This paper reviews the available evidence on post-war trends in Dutch private wealth inequality using a range of scattered sources. Wealth tax records suggest a substantial decline in inequality to the 1970s and, more tentatively, a gradual rise thereafter. In the post-1990 years, Gini-coefficients of private wealth inequality range from 0.8 to 0.9, which is at the high end of the international comparison. Such high levels of private wealth inequality contrast with relatively low levels of net income inequality; a paradox that the Netherlands share with other Northern European welfare states. We hypothesise that publicly funded life-time income security limits the wealth-formation by ordinary Dutch households, while the redistributive taxes required to finance this system are targeting income rather than wealth.

The renaissance of African economic history in the past decade has produced a range of new data and approaches that stimulate deeper insights into the long-term social and economic development of Africa. Some of these data and approaches are not just promising, but also problematic. We engage with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf (2016) to show how selection biases in the use of Anglican parish registers may provoke overly optimistic accounts of European influences on Africa’s schooling revolution and associated opportunities of gender emancipation. Confronting their dataset – drawn from the marriage registers of the Anglican ‘Namirembe Cathedral’ in Kampala – with Uganda’s 1991 census, we show that trends in literacy and numeracy of people born in Kampala lagged half a century behind those who wedded in Namirembe Cathedral, and that the gender gap widened for a much longer period. We run a regression analysis showing that unequal access to schooling along lines of gender and ethnicity was pervasive throughout the colonial era and argue that European colonial influences did not much to alleviate gender inequality, but instead reconfigured its nature. We also argue that unequal opportunities were sustained through a political coalition of the British colonial administration with the Buganda Kingdom. This paper thus calls for a more sensitive treatment of African realities in the evaluation of European colonial legacies and a critical approach towards the use of new sources and approaches.

To what extent did the 18th century intensification of the trans-Atlantic slave trade boost commercial agriculture in the coastal areas of West Africa? Exploring the provisioning strategies of 187 British, French, Dutch and Danish slave voyages conducted between 1681 and 1807, we call for a major downward adjustment of available estimates of the slave trade induced demand impulse. We show that during the 18th century, an increasing share of the foodstuffs required to feed African slaves were taken on board in Europe instead of West Africa. We also document considerable variation in provisioning strategies among slave trading nations and across main regions of slave embarkation. We explain these trends and variation in terms of the relative (seasonal) security of European versus African food supplies, the falling relative costs of European provisions and the increasing risks in the late 18th century trade, putting a premium on faster embarkation times.

This paper comments on studies that aim to quantify the long-term economic effects of historical European settlement across the globe. We argue for the need to properly conceptualize ‘colonial settlement’ as an endogenous development process shaped by the interaction between prospective settlers and indigenous peoples. We conduct three comparative case studies in West, East and Southern Africa, showing that the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of colonial settlement critically depended on colonial government policies arranging European farmer’s access to local land, but above all, local labour resources. These policies were shaped by the clashing interests of African farmers and European planters, in which colonial governments did not necessarily, and certainly not consistently, abide to settler demands, as is often assumed.

There is a tight historical connection between endemic labour scarcity and the rise of coercive labour market institutions in former African colonies. This paper explores how European mining companies in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia secured scarce supplies of African labour, by combining coercive labour recruitment practices with considerable investments in living standards. By reconstructing internationally comparable real wages we show that copper mine workers lived at barebones subsistence in the 1910s-1920s, but experienced rapid welfare gains from the mid-1920s onwards, to become among the best paid manual labourers in Sub-Saharan Africa from the 1940s onwards. We investigate how labour stabilization programs raised welfare conditions of mining worker families (e.g. medical care, education, housing quality) in the Congo, and why these welfare programs were more hesitantly adopted in Northern Rhodesia. By showing how solutions to labour scarcity varied across space and time we stress the need for dynamic conceptualizations of colonial institutions, as a counterweight to their oft supposed persistence in the historical economics literature.

This chapter reviews the ‘long twentieth-century’ development of ‘modern’ manufacturing in Sub-Saharan Africa from colonization to the present. We argue that classifying Africa generically as a ‘late industrializer’ is inaccurate. To understand the distinctively African pattern of manufacturing growth, we focus our discussion on the dynamic interplay between the region’s specific endowment structures, global economic relationships and government policies. We conclude that the case of Sub-Saharan Africa is best characterized as interrupted industrial growth instead of sustained convergence on world industrial leaders. This is partly because, until very recently, the factor endowments made it very costly for states to pursue industrialization; and partly because successive rulers, colonial and post-colonial, have rarely had both the capacity to adopt and the dedication to sustain policies that modified the region’s existing comparative advantage in primary production, by using their fiscal and regulatory powers effectively to promote industrialization.

Building on recent insights from archeology, genetics, and linguistics I challenge Jared Diamond’s grand narrative of the biogeographic roots of world inequality. I argue that this narrative pays insufficient attention to contrasting patterns of human settlement in Africa and the Americas. I develop alternative hypotheses concerning the role of domesticated animals in shaping human disease environments and processes of state formation prior to the Columbian exchange. My overarching objective is to enhance the debate on the deep roots of world inequality by tackling Eurocentric conceptions of world development and exploring the potential of new comparative and multi-disciplinary research perspectives.

In Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History, 11 leading economic historians explore whether East Asia’s pathway into modern economic growth can be meaningfully characterized as a trajectory of ‘labour-intensive industrialization’, a route distinct from the North Atlantic capital-intensive path as well as the more diffuse paths of industrialization in the labour scarce regions of the Southern hemisphere. This review essay situates this collective volume in the wider literature on modern economic growth to stake out its main arguments. It proceeds with an integrated overview of the main chapters to discuss some of the shared conclusions as well as some of the internal disagreements. It concludes with some critical reflections on the viability of the concept of labour-intensive industrialization, as well as the possible implications for areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, which have largely remained outside the global diffusion of modern manufacturing.

This chapter aims to disentangle the causal complex underpinning Indonesia’s ‘green revolution’ in order to assess which aspects of it are, in principle, replicable in other parts of the world and which aspects are not. More in particular this study focuses on the question which elements of the transition in Javanese rice farming are useful for Sub-Saharan African economies, where comparable transitions in crop productivity have not occurred (yet). The main argument is that specific historical and ecological conditions make it unlikely that Indonesia’s green revolution will be replicated in (parts of) Africa, but that Indonesian agricultural policies contain some important lessons for African governments that aspire to promote broad-based rural development.