The Causal History of Africa: A Response to Hopkins

Fenske, James

doi:10.1080/20780389.2010.527693

Cited by 32 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 176 publications

(193 reference statements)

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“…Since I collected data on the political climate at the district level, 17 I include an index of political instability as an additional regressor in columns 10 and 11. This index is the average annual number of severe events expressing hostility toward colonial power from .…”

Section: Control Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

History Matters: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial Public Investments in French West Africa

Huillery

2009

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

187

143

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International audienceTo what extent do colonial public investments continue to influence current regional inequalities in French-speaking West Africa? Using a new database and the spatial discontinuities of colonial investment policy, this paper gives evidence that early colonial investments had large and persistent effects on current outcomes. The nature of investments also matters. Current educational outcomes have been more specifically determined by colonial investments in education rather than health and infrastructures, and vice versa. I show that a major channel for this historical dependency is a strong persistence of investments; regions that got more at the early colonial times continued to get more

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Section: Control Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

History Matters: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial Public Investments in French West Africa

Huillery

2009

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

187

143

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“…While the present boom in African economic history research has stimulated debates about methods and data (e.g. Hopkins , ; Fenske ), it has not led to a critical discussion about the explanatory value of the Smithian approaches, as it did in the 1970s (see, e.g., Dalton's review of Hopkins' book). On the contrary, there currently seems to be a broad consensus within mainstream African economic history research that Smithian growth models offer the most valuable explanation for the long‐term economic development in Africa.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Extensive to Involutionary Growth: A Dialectic Interpretation of the Boom and Busts of Cocoa Production in the Gold Coast

Green

2016

Journal of Agrarian Change

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African economic history has undergone impressive revitalization in the past decade. Much of the recent work is, quite naturally, inspired by developments in economic history at large, and increasingly -indirectly or directly -using markets as the organizing principle in understanding how economies evolve over time. More specifically, recent work assumes that markets create the possibility to use resources more efficiently, which, theoretically, enables economies to grow as long as institutions adjust and enable the population to exploit the arising opportunities. That is, the current works in African economic history are to a large extent grounded in Smithian growth models, labelled after Adam Smith's work on the mechanisms of long-term growth. This paper critically discusses the explanatory value of the Smithian growth models for understanding the long-term economic development in Africa. The latter is best described as recurrent growth episodes, and we argue that while Smithian models can account for initial periods of growth, they fail to explain why the growth was not sustained. We use the boom and busts of cocoa production in Ghana in the twentieth century as a case in point. We show that the decline in cocoa production was not caused by state policies distorting the functions of the markets, as the Smithian growth models suggest. Instead, the decline in production was an outcome of changes in the ecological and institutional conditions that caused the initial growth. The irony is that it was the initial growth in cocoa production that altered the conditions, making further growth in production impossible. We capture these changes -for the first time ever -by combining the concepts of forest rents and involutionary growth in an African case.

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“…Austin and Broadberry, ‘Introduction’; Akyeampong, Bates, Nunn, and Robinson, Africa's development . For discussion, see Hopkins, ‘New economic history’; Fenske, ‘Causal history’. For a review of the data revolution, see Fourie, ‘Data revolution’.…”

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confidence: 99%

Gender, ethnicity, and unequal opportunity in colonial Uganda: European influences, African realities, and the pitfalls of parish register data

Haas

Frankema

2018

The Economic History Review

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The renaissance of African economic history in the past decade has opened up new research avenues for studying the long‐term social and economic development of Africa. A sensitive treatment of African realities in the evaluation of European colonial legacies and a critical stance towards the use of new sources and approaches is crucial. In this article, we engage with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf to show how selection biases in, and Eurocentric interpretations of, parish registers have provoked an overly optimistic account of European influences on the educational and occupational opportunities of African men and women. We confront their dataset, drawn from the marriage registers of the Anglican Cathedral in Kampala, with Uganda's 1991 census, and show that trends in the literacy and numeracy of men and women born in Kampala lagged half a century behind those who wedded in Namirembe Cathedral. We run a regression analysis showing that access to schooling during the colonial era was unequal along lines of gender and ethnicity. We foreground the role of Africans in the spread of education, and we argue that European influences were not just diffusive but also divisive, and that gender inequality was reconfigured rather than eliminated under colonial rule.

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The Causal History of Africa: A Response to Hopkins

Cited by 32 publications

References 176 publications

History Matters: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial Public Investments in French West Africa

History Matters: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial Public Investments in French West Africa

From Extensive to Involutionary Growth: A Dialectic Interpretation of the Boom and Busts of Cocoa Production in the Gold Coast

Gender, ethnicity, and unequal opportunity in colonial Uganda: European influences, African realities, and the pitfalls of parish register data

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