British colonial rule has often been praised for its comparatively benign features, such as its support for local educational development. This paper studies the origins of formal education in sub-Saharan Africa arguing that the beneficial effects of British educational policy should not be overstated. British African colonies showed significantly higher school enrolment rates in the late colonial era, but these were not the result of impressive investment efforts.Missionary schools provided the bulk of education to native Africans at extremely low costs.We show that local African conditions affecting the African reception of missionary education explain much more of the variation in colonial educational outcomes than metropolitan identity.

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

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This article aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent-wide dataset on African population extending into the pre-1950 era. We investigate the reliability and the validity of the current population databases with the aim of working towards a consensus on the long-term series of African total population with a reliable 1950 benchmark. The cases of Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana are explored to show the uneven coverage of census taking in colonial and post-colonial Africa and to demonstrate the need for an upward adjustment of the conventional 1950 benchmark. In addition, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Manning's approach of projecting population growth estimates backwards in time by adopting the available Indian census data as African 'default growth rates', and we propose an alternative approach by incorporating the demographic experiences of tropical land-abundant countries in South-East Asia.T he lack of reliable historical population estimates for large parts of Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, continues to hamper long-term analyses of African social and economic development. Denominator problems complicate the reconstruction of historical GDP per capita and make it hard to assess the timing and incidence of changes in development indicators such as child mortality, life expectancy, educational attainment, tax pressure, and so on. 2 However, despite its obvious importance, African historical demography has been largely neglected for nearly two decades. Judging by the loose ends left behind and the paths of research

This paper studies the expansion of mass education in Latin America in the twentieth century from a global comparative perspective. The paper argues that expansion in terms of enrolment and attainment levels was quite impressive. A comparative analysis of the grade enrolment distribution demonstrates, however, that the rapid expansion of primary school enrolment did not correspond with an equally impressive improvement in educational quality. The persistently large tertiary education bias in public education spending suggests that part of the poor quality performance is related to a lack of fiscal support for primary education and that the political economy explanation for educational underdevelopment, as advanced by Engerman, Mariscal and Sokoloff for the 19 th century, still applied to Latin America during most of the 20 th century. Keywords RESUMENEste artículo estudia la expansión de la enseñanza básica en América Latina durante el siglo XX desde una perspectiva mundial y comparativa. El trabajo argumenta que los niveles y la expansión, en términos de matrícula, fue bastante notable. Sin embargo, el análisis comparativo del grado de distribución de la matrícula demuestra que dicha expansión no se corresponde con mejoras equivalentes en la calidad de la educación. El persistente sesgo del gasto público en educación terciaria sugiere que la explicación de su baja calidad está relacionada con las carencias del financiamiento público de la educación primaria. Esto implica que la tesis de economía política sobre el subdesarrollo educativo de América Latina que proponen Engerman, Mariscal y Sokoloff para el siglo XIX, se mantiene durante la mayor parte del siglo XX.Palabras clave: educación, América Latina, distribución de la matrícu-la, gasto público