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...

Christian missions played an essential role for European colonial empires, often entering territories before European powers officially claimed control. While interactions between governmental and religious actors and their long-term consequences have been subject to earlier studies, little is...

We study the effect of exposure to colonial public primary education on contemporary education outcomes in Tunisia. We assemble a new data set on the location of schools with the number of pupils by origin, along with population data during the French protectorate (1881-1956). We match those...

This paper considers Italy’s short but intense colonisation of Eritrea in light of the more well-known European colonial histories in Africa. We review the Italian historiography on Italy’s involvement in Eritrea, supplementing it with novel archival data. The focus is on the activities of...

We investigate the well-being of urban workers in Angola under colonialism. Using a newly compiled dataset derived from archival and secondary sources, we construct welfare ratios for both skilled and unskilled workers in the cities of Luanda and Benguela spanning the years 1760 to 1975. Angolan...

How much did France pay for its colonial empire? Did colonies benefit from large transfers from French taxpayers and private investors, or were they on the contrary drained of their capital? So far, Jacques Marseille (1984) was the only attempt to investigate these questions, by deducting from...

In the literature on wages and income inequality in colonial sub-Saharan Africa, two recurrent themes can be observed: high racial inequality between European colonisers and the colonised African population and high skill premiums, a measure of the ratio of skilled to unskilled wages. For...

Using educational and occupational statistics derived from 30,000 marriage registers obtained from six major cities in British colonial Africa, we show how early colonial mission education helped African men access formal labour. Women were relegated to informal and homemaking activities...

This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of living standards in Angola during the colonial period, with a specific focus on the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang), the largest and most profitable company in Portuguese colonial history. Employing the "barebones subsistence...