Limited knowledge of African inequality trajectories hampers our understanding of the drivers of heterogeneous inequality outcomes in Africa today, and leads to a major omission in debates about global inequality. In recent years, African economic history has advanced towards the reconstruction...

Limited knowledge of African inequality trajectories hampers our understanding of the drivers of heterogeneous inequality outcomes in Africa today, and leads to a major omission in debates about global inequality. In recent years, African economic history has advanced towards the reconstruction...

Despite the essential role that international trade has historically played for resource-rich African economies, growth possibilities have been hindered by considerable trade barriers. Yet, in the large literature on commodity market integration, Africa is a blank spot and little is known about...

Sub-Saharan Africa is home today to some of the most unequal countries in the world, in Southern and Central Africa, as well as others that are close to the world average, in Western Africa. Yet, there is no consensus regarding the historical factors that led to such a situation. Given limited...

Today, income inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa is exceptionally high. In this paper, we study whether present-day inequality can be traced back to the colonial period by reconstructing income distributions in a sample of representative colonies. To do so, we use data from colonial records to...

A common explanation for current African underdevelopment is the extractive character of institutions established during the colonial period. Yet, since colonial extraction is hard to quantify, the magnitude of this phenomenon is still unclear. In this paper, I address this gap in the literature...