The historical and social science literature is divided about the importance of metropolitan blueprints of colonial rule for the development of colonial states. We exploit historical records of colonial state finances to explore the importance of metropolitan identity on the comparative development of fiscal institutions in British and French Africa. Taxes constituted the financial backbone of the colonial state and were vital to the state building efforts of colonial governments. A quantitative comparative perspective shows that pragmatic responses to varying local conditions can easily be mistaken for specific metropolitan blueprints of colonial governance and that under comparable local circumstances the French and British operated in remarkably similar ways.
Category: Publications
Two decades of substantial economic growth in Africa have challenged the deep-seated Afro-pessimism of the 1990s and 2000s and re-invigorated the academic debate on Africa’s ability to grow out of poverty in the 21stcentury. Although the opinions differ widely on how sustainable current African growth trajectories are, there is a widespread consensus that a fundamental agricultural transformation is key to consolidate current and future welfare gains. This study interprets recent signs of agricultural productivity growth from a long term global historical context, arguing that the combination of present-day developments in information and communication technology, transport infrastructure, demographic growth,urbanization and in macro-economic governance form a fundamental break with African history. This break does not offer any guarantees, but it does raise the probability that Africa will complete a green revolution of its own.
This paper aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent wide data set on African population extending into the pre-1950 era. We investigate the reliability and the validity of the current population databases with the aim of working towards a consensus on the long term series of African total population with a reliable 1950 benchmark. The cases of Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana are explored to show how uneven coverage census taking has been in colonial and post-colonial Africa and to demonstrate the need for an upward adjustment of the conventional 1950 benchmark. In addition, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Patrick Manning’s approach of projecting population growth estimates backwards in time by adopting the available Indian census data as African ‘default growth rates’ and propose an alternative approach by incorporating the demographic experiences of tropical land abundant countries in South East Asia.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti has exposed the extreme vulnerability of a society where the state and the economy simultaneously fail to deliver. The Dominican Republic has witnessed several phases of rapid economic growth since the 1870s and, from the 1970s onwards, a sustained process of political emancipation. Douglas North, John Wallis and Barry Weingast have developed a conceptual framework to explain different long-term performance characteristics of societies, which we apply to the case of Hispaniola. We argue that it captures the internal logic of the political economy of both societies but fails to account for the effect of different foreign relations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Economische geschiedenis gaat over de evolutie van armoede en rijkdom in de wereldeconomie. Het vakgebied bestrijkt daarmee een enorm terrein: van het marktverkeer in Mesopotamië onder Nebukadnezar tot de oorzaken van de financiële crisis in 2007– 2008, en van de effecten van de Reformatie op Europees ondernemerschap tot de ontwikkeling van het stedelijk systeem in China onder de Song-dynastie. We moeten in dit overzicht selectief zijn, en proberen vooral de vraag te beantwoorden wat de ‘new economic history’ die zo’n vijftig jaar geleden in de VS opkwam, nieuwe resultaten heeft opgeleverd. Waarbij elk ‘resultaat’, zoals dat onder academici gaat, nog steeds onderwerp is van intens debat.
De afgelopen twee decennia is de economische groei in sub-Sahara- Afrika fors aangetrokken, maar hoe moeten we die groei interpreteren? Is dit een zeepbel die veroorzaakt wordt door gunstige, maar tijdelijke, ontwikkelingen op de wereldmarkt die de vraag naar Afrikaanse natuurlijke hulpbronnen vergroten? Of vinden er dieperliggende structurele veranderingen plaats die voorwaarden scheppen voor moderne economische groei? De door Vidi en het ERC Starting Grant mogelijk gemaakte projecten plaatsen dit belangrijke vraagstuk in een historisch perspectief.
The debate concerning the exact timing and causes of changes in economic leadership constitutes one of the central themes in economic history. This study aims to improve the measurement of economic performance in the United States and Western Europe (Britain, France and the Netherlands) during the long nineteenth century by constructing a new benchmark of sector productivity and new estimates of comparative gdp per capita and per worker. Our main finding is that the Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-American take-overs should be located earlier in time than suggested by the conventional Maddison database. We offer an explanation for this result by looking at differences in sectoral productivity performance as well as the different structures (sectoral employment shares) of the economy.
This contribution builds upon Anne Booth’s extensive work on the differentiated evolution of colonial education systems in East and Southeast Asia. The article probes further into the underlying causes of the poor Dutch legacy. I argue that the spread of popular education was not only hampered by a lack of financial commitment, but also by notable inequalities in the allocation of funds for education and a great reluctance to support initiatives in investment in private education, which, I think, should be interpreted as the result of the metropolitan commitment to secular colonial rule in an overwhelmingly Islamic society.