As Africa's role on the global stage is rising, so does the need to understand the shadow of history on the continent …'s economy and polity. We discuss recent works that shed light on Africa's colonial and precolonial legacies. The emerging corpus … Africa's post-independence maladies, we first review works that uncover the lasting legacies of colonial investments in …

effect on income. However, in Africa rugged terrain afforded protection to those being raided during the slave trades. Since … the slave trades retarded subsequent economic development, in Africa ruggedness has also had a historical indirect … for Africa the indirect positive effect dominates the direct negative effect. Looking within Africa, we also provide …

Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data … exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves …

systems. After showing that the intensity with which people were enslaved and exported from Africa during the 1400 - 1900 …

this line of research to Asia. Japan imposed its system of well-defined property rights in land on some of its Asian … colonies, including Korea, Taiwan and Palau. In 1939 Japan began to survey and register private land in its island colonies, an … land registration obsolete. Third, considering all of Japan's colonies, we use the presence or absence of a land survey as …

Japan, an isolated, backward country in the 1860s, industrialized rapidly to become a major industrial power by the …

We examine the long-run consequences of ethnic partitioning, a neglected aspect of the Scramble for Africa, and uncover …