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Paper for ‘The Future of Economic History’ conference, Guelph, October 2003

THE FUTURE OF AFRICAN ECONOMIC HISTORY, AND AFRICA IN THE

FUTURE OF ECONOMIC HISTORY AS A DISCIPLINE

Gareth Austin

Department of Economic History, London School of Economics

g.m.austin@lse.ac.uk

In line with the conference theme, this paper suggest directions which future research

into the economic past of Sub-Saharan Africa might profitably pursue, and comments on

the place of the study of African economic history in the broader future of economic

history as a discipline (I assume that it has sufficiently autonomous discourse to be more

than just the intersection set of two disciplines). The discussion is organised in five

sections. The first sets out the motivation of the paper. The second sketches what I see as

the main lines along which the economic historiography of Africa has developed. The

third tentatively suggests priorities for the field concerning chronological scope, sources

and methods, and theory. The fourth comments on certain substantive issues which

particularly merit new work, and with which I have begun to engage. The final section

briefly considers the study of Africa in the context of the future of economic history

generally.

1. Neglect and progress

A discussion of the state of the AEH as a field can most realistically be framed by

thoughts both bearish and bullish: by a concern about recent relative neglect of this field,

combined with the hope of building on an accumulation of evidence and ideas within it.

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This field, very active in the 1960s-70s, has been relatively neglected since, both

by historians and economists. Historians have continued to research and write prolifically

on Africa, but, in line with the general tendency of their disciplinary colleagues over the

last 20-25 years, the most popular research agendas have focussed on issues of culture

and identity. By comparison, the volume of new research in economic history has been

modest.1 Where material phenomena continued to be studied they now tended to be

treated in cultural rather than economic perspective. For instance, what colonial officials

thought about labour attracted more attention than the actual workings of labour

markets.2

It is striking that research interest in Africa’s economic past should have waned

during a period when publications on Africa’s current economic affairs proliferated.3 The

latter trend was partly a response to a widespread anxiety, inside and outside the

continent, about the contemporary performance of African economies. A perverse

imbalance has emerged: while issues of sustenance and accumulation weigh so heavily

upon the present, the further marginalization of Africa’s economies has been

accompanied by the marginalization of their histories. In this context, I think it is more

than just professional special pleading to say that a renewed intensity of research on

economic history is overdue, not just within African historiography, but within African

Studies generally.

While African economic history was being relatively neglected by historians and

economists of Africa it is hardly surprising that Africa’s economic history - other than its

external slave trades - has tended to occupy negligible space in the emerging literature on

1Much of the best economic history published in these years is also, and has been received as,

social or occasionally political history: which ameliorates, but also illustrates, the sidelining of economic history as such. A recent example is R. Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda (Oxford, 2002): which is the long awaited - and excellent - full-length study of the economy of this major East African state, though one would not think so from the title.

2This emphasis is exemplified by F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: the Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996).

3Epitomised by the founding of the first journal to be published outside Africa dedicated to the study of contemporary African economies: the Journal of African Economies, published by Oxford University Press from 1992.

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‘global economic history’.4 Yet, as I will amplify below, Africa’s economic history is

potentially as relevant as that of, for example, preindustrial Europe for the empirical

exploration of the kind of concepts with which a plausible theory of the political

economy of long-term development, and the obstacles to it, might be constructed.5 Here,

it is time to move from lamenting neglect to consideration of the evolution of the existing

economic historiography of Africa, on whose achievements future research can build.

2. The past of African economic history as a subject of study

Economic history, like all fields of enquiry, is path-dependent: past choices determine

what there is to build on and to react against. I think it will be helpful to present a

relatively long review section. Yet it must be emphasised that in focussing on what I see

as the main threads of the evolving debate, it omits many significant nuances.

Correspondingly, references are kept to a minimum. Though there had been some notable

pioneering studies during the colonial period, the continuous professional study of

African economic history dates from the era of independence.6 Given the political and

cultural context of the time, it is hardly surprising that the first generation of professional

students of Africa’s past, economic and otherwise, drew their analytical categories from

Western social science and looked to see how African economic and political behaviour

before colonial rule compared to European. To take a leading example, in political

history Ivor Wilks argued that the kingdom of Asante (c.1701-1896) showed a capacity

for innovation, with a ‘revolution in government’ to match that announced by Geoffrey

4This is even true of the better efforts at the exceptionally difficult task of analysing ‘economic

change in world history’, such as E. L. Jones’s book with that sub-title, Growth Recurring (Oxford, 1988).

5The comparison is with the important work of A. Grief: e.g. his ‘Microtheory and recent developments in the study of economic institutions through economic history’, in D. M.. Kreps and K. F. Wallis (eds), Advances in Economics and Econometrics, Seventh World Congress, Vol. II (Cambridge, 1997), 81-113.

6The seminal monograph was K. O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885 (Oxford, 1956).

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Elton for Tudor England. Wilks contended strongly that the kingdom of Asante in the

nineteenth century was a state in the same sense as nineteenth-century European states,

complete with a trend towards ‘bureaucratic’authority.7 The economic equivalent of the

search for ‘state-like states’ in pre-colonial Africa was to find evidence of markets and

economically rational behaviour before European rule. Conceptually, the empirical

challenge was defined by the work of the Substantivist school in economic anthropology,

led by Karl Polanyi - whose last book was an African case-study, the eighteenth-

nineteenth century kingdom of Dahomey.8 Polanyi and his students contended that

precolonial (and often colonial-era) Africans were motivated overwhelmingly by values

other than income maximization, and that therefore theories of market economics have

nothing to offer the student of precolonial life.

In my view, the fundamental achievement of the empirical research of the 1960s-

70s in AEH was precisely to establish that concepts drawn from market economics -

there was and is room to argue about which of these concepts - can indeed assist in the

analysis of ‘even’ pre-colonial economic activity. While the vast majority of food

consumed in Africa was produced by members of the household (of whatever form),

good markets were very important: in exchange across ecological frontiers (grain for

animals and animal products), in the distribution of salt, in the supply of various protein

foods, as well as textiles and weaponry, from horses to firearms. There was much

variation over space as well as change over time, but a widespread pattern - particularly

for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - was that market exchange was a key means

to social and political reproduction, as in marriage and state maintenance, as well as for

manifesting and enjoying the possession of discretionary income. As for factor markets,

A. G. Hopkins noted that labour markets existed, but usually in the form of slave trading,

7I. Wilks, ‘Aspects of bureaucratization in Ashanti in the nineteenth century’, Journal of African

History 7 (1966), 215-32; Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: the Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (London, 1975: 2nd edn, with new preamble, Cambridge, 1989). For an incisive general review of the historiography of the African state published in the 1960s and 1970s see J. Lonsdale, ‘States and social processes in Africa: a historiographical survey’, African Studies Review 24 (1981), 139-225.

8K. Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade (Seattle 1966).

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which he interpreted, in terms of the Nieboer hypothesis, as a response to labour

scarcity.9 Meanwhile land markets were rare before the twentieth century, he argued,

fundamentally because land was usually relatively abundant and therefore without

commercial value. Conversely, when and where the spread of export agriculture or

population growth increased pressure on land, some form of rights in land began to be

traded or accepted as collateral. Thus the logic of market analysis could help to account

for the absence of certain markets. Supply, whether of goods or factors, generally

responded positively to price signals, albeit naturally with greatly varying elasticities.

Such work, by many hands, received its classic synthesis from Hopkins’s An

Economic History of West Africa in 1973.10 There is a traditional view that markets were

more widespread, and market-responsiveness more pronounced, in West Africa rather

than elsewhere south of the Sahara. This is often seen as a major reason why the

European colonizers appropriated land on a large scale in southern and eastern Africa

rather than in West Africa: in the latter the incentive to encourage or permit settlers or

plantation companies was reduced by the fact that Africans were already generating a

foreign trade large enough to provide fiscal and commercial satisfaction to European

treasuries and businesses respectively.11 This consideration does help explain why the

colonial administrations of British West Africa, after much internal argument, finally

decided definitively in favour of African ‘peasant’ agriculture and against direct

European control of farmland.12 But in the 1970s, following earlier work underlining the

9A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London 1973).

10For a detailed survey and critique of the 1960s-70s literature see F. Cooper, ‘Africa and the World Economy’, African Studies Review 24: 2/3 (1981), 1-86; reprinted with postscript in Cooper et al., Confronting Historical Paradigms (1993).

11The argument goes back to both marxist (Nzula et al.) and ‘market’ (Hancock) writings during the colonial period, and, with variations over the precise causal mechanisms involved, has been generally maintained since. See A. T. Nzula, I. I. Potekhin and A. Z. Zusmanovich, Forced Labour in Colonial Africa (ed. R. Cohen, transl. H. Jenkins) (London, 1979; Russian original, 1933); W. K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, Vol. 2, Problems of Economic Policy 1918-1939, Part 2 (London 1942).

12Hopkins, Economic History of West Africa; I. Wallerstein, ‘The three stages of African involvement in the world economy’, in P. C. Gutkind and I. Wallerstein (eds), The Political Economy of Contemporary Africa (Beverly Hills, 1976), 30-57; A. Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London, 1989).

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vitality of pre-colonial trades in eastern, southern and central Africa,13 there was a wave

of research on the early colonial period in what became the settler colonies. This showed

that African producers responded strongly to market demands in this period, notably by

producing grain to feed markets in the expanding mining and urban areas. The policy of

reserving land for Europeans was expanded, and combined with the banning or

restriction of African tenancy on European-owned land, precisely in an attempt to force

Africans out of produce markets - and into labour markets.14

The specific propositions from this literature, noted above, have generally

survived subsequent research; indeed, the most rigorous tests of the substantivist

approach were in the 1980s-90s; and they found it badly wanting.15 Again, for example,

the view that land markets have developed as and when land became relatively scarce

had become the ‘conventional wisdom’ by 1996, as a critic pointed out.16 I would caution

that there are serious limits to the explanatory power of the ‘induced institutional

innovation’ approach to the history of property rights in Africa, especially as it does not

adequately account for the political influences on institutional change.17

13R. Gray and D. Birmingham (eds), Precolonial African Trade (Oxford, 1970); see further, e.g., J.

Vansina, The Children of Woot: History of the Kuba Peoples (Madison, 1978); A. von Oppen, Terms of Trade and Terms of Trust: the History and Contexs of Pre-Colonial Market Production Around the Upper Zambezi and Kasai (1994). There is also a considerable literature on the pre-colonial trade of East Africa, notably E. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (1975); A. Sherriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: the Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770-1873 (1987).

14Seminal contributions were G. Arrighi, ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective: a study of the proletarianization of the African peasantry in Rhodesia’, Journal of Development Studies 3 (1970), 197-234; R. Palmer and N. Parsons (eds), The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa (1977); C. Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London 1979). Subsequent work has shown that African crop production for the market survived these policies, notably in Rhodesia and Kenya (e.g. P. Mosley, The Settler Economies: Kenya and Southern Rhodesia 1900-1963 (Cambridge 1983).

15P. Lovejoy, ‘Polanyi’s “ports of trade”: Salaga and Kano in the nineteenth century’, Canadaian Journal of African Studies 16: 2 (1982), 245-77; R. Law, ‘Posthumous questions for Karl Polanyi: price inflation in pre-colonial Dahomey’, Journal of African History, 33 (1992), 387-420.

16J-P Platteau, ‘The evolutionary theory of land rights as applied to Sub-Saharan Africa: a critical assessment’, Development and Change 27 (1996), 29-86.

17I examine the induced institutional innovation approach in the context of a historical case-study in G. Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807-1956.

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Meanwhile, an emphasis on the vigour and quality of African entrepreneurship,

which characterised some of the 1960s studies, especially in the context of cash-crop

agriculture, was again endorsed by later research, this time most notably in the context of

services and manufacturing. This work documented the vigour and quality of

entrepreneurship, in respect of risk-taking, long-sightedness and a willingness to innovate

(if, in this context, mainly by adaptation).18

The evidence of widespread supply-responsiveness to price incentives, and in

some cases of impressive entrepreneurship, helps us account for the phases of growth in

marketed output in various regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. A well-known episode of such

growth, under African ownership of the means of production, is the export-agricultural

‘revolution’ of the early colonial period (c.1890-c.1930), in much of West Africa and

also in Uganda (with cotton). For instance, in southern Ghana, farmers started planting

cocoa trees, resulting in an explosion of annual output from zero in 1890 to the biggest in

the world (overtaking Brazil) twenty years later. There are continuities between this early

colonial-era export growth and nineteenth-century, pre-colonial, expansions of output for

the market, especially over large areas of West Africa. The latter mainly comprised the

development of palm oil and groundnut (peanut) production in coastal areas for overseas

markets,19 The intra-West African expansion took place primarily within the Hausa

commercial network, which was centred on the Sokoto Caliphate (1804-1903) and its

commercial capital, the city of Kano.20

Our increased awareness of periods of economic growth, including before

colonial rule and not always for overseas markets, help to redefine the central analytical

18P. Hill, Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana (Cambridge, 1963: 2nd edn, with

introduction by G. Austin, Hamburg and Oxford, 1997); T. Forrest, The Advance of African Capital: The Growth of Nigerian Private Enterprise (1994). See further A. Jalloh and T. Falola (eds), Black Business and Economic Power (Rochester NY, 2002).

19R. Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: the Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge, 1995).

20P. Lovejoy, ‘Plantations in the economy of the Sokoto Caliphate’, Journal of African History 19 (1978), 341-68; Lovejoy, ‘Interregional monetary flows in the precolonial trade of Nigeria’, Journal of African History 15 (1974), 563-85; Lovejoy, Caravans of Kola: the Hausa Kola Trade 1700-1900 (Zaria, 1980); Lovejoy, Salt of the Desert Sun (Cambridge, 1986).

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problem which has faced economic historians of Africa throughout these forty-plus years

of sustained research: how to explain the relative poverty of Sub-Saharan Africa as a

whole, at the end of the colonial period, but also on the eve of the European partition and

– with more qualifications – before direct contact with Europe.

By the mid-1970s the effect of the accumulated evidence of ‘rational’ market

behaviour, and of entrepreneurship, was to discredit attempts to account for African

relative backwardness by reference to a supposedly – but as it turned out, non-existent –

general hostility to market forces.21 But why then had Africa been, over a long period,

relatively so poor?

Dependency theory inverted Eurocentric answers to this question. In How Europe

Underdeveloped Africa (1973), Walter Rodney brought to Africa A. G. Frank’s

proposition that the development of the West had entailed the simultaneous retardation

and exploitative subordination of the Rest.22 A major limitation of dependency theory

was that it had little to say about African systems of production.23 This deficiency was

addressed by the French ‘modes of production’ school, also writing in the 1970s.

Intellectually liberated by ‘1968’ from the obligation to interpret all pre-capitalist social

formations within the typology of modes of production specified by Marx, they explored

various candidates for the ‘African mode of production’.24 In that sense they can be

credited with the first sustained attempt to escape, or at least seriously to dilute, what

might be called ‘conceptual Eurocentrism’: the reliance on analytical tools derived from

reflections on European experience. They made a bridge to dependency theory through

21For a more nuanced approach to cultural explanation see J-P Platteau, ‘Behind the market stage

where real societies exist’, Journal of Development Studies 30: 3 (1994), 533-77 and 30: 4 (1994), 753-817.

22The other leading exponent of the dependista approach in African history is S. Amin. For a succinct early statement see Amin, ‘Underdevelopment and dependence in Black Africa – their historical origins and contemporary forms’, Social and Economic Studies 22: 1 (1973).

23This and other criticisms were made particularly by scholars in the mainstream Marxist tradition. See S. Smith, ‘The ideas of Samir Amin: theory or tautology?’, Journal of Development Studies 17 (1980); further, J. Sender and S. Smith, The Development of Capitalism in Africa (1986).

24C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘Research on an African mode of production’, Critique of Anthropology, 1975); E. Terray, ‘Long-distance exchange and the formation of the state: the case of the Abron kingdom of Gyaman’, Economy and Society 3 (1974), 315-45.

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the notion of the ‘articulation of modes of production’. For instance, they interpreted

‘migrant labour’ as a means by which the capitalist mode of production was ‘articulated’

with – subsidised by – the ‘domestic’ mode of production, in that the semi-subsistence

African household, and especially its female members, bore most of the costs of

reproducing and supplying male seasonally-migrant workers to European-owned mines

and farms (and indeed to African cash-crop farms in the non-settler colonies).25

By 1981 the mode of production approach appeared exhausted as a source of big

new ideas, and its terminology rapidly fell into disuse.26 But it can be said to have left

two fertile legacies. Its focus on domestic production contributed to the emergence of a

prolific literature ‘gendering’ the study of African history, which has flourished to this

day.27 Again, their anti-imperialist credentials can be said to have made it politically

easier for Marxists to begin to study the history of slavery within Africa.28 That too has

been an enormously fruitful line of research, practised by many hands, over the past

quarter-century.

In the 1980s the rational-choice tradition regained its sway in African

historiography, just as it did with policy-makers in Africa and elsewhere. As in other

fields, rational-choice work over the last quarter-century has focussed less on

individuals’ decision-making and (like the ‘modes of production’ approach) more on the

structures conditioning those decisions. The political scientist Robert Bates led attempts

to explain why governments might rationally persist with policies that did not deliver

economic growth. His explanations emphasised the power or rent-seeking, distributional

coalitions. For the early post-colonial period, in particular, he argued that urban elites,

25C. Meillassoux, ‘From reproduction to production: a Marxist approach to economic

anthropology’, Economy and Soceiety 1 (1972), 93-105.

26Perhaps the final major statement from and on the modes of production approach was a special issue of the Canadian Journal of African Studies that year(?).

27For an overview see C. Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women: A Modern History (1997).

28E.g. Terray, ‘Long-distance exchange’, which argued that there was a ‘slave mode of production’ in the case he studied (for an alternative view see R. Dumett, ‘Precolonial gold mining and the state in the Akan region: with a critique of the Terray hypothesis’, Research in Economic Anthropology, 2 [1979], 37-68.

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wanting cheap food and a share of export revenues, were structurally better-placed to

influence government policy than were the mass of small farmers: the result being penal

levels of (explicit and implicit) taxation of export agriculture, with adverse consequences

for producers’ incentives and output.29

At a micro-economic level E. W. Evans and David Richardson explored rent-

seeking by African merchants and elites in the Atlantic slave trade.30 Conversely, Nimi

Wariboko’s application of transactions costs theory to the history of a corporate trading

institution, the canoe houses of the pre-colonial Niger Delta, used an idea from

contemporary economic theory to highlight an apparently efficient indigenous solution to

problems of cooperation.31 In this sense Wariboko blends the ‘optimism’ of the earlier

generation of ‘market’ scholarship with the more recent preoccupation with information

asymmetry and incentive structures.

Personally I take a pragmatic, eclectic approach to the use of theory in writing

economic history. In a forthcoming book I offer a case-study of ‘new institutionalism’

and related rational-choice ideas in the context of property rights and markets in factors

of production. This raises perhaps one-and-half cheers, rather than three, for the utility of

these ideas in that context.32 Likewise, I find the distributional coalitions analysis of state

behaviour stimulating of research but of restricted explanatory power. It has tended to

under-estimate the power of small producers against elites. For instance, a major reason

why African governments reluctantly adopted Structural Adjustment in the 1980s was

because their heavy taxation of market activities had induced widespread, if unorganised,

tax revolts – producers and traders bypassed official markets.33

29R. H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berekeley, 1981); Bates, Essays on the

Political Economy of Rural Africa (Cambridge, 1983).

30E. W. Evans and D. Richardson, ‘Hunting for rents: the economics of slaving in pre-colonial Africa’, Economic History Review 48 (1995), 665-86.

31N. Wariboko, ‘A theory of the canoe house corporation’, African Economic History 26 (1998), 141-72.

32Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana.

33This point is made more fully in G. Austin, ‘National poverty and the ‘vampire state’ in Ghana: a

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What is striking so far about the application of the related notions of agency

problems, information asymmetry and transactions costs to the history of African

commercial institutions is the discrepancy between the apparent private efficiency of the

institutions for the traders concerned, and the much more questionable effect on the

economy as a whole. Here a distinction should be made. Slaves presumably did not

benefit from the efficiency of the canoe house as an institution; but it seems to have

contributed to the economic growth of the small polities concerned.34 On the other hand,

the use of hostages in the slave trade from the port of Bonny (European ship-masters

accepted pawns as security for their advances of goods to their African trading

partners),35 benefited the willing parties to the contract, but at the social cost of

magnifying a slave trade whose effects on the region as a whole were very negative (a

point to which we shall return). Such studies help us towards a better understanding of

how evidence of pre-colonial market behaviour, and of episodes of economic expansion,

can be reconciled with the overall picture of African economies being relatively poor. In

Sub-Saharan history, economic growth and economic rents often went together – in

contrast to E. L. Jones’s dictum that ‘Economic history may be thought of as a struggle

between a propensity for growth and one for rent-seeking’.36 We will return to this too.

3. Some general suggestions about priorities in the study of African economic

history

review article’, Journal of International Development 8 (1996), 553-73. Bates himself was quick to modifiy his position in the light of experience. See Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market: the Political Economy of Afrarian Development in Kenya (Cambridge, 1989); Bates, ‘Agricultural policy and the study of politics in post-independence Africa’, in D. Rimmer (ed.), Africa 30 Years On (1991), 115-29.

34Wariboko, ‘A theory of the canoe house corporation’.

35P. Lovejoy and D. Richardson, ‘Trust, pawnship, and Atlantic history: the institutional foundations of the Old Calabar slave trade’, American Historical Review 104:2 (1999), 333-55.

36E. L. Jones, Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (Oxford, 1988), 1.

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This section makes suggestions in three areas: chronological scope, sources and

(relatedly) method, and theory.

Wwhereas in the first twenty years or so after independence the priority was

generally considered to be the recovery and analysis of evidence on pre-colonial

societies, in the last twenty years new research in African history (not only economic

history), has overwhelmingly concentrated on the colonial period. This focus has now

reached the point of threatening to induce interpretive myopia, where most of the

impulses to new synthesis themselves are likely to come from the study of one very

important but relatively brief period (about 60 years, for most of tropical Africa). In this

context, there is a double imperative. One is to ‘historicise’ the post-colonial era,

specifically by tracing historical changes and continuities across the moment of

independence. This has already begun to happen.37 At least as important is the need for

new research projects on the pre-colonial ‘period’: which, after all, comprises most of

African history. In recent years it has been left largely to archaeologists to study material

life over what they call ‘deep time’, right through to recent centuries.38 From them has

emerged a promising literature has emerged on ‘historical ecology’,39 tracing the human-

land relationship in ways that seem to suggest a more dynamic (if complicated and

nuanced) picture than the received image of a pre-colonial, pre-Atlantic trade la longue

durée. For economic historians, the need to invest more in pre-colonial research is

enhanced by the challenge of the emergent global history literature, much of which has

focussed attention on very long term patterns and trends.40

37A pioneer was C. Boone, Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930-1985

(Cambridge, 1992).

38For a valuable example see C. R. DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400-1900 (Washington DC, 2001).

39E.g. G. Barker and D. Gilbertson (eds), The Archaeology of Drylands: Living at the Margin (London, 2000).

40The extreme example is J. Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (1997). But for economic historians, the most sustained debate has been about comparisons between western Europe and south and east Asia over several centuries before the industrial revolution. I refer to this debate below.

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Moreover, the well-known source constraints have proved less ineluctable than

might have been supposed forty years ago. More and more texts, most but not all from

European sources, have been identified and in some cases critical editions have been

produced. There are localities in which archival evidence, for example from mission

sources, offers remarkable detail on, among other matters, the pervasiveness of debt in a

nineteenth-century society in what is now southern Ghana.41

Mentioning sources in the context of African economic history raises the spectre

of what I see as a reciprocal fallacy: that either there are no decent numbers, so only

qualitative sources are usable;42 or, conversely, that all qualitative sources are anecdotal,

hence nothing important can be rigorously established without quantification. I

sometimes suspect that the term ‘anecdotal’ is sometimes used as a rhetorical device to

delegitimise whole bodies of evidence. It is crucial to distinguish between the systematic

and unsystematic use of qualitative sources, and to reserve the term ‘anecdotal history’ to

the latter. Texts can tell us things important for economic history: showing the frequent

complexity of decision-making processes, and offering the possibility of non-circular

explanations of the outcomes; providing observations about crude factor ratios and

technical responses to them,43 which are particularly valuable where numbers do not

exist; while contemporary dictionaries tell us something about what contemporaries

thought about wealth, profit, and poverty.44

For their part, those who dismiss the possibility of useful quantification in African

economic history make two mistakes, in my view. One is to overlook the basic principle

41I refer to the Basel Mission Archive, which remains largely unexploited on this issue.

42Which seems close to being the implication of D. Platt’s polemic against quantification in Third World economic history, Mickey Mouse Numbers.

43For a good illustration see Mungo Park, Travels into the Interior of Africa (London, 1954; 1st edn 1799), 215.

44R. Harms, River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: the Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade (1981); M. Wagner, ‘Trade and commercial attitudes in Burundi before the 19th century’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 26 (1993), 149-66; I. Wilks, ‘The Golden Stool and the Elephant Tail: an essay on wealth in Asante’, Research in Economic Anthropology, 2 (1979), 1-36 (reprinted with minor revisions in Wilks, Forests of Gold [1993]).; T. C. McCaskie, ‘Accumulation, wealth and belief in Asante history: I. To the close of the nineteenth century’, Africa 53: 1 (1983), 23-43

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of fitness for purpose: to decide whether a particular set of numbers is good enough to

use it is necessary to ask whether their likely inaccuracy is too great to make them useful

for the specific job in hand. For example, I have assembled nineteenth-century

observations of slave prices in the Asante kingdom (Ghana). If the analytical question is

one to which only answers accurate to within, say, plus or minus 20% are relevant, these

observations would be unusable. But when they indicate that an Asante farmer could buy

a slave for the equivalent of what he was likely to obtain from two or three years of

digging gold during 8-12 weeks of the dry-season, they would have to be wildly

inaccurate to disturb the conclusion (also supported by qualitative evidence) that slaves

were cheap in terms of Asantes’ purchasing-power.45

The other mistake is to under-estimate the extent of quantitative evidence now

and potentially available. To take a key example, we now know far more than we did

twenty years ago about the prices of slaves in many parts of nineteenth-century west and

west-central Africa.46 For the colonial period, there is hope of alleviating a long-standing

sore in the historiography of agriculture, namely its relative neglect of food farming.

While most of the published data on colonial-era agriculture concern export crops, my

impression from the Ghana national archives is that there a lot of numbers to be dug out

of archival files on foodstuff prices in local markets, especially but not exclusively in

wartime. Above all, it makes sense to combine quantitative and qualitative methods

wherever practicable. A one-eyed approach is hard to justify except perhaps as a short-

term expedient.

Finally in this section, let us return to the issue of conceptual Eurocentrism. The

best response to the influence of theorizing which offers ‘universal’ models from

European experiences is not to reject ‘meta-narratives’ on principle, but rather to work,

through properly comparative historical research, to ensure that any ‘general’

frameworks are worthy of the name. The most informative way of ‘provincializing

45G. Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana (forthcoming).

46E.g. P. E. Lovejoy and D. Richardson, ‘British abolition and its impact on slave prices along the Atlantic coast of Africa, 1783-1850’, Jurnal of Economic History 55 (1995), 98-119.

15

Europe’ (in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase)47 is to adopt Kenneth Pomeranz’s principle of

‘reciprocal comparison: to ask equally why Europe was not China as well as why China

was not Europe, as opposed to the traditional practice of taking western Europe as the

template. By extension, we should ask why both ‘Europe’ and ‘China’ were different

from Africa, as well as why Africa was different from either (and the most meaningful

comparisons, as Pomeranz notes, may well be at a more disaggregated level of

geography).48

This approach in turn requires, paradoxically, a more outward-looking mode of

writing African economic history. Over the last 40-50 years historians of Africa, as

Manning observes in forthcoming work, have given priority to monographic research.49

This is especially true of African scholars themselves, for reasons discussed recently by

Toyin Falola.50 Because the results reflect the immense diversity of experience within

the continent, these potential ‘building blocks’ can be hard to combine into syntheses of

African history which are sensitive to internal variation yet sufficiently definite at a

regional or even sub-regional level to be useful for scholars attempting to formulate

world histories or cross-cultural theories. This is one reason why African historical

experiences are as yet insufficiently represented in these over-arching studies, despite the

contributions of Africanists such as Goody, Curtin, and Manning in helping to pioneer

such comparisons. (There is a second, more unfortunate reason: those syntheses of

African history - or of major regions or themes within the field - which do exist have

been neglected by some among even the most distinguished of the writers with global

ambitions). Important though it is to recognise local difference, it is essential not to be

disabled by it. The monographic foundation is now sufficient to facilitate defensible

47D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

(Princeton, 2000).

48K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000).

49Actually it may now have appeared: P. Manning, Navigating World History (2003).

50T. Falola, Nationalism and African Intellectuals (Rochester NY, 200)1.

16

generalizations about Sub-Saharan Africa (or major regions within it) which can then be

contributed to the debates about broader historical patterns.

An essential part of ‘reciprocal comparison’ is to derive models from Africa and

then explore their applicability elsewhere. It is all too emblematic of the historiographical

situation until recently that one of the rare efforts to do exactly this remains unpublished:

Stefano Fenoaltea’s 1988 conference paper ‘Europe in the African mirror: the slave trade

and the rise of feudalism’, which used the literature on the African side of the Atlantic

slave trade to derive a model which he then applied to European slavery during and after

the Roman empire. A different kind of ‘exception that proves the rule’ was Keith

Thomas’s use of Evans-Pritchard’s work on the mid-twentieth century Nuer in

conceptualizing witchcraft accusations in early modern England.51 Here Africa was

included in what was in effect a form of reciprocal comparison, but the Africanist

research was ethnographic rather than historical, and the subject-matter was the epitome

of Africa at its most ‘exotic’. Things have changed, however: some historians of Europe

have demonstrated interest in Africanist literature across a broader range of themes

(including ethnicity and national identity), while some Africanists in various disciplines

have sought to highlight what their area specialisms have to offer to comparative and

conceptual work in those disciplines.52

Trying to put my money where my mouth is, the next section outlines a set of

substantive issues whose exploration requires a long-term perspective, a combination (at

least ultimately) of qualitative and quantitative techniques, and which provides

opportunities for making reciprocal comparisons with other parts of the world.

4. Lines of future enquiry: two sets of substantive suggestions

51K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic.

52R. Bates, V. Mudimbe and J. O’Barr, eds, Africa and the Disciplines (1993).

17

Here are some thoughts on a pair of related themes on which revisionist thinking and

fresh research is much needed (and on which I have begun to work myself).

(i) Production functions and choice of techniques53

One of the most widely-held generalisations in African economic history is that, in most

of Africa, most of the time, population densities were relatively low.54 More pertinent in

economic terms, labour was scarce in relation to land in the sense that the expansion of

farm output was constrained not by the availability of land, but of labour. Associated

with this proposition is a further one: that capital goods were mostly created by labour

aided by simple tools. Thus, in all but the short run (the same season, or at most the same

year), arable agriculture could be seen as characterised by a single-factor production

function, in which output was a function of labour inputs, exclusively.

I argue elsewhere that, despite some exceptions, the notion of the relative scarcity

of labour in relation to cultivable land holds up rather well as a generalisation, at least

until land became scarce in some areas as a result of population growth and, depending

on the region, either European expropriation of land or the extension of African-owned

export agriculture.55 But I also think that this framework needs further thought and

research, in the following respects.

First, we need to take systematic note of an observation which is familiar yet, as

far as I can see, has not been incorporated systematically into analyses of production

functions, wther before or during colonial rule. This is that, as Philip Curtin showed 30

years ago in a Malian case-study, labour tended to be under-employed in much of the dry

season. The opportunity cost of such labour was low; it was only this that made it

53This section is based partly on my forthcoming book and partly on G. Austin, ‘’The labour-

intensive path to industrialization: an Africanist perspective’, paper presented at the International Economic History Congress, Buenos Aires, July 2002; a revised version has been submitted for publication.

54See especially Hopkins, Economic History of West Africa; cf. J. Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge, 1995).

55Austin, ‘’The labour-intensive path’.

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worthwhile to mine gold in this unpromising area.56 This insight can be extended to

account for the otherwise perverse fact that whereas Africans preferred labour-saving,

land-extensive techniques in agriculture, in handicraft industries they were willing to use

labour-intensive methods even where they had a choice: as in the characteristic Sub-

Saharan preference for the narrow loom over broader looms.57

Again, while it is true in the long term that the supply of capital goods (including

hand-looms and gold pits) was basically a function of labour inputs, it is important to

note that fixed capital formation was a key feature of farming systems in the forest zones.

For the production of crops was facilitated by past investment of labour in clearing the

forest. In southern Ghana, for example, the moist weight of vegetation in mature (40-50

year old) forest is estimated to average 300 tons per acre. In contrast, after 20 years of

fallowing, the moist weight is just 70 tons per acre.58 Thus a dadaso, a farm cleared and

cultivated in a previous year, may be regarded as a capital asset, the economic effect of

which was to increase the returns on the labour now expended on replanting and weeding

it during the current year.59

Finally on the production function, ‘land’ was not homogenous. This was true not

only in that its fertility varied, but, perhaps more importantly for political economy, in

that commercially valuable crops could be gown only in certain areas. To take the case of

the Asante kingdom: in the early nineteenth century its military might secured local

monopolies, or near-monopolies, of gold and kola nuts. Though this position was eroded

over the next 150 years, the British colonial administration (1896-1957) upheld the

virtual exclusion of non-Asantes from Asante lands. Because the Asantes’ neighbours to

the north lived in the savanna, they had no direct access to the forest lands required to

plant cocoa – by far the most lucrative product on the colonial-era agricultural menu. In

56P. D. Curtin, ‘The lure of Bambuk gold’, Journal of African History 14 (1973), 623-31..

57Austin, ‘The labour-intensive path’.

58J. Phillips, Agriculture and Ecology in Africa (London, 1959), cited by Wilks, Forests of Gold, 56.

59Discussed in Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana (forthcoming).

19

this context, therefore, consideration of the production function leads on to political

economy.60

ii) Rents in African history: natural-resource rents and economic rents, including

‘Nieboer’ rents

Rents of various kinds need to part of any conceptual framework for understanding

African economic history, pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial. The political capture

of exceptional natural rresources is a theme which links analytically the relationship

between groups of African neighbours and the European partition of Africa.

The most pervasive kind of economic rent in pre-colonial and colonial history

was, arguably, what might be called ‘coerced labour’ or ‘Nieboer’ rents: the difference

between the marginal product of an individual working for him or herself, and the cost of

their labour to a master or employer when the labourer was – as the case may be –

enslaved, pawned, or obliged by the direct or indirect use of state power to offer his

labour to European-owned mines or farms.

In the case of the kingdom of Asante, I argue elsewhere that in the nineteenth

century the choice was between a slave trade or no labour market at all. If this was true

more widely, before colonial rule and in many cases during at least part of it, what needs

to be explained in the twentieth century is not why markets in labour services emerged so

haltingly, but how they emerged at all.61

The contribution of slave and pawn labour to the growth of extra-subsistence

production in the late pre-colonial and early colonial periods shows us that economic

growth in an African context could itself be dependent on a form of rent-capture. Again,

this African evidence shows us (and there are surely examples elsewhere in the world)

that economic history is not always a struggle between rival propensities for growth and

for rent-seeking.

60Ibid.

61Ibid.

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But different modes of capturing economic rent impose different external costs.

The coercion of labour imposed suffering on the immediate victims and their families,

but also on the communities from which they came. In global history terms, the critical

case of this is Africa’s external slave trades. The economies which imported slaves from

Africa - whether across the Atlantic, the Sahara, the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean - varied

greatly in the extent to which they achieved economic growth. But most of them had

something in common which distinguished them from much of Africa: they did not face

the ‘collateral damage’ entailed by the process of capturing slaves. Slave raiding, in

particular, damaged buildings and property, brought death or injury to people who were

not themselves enslaved, and induced defensive measures which themselves hindered

trade.62 On a smaller scale, within West Africa the economic expansion of the Sokoto

Caliphate during the nineteenth century illustrated the advantages that could come to an

economy which imported slave labour while being largely free from the predation of

others. On the other hand, the long-term growth of the Caliphate economy was perhaps

constrained by the effect of its slave raids and expansionist wars on its neighbours. For

the removals of population and the disruption of trade constrained the possibilities for

specialisation, the basic mechanism of ‘Smithian growth’.63

5. Africa and the future of economic history in general

Finally, I wondered if one element in the choice of conference theme might be a concern

that economic historians demonstrate the value of their work for economists preoccupied

with contemporary policy. On this I offer two thoughts.

62This is familiar from the literature on slave trading, but a particularly sharp analysis was

presented by Fenoaltea in the sadly unpublished paper mentioned earlier in the text.

63For an argument that the Caliphate both benefited economically from the relatively high population densities of its central emirates, and suffered from the relatively low population of the region as a whole, see Abdullahi Mahadi and J. E. Inikori, ‘Population and capitalist development in precolonial West Africa: Kasar Kano in the nineteenth century’, in Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory (eds), African Population and Capitalism:Historical Perspectives (Madison, 2nd edn 1987), 62-73..

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The basic service which economic historians of Africa can contribute to the

understanding of contemporary Africa is an appreciation of the historicity of Africa’s

institutions and technical choices. Ethnic identities, and rotating credit societies and

labour-exchange groups (‘beer parties’) are not ‘traditional’ phenomena: all occur in

specific historical contents within Africa: they have origins, and in some areas they have

disappeared.64

Second, the kind of general picture, picturing major variations within Africa, but

clear on the main patterns, would also enrich understanding of the roots of contemporary

problems.

It would also be the major contribution which Africanists could make to progress

in economic history generally. That factor ratios south of the Sahara have historically

differed from those of most of Eurasia enhances the historical and theoretical interest of

bringing Africa more fully into global comparisons.

64For labour-exchange groups see ibid. On rotating credit societies see G. Austin, ‘Indigenous

credit institutions in West Africa, c.1750-1960’ in G. Austin and K. Sugihara (eds), Local Suppliers of Credit in the Third World and, further, R. Law, ‘Finance and credit in pre-colonial Dahomey’, in E. Stiansen and Jane I. Guyer (eds), Credit, Currencies and Culture: African Financial Institutions in Historical Perspective (Uppsala, 1999), 15-37.