Department of International History
Academic year 2015 - 2016
PROFESSOR
Gareth Austin
gareth.austin@graduateinstitute.ch
AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY
HI077 - Autumn - 6 ECTS
Office: MdP-P2-511
Phone: +41 22 908 62 18
Reception hours : Wednesdays 14h3016h30 (absent 11 November).
Course Description
ASSISTANT
This seminar course explores the economic history of SubSaharan Africa, focussing upon (a) theories, methods and
sources, (b) key debates. It is particularly suited to
students planning to write dissertations in this or related
fields, whether for MA or PhD. We assess the uses and
limitations of different kinds of sources, consider how to
get the most from a range of quantitative and qualitative
methods, and explore external and internal, institutional
and resource-based explanations of the region's relative
poverty today. The specific historical issues examined
include the causes and consequences of the slave trades
out of Africa; the political economy of slavery and other
forms of labour coercion within the region; economic
cultures and responses to markets; patterns of state
formation, and consequences for ethnicity; settler and nonsettler economies; capitalism and apartheid in South
Africa: the shift from market to state mechanisms of
resource allocation after 1945, and its reversal during and
since Structural Adjustment in the 1980s; and the halting
steps towards industrialization.
Riina Turtio
Riina.turtio@graduateinstitute.ch
Office: MdP-P2-501
Phone: +41 22 908 44 46
Syllabus
A note on timing: 11 of the 14 classes take place on Thursdays, 14h15-16h in Salle 3; the other 3 on Fridays (please
make a note of the times and rooms in the syllabus below).
Nature of the course: the aim is to explore, at an advanced level, both Africa’s economic past and the ways in
which it has been and can be studied. It is reading-intensive, and particularly suited to students thinking of writing a
master’s memoire or doctoral dissertation in this or a related field. The main format will be the seminar: a
presentation, either by the professor or by a student or group of students, followed by questions and discussion
from the rest of the group, based on your prior reading. Thus is not the course to choose for a general introduction,
especially one based on lectures, and especially if you plan to limit to reading to below 70-80 pages a week. On the
other hand, I hope it will suit you if you are interested in research training, or in intensive pursuit of the issues.
Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2 | CP 136 - CH-1211 Genève 21 | +41 22 908 57 00 | graduateinstitute.ch
MAISON DE LA PAIX
Teaching model: arguably even more important than lectures and seminars, and active student participation
throughout (including questions in the lectures), is feedback on your individual work. You are strongly encouraged
to talk to the professor and teaching assistant while planning your research paper. You will receive detailed written
comments from the professor on your draft and briefer ones on the final version. You will also get feedback on
your commentaries on other students’ papers.
What is asked of students:
1. To participate in the course as a whole: doing the reading for each week’s topic (including other students’ draft
papers, when applicable), and coming prepared to question and intervene.
2. Providing written and oral comments on another student’s draft paper, to help the author improve it.
3. Researching, writing, presenting, defending and improving your own paper.
Evaluation will be based on:
1. Class preparation and participation (20%).
2. Commentaries on one or two papers by fellow students (20%).
3. Presentation and defence of your own draft paper (10%).
4. Final version of your paper, which should be 5-6000 words (50%).
Readings: will mostly be available electronically, on Moodle. In addition, books on the reading list that contain
relevant chapters besides those on Moodle are held on Reserve in the library. The list includes a very few books
which are listed as a whole: in these cases, you are invited to practice the ancient and still-invaluable skill of
looking through the whole work, focussing on whichever pages you decide are the most pertinent.
Students are expected to read and reflect before each seminar. Please read at least 70-80 pages a week,
including the ‘essential’ readings where specified. For your paper, you will need even more readings; please come
and discuss these, and your topic and the formulation of your question, in my reception hours (14h30-16h30, except
for absence on 11 November).
1. INTRODUCTION: AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY AS SUBJECT AND FIELD
(17 September)
A.Organising meeting: introduction to the course, to Moodle, and to what is expected of students.
B.Introductory mini-lecture: attempting to sketch the major distinctions of period and region within the economic
history of Sub-Saharan Africa, and of the emergence of its study as a professional field. This includes the earlier
expansion of research from the later 1950s to the mid-1980s, the quiet period of the later 1980s and 1990s, and the
resurgence that began in the early 2000s and continues very strongly today. Two problems of the field, as with
African social science and history generally, is that so far the bulk of the research has been done by scholars (some
of them African) based at universities outside Africa, reflecting the relative poverty of the economies that support
them. Another is that the concepts with which scholars think about Africa were very often devised originally with
reference to the history of another part of the world, whereas economic historians of Africa have yet to export many
of their ideas.
Essential reading
On ‘what happened’ so far in Africa’s economic history, the most recent single-volume text covering the last few
hundred years remains R. Austen, African Economic History (1987). Please skim or read it (or related African
history textbooks by F. Cooper, C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, B. Freund, J. Iliffe, R. Reid, T. Zaleza and others that you
can find).
On the evolution of the literature to the present, see G. Austin & S. Broadberry (2014), ‘Introduction: the
renaissance of African economic history’, to Economic History Review, 67: 4, special issue, The Renaissance of
African Economic History, 893-906.
Further reading
Like the preceding readings, the following reflect different moments in the story, as well as different perspectives
on it. So the list is in order of publication.
A.G. Hopkins (1980), ‘Africa’s age of the improvement’, History in Africa 7, 141-60.
F. Cooper (1981), ‘Africa and the world economy’, African Studies Review, 24: 2/3, 1-86. (Reprinted with
postscript in Cooper et al. [1993], Confronting Historical Paradigms).
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T. Zaleza (1993), ‘Introduction: rethinking African economic history’, in his A Modern Economic History of
Africa: The Nineteenth Century, 1-22.
F. Bernault (2001),, ‘L’Afrique et la modernité des sciences sociales’, Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire 70, 12738. On the dominance of the study of Africa by models formulated for other contexts.
G. Austin (2007), ‘Reciprocal comparison and African history: tackling conceptual euro-centrism in the study of
Africa’s economic past’, African Studies Review, 50: 3, 1-28.
A.G. Hopkins (2009), ‘The new economic history of Africa’, Journal of African History, 50: 2, 155-77.
G. Austin, ‘African economic history in Africa’ (2015), Economic History of Developing Regions, 30: 1, 79-94.
2. MARKET APPROACHES AND RATIONAL-CHOICE INSTITUTIONALISM
(24 September)
Except during the heyday of Dependency and ‘modes of production’ theory in the 1970s and early 1980s, the
dominant tradition in the inter-disciplinary study of Africa’s economic past has been that based on models of (in a
broad sense) economically-rational choices by individuals. From K.O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta
(1956) to Hopkins (1973), this took the form of a general emphasis on the importance of markets, and African
responsiveness to markets under often difficult environmental and political conditions. That approach continues to
the present, especially but not exclusively in the work of historians. In the 1980s, ‘new’ or ‘rational-choice’
institutionalism reached African Studies through the political scientist Robert Bates. This was given an econometric
twist by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson in the 2000s. Rational-choice institutionalism remains the most
influential approach to the political economy of Africa, past and present, across several disciplines. But some
economic historians working broadly within a market framework argue that choices of both institutions and
production techniques themselves respond to a great extent to environmental constraints and opportunities (the
quantity and properties of resources; factor ‘endowments’).
Essential reading
A.G. Hopkins (1973), An Economic History of West Africa, esp.1-7, 293-6. The book as a whole is a classic, the
single most influential study in the field, as far as researchers are concerned, and is a model of clarity.
R.H. Bates (1989), ‘The demand for revolution: the agrarian origins of Mau Mau’, in his Beyond the Miracle of the
Market: the political economy of agrarian development in Kenya, 11-44, 157-63. Illustrates the rationalchoice approach in a key historical context.
Further reading
R.H. Bates (1995), ‘Social dilemmas and rational individuals: an assessment of the New Institutionalism’, in J.
Hunter, J. Harriss & C. Lewis (eds), The New Institutional Economics and Third World Development, 2748. Not specifically about Africa but very clear and helpful on his theoretical perspective, and on rationalchoice institutionalism in general.
G. Austin (2008a), ‘Resources, techniques and strategies south of the Sahara: revising the factor endowments
perspective on African economic development, 1500-2000’, Economic History Review 61: 3, 587-624.
D. Acemoglu & J. Robinson (2010), ‘Why is Africa poor?’, Economic History of the Developing Regions 25:1, 2150. Note that this article rests to a large extent on the techniques and sources used in D. Acemoglu, S.
Johnson and J. Robinson’s famous if controversial articles of 2001 and 2002: ‘The colonial origins of
comparative development: an empirical investigation’, American Economic Review 91: 5 (2001), 13691401, and ‘Reversal of fortune: geography and institutions in the making of the modern world income
distribution’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 117: 4 (2002), 1231-79.
G. Austin (2008), ‘The “reversal of fortune” thesis and the compression of history: perspectives from African and
comparative economic history’, Journal of International Development 20: 8, 996-1027.
3. DEPENDENCY, MARXIST AND POPULIST INTERPRETATIONS
(1 October)
The most popular ‘heterodox’ approach is dependency theory: the idea that the economic development of the West
was simultaneously, and by the same process, the underdevelopment of the Rest. Brought to Africa by Rodney and
Amin, it was modified in Immanuel Wallerstein’s less pessimistic ‘World Systems’ approach. Dependency theory
is heresy to orthodox marxists such as John Sender and Sheila Smith, because it departs from Marx’s principle that
exploitation is based in social relations of production rather than in relationships of exchange, and because it is
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purely pessimistic about the impact of colonial rule, which marxists see both bloody and constructive in promoting
capitalism. ‘Populist’ approaches, such as that of Hill, are different again: emphasising the quality and durability of
indigenous methods and institutions, and typically focussed on agriculture and agrarian issues.
Essential reading
W. Rodney (1972), ‘The European slave trade as a basic factor in African underdevelopment’. How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa, 103-12.
I.Wallerstein (1976), ‘The three stages of African involvement in the world economy’, in P. Gutkind & I.
Wallerstein (eds), The Political Economy of Contemporary Africa, 30-57. Reprinted in Wallerstein, Africa
and the Modern World (1986).
C. Coquery-Vidrovitch (1969), ‘Recherches sur un mode de production africain’, Pensée, 144, 3-20. Appeared in
English translation in, among other places, M. Klein and G. Johnson (eds), Perspectives on the African
Past (1972).
J. Sender & S. Smith (1986), The Development of Capitalism in Africa, ‘Introduction’, 1-4.
Further reading
S. Amin (1972), ‘Underdevelopment and dependence in Black Africa – origins and contemporary forms’, Journal
of Modern African Studies 10, 503-24.
P. Hill (1970) Studies in Rural Capitalism in West Africa: especially chs 1-2, ‘A plea for indigenous economics’
and ‘Ghanaian capitalist cocoa-farmers’, 3-29.
For reference
If you have never read Marx, read the following for a sense of the intellectual context to which both dependency
and Marxist writers refer.
K. Marx, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (1859). Reprinted in translation in,
among other places, Karl Mark and Frederick Engels: Selected Works (1968), 180-4.
K. Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’ (New York Daily Tribune, 1853). Reprinted in, e.g., Marx and Engels on
Colonialism (1976), 35-41.
4. QUALITATIVE SOURCES AND THEIR USES
(8 October)
The economic historiography of Africa, as of the rest of the world, has drawn heavily on qualitative as well as
quantitative sources. These include oral testimonies (more than formal oral traditions) for ‘history from below’ as
well as for the study of decision-making in business and government; archaeological evidence, for example on the
history of intensive agriculture and towns; and photographs and earlier visual images. There is also the whole range
of written records, from official and unofficial publications to the archives of governments, firms, missionary and
other non-governmental organisations, and international organizations such as the ILO (here in Geneva) and the
World Bank. The sources are both more diverse and go back further than is often appreciated, but written sources
are much fewer before the nineteenth century, and informants are, after all, only mortal (though notes from
interviews given by now-deceased informants may survive, for instance in ethnographers’ papers).
We will discuss not only the opportunities but also the problems, including various forms of selectivity and
outright bias, basic principles of reading texts and conducting interviews, and ethical issues. The readings on
Nigeria illustrate some of the strategies in the use of written and oral sources in the modern economic history if
Africa. Please select two or three articles to read before the class, according to your particular interests.
Varieties of sources
P. Curtin (1968), ‘Field techniques for collecting and processing oral data’, Journal of African History, 9, 367-85.
Practical recommendations for users of oral testimonies.
P. Delius & S. Shirmer (2014), ‘Order, openness, and economic change in precolonial Southern Africa: A
perspective from the Bokoni terraces’, Journal of African History 55: 1, 37-54. A reminder of the
importance of archaeological sources, including for relatively recent history.
Archival research: examples from Nigerian historiography, nineteenth and twentieth centuries
A. G. Hopkins (1978), ‘Innovation in a colonial context: African origins of the Nigerian cocoa-farming industry,
1880-1920’, in C. Dewey & Hopkins (eds), The Imperial Impact, 83-96 (endnotes at 341-2). Use of diaries
in examining the decision-making of the Creole pioneers of Nigerian cocoa-farming.
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M.P. Cowen and R.W. Shenton (1991), ‘Bankers, peasants, and land in British West Africa 1905-37’, Journal of
Peasant Studies 19: 1, 26-58. Use of archival sources to try to resolve the issue of whether European banks
or the colonial state was responsible for the lack of bank credit available to African entrepreneurs.
J. Fenske (2012), ‘Land abundance and economic institutions: Egba land and slavery, 1830-1914’, Economic
History Review, 65, 527-55. Use of local court records in studying the evolution of institutions.
C. Uche (2012), ‘Oil, British interests and the Nigerian civil war’, Journal of African History, 49: 1, 111-35. Use of
post-colonial British records to investigate the reasons for Britain’s support for the Federal side.
T. Forrest (1992), ‘The advance of African capital: the growth of Nigerian private enterprises’, in F. Stewart, S.
Lall and S. Wangwe (eds), Alternative Development Strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa. See, for more of his
use of oral testimonies and assorted local written sources, Forrest’s book (1994), The Advance of African
Capital: the Growth of Nigerian Private Enterprise.
5. QUANTITATIVE SOURCES AND THEIR USES
(15 October)
Quantification has been a major tool in research on African economic history since the 1960s: estimating the size of
populations; counting the numbers of Africans embarked in the Atlantic slave trade and estimating those in the
other external trades; studying exports, imports and the terms of trade, and beginning to collect slave prices and
free wages in internal labour markets. But there has been something of a revolution in the range and ambition of
quantitative enterprises since the early 2000s. The headlines in economics journals have been grabbed by
geographically broad cross-sectional studies using data-bases derived partly from post-colonial national income
accounts and partly from the so-called Murdock ‘ethnographic atlas’, which has been (mis-)treated as representing
African societies on the eve of colonialism. We discussed some of the methodological problems in long-term
comparative statics in topic 2. However, this is only one of a range of often imaginative lines of quantitative
inquiry, using previously neglected sources and/or new techniques, and including attempts to develop new and
more meaningful databases. Please choose two or three articles from the readings, which include Cogneau &
Dupraz’s critique of the use of Murdock, and Jerven’s critique of existing national income accounts; a new
beginning to the tricky project of estimating the trajectory of African demographic history; and new approaches to
tracking the evolution of living standards in Africa: by the study of average heights, and using the Allen ‘welfare
ratio’ method of calculating real wages. Marwah illustrates the possibilities for developing additional databases on
specific issues, such as investment in the Nigerian construction industry (informative on both productivity and
corruption).
Reading
D. Cogneau & Y. Dupraz (2015), ‘Institutions historiques et développement économique en Afrique: une revue
selective et critique de travaux réecents’, Histoire & Mesure, 30 : 1, 103-34.
P. Manning, (2010), ‘African population projections, 1850-1960’, in K. Ittmann, D. Cordell & G. Maddox (eds),
The Demographics of Empire: the Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge, 245-75.
E. Frankema & M. Jerven (2014), ‘Writing history backwards or sideways: towards a consensus on African
population, 1850-2010', Economic History Review, 67: 4, 907-31.
J. Destombes (2006), ‘From long-term patterns of seasonal hunger to changing experiences of everyday poverty:
Northeastern Ghana c.1930-2000’, Journal of African History, 47: 2, 181-205.
A. Moradi (2009), ‘Towards an objective account of nutrition and health in colonial Kenya: a study of stature in
African army recruits and civilians, 1880-1980’, Journal of Economic History 69, 719-54.
E. Frankema and M. van Waijenburg (2011), ‘Structural impediments to African growth? New evidence from real
wages in British Africa, 1880-1945’, Center for Global Economic History, Utrecht University, Working
Paper 24.
M. Jerven (2013), ‘What do we know about income and growth in Africa?’, in his Poor Numbers: How We Are
Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do About it, 8-32. Focussed on national income
accounts. For why bad data matters, see 55-82.
H. Marwah (2014) ‘What explains slow sub-Saharan African growth? Revisiting oil boom-era investment and
productivity in Nigeria’s national accounts, 1976-85’, Economic History Review, 47: 4, 993-1011.
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6. CULTURE AND MARKETS: RELATIONSHIPS
(Friday 16 October: 10h15-12 in S.3: please note different day and time)
The traditional view that the effective operation of individual enterprises, and the growth of economies, has been
and continues to be fundamentally inhibited by features of African cultures, was expressed in an unusually
sophisticated form in the work of Karl Polanyi and his students in the 1950s-60s. This ‘substantivist’ view was
comprehensively refuted by research on African economic behaviour in precolonial and colonial economies,
including Hopkins (1973, cited earlier: ch. 2 includes a fair summary as well as criticisms of Polanyi’s view) and
Law. A new orthodoxy argued that indigenous institutions were indeed helpful for economic efficiency and
entrepreneurship (e.g. Cohen, Wariboko). This perspective was queried by Douglas (see also, more generally,
Kennedy). Recent anthropologists have pointed to more subtle interactions between culture and economy (Guyer).
However, broad cultural explanations for Africa’s relative poverty have been revived by sociologists (Chabal &
Deloz) and even economists (Platteau). Meanwhile, historians have emphasised the importance of examining
changes in the cultural context of economic activity (Iliffe), including in the context of anti-colonial resistance
(Lonsdale).
Essential reading
R. Law (1992), ‘Posthumous questions for Karl Polanyi: price inflation in pre-colonial Dahomey’, Journal of
African History 33: 3, 387-420.
J-P Platteau (2009), ‘Institutional obstacles to African economic development: state, ethnicity, and custom’,
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 71: 3, 669-83.
Further reading
G. Austin (2012), ‘Developmental “paths” and “civilizations” in Africa and Asia: reflections on strategies for
integrating cultural and material explanations of differential long-term economic performance’, in M. Aoki,
T. Kuran & G. Roland (eds), Institutions and Comparative Economic Development, 237-53.
N. Wariboko (1998), ‘A theory of the canoe house corporation’, African Economic History 26, 141-72. A reinterpretation of earlier research in terms of the theory of transactions costs (part of rational-choice
institutionalism).
A. Cohen (1971), ‘Cultural strategies in the organization of trading diasporas’ in C. Meillassoux (ed.), The
Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa, 266-81.
J. Lonsdale (1992), ‘The moral economy of Mau Mau’, in B. Berman & J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, Book 2.
Long but excellent.
M. Douglas (1969), ‘Is matriliny doomed in Africa?’, in M. Douglas & P. Kaberry (eds), Man in Africa, 121-35.
J. Iliffe (1983), ‘Capitalists and preachers’, in his The Emergence of African Capitialism, 44-63.
P. Kennedy (1988), ‘Entrepreneurial endeavour, business success and social origins’, in his African Capitalism: the
Struggle for Ascendency, 158-83.
P. Chabal & J-P Deloz (1999), ‘The (in)significance of development’, in their Africa Works: Disorder as Political
Instrument, 124-38.
J. Guyer (2004), Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Post-substantivist anthropological
perspectives. A short but complex book; for dipping into.
6. EXTERNAL SLAVE TRADES: CAUSES AND ECONOMIC EFFECTS
(22 October)
For over a thousand years slaves were exported from Sub-Saharan Africa: across the Sahara, Red Sea, Indian
Ocean and, most briefly but most intensely, the Atlantic. In view of the relative scarcity of labour in Africa, what
were the political and economic conditions that made the largest forced migration in history profitable for European
merchants and African merchants and rulers? And, despite our very limited knowledge of the size of the population
of Africa (including, most relevantly, of west and west-central Africa) during this era, what can we establish about
the consequences for the nature and distribution of power, poverty and wealth within the continent?
Essential reading
A.G. Hopkins (1973), ‘External trade: the Sahara and the Atlantic’, in his An Economic History of West Africa, 78123.
D. Eltis et al (2008 edition with subsequent updates), Voyages: the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database:
http://www.slavevoyages.org For the most up to date and comprehensive quantification of the trade.
Further reading
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P. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: a history of slavery in Africa (pref. the 2000 or 2012 editions, which
progressively update the tables). Detailed overview of all the external trades, plus slavery and slave trading
within Africa.
O. Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les traits négrières (2004). An excellent overview.
W. Rodney (1969), ‘Gold and slaves on the Gold Coast’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, 10, 1328.
J. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730-1830 (1988), Part I. Incisive and
controversial analysis of the huge Angolan trade.
E. Evans & D. Richardson (1995) “Hunting for rents: the economics of slaving in pre-colonial Africa” Economic
History Review 48: 665-86.
J. Inikori (2009), ‘The economic impact of the 1807 British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade’, in T. Falola
and M. Childs (eds), The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa: Essay in Honor of Robin Law, 163-82.
J. Inikori (2007), ‘Africa and the globalization process: Western Africa, 1450-1850’, Journal of Global History 2:
1, 63-86.
J. Inikori (2003), ‘The struggle against the transatlantic slave trade: the role of the state’, in S. Diouf (ed.), Fighting
the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, 170-98.
NB: There is no class on 29 October
7. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LABOUR COERCION IN PRE-COLONIAL AND
COLONIAL AFRICA
(5 November)
The use of coercion to reduce the cost of obtaining labour has a long history in Africa, but it became particularly
extensive in the nineteenth century. In economic terms, this was encouraged by the relative scarcity of labour and
the relative abundance of land, combined with the growth of demand for labour to produce commodities for sale.
Economic explanations of the profitability of labour coercion can never be sufficient; a full explanation has to
account for the capacity and willingness of elites to use force in this way. Also, economic approaches to African
slavery have also been opposed by those who see slavery in Africa as essentially an institutional of social inclusion
(Kopytoff and Miers). This week we examine that argument, and also ask why slavery declined – albeit slowly – in
the early twentieth century. Finally, we consider the use of direct and indirect (land-grabbing) forms of labour
coercion by colonial regimes, and consider the seemingly contradictory ways in which these related to the growth
of wage labour over the last century. Please select 70-80 pages- worth of reading.
Reading
A.G. Hopkins (1973), An Economic History of West Africa, 23-7.
I. Kopytoff & S. Miers (1977), ‘Slavery as an institution of marginality’, in S. Miers & I.Kopytoff (eds), Slavery in
Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, 3-81.
E. Mandala (1984), ‘Capitalism, kinship and gender in the Lower Tchiri Valley of Malawi, 1860-1960’, African
Economic History 13, 137-70.
C. Robertson & I. Berger (1986), ‘Introduction: analysing class and gender – African perspectives’, in their (eds),
Women and Class in Africa, 3-24.
G. Austin (2005), ‘Free markets without free labour: the Nieboer hypothesis and Asante slavery and pawnship,
1807-1896’, in Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 18071956, 155-70 (endnotes, 495-8).
G. Austin (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.
G. Arrighi (1970), ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective: a study of the proletarianization of the African
peasantry in Rhodesia’, Journal of Development Studies 3, 197-234; reprinted in Arrighi and J. Saul,
Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (1973).
J. Sender & S. Smith (1986), ‘The emergence of wage labour’, in their The Development of Capitalism in Africa,
35-66.
NB: There is no class on 12 November
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8. VARIETIES OF COLONIAL ECONOMIC EXPERIENCE
(19 November)
To focus this broad topic, we consider the fundamental distinction between colonies in which much of the land was
appropriated for European settlers or plantations, and colonies in which it remained in African hands. In both cases
African farmers responded to price incentives to produce for the market. In the settler colonies, however, the state
sought to drive Africans out of the produce market and into the labour market. In some of the ‘peasant’ (and rural
capitalist) economies, in contrast, African producers achieved an export crop ‘revolution’, which persuaded the
local colonial administrators to support continued African ownership of the land. Even so, African businesses were
constrained, even in non-settler colonies, by the monopolistic tendencies of European firms. There were other,
related, differences between the two (or three types, if we distinguish ‘plantation’ or ‘concessionaire’ colonies, as
in the Belgian Congo): including in their implications for the distribution of income and the growth of
manufacturing. Bates offers a rational-choice account of the significance of the distinction between settler and
peasant colonies for the effectiveness of agricultural lobbies.
We will discuss four themes in particular. First, the debates arising from - and now much surpassing – the
old conventional wisdom that economic growth in both kinds of colony was based on mobilising a labour surplus:
on getting underemployed Africans to work. That idea was formalised in the Lewis model, which was applied by
some South African and British economists to the settler colonies, and in the Myint ‘vent-for-surplus’ model,
designed to capture the experience of the ‘peasant’ colonies. Was this idea of ‘costless’ economic growth justified
in either or both cases? Second, we review the emphasis which historians have placed on African historical agency:
the capacity of the indigenous population to determine their own fates, to a large extent, even under colonial rule.
This was exemplified by the failure of colonial governments to drive Africans completely out of the produce
market in the settler colonies, and of French merchants to ‘capture’ the lion’s share of cotton production in French
Soudan (Mali). Third, we ask whether the concept of ‘extraction’ is analytically useful in this period. Last but not
least, we discuss poverty and poverty alleviation in the two main categories of colonies. Please select 70-80 pages
of reading.
Overviews
G. Austin (2015), ‘The economics of colonialism’, in C. Monga and J. Lin (eds), Oxford Handbook of Africa and
Economics, 522-35 (already published online 2014).
S. Bowden, B. Chiripanhura & P. Mosley (2008), ‘Measuring and explaining poverty in six African countries: a
long-period approach’, Journal of International Development 20: 8, 1049-79.
Regional and case studies
P. Mosley (1982), ‘Agricultural development and government policy in settler economies: Kenya and Southern
Rhodesia, 1900-60’, Economic History Review, 35, 390-408. See also the criticism by S. Choate (1984),
and Mosley’s reply (1984), Economic History Review, 37, 409-16.
R. Bates (1980), ‘Pressure groups, public policy, and agricultural development: a study of divergent outcomes’
(Kenya/Gold Coast) in R.H. Bates & M. Lofchie (eds), Agricultural Policy in Africa, 61-91. Reprinted in
Bates, Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa (1983).
G. Austin (2013), ‘Explaining and evaluating the cash-crop revolution in the “peasant” colonies of tropical Africa:
beyond “vent-for-surplus”’, in E. Akyeampong, R. H. Bates, N. Nunn & J. Robinson (eds), Africa’s
Economic Development in Historical Perspective, 295-320.
G. Austin (2014), ‘Vent for surplus or productivity breakthrough? The Ghanaian cocoa take-off, c.1890-1936’,
Economic History Review, 67: 4, 1035-64.
J. Miles (1978), ‘Rural protest in the Gold Coast: the cocoa hold-ups, 1908-1938’, in C. Dewey and A. Hopkins
(eds), The Imperial Impact, 152-70 (endnotes at 353-7).
A. Nwabughuogu (1982), ‘From wealthy entrepreneurs to petty traders: the decline of African middlemen in
eastern Nigeria, 1900-1950’, Journal of African History 23. 365-79.
A. Olukoju (2002), ‘The impact of British colonialism on the development of African business in colonial Nigeria’,
in A. Jalloh & T. Falola (eds), Black Business and Economic Power, 176-98.
R. Roberts (1996), ‘Local processes and the world economy: imported cloth, the domestic cotton market, and the
handicraft textile industry, 1918-1932’, in his Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism and the Regional
Economy in the French Soudan, 1800-1946, 192-220.
E. Frankema (2010), ‘Raising revenue in the British empire, 1870-1940: how “extractive” were colonial taxes?’,
Journal of Global History, 5: 3, 447-77.
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E. Frankema & F. Buelens (eds) (2013), Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development: the Belgian Congo and
the Netherlands Indies Compared.
10. CAPITALISM AND APARTHIED IN SOUTH AFRICA: THE DEBATE
(Friday 20 November: 10h15-12 in S.3: please note different day and time)
Was racial segregation the instrument or enemy of capitalism in South Africa? Did the policies of segregation and
(after 1948) apartheid help or hinder profits and economic growth in South Africa, and was the eventual fall of
apartheid in part a response to the changing interests of capitalism in the country? Legally-enforced racial
segregation in South Africa was reinforced by the National Party’s victory in the 1948 election, in which few
blacks had the vote, and lasted until the transfer of power to majority rule in 1994. The South African economy
grew rather fast in earlier part of this period, but stagnated during its last fifteen years. We examine the classic
debate about the relationship between capitalism and racial supremacism in South Africa (Nattrass). The radical
tradition argues that systematic racial discrimination was the local form of the general tendency of capitalism to use
coercive means to reduce the cost of labour before and during industrialisation (Trapido; see also Feinstein). The
liberal tradition argues that, on the contrary, the logic of the market is anti-discriminatory and that the eventual fall
of apartheid owed much to the constraints on the supply of skilled labour, and on the growth of mass demand, that
were intrinsic features of the system (Lipton, Moll, Feinstein). Hyslop re-examines the crisis of the segregation
system that preceded the National Party victory in 1948: a moment when things might perhaps have gone
differently. In different ways, Iliffe and Worden provide a short analytical overviews; Feinstein is the best
economic history. Interest in economic history in South Africa declined in the initial aftermath of the transfer of
power in 1994, but there are now strong signs of a revival, including with reference to the classic debate (Mariotti;
Fourie & Schirmer).
Essential reading
N. Nattrass (1991), ‘Controversies about capitalism and apartheid in South Africa: an economic perspective’,
Journal of Southern African Studies 17, 654-77.
S. Trapido (1971), ‘South Africa in a comparative study of industrialisation’, Journal of Development Studies 7: 3,
309-20. Perspicacious.
J. Iliffe (2007), ‘Industrialisation and race in South Africa’, Africans: the History of a Continent (2nd edn), 275-88.
Further reading
C. Feinstein (2005), An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination and Development, 113-35,
143-64, 172-93, 200-251. The standard economic history: excellent.
J. Hyslop (2012), ‘“Segregation has fallen on evil days”: Smuts’ South Africa, global war, and transnational
politics, 1939-46’, Journal of Global History 7: 3, 438-60. A transnational perspective.
T. Moll (1991), ‘Did the apartheid economy “fail”?’, Journal of Southern African Studies 17, 271-91.
M. Lipton (1986), Capitalism and Apartheid: South Africa, 1910-1986 (2nd edition).
M. Mariotti (2012), ‘Labour markets during apartheid in South Africa’, Economic History Review, 65, 1000-22. An
example of the best recent work by economic historians within this debate.
J. Fourie & S. Schirmer, ‘The future of South African economic history’, Economic History of Developing Regions,
27, 111-24.
N. Worden (2012), The Making of Modern South Africa (5th edition), 104-55. Useful on the general story.
11. CHANGING ECONOMIC POLICIES AND PERFORMANCES SINCE INDEPENDENCE
(26 November)
Readings
Between the Second World War and the end of the twentieth century, the mechanism of resource allocation in most
African countries underwent a double reversal: from the market to the state and back again. The colonial
introduction of state export marketing boards, often originally intended merely as temporary measures during the
Second World War, inaugurated a trend towards greater state intervention in economic life. The trend went further
after Independence, though much more so in some countries than others. By the mid-1970s, most governments
outside the franc zone had imposed detailed controls on price and quantity, across all markets; while consumers and
producers often resorted to unofficial markets to circumvent the controls. In aggregate, the economic growth of this
period was considered disappointing, though until c.1975, following the OPEC oil shock of 1973, average per
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capita growth averaged over 1% a year. The second reversal in the means of resource allocation, the counter-trend
towards replacing administrative by market mechanisms, was signalled by the World Bank’s Berg Report of 1981.
During the decade that followed, more than thirty African countries adopted ‘Structural Adjustment’ programmes
which went further than simply restore the pre-1939 status quo. The first decade or so of economic liberalization
saw, in aggregate, negative economic growth per head, despite spectacular successes in Ghana and Uganda, whose
economies had shrunk under the older policies. Since 1995, essentially under the economically-liberal regime
introduced so controversially in the 1980s, Sub-Saharan Africa has a whole has grown at an annual average of
about 2% per capita, the longest and broadest boom in the region’s history.
We will review this complicated story, asking what generalisations can be made: including about the respective
records of markets and states as agents of resource allocation, and about what sustained improvements, not only in
per capita income but in development more generally, have been achieved. Please select 70-80 pages of reading.
Readings
F. Cooper (2002), ‘Development and disappointment’ in: Africa Since 1940, 91-132. Useful introduction.
B. Ndulu & S. O’Connell, ‘Policy plus: African growth performance, 1960-2000’ (2008), in B. Ndulu, S.
O’Connell, R.H. Bates, P. Collier & C. Soludo (eds), The Political Economy of Economic Growth in Africa
1960-2000, vol. I, 3-75. A detailed overview from mainstream economists.
(An older though perhaps more accessible alternative to Ndulu & O’Connell is P. Collier and J. Gunning (1999),
‘Explaining African economic performance’, Journal of Economic Literature 37, 64-111. Menu of
mainstream economists’ criticisms of African institutions)
M. Jerven (2011), ‘The quest for the African dummy: explaining African post-colonial economic performance
revisited’, Journal of International Development, 23:2 (2011), 288-307. A critique of the sources and
methodological foundations of mainstream studies of post-colonial economic growth.
R. Austen (1987), ‘From decolonization to post-colonial regimes: efforts at internal transformation’, African
Economic History, 224-67. Covers the growth of state intervention from the late colonial period until
Structural Adjustment in the 1980s, in a broad context and emphasising variations between ‘socialist’ and
‘capitalist’ regimes in the first twenty years after independence.
World Bank (1981), Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: an agenda for action (The Berg Report).
This was effectively the manifesto for Structural Adjustment, and in that sense a primary source: worth
dipping into, including for its critique of state intervention.
R. Bates (1983), ‘The nature and origin of agricultural policies in Africa’, Essays on the Political Economy of
Rural Africa, 107-33. This essay summarises the position expounded in Bates's short book Markets and
States in Tropical Africa (1981), which first made rational-choice institutionalism influential in the study of
Africa.
G. Austin (1996), ‘National poverty and the “vampire state” in Ghana: a review article’, Journal of International
Development 20: 8, 553-73.
R. Lensink (1996), ‘Economic results’, in his Structural Adjustment in Sub-Saharan Africa, 95-108. Succint
overview.
P. Chabal and J-P Deloz (1999), ‘How useful is Structural Adjustment?’, in their Africa Works: Disorder as
Political Instrument, 119-23. Maintains that the structural adjustment programmes were captured by the
ruling African elites.
C. Soludo (2003), ‘In search of alternative analytical and methodological frameworks for an African economic
development model’, in T. Mkandawire & C. Soludo (eds), African Voices on Structural Adjustment, 1771.
12.AFRICA’S HALTING STEPS TOWARDS INDUSTRIALIZATION
(Friday 27 November: 14h15-16 in S.3: please note different day but usual time and place)
Given that Sub-Saharan Africa lacked a comparative advantage in manufacturing, and under colonial rule lacked
governments with the commitment and resources to invest in moving their economies up the value chain, it is
perhaps surprising that there was so much manufacturing in Africa by 1960, or even 1980 or 1995, rather than so
little. Settler regimes in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia were willing to use mineral revenues to subsidise
manufacturing (from 1924 and 1934 respectively), but it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that
modern manufacturing really began to expand in even a few of the former ‘peasant’ colonies, notably Nigeria. As
in Latin America and South Asia, African governments in the 1960s favoured import-substitution industrialization.
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The outcomes are usually, though not always, regarded very pessimistically. But during the general African
economic boom of the last twenty years, under liberal economic policies, while manufacturing has expanded in
aggregate, it has actually shrunk as a proportion of output. Has the growth of population in Africa (since the
1920s), and the expansion of education (especially since independence, c.1960) combined to move Africa’s
comparative advantage towards manufacturing? Will the industrialization of China eventually help African
manufacturing through major investment, rather than reinforcing Africa’s concentration on primary product
exports? Generally, is the small size of African manufacturing the result of economic or political constraints, and if
both, in what combination? Again, please choose 70-80 pages, partly according to your interests in particular
periods and countries.
Overview
G. Austin, E. Frankema and M. Jerven (2015), ‘Patterns of manufacturing growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: from
colonization to the present’, Utrecht: Working Paper 17, Centre for Global Economic History.
Studies of particular periods and cases
R. Austen (1987), African Economic History, 181-7. Succinct analysis of why the type of colony mattered for
manufacturing.
P. Kilby (1975), ‘Manufacturing in colonial Africa’, in P. Duignan and L. Gann (eds), Colonialism in Africa, 18701960, vol. IV, The Economics of Colonialism, 475-520.
L. Mytelka (1989), ‘The unfulfilled promise of African industrialization’, African Studies Review, 32:3, 77-137.
P. Nyong’o (1988), ‘Possibilities and historical limitations of import-substitution industrialization in Kenya’, in P.
Coughlin & G. Ikiara (eds), Industrialization in Kenya, 6-50. Useful case-study.
J. Sender and S. Smith (1986), The Development of Capitalism in Africa, ch. 4, ‘Trade, industrialization and the
state in the post-colonial period’, 67-109. A strong defence of the import-substitution policies.
J. Sender (1999), ‘Africa’s economic performance: limitations of the current consensus’, Journal of Economic
Perspectives, 13: 3, 89-114. The other side of the ledger: post-colonial achievements in education and
health, especially women’s.
A. Wood and K. Jordan (2000), ‘Why does Zimbabwe export manufactures and Uganda not?’, Journal of
Development Studies 37: 2, 91-116. Draws (among other things) on the difference between settler and
peasant colonies, in respect of their legacies for manufacturing.
F. Teal (1999), ‘Why can Mauritius export manufactures and Ghana not?’, The World Economy, 22: 7, 981-93.
C. Cramer (1999), ‘Can Africa industrialize by processing primary commodities? The case of Mozambican cashew
nuts’, World Development, 27: 7, 1247-66.
J. Stiglitz, J. Lin, C. Monga & E. Patel (2013), ‘Industrial Policy in the African Context’ (Washington DC: World
Bank Policy Research Working Paper 6633).
NB: There is no class on 3 December.
13.STATE FORMATION TOO WEAK, ETHNICITY TOO STRONG?
(10 December)
The state has had a bad press in the history and social science literature on Africa: whether pre-colonial, colonial or
post-colonial, governments have often been accused of being either too weak to be effective in promoting
economic development, or as being interested only in extracting resources for the benefit of the rulers and their
main supporters, rather facilitating the growth of the economy as a whole. There are strong grounds for a traditional
view (restated by Herbst 2000) that the combination of relative scarcity of labour and constraints upon the
productivity of land made state-building harder – though, clearly, not impossible – before colonial rule. Nor were
these constraints much lifted under colonial rule, given the insistence of European imperial governments that
colonial administrations should raise any funds they wanted to spend (Frankema, etc). Post-colonial states have
continued to be constrained by difficulties in raising revenue in relatively poor economies. But they are usually
criticised as patrimonial and rent-seeking. During the period of state-led developmental policy before Structural
Adjustment, this criticism was framed as a bias in favour of predominately urban elites at the expense of small
farmers (Bates’s work of the early 1980s). More recently, the charge of rent-seeking has been rephrased as ethnic
bias (Easterly & Levine 1997). On the face of it, the other side of weak states, and, correspondingly, a supposedly
weak sense of national identity, is a strong sense of ethnic affiliation. Historians generally argue that ethnic
divisions were deepened under colonial rule, especially because of the reliance of revenue-constrained foreign
rulers on African chiefs, creating a form of divide-and-rule (Mamdani builds on this, though historians generally
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see chiefs as less powerful than the petty dictators he depicts). Has ethnic ‘fragmentation’ been a fundamental
constraint on the emergence of ‘developmental states’ in Africa? In considering this issue, and the broader question
of constraints on effective political centralization in Africa, please pay attention to variations between different
societies, and over time.
Essential reading
J. Herbst (2000), ‘The challenge of state-building in Africa’ in his States and Power in Africa, 11-31.
R. Law (1978), ‘Slaves, trade, and taxes: the material basis of political power in nineteenth-century West Africa’,
Research in Economic Anthropology 1, 37-52.
T. Mkandawire (2001), ‘Thinking about developmental states in Africa’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 25: 3,
289-313.
Further reading
J-F. Bayart (2000), ‘Africa in the world: a history of extraversion’, African Affairs 99: 395, 217-67. For an earlier
but fuller version see Bayart, L’Etat en Afrique: la politique du ventre (1989).
E. Frankema (2011), ‘Colonial taxation and government spending in British Africa, 1880-1940: maximizing
revenue or minimizing effort?’, Explorations in Economic History 45, 136-49.
E. Frankema & M. van Waijenburg (2014), ‘Metropolitan blueprints of colonial taxation? Lessons from fiscal
capacity building in British and French Africa, c.1880-1940’, Journal of African History, 55: 3, 371-400.
A.H. Kirk-Greene (1980), ‘The thin White Line: the size of the British colonial service in Africa’, African Affairs
79: 314, 25-44.
T. Spear (2003), ‘Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa’, Journal of African
History 44: 1, 1-27. Excellent critical survey of the literature on the ‘invention’ of tradition, especially
ethnicity.
F. Cooper (2002), ‘The recurrent crises of the gatekeeper state’, in his Africa Since 1940, 156-90.
W. Easterly & R. Levine (1997), ‘Africa’s growth tragedy: policies and ethnic divisions’, Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 112, 1203-50. Influential if much criticised.
R. Bates (2008), When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa, 3-14, 129-39.
M. Mamdani (1996), ‘Conclusion’ in his Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism, 285-301, 337. The legacy of colonial policies of ‘indirect rule’ as the source of conflict and
economic stagnation.
P. Nugent (2010), ‘States and social contracts in Africa’, New Left Review 2nd series, 63, 35-68. Useful survey of
the literature on contemporary African states, critiquing the view of them as patrimonial.
D. Woods (2003), ‘The tragedy of the cocoa pod: rent-seeking, land and ethnic conflict in Ivory Coast’, Journal of
Modern African Studies 41: 4, 641-55.
J. Lonsdale (2014), ‘Ethnic patriotism and markets in African history’, in H. Hino, J. Lonsdale, G. Ranis & F.
Stewart (eds), Ethnic Diversity and Economic Instability in Africa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 19-55.
C. Boone (1995), ‘Rural interests and the making of modern African states’, African Economic History: 23, 1-36;
or, further, her Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice
(2003) and her latest book (2014) Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of
Politics.
14. REVIEW AND REFLECTIONS
(17 December)
This concluding session will be a conversation about the major patterns and processes discussed in the course, and
the opportunities for new research, from master’s memoires on. This is an important occasion for tying up loose
ends and reflecting on the most important issues. By the time of this session most of you will have submitted the
final version of your paper, but the final meeting is an important opportunity to discuss: please come and
participate.
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