This paper examines the responses of Indigenous nations and European companies to new trading opportunities: Cree nations and the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), and Khoe nations and the Dutch East India Company (VOC). This case study is important because of the disparate outcomes: within a few...

This paper examines the responses of Indigenous nations and European companies to new trading opportunities: Cree nations and the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), and Khoe nations and the Dutch East India Company (VOC). This case study is important because of the disparate outcomes: within a few...

The field of African economic history is in resurgence. This paper reviews recent and on-going research contributions and notes strengths in their wide methodological, conceptual and topical variety. In these strengths there is also a challenge: different methodological approaches may also...

According to the debate on the long-term impact of colonialism, the central concern is the institutions the colonial powers imposed on the colonies. The main line of argument in this paradigm is that such institutions, once jelled, persisted and provide explanations to current-day development...

This paper ties into a new literature that aims to quantify the long-term economic effects of historical European settlement, arguing for the need to properly address the role of indigenous agency in path-dependent settlement processes. We conduct three comparative case studies in West, East and...

In this paper I use primary and secondary sources to quantify the role of tenant labour on settler farms in colonial Africa, using Southern Rhodesia as a case in point. My findings show that the rise of wage labour did not mark the end of labour tenancy, as has been assumed in previous...

Traditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for children as labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older and more densely populated farming regions. In this paper we...

The flexibility of slave labour as an economic institution has often been assumed as a given. In general, some capital investment is necessary to retrain novice slaves but essentially they could be substituted for any other form of labour. This paper refutes the claim of the flexibility of slave...