on the rationality
of the behaviour of African peasants and workers (e.g. Jones 1960/1977, Kilby 1961), while
often under-estimating the extent, complexities and inequalities of African market activities in
precolonial and early colonial settings.2 All practitioners of the market approach rejected the
counter-veiling attempt of the ‘Substantivist’ school to portray resource allocation in precolonial
economies as determined by cultural forces rather than the interaction of supply and demand
(leading Substantivist works were Bohannon 1955, 1959; Bohannon and Dalton 1962; Polanyi
1966; Bohannon and Bohannon 1968).
The second generation, in the the 1970s, saw the influence of various lines of broadly leftwing revisionism. Dependency theory was brought to Africa by Walter Rodney (1972) and
1
An earlier version of this paper was presented at Ryukoko University, Kyoto, 18 April 2009. I am
grateful for the many useful comments received then.
2
For example, the exponents of the vent-for-surplus model shared with Elliott Berg, pioneer economic
historian of the wage labour market in Africa (Berg 1965), an explicit or implicit assumption that precolonial
labour forces were overwhelmingly composed of family labour; overlooking the importance of slaves and pawns
in extra-subsistence production (relatedly, they also underestimated the extent of the latter). Austin 2009, 8-10.
enlarged upon by Samir Amin (1973, 1976), despite a critical reception from Hopkins (1976). If
Dependency theory lacked grounding in the social relations of production, as orthodox marxists
complained (Brenner 1977), this was provided in part by a literature on the ‘articulation of modes
of production’. This was inspired by French marxism, liberated by ‘soixante-huit’ from the
obligation to analyze pre-colonial societies only in terms of categories mentioned by Marx. The
search for African modes of production, and the exploration of how they were subjected to
unwanted ‘articulation’ with the capitalist mode, produced an intense burst of debate (notably
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch [1969], Emmanuel Terray [1972, 1975]). On southern and
eastern Africa, ‘left-wing’ impulses were less associated with marxist categories. The major target
was the dualist view of settler economies which portrayed the sectors characterized by European
enterprise as intrinsically dynamic and the sector designated (often by government policy) largely
for the reproduction of African labour forces as mired in custom-based stagnation. The Lewis
model of ‘economic development with unlimited supplies of labour’ had been appropriated to this
interpretation (Barber 1961) without the sanction of W. A. Lewis himself, who was well aware
that Sub-Saharan Africa was basically short of labour (Lewis 1953). In contrast to this view of
the Europeans as bringing the market to subsistence-oriented, labour-surplus economies,
Giovanni Arrighi (1970), Colin Bundy and others (e.g. Palmer and Parsons 1977) showed that
Africans in what became the settler colonies of Africa had responded positively to the emergence
of markets for grain during the early colonial period; but colonial and settler governments had
responded with measures seeking to drive them out of the produce markets and into the market
for labour on European-owned farms and mines. The 1970s also saw the a productive
‘Thompsonian’ strand of working class and labour history, led by Charles van Onselen (1976,
1990) for southern Africa and, in a rather different way on East Africa, by Frederick Cooper
(1977, 1981, 1987). The overall effect of these various historiographical trends was to shift the
emphasis from efficiency and consensus to exploitation and conflict. This applied to internal
African contexts (such as indigenous slavery [Meillassoux 1975, Miers and Kopytoff 1977,
Lovejoy 1978, Northrup 1979]) as well to in the impact of Western capital and alien states.
All these ‘second-generation’ approaches were to lose momentum in the 1980s, though
the empirical contribution of the labour historians has stood up well even as historiographical and
theoretical fashions have changed. Further research on settler economies confirmed Arrighi et
al.’s critique of dualism, but also showed that governments were less successful in eliminating
African agricultural production for the market than Arrighi and his colleagues had thought
(Mosley 1983).3 Meanwhile the dependency and world systems approach came under powerful
attack from ‘orthodox’ marxists (Warren 1980, Sender and Smith 1986). The ‘modes of
production’ approach quickly ran into diminishing returns, as was evident from what became a
concluding symposium (Jewsiewicki and Létourneau 1985). But it had a positive legacy, notably
in helping to establish the controversial subject of internal slavery as a legitimate and important
subject of research (the many later contributions include Meillassoux 1986, Austin 2005; for
rather different analyses of the relationship between the evolution of internal and external slavery
and slave trading, see Lovejoy 2000, Manning 1998, Manning 1990). The ‘modes of production’
agenda of research the social relations of production was taken up, perhaps unwittingly, by a new
kind of rational-choice economics and political economy.
The third generation of literature, in the 1980s and 1990s, saw the renewed ascendency of
the rational-choice tradition, but this time primarily focussing not on individual calculus (as in the
1960s) but rather on the institutions surrounding economic activity and the politics surrounding
3
See also Mosley-Choate debate in Economic History Review 37 (1984), 409-16; and for further
perspectives, Phimister 1986, Mandala 1990, Nyambara 2000.
2
those institutions: on property rights, principal-agent problems and distributional coalitions.
Robert Bates, from political science, was the major innovator, especially with a series of essays
ranging over topics in pre-colonial and colonial history, while giving most attention to his
argument that most of the then contemporary (pre-Structural Adjustment) post-colonial states of
tropical Africa were characterised by a high rent-seeking but stable equilibrium, reflecting the
sectional interests of urban-biassed coalitions (Bates 1981, 1983).4 As it happens, the very fact
that most African countries proceeded later in the 1980s to adopt Structural Adjustment, which
precisely meant shifting the mechanism of resource allocation from the state to the market, must
by definition have reduced the size of economic rents generated in the economies concerned
(given that economic rent is a surplus above what would be earned on a competitive market).
That basic fact seemed - and still seems - to have escaped the notice of those scholars who see
rent-seeking behaviour as the basic constraint on African economic growth. Rather, in this
discourse the main change was a re-definition of the nature of the distributional coalitions that are
apparently hindering the region. Following William Easterly and Ross Levine (1997), ‘Africa’s
growth tragedy’ was identified as ethnic fragmentation’: though the specific policies and
mechanisms involved were largely the same as those which Bates had previously associated with
urban coalitions.5 A partly parallel consensus developed among economic-liberal writers on South
Africa, that apartheid was ultimately a brake upon economic growth in that economy, rather than
- as radicals argued - its engine (Lipton, 1986; Nattrass 1991). While the 1980s and 1990s saw
many publications on colonial and post-colonial topics, the now neglected pre-colonial period was
the subject of less well known but acute papers in ‘new institutionalist’ vein, from the likes of
Joseph Inikori (1994), David Richardson (Evans and Richardson 1995, Lovejoy and Richardson
1999, 2004), Nimi Wariboko (1998). More recently (by the time it was finished!), I ventured a
full-length historical test of the rational-choice theory of induced institutional innovation for the
case of the former kingdom of Asante, before and during colonial rule (Austin 2005). Finally on
the late twentieth century, it should be noted that historians in general took less interest in
economic than in cultural history: this applied to the study of Africa as elsewhere. Thus Cooper’s
major study of ‘the labour question’ and decolonization in Africa focussed not on the cost or
efficiency of labour, or the struggle over wages, but rather on what European officials’ changing
perceptions of African labour (Cooper 1996).
The successive influence of particular ‘paradigms’, and the pursuit of corresponding
empirical subject-matter, can partly be attributed to shifts in the contemporary political, economic
and intellectual contexts, within and outside Africa. But there was also an internal logic from
research findings and consequent specialist debates; though the operation of such an intellectual
evolution has often been hindered by the imperfections of the markets for ideas: scholars in
different disciplines or sub-disciplines failing to communicate with each other. Conversely, the
entry of a new generation has never entailed the complete abandonment - let alone genuine
supersession - of earlier generations’ preoccupations. Indeed, the best monographic research and
the best synthesis produced within a particular ‘school’ have often appeared after that school had
begun to become unfashionable.6 Probably this is because ‘deep’ research typically takes a long
time, whereas theoretical frameworks can (though do not always) move in and out of fashion
within a few years. On the other hand, specific lines of theorizing or empirical enquiry have been
fairly abruptly (sometimes prematurely) dropped. Take, for instance, the supply side of the
4
He later gave a more qualified view in his masterly monograph on Kenya (Bates 1989).
For the latest work of ‘mainstream’ economists on post-colonial growth, see Ndulu et al. 2008;
compare Bates 2008. For critical perspectives of different kinds, see Sender 1999, Arrighi 2002, Jerven 2009.
6
E.g., in the case of dependency and modes of production theory, Watts 1983.
5
3
growth of export agriculture in the so-called ‘peasant’ colonies in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. The vent-for-surplus framework was much criticised in the 1970s and early
1980s, but no-one has taken the trouble to develop a better framework, as distinct from occasional
additions to the rich range of case-studies provided by early work.7 I attribute this omission
largely to shifts in the dominant paradigm. Dependency theorists were not interested, perhaps
thought they already knew the answers and downplayed the evidence of autonomous choice by
ordinary African decision-makers, even in European colonies. More recent economic historians,
focussed on institutional problems, have not necessarily wanted to pick up the unfinished business
of the ‘market approach’ of the 1960s. Again, I would argue for the importance of taking a broad
and long view of the literature, to avoid missing lessons already learned by an earlier generation
(an important example, to which we will return, is the importance of African agency in the
construction of the cash-crop economies of much of tropical Africa, which has been overlooked in
recent accounts which assume that colonial governments could basically do what they liked). We
need to build on earlier foundations rather leaving the process of intellectual construction (as is
often the case with real buildings in Africa today) half-finished and roofless.
Part II. A critical - but optimistic - appraisal of recent trends and current research
opportunities
From the various works that have appeared so far in the first decade of the new century I see three
broad trends: a general search for new or previously neglected primary sources, for qualitative
and especially quantitative studies of various kinds; a new interest of growth economists in the
long-term history of Africa; and an increasing influence of the new global economic history on the
agenda of economic historians of Africa. I will comment on these in reverse order.
First, the emergence of the new global economic historiography (e.g. Pomeranz 2000,
Sugihara 2003, 2007) has begun to influence specialists on Africa, and this influence and
interaction will surely strengthen over the next few years. It is not surprising, in that Africanists
such as Jack Goody, Philip Curtin and Patrick Manning have been among the pioneers of global
history. But it also poses new questions for economic historians of Africa. For instance, while the
literature on West Africa has long emphasised the market-responsiveness of African producers in
the late pre-colonial period as well as later, and the adaptability of indigenous African institutions
to market opportunities (Hopkins 1973, Hill 1963/1997), there has been little emphasis on
economic growth, probably because Africa is still relatively poor today. Yet if economic growth
was normal, though discontinuous, in pre-modern societies, as the global economic historians are
telling us with reference to Eurasia, then one might expect to see phases of such growth in
relatively market-oriented economies such as those of - especially - West Africa. Again, Kaoru
Sugihara’s identification of different ‘paths’ of long-term economic development in East Asia and
in the West, respectively labour-intensive and capital-intensive, raises the question of how SubSaharan Africa, with its history of scarcity of both labour and capital, fits into the picture. I have
tried to respond to these questions (Austin 2008A), and others will improve upon that effort. The
rise of ‘global history’, with its challenge to more than one form of Eurocentrism, may also
encourage economic historians of Africa to put forward models or generalizations from their own
work that may be worth testing in other regions of the world. This would help to balance the
largely one-way traffic in theories, from specialists on the West (and now also, on India) to
studies of African economic history and development (Austin 2007B).
Second, for the first time ‘mainstream’ economists, at least those concerned with
7
I hope to meet this gap in the near future, with new quantitative research as well as by drawing on the
existing scattered literature.
4
economic growth, on a scale involving more than rare individuals (e.g. Mosley 1983), economists
concerned not with economic history as such, but rather with contemporary Africa, or with the
general problem of the sources of economic growth, have become interested in, and have begun to
contribute to, the study of Africa’s precolonial and colonial past. Until the present decade,
economists interested in African history were either themselves economic historians or belonged
to the small minority of development economists who did not treat Africa’s economic history as
beginning with independence from colonial rule.8 With the discovery of Africa’s past by growth
economists, the conceptual framework remains rational-choice institutionalist economics; what is
new is the method, cross-country regression analysis. Following Barro, this method was much
applied in the 1990s to the study of post-colonial Africa, in an attempt to explain why it had not
grown faster since Independence (‘the quest for the African dummy variable’, as Morten Jerven
[2009] calls it). This was the method that gave apparent empirical underpinning to Easterly and
Levine’s ethnic version of the distributional coalition thesis. But in the 2000s Daron Acemoglu,
Simon Johnson and James Robinson dramatically extended the frontiers of cross-country
regression analysis backwards to compare the prosperity of national units around the world in
1995 with the same territories c.1500 (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2001, 2002B). They
used GDP per capita for the recent year; and for c.1500 offered population density and
urbanization as proxies. The content of their argument is rather like a rational-choice
institutionalist version of dependency theory. They argue that, of the territories in five continents
that were sooner or later colonized by Europeans, those which were rich in 1995 had been
relatively poor 500 years before, and those that were relatively rich in 1500 were relatively poor
by 1995. The explanation, they contend, is that in the former the Europeans settled in large
numbers and introduced institutions favourable for economic growth, while in the latter the
colonial regimes were content to extract rent.
AJR’s work has had a huge impact among growth economists, and on economic historians
working in economics departments, and has stimulated a lot of papers by others. Many criticise
AJR from within the same conceptual and methodological framework, while some offer
alternative accounts of the colonial impact, more differentiated by period (Olsson 2004), or
question whether the reality of the ‘reversal of fortunes’ (Przeworski 2004[?]). Pranab Bardhan’s
cross-country regressions point to continuity of the existence of states in particular areas as the
strongest predictor of future prosperity (Bardhan 2005); which might fit, at least loosely, with the
historic difficulty of achieving political centralization in Sub-Saharan Africa.9
I have engaged with AJR from the perspective of the specialist literature on African
economic history. I argue that, in addition to serious data problems, the exercise in comparative
statics across a half-millennium gap predictably over-simplifies the causation. In particular, the
work of AJR, and even more so of Nathan Nunn (2007, 2008), fundamentally overlooks the
importance of African agency - that theme rightly insisted upon by the first generation of
Africanist historians. The pre-colonial era, for example, was precisely that; not a form of
colonialism by remote control. Again, it was African responsiveness to export-market incentives
basically explains why West Africa became an area of ‘peasant’ colonies whereas South Africa,
Rhodesia and Kenya were subjected to settler colonialism. I do find AJR’s work very stimulating,
however, and suggest that it may be possible to find ways of including African agency in their
8
The tendency for development economists to equate economic history with the post-colonial era was
originally noted by Manning (1996).
9
But how to account for Abyssinnia/Ethiopia, with its very long history of rule by the same state, which
was able to mobilize the fiscal resources required to defeat Italian invasion in the 1890s, but which in the late
twentieth century was one of the poorest countries in the world?
5
framework (Austin 2008B). However, I think their emphasis upon the causal primacy of
institutions over factor endowments is hard to sustain in an African (or comparative) setting
(Austin 2008A, 2008B).
Again, while AJR have the great virtue of using evidence from Africa and all other
continents to test models than in the past were usually formulated mainly with the West in mind,
they share the tendency of recent work in the rational-choice institutionalist tradition, of equating
property in history with its late-modern forms. Thus the long history of property rights in people,
including within precolonial Africa, is overlooked (Austin 2007B, 2008B). There is a related
tendency in the recent work of growth economists to underestimate the historic role of organized
violence in the exploitation of natural resources and other forms of ‘extensive’ economic growth.
While the late Charles Feinstein’s book on South Africa rightly reaffirms the proposition that the
apartheid system increasingly constrained economic growth, he also reiterated (adding a telling
quantitative calculation) a proposition from the 1970s ‘radical’ historiography of South Africa,
namely that the repression of black labour had been fundamental to the economic expansion of
the late nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth (Feinstein 2005).
I would add, here, that the reliance on regression analysis in this literature has in some
cases come at a price in terms of the ambitions of causal explanation. One of the virtues of Bates’
early 1980s model of post-colonial political economy was that it claimed to account
endogenously for the outliers: Ivory Coast and Kenya had much better economic growth records
than most other tropical African countries in the 1960s-early 1980s, and he argued that this was
because they, exceptionally, had farmers in their ruling elites. Thus their governments followed
policies that favoured export agriculture (where comparative advantage lay) and so benefited
economic growth. Thus Bates was able to argue that the exceptions did indeed prove the rule.
This ambition of being able to account for the exceptions within the terms of the model is an
important characteristic of the way in which historians and many political scientists have
approached causal explanation. Conversely, by settling for a high statistical significance, i.e. an
explanation based on probability, some of the regressions-based literature - with the honourable
exception of AJR 10 - settles for a weaker standard for explanation.
Let us now turn to the search for, and use of, new or neglected primary sources. Recent
work on African history has been unable to make use of new oral sources on the precolonial
period, because of the passing of generations who could remember it. On the other hand, besides
interviewing people about more recent decades (Forrest 1994), historians have the advantage of
successive releases into the public domain of government and business records. Where the issue is
the motives for decisions, access to the contemporary papers of the decision-makers is invaluable.
These have been particularly used by historians of business and decolonization (notably Tignor
1998, Stockwell 2000, Decker 2005, 2007). The same applies to Chibuike Uche’s use of recent
UK government releases in an article on the role of oil interests in British support for the Federal
side in the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70 (Uche 2008). Meanwhile bank records have permitted
research into the extent of cartelization in the services sector during the colonial period (Austin
and Uche 2007).
In the context of the literature on Africa, arguably the most innovative new work has been
the current research into the study of heights of Africans, especially recruits to the colonial armies.
Alexander Moradi has been the main pioneer here, working on his own and with others to study
10
They devoted a paper to the case of Botswana, one of the most sustained economic success stories of
the post-colonial Third World (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2002A). I am not convinced by their attempt to
show that Botswana is an exception that proves their rule (Austin 2008B), but their concern to make the outliers
endogenous is very welcome.
6
this for Kenya, Ghana (with Jörg Baten and me) and now also (with Denis Cogneau) French West
Africa. Moradi’s work has begun to produce interesting results, notably showing that physical
welfare of Africans tended to improve over the colonial period as a whole - though with major
variations over time and space - both in the settler colony of Kenya and the ‘peasant’ colony of
Ghana (Moradi 2008). It is important to bear in mind that not everything that happened during
the colonial period was the result (intended or otherwise) of colonial rule. It looks as the
improvement in physical welfare in Ghana owed much to the development of cocoa growing,
which was primarily an achievement of African enterprise (Hill 1963/1997, Austin 2005). Also,
cocoa was the most lucrative of the major export crops of colonial Africa: it will be interesting to
see, from the next phase of anthropometric research, whether the growth in heights is as marked
for colonies with much less remunerative specialisations. Methodologically, the advent of
anthropometrics in African economic history is very promising, because the quantity and quality
of the data on heights is superior to that available on any of the traditional economic indices,
much as some of us are keen also to explore prices (e.g. of slaves in precolonial markets: Terray
1982; Lovejoy and Richardson, 1995A, 1995B; Austin 2005, 128-34) and estimate areas under
cultivation (Austin 2007A). National income accounting in Africa is relatively old, going back at
least to the 1950s, but the quality of the data, even for recent decades, is notoriously poor.
However, Morten Jerven is doing important work in critiquing and refining it for certain
countries, which offers the potential of a more reliable basis for macro-economic history in future
(Jerven 2008).
In view of the present - very welcome - eagerness for more numbers out of Africa, it is
appropriate to add a call for patience. One of the most effective uses of quantitative evidence on
Africa is Robin Law’s paper (1992) testing Polanyi’s proposition that prices were fixed in the
precolonial kingdom of Dahomey. This mattered theoretically because the Substantivist position,
elaborated in Polanyi’s book on the Dahomey case (Polanyi 1966) was that precolonial prices
were set not by market forces but by custom or command. Law’s research refuted this by a
finding summarized in his sub-title: ‘inflation in pre-colonial Dahomey’. The paper deserves wide
attention, especially considering Douglass North’s fear that Substantivism was unfalsifiable
(North 1977). Law’s work showed that it could be falsified, and proceeded to do exactly that
(Law 1992; see also Lovejoy 198?). My point, however, is that though the numbers produced by
Law are simple, their construction required painstaking research in contemporary sources in
different languages and with confusing monetary units. There was no short cut. Today various
economists have turned to G. P. Murdock’s mid-twentieth century ‘ethnographic atlas’ because,
though old and (as they may or may not be aware) much criticised by anthropologists, it does at
least permit a quantification of, for example, which precolonial societies did or did not have
particular institutions. Murdock’s work is useful for comparative history, as Goody demonstrated
long ago (Goody 1976). However, reliance on it seems doubly ahistorical approach. First,
institutions have histories: to say whether ‘the Hausas’ had slaves, for example, tells us nothing
about the changing incidence and perhaps meaning of slavery. Second, by now we have the
opportunity to construct a much more detailed and refined database covering the same ground but
taking care to refine the provenance of the claims made in it and to supplement them by
incorporating further evidence from the numerous historical studies that have been conducted
since Murdock’s time.
I end with the hope that ‘the agrarian question’ in Africa can be rescued from the relative
neglect which, with some exceptions (including Sender and Smith 1986, Mandala 1990, Berry
1993, Austin 2005), it has endured since it went out of fashion at the end of the 1970s. The issue
of long-term trends in agrarian social relations and agricultural productivity remains fundamental
to understanding the future prospects for Africa, economically and otherwise. Is the agricultural
future Geertzian involution or Boseupian productivity growth (Murton 1999)? Is Africa, rural
7
and urban, ‘too late’ for effective capitalist development, as John Iliffe asked a quarter-century
ago (Iliffe 1983)?
Postscript: a brief Note on the State of African Economic History in African Universities
In tropical Africa the universities are post-war, and mostly post-colonial, creations. Some of them
enjoyed relatively good times as research centres, especially in the 1960s (in Senegal, Ghana,
Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania, in particular). But long-term, and especially since the general
downturn of economic growth in most Sub-Saharan countries in the mid-1970s, African
universities have suffered greatly from the relative poverty of the surrounding economies. This
has induced a massive and sustained net brain drain, of both faculty and research students. Again,
government research funding is very low, and the supplements offered by international
development agencies tend to be tightly concentrated on research within the framework of those
agencies’ priorities and strategies, which are highly present-oriented. The relative poverty of most
of Africa, and specifically of its universities, is the fundamental reason why the majority of
studies of African economic history have been written by non-Africans, and why - if my
impression is correct - this imbalance has been widened over the last generation.
The story is not just money. History has tended to be given decreasing priority in national
debate and expenditure. In Nigeria, it is no longer a compulsory subject at secondary school.
Moving from tropical Africa to South Africa, the end of the apartheid regime in 1994 was
followed by a major change in the preoccupations of historians: the previously dominant debate
over the historical relationship between capitalism and apartheid was quickly superseded by a
focus on culture and identity politics. South African economic historians had anyway long been
split into mutually-hostile groups: between the ‘orthodox’ economic historians around the South
African Journal of Economic History, and, on the other hand, the radicals (more likely to
publish in the Journal of Southern African Studies) who saw institutionalised racism as a local
variation in global capitalist strategies of domination, and considered the former group to be
obsessed with second-order issues rather than the primary one of the political economy of
apartheid. In my view, Feinstein 2005 is an outstanding synthesis. With the next WEHC going to
be in Stellenbosch, as an outsider I can only hope that peace, discussion, and intellectual marketintegration have long since occurred.
References
Note: The following is a very small selection of the literature, merely comprising works cited
above. Much more has been written on African economic history than non-specialists might
expect. Already in 1973, and with reference just to the one region of Africa, Hopkins’ An
Economic History of West Africa had a bibliography of well over 600 items, the vast majority of
which were undoubtedly economic history rather than simply being relevant works from other
disciplines.
Acemoglu D, Johnson S, Robinson JA. 2001. The colonial origins of comparative development: an
empirical investigation. American Economic Review 91: (5: 1369-1401.
Acemoglu D, Johnson S, Robinson JA. 2002A. An African success story: Botswana. CEPR Discussion
Paper 3219. Centre for Economic Policy Research, London.
8
Acemoglu D, Johnson S, Robinson JA. 2002B. Reversal of fortune: geography and institutions in the
making of the modern world income distribution. Quarterly Journal of Economics 117: 4: 12311294.
Amin, Samir. 1973. Neo-Colonialism in West Africa (Harmondsworth; French original, 1971).
-----. 1976. Unequal Development: an Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism
(Hassocks, Sussex, UK; French original, 1973).
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1970. ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective: a study of the proletarianization
of the African peasantry in Rhodesia’, Journal of Development Studies 3, 197-234.
-----. 2002. ‘The African crisis’, New Left Review (2 nd series) 15, 5-36.
Austin, Gareth. 2005. Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante,
1807-1956 (Rochester NY).
-----. 2007A. ‘Labour and land in Ghana, 1879-1939: a shifting ratio and an institutional revolution’,
Australian Economic History Review (special issue on ‘Factor Prices and the Performance of Less
Industrialised Countries), 47: 1, 95-120.
-----. 2007B. ‘Reciprocal comparison and African history: tackling conceptual euro-centrism in the
study of Africa’s economic past’, African Studies Review 50: 3, 1-28.
-----. 2008A. ‘Resources, techniques and strategies south of the Sahara: revising the factor
endowments perspective on African economic development, 1500-2000’, Economic History Review,
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-----. 2008B. ‘The “reversal of fortune” thesis and the compression of history: perspectives from
African and comparative economic history’, Journal of International Development 20, 996-1027.
-----. 2009. ‘Cash crops and freedom: export agriculture and the decline of slavery in colonial West
Africa’, International Review of Social History, 54:1,1-37.
----- and Chibuike Uche. 2007. ‘Collusion and competition in colonial economies: banking in British
West Africa, 1916-1960’, Business History Review 81 (Spring), 1-26.
Barber, W.L. 1961. The Economy of British Central Africa (London).
Bardhan P. 2005. Institutions matter, but which ones?’, Economics of Transition, 13: 3, 499-532.
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