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THE NEW ECONOMIC HISTORY OF AFRICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

A. G. HOPKINS
A. G. HOPKINS
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
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Abstract

The purpose of this article is to promote the revival of African economic history. Poverty, the most pressing issue confronting the continent, has received world-wide publicity in recent years. Yet historians have continued to neglect the history of economic development, which is central to the study of poverty, in favour of themes that have their origins in the Western world rather than in Africa. However, there is now an exceptional opportunity to correct the balance. Unknown to most historians, economists have produced a new economic history of Africa in the course of the past decade. This article introduces and evaluates two of the most important contributions to the new literature: the thesis that Africa has suffered a ‘reversal of fortune’ during the last 500 years, and the proposition that ethnic fragmentation, which has deep historical roots, is a distinctive cause of Africa's economic backwardness. These arguments are criticized on both methodological and empirical grounds. But they are also welcomed for their boldness, their freshness and their potential for re-engaging historians in the study of Africa's economic past – not least because it is relevant to Africa's economic future.

Keywords

Economichistoriography
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , July 2009 , pp. 155 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 To the best of my knowledge, Gareth Austin is the only historian of Africa to have engaged with this literature: Austin, ‘The “reversal of fortune” thesis’. C. A. Bayly has commented on India and Africa, though primarily on the former: Indigenous and Colonial Origins of Comparative Economic Development: The Case of Colonial India and Africa (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4474, 2008).

2 Even so, some of the most notable thematic and regional studies were published more than twenty years ago: Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960 (Cambridge, 1982); Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 1880–1985 (Cambridge, 1988); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983); Fred Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, 1980); Cooper, On the Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven, 1987). John K. Thornton's Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 1992) only just qualifies as an exception.

3 A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973); Ralph A. Austen, African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency (London, 1987); Charles H. Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa (Cambridge, 2005). Paul T. Zeleza's A Modern Economic History of Africa, vol. I: The Nineteenth Century (Dakar, 1993) summarizes much of the work undertaken during the previous two decades.

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7 Rita Abrahamsen's defence of ‘postcoloniality’ and advocacy of its application to Africa, for example, is notably slim in treating development issues and economic matters in particular: ‘African studies and the postcolonial challenge’, African Affairs, 102 (2003), 189–210.

8 The general trends are agreed and are widely summarized. For the illustrations that follow, see Elsa V. Artadi and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, The Economic Tragedy of the Twentieth Century: Growth in Africa (National Bureau of Economic Research [hereafter NBER] Working Paper 9865, 2003); Easterly, William and Levine, Ross, ‘Africa's growth tragedy: policies and ethnic traditions’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112 (1997), 1203–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 The Economist, 13 May 2000, 23–5. I owe this reference to Professor John Lonsdale.

10 Ibid. 17.

11 The G8 states are the Group of Eight richest industrialized countries: the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.

12 A comprehensive statement is Claude Menard and Mary M. Shirley (eds.), Handbook of New Institutional Economics (2005). The Ronald Coase Institute provides accessible guides to the subject and news of relevant conferences: www.coase.org.

13 David Secker, Thorstein Veblen and the Institutionalists (London, 1975), provides a broader account than its title might suggest.

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15 Manning, ‘Prospects for African economic history’; Manning, ‘African economic growth and the public sector: lessons from historical statistics of Cameroon’, African Economic History, 19 (1990–1), 135–70, is a model demonstration of the flaws that arise from poorly based historical assumptions. A broader view from the same standpoint is Hopkins, A. G., ‘The World Bank in Africa: historical reflections on the African present’, World Development, 14 (1986), 1473–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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17 The literature on structural adjustment is now vast. Accessible guides include: David E. Sahn, Paul A. Dorosch and Stephen D. Younger, Structural Adjustment Reconsidered: Economic Policy and Poverty in Africa (Cambridge, 1997); and Giles Mohan, Ed Brown, Bob Williams and Alfred B. Zach-Williams, Structural Adjustment: Theory, Practice and Impacts (London, 2000). An evaluation with a strong historical dimension is Celestin Monga, ‘Commodities, Mercedes Benz, and structural adjustment: an episode in West Africa's economic history’, in Emmanuel K. Akyeampong (ed.), Themes in West Africa's History (Oxford, 2006), 227–64. For a broader view of the evolution of development thinking in Africa, see Rimmer, Douglas, ‘Learning about economic development from Africa’, African Affairs, 102 (2003), 469–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Representative examples include: Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policy (Berkeley, 1981); Bates, Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa (Cambridge, 1983); Bates, Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development (New York, 2001); Sara S. Berry, Fathers Work for Their Sons: Accumulation, Mobility and Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community (Berkeley, 1985); Berry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, 1993); Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power, and the Past in Asante, 1896–1996 (Oxford, 2001); Manning, Slavery, Colonialism, and Economic Growth; Manning, ‘The slave trade: the formal demography of a global system’, Social Science History, 14 (1990), 255–79. Robert Szereszewski, Structural Changes in the Economy of Ghana, 1896–1911 (London, 1965), though not strongly institutional in orientation, should also be mentioned as a pioneering (and now unjustly neglected) account of structural economic change.

19 Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985); World Bank, Governance and Development (Washington DC, 1992).

20 See, for example, Paul Mosley's reflections on how Africa's continuing poverty was expressed in the poverty of development economics, and his suggestion that a comparison with Asia might be illuminating: ‘Development economics and the underdevelopment of sub-Saharan Africa’, Journal of International Development, 7 (1995), 685–706. An influential comparison at that time was Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialisation (Princeton, 1992).

21 An accessible introduction to quantitative methods is Pat Hudson, History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches (London, 2000). A more advanced text is Charles H. Feinstein and Mark Thomas, Making History Count: A Primer in Quantitative Methods for Historians (Cambridge, 2002).

22 See in particular, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Tropical Underdevelopment (NBER Working Paper 8119, 2001) at: www.nber.org/papers/w8119; Sachs, Institutions Don't Rule: Direct Effects of Geography on Per Capita Income (NBER Working Paper 9490, 2004) at www.nber.org/papers/w9490; Olsson, Ola and Hibbs, Douglas A., ‘Biogeography and long-run economic development’, European Economic Review, 49 (2005), 909–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 See, for example, Banerjee, Abhijit V., ‘The two poverties’, Nordic Journal of Political Economy, 26 (2001), 129–41Google Scholar; Esther Duflo, ‘Field experiments in development economics’, in Richard Blundell, Whitney Newey and Torsten Persson (eds.), Advances in Economics and Econometrics (Cambridge, 2006), 322–48; Rohinde Pande and Christopher Udry, ‘Institutions and development: a view from below’, in Blundell, Newey and Persson (eds.), Advances in Economics, 349–412; Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennester and Michael Kremer, Using Randomization in Development Economics: A Toolkit (NBER Technical Working Paper 333, 2006).

24 Such as the World Bank and the US National Bureau of Economic Research, which describes itself as ‘the nation's leading non-profit economic research organization’.

25 In addition to the specific citations that follow, see the ‘Symposium on institutions and economic performance’, Economics of Transition, 13 (2005), 421–572.

26 Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon and Robinson, James A., ‘Reversal of fortune: geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income distribution’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 17 (2002), 1231–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, ‘The colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation’, American Economic Review, 91 (2001), 1369–401. Earlier versions of both articles appeared as Working Papers that stimulated discussion before their formal publication.

27 The authors are careful to explain that ‘by economic prosperity or income per capita in 1500, we do not refer to the economic or social conditions or the welfare of the masses but to a measure of the total production in the economy relative to the number of inhabitants’. Similarly, the reversal of fortune refers to ‘changes in relative incomes across different areas and does not imply that the initial inhabitants of, for example, New Zealand or North America themselves became relatively rich’. Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, ‘Reversal of fortune’, 1232 n.1.

28 See, for example, Pranab Bardhan, ‘Institutions matter, but which ones?’ Economics of Transition, 13 (2005), 499–532; Jutta Bolt and Dirk Bezemer, Understanding Long-Run African Growth: Colonial Institutions or Colonial Education: Evidence from a New Data Set (MPRA Paper 7029, 2008) at http://mpra.ubuni-muenchen.de/7029/; Glaeser, Edward L., Porta, Rafael La, Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio and Shleifer, Andrei, ‘Do institutions cause growth?’, Journal of Economic Growth, 9 (2004), 271–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dani Rodrik, Getting Institutions Right, CESifo DICE Report (Munich, 2004); Rodrik, Second-best Institutions (NBER Working Paper 14050, 2008).

29 Rodrik, Dani, Subramanian, Arvind and Trebbi, Francesco, ‘Institutions rule: the primacy of institutions over geography and integration in economic development’, Journal of Economic Growth, 9 (2004), 131–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 O'Brien, ‘Colonies in a globalizing economy, 1815–1948’, in Barry Giles and William R. Thompson (eds.), Globalization and Global History (Hoboken, 2006), 224–65.

31 See especially, John W. McArthur and Jeffrey D. Sachs, Institutions and Geography: Comment on Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2000) (NBER Working Paper 8114, 2001); Sachs, Tropical Underdevelopment; Sachs, Institutions Don't Rule; William Easterly and Ross Levine, Tropics, Germs and Crops: How Endowments Influence Economic Development (NBER Working Paper 9106, 2002); Ola Olsson, ‘Geography and institutions: a review of plausible and implausible linkages’, Working Papers in Economics (Department of Economics, Goteborg University), 106 (2003).

32 Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Stanley L. Engerman have elaborated this point in a series of important studies: ‘Institutions, factor endowments, and paths of development in the New World’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 14 (2000), 217–32; Institutional and Non-Institutional Explanations of Economic Differences (NBER Working Paper 9989, 2003); Colonialism, Inequality and Long-Run Paths of Development (NBER Working Paper 11057, 2005).

33 Valuable examples of putting these principles into practice are the studies of land tenure by Pande and Udry, ‘Institutions and development: a view from below’; and Boone, Catherine, ‘Property and constitutional order: land tenure reform and the future of the African state’, African Affairs, 106 (2007), 557–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pande and Udry deal with Ghana; Boone with the Ivory Coast, Uganda, South Africa and Tanzania. See also Berry, Sara, ‘Debating the land question in Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 44 (2002), 638–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which ought to be mandatory reading for development planners.

34 Two balanced accounts are: Levine, Ross and Renelt, David, ‘A sensitivity analysis of cross-country growth regressions’, American Economic Review, 82 (1992), 942–63Google Scholar; Roodman, David M., ‘The anarchy of numbers: aid, development and cross-country empirics’, World Bank Economic Review, 21 (2007), 255–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Ola Olsson, ‘Unbundling ex-colonies: a comment on Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, 2001’, Working Papers in Economics (Goteborg University), 146 (2004); Olsson, ‘On the institutional legacy of mercantilist and imperialist colonialism’, Working Papers in Economics, 247 (2007).

36 Nunn, Nathan, ‘Historical legacies: a model linking Africa's past to its current underdevelopment’, Journal of Development Economics, 83 (2007), 157–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nunn, ‘The long-term effects of Africa's slave trades’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 23 (2008), 139–72. I follow Nunn in using the plural, ‘trades’, to refer to all Africa's external slave exports.

37 Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution (NBER Working Paper 2001), 4–5. The published version of this paper (see n. 26) omits this reference.

38 An exchange on this subject has already taken place. See David Albouy, The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Investigation of the Settler Mortality Data (Working Paper CO4-138, University of California at Berkeley, Center for International and Development Economics Research, 2006); Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson, ‘Reply’ (2006), at http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/212.

39 Acemoglu and his co-authors wisely decided that evidence of precolonial urban populations was insufficient for their purposes. Many towns in precolonial Africa varied in size according to seasons and market days; others were established for defensive purposes and contained a high proportion of cultivators who commuted to their farms.

40 Austin provides a fuller appraisal of the frailty of the data bases created by Acemoglu and his co-authors and by Nunn in ‘The “reversal of fortune” thesis’, 5–8.

41 Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population (New York, 1978). Kent G. Deng concludes, with respect to China, that there ‘is not a shred of evidence to support their claims’: ‘Fact or fiction? Re-examination of Chinese premodern populaton statistics’, Working Papers in Economic History (LSE), 76 (2003), 6 n. 2.

42 Thornton, John, ‘Demography and history in the kingdom of the Kongo, 1550–1750’, Journal of African History, 18 (1977), 507–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Acemoglu et al., ‘Reversal of fortune’, 1256.

44 Noel G. Butlin, Our Original Aggression: Aboriginal Populations of Southeastern Australia, 1788–1850 (Sydney, 1983); Butlin, Economics and the Dreamtimes: A Hypothetical History (Cambridge, 1993); Derek J. Mulvaney and John P. White (eds.), Australians to 1877 (Sydney, 1987).

45 Charles C. Mann provides a convenient summary of recent research in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York, 2005).

46 David Henige has provided what should be the last word on this subject: Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate (Norman OK, 1998).

47 Sullivan, Eileen P., ‘Liberalism and imperialism: J. S. Mill's defence of the British empire’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (1983), 599–617.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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50 Hla Myint, The Economics of the Developing Countries (London, 1964); and for a similar insistence on the need to relate development policies to diverse regional realities, Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (London, 1972).

51 Nunn, in particular, tends to assume that Europeans dealing with Africa in the precolonial period had much the same degree of authority as in the colonial period: ‘Long term effects’; ‘Historical legacies’. See Austin, ‘The “reversal of fortune” thesis’, 9.

52 Olsson, ‘Unbundling ex-colonies’.

53 Hopkins, Economic History, ch. 4, and, for an extension of the argument, Hopkins, ‘The “new international economic order” in the nineteenth century: Britain's first development plan for Africa’, in Robin Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to Legitimate Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge, 1995), 240–64.

54 Easterly and Levine, ‘Africa's growth tragedy’.

55 Ibid. p. 237.

56 Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara provide an excellent guide to the literature: ‘Ethnic diversity and economic performance’, Journal of Economic Literature, 43 (2005), 762–800.

57 The ‘ethno-linguistic fragmentation index’, which has been much used by social scientists, was produced by Charles L. Taylor and Michael C. Hudson, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (2nd ed., New Haven, 1972), from Atlas Narodov Mira (Moscow, 1964).

58 Alberto Alesina, Arnaud Devleeschauwer, William Easterly, Sergio Kurlat and Romain Wacziarg, ‘Fractionalization’, Journal of Economic Growth, 8 (2003), 155–94; Fearon, James D., ‘Ethnic and cultural diversity by country’, Journal of Economic Growth, 8 (2003), 195–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 Jean-Louis Arcand, Patrick Guillaumont and Sylviane Guillaumont Jeanneney, ‘How to make a tragedy: on the alleged effect of ethnicity on growth’, Journal of International Development, 12 (2000), 925–38.

60 Posner, Daniel N., ‘Measuring ethnic fractionalization in Africa’, American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004), 849–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 Englebert, Pierre, ‘Pre-colonial institutions, post-colonial states, and economic development in tropical Africa’, Political Research Quarterly, 53 (2000), 7–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Englebert, State Legitimacy and Development in Africa (Boulder, 2000).

62 Nicola Gennaioli and Ilia Rainer reach broadly the same conclusion but do not refer to Englebert (see n. 67): ‘The modern impact of precolonial centralization in Africa’, Journal of Economic Growth, 12 (2007), 185–234.

63 Pelle Ahlerup and Ola Olsson, ‘The roots of ethnic diversity’, Working Papers (School of Business, Economics and Law, Goteborg University), 281 (2007).

64 They follow here Robert H. Bates, ‘Ethnicity’, in David A. Clark (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Development Studies (Cheltenham, 2006), 167–73. On this definition, ethnicity is ultimately a cultural construct, however primordial its roots may be, whereas race is a physiological attribute.

65 Fortunately, there is now a comprehensive guide to the literature: Spear, Thomas, ‘Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa’, Journal of African History, 44 (2003), 3–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The modern debate stems from Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). See also the pioneering work by Leroy Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989).

66 See, particularly, Terence O. Ranger's auto-criticism: ‘The invention of tradition revised’, in Terence O. Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan (eds.), Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa (London, 1993), 62–111.

67 John Lonsdale provides an excellent summary in ‘Globalization, ethnicity and democracy: a view from “the hopeless continent”, in A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization World History (New York, 2002), ch. 9.

68 For one such example, see Willis, Justin, ‘“Hukm”: the creolization of authority in condominium Sudan’, Journal of African History, 46 (2005), 29–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Dorothy L. Hodgson examines shifts in colonial policy in ‘Taking stock: state control, ethnic identity and pastoralist development in Tanganyika, 1948–1958’, Journal of African History, 41 (2000), 55–78; Pius S. Nyambara traces changing ethnicities in the postcolonial period in ‘“Madheruka and Shangwe”: ethnic identities and the culture of modernity in Gokwe, northwestern Zimbawe, 1963–79’, Journal of African History, 43 (2002), 287–306.

69 Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism’, 16–25.

70 This is the conclusion of the most thorough account of ethnicity and development in Africa yet completed: Marcel Fafchamps, Market Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge MA, 2004), section VI.

71 Thornton, Africa and Africans, 102–7.

72 I hope it is not an exaggeration to say that the argument that follows was first formulated in Hopkins, Economic History. Elements of the argument were then applied to Africa as a whole by John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge, 1995).

73 The most important refinements and extensions of the argument are Austin, Labour, Land, and Capital in Ghana; Austin, ‘Resources, techniques and strategies south of the Sahara: revising the factor endowments perspective on African economic development, 1500–2000’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), 587–624. The wider implications of Austin's Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana are considered in Hopkins, A. G., ‘Making poverty history’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38 (2005), 513–31.Google Scholar

74 Mwangi S. Kimenyi points out, for example, that ethnic heterogeneity may affect the provision of public goods adversely but also stimulates the supply of private patronage goods: ‘Ethnicity, governance and the provision of public goods’, Journal of African Economies, 15 (2006), 62–99. Alberto Alesina, Reza Baqir and William Easterly show that ethnic fragmentation in the USA is linked to increased private patronage: ‘Public goods and ethnic divisions’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114 (1999), 1243–84.

75 Fafchamps, Market Institutions, section VI, provides a full account of the advantages and disadvantages of ethnic networks today.

76 It is interesting to find that some of the most persuasive evidence comes not from Africa, but from the United States. Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara have shown that public participation is lower in ‘racially or ethnically fragmented localities’: ‘Participation in heterogeneous communities’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115 (2000), 847. It is worth pointing out, however, that their findings are robust partly because they refer to race rather than to ethnicity, the former being more readily identifiable than the latter.

77 As exemplified by Gareth Austin's work, which has linked the growth of land scarcity to the increasing importance of ethnic identities in the twentieth century: ‘Sub-Saharan Africa: land rights and ethno-national consciousness in historically land-abundant economies’, in Stanley L. Engerman and Jacob Metzer (eds.), Land Rights, Ethno-Nationality, and Sovereignty in History (New York, 2004), ch. 11.

78 Bardhan, ‘Institutions matter’, 511.

79 Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002); David R. Roediger, Working Towards Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (New York, 2005).

80 An interesting recent comment on this ancient subject is Esther Duflo, ‘Poor but rational?’, in Abhijit Banerjee, Dilip Mookherjee and Roland Benabou (eds.), Understanding Poverty (New York, 2006), 367–78.

81 Some unintended and adverse consequences of institutional reform are identified by Bates, Robert H., ‘Institutions and development’, Journal of African Economies, 15 (2006), 10–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

82 As argued by Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford, 1999), who show how policies of structural adjustment, imposed to promote ‘good’ institutions, have led to unintended neo-patrimonial adaptations that nevertheless enable African states to function.

83 Rodrik, Second-best Institutions, illustrates the advantages of adapting best practice to local circumstances. For a less benign view of the same process, see Jean François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Beatrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Oxford, 1999).

84 First advanced in Talcott Parsons, Towards a General Theory of Action (New York, 1937), and elaborated subsequently.

85 Diego Comin, William Easterly and Erick Gong, Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.? (NBER Working Paper 12657, 2006), 23. Italics in the original.