The Long-Term Effects of the Printing Press in sub-Saharan Africa

Cagé, Julia; Rueda, Valéria

doi:10.1257/app.20140379

Cited by 44 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 57 publications

(58 reference statements)

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“…Our approach begins by considering how religions have evolved in ways that shape people's institutions, social practices, economic outcomes, and psychology (17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22). Research in this area has, for example, documented the effect of Christian missions on both formal schooling and economic prosperity in places as diverse as Africa, China, and South America (23)(24)(25)(26). Here, highlighting a less conspicuous channel, we go deeper into history and test the theory that the Western Catholic Church, primarily through its influence on marriage and family structures during the Middle Ages, had an important impact on psychological variation.…”

Section: A B Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation

Schulz

Bahrami‐Rad

Beauchamp

et al. 2019

Science

318

297

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Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of many Western populations. We propose that part of this variation can be traced back to the action and diffusion of the Western Church, the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church. Specifically, we propose that the Western Church’s transformation of European kinship, by promoting small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility, fostered greater individualism, less conformity, and more impersonal prosociality. By combining data on 24 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both Church exposure and kinship, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions, and among individuals from different cultural backgrounds.

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Section: A B Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation

Schulz

Bahrami‐Rad

Beauchamp

et al. 2019

Science

318

297

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…sewing of European-style clothes (Pirie 1985 ; Sheldon 2017 ). Protestants even set up printing presses to have a larger number of bibles at their avail (Cagé and Rueda 2016 ).…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Frankema 2012 ; Jedwab, Meier zu Selhausen, and Moradi 2019 ; Nunn 2014 ; Wantchekon, Klašnja, and Novta 2015 ). Cagé and Rueda ( 2016 ) also find positive effects, but caution that they are limited to missions that built schools and established printing presses. Another debate concerns the religious denomination of missions.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The latter sample restriction is applied to exclude respondents who live in localities in which Christian missions were very unlikely to settle. Doing so facilitates the identification of causal effects(Cagé and Rueda 2016).The results are robust to using an even narrower band of 50 kilometres (see online Supplemental Material). 7 Note that the DHS assumes that all respondents who completed higher education are literate and does not test their reading skills directly.8 B. BECKER…”

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confidence: 92%

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The colonial struggle over polygamy: Consequences for educational expansion in sub-Saharan Africa

Becker

2021

Economic History of Developing Regions

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Christian missions in colonial Africa have contributed significantly to the expansion of formal education and thereby shaped the continent's long-term economic and political development. This paper breaks new ground by showing that this process depended on local demand for education. It is argued that disagreements over norms, and in particular the struggle over polygamy, which resulted from missions' insistence on monogamy in traditionally polygamous areas, lowered African demand for education. Analyses of geocoded data from historical and contemporary sources, covering most of sub-Saharan Africa, show that the struggle is associated with worse educational outcomes today. Effects are not limited to formal attainments but carry over to informal outcomes, in particular literacy. The findings attest to considerable heterogeneity in missionary legacies and suggest that local conditions should be given greater consideration in future studies on the long-term consequences of colonial-era interventions.

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“…On the contrary, according to John Iliffe (2007, 245), missionary societies also had an emancipating aspect, furthering female African's formal education and occupational skills through the creation of mission employment opportunities. Moreover, recent empirical studies have presented evidence that the historical presence of Christian missionaries generated important long-term effects on African culture (Nunn 2010), education (Gallego and Woodberry 2010;Frankema 2012) and newspaper readership (Cagé and Rueda 2014). However, although Catholic and Protestant missions had an overall positive long-run impact on African educational attainment, Nunn (2014) presents evidence that Protestant missions placed greater importance on female education relative to their Catholic contenders.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Missionaries and female empowerment in colonial Uganda: New evidence from Protestant marriage registers, 1880–1945

Selhausen¹

2014

Economic History of Developing Regions

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Protestant missionaries have recently been praised for their comparatively benign features concerning their support of women's education in Africa. Using a novel dataset of 5,202 Protestant brides born between 1880 and 1945 from urban and rural Uganda, this paper offers a first pass at analysing empirically the role of mission education on African women's socio-economic position within the household. The paper finds that although mission education raised the sampled brides' literacy skills way above female national levels, they were largely excluded from participating in the colonial wage labour market. In this context, the missionary society presented an almost exclusive source of female wage labour in areas of religious service, schooling and medical care. While literacy per se did not affect women's marriage behaviour, women who worked for the missionaries married significantly later in life and married men closer to their own age, signalling a shift in the power balance between parents and daughters and between husband and wife. On average, daughters of fathers deeply entrenched in the missionary movement had the highest chances to access wage employment, emphasizing the importance of paternal mission networks for Protestant women's work outside the household during colonial times.

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The Long-Term Effects of the Printing Press in sub-Saharan Africa

Cited by 44 publications

References 57 publications

The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation

The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation

The colonial struggle over polygamy: Consequences for educational expansion in sub-Saharan Africa

Missionaries and female empowerment in colonial Uganda: New evidence from Protestant marriage registers, 1880–1945

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