Climate and the slave trade

Abstract

ABSTRACT. African societies exported more slaves in colder years. Lower temperatures reduced mortality and raised agricultural yields, lowering slave supply costs. Our results help explain African participation in the slave trade, which predicts adverse outcomes today. We use an annual panel of African temperatures and port-level slave exports to show that exports declined when local temperatures were warmer than normal. This result is strongest where African ecosystems are least resilient to climate change. Cold weather shocks at the peak of the slave trade predict lower economic activity today. We support our interpretation using the histories of Whydah, Benguela, and Mozambique.

Is Africa Different? Historical Conflict and State Development

“…Besley and Reynal-Querol (2014) argue that social groups with a history of fighting can be less trustful of each other. A lack of social trust can translate into greater civil conflict, particularly if social groups used violence to produce slaves for export (Nunn, 2008, Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011, Fenske and Kala, 2015. 1 Bates (2008) and Reid (2012) argue that pre-colonial warfare in Sub-Saharan Africa has important consequences for civil conflict today.…”

‘Force of Nature’ : climate shocks, food crises and conflict in Colonial Africa and Asia, 1880-1960. THESIS RETRACTED

“…Table 7 presents the results for different sub-samples, reporting a wide range of compliers. This exercise is similar to Dell (2012) and Fenske & Kala (2015). Column 1 reports the baseline second stage relationship from the full sample, reproducing Column 3 of Table 6 for comparison purposes.…”

“…Additionally, we include a categorical variable, [agro-ecological_zones], which ranges from 1 to 5, in order to control for differences in the resilience of agro-ecological zones to climatic shocks (Fenske & Kala, 2015;Seo et al, 2008). Finally, we include the coefficient of variation of rainfall [cv] in order to control for the possibility that a climate shock impacts differently on agricultural production in the northern provinces than in the southern ones.…”

“…This body of literature emphasizes the supply-side of environmental shocks and suggests that the harvests of crops in less resilient regions can more easily be destroyed (Fenske & Kala, 2015). As a result, extreme climate shocks in these regions are more likely to jeopardize food security, raise resource competition over cropland and pastures, and trigger conflict.…”

“…This suitability index runs from 1 (most suitable) to 8 (least suitable). Similar to other studies that have successfully exploited the exogenous nature of the crop suitability indicators to proxy for adoption or production of various types of crops (Nunn & Qian, 2010;Jia, 2014;Fenske & Kala, 2015), we take the average of the gridded suitability values within the borders of each colonial district. We construct our indicator by combining all relevant export crops, using the average suitability for all export crops for each districts.…”