This paper is concerned with the accommodation to the market economy of Tolai people, indigenous to the Gazelle Peninsula in Papua New Guinea and regarded as one of the most prosperous and enterprising groups in the country. 'The market' was introduced to Tolai by German (and later, Australian)...

Pour connaître la pauvreté, il faut connaitre l'histoire de la pauvreté. Le cas de l'île de Mayotte, désarticulée de l'archipel des Comores, en 1975, est, à ce titre exemplaire. Ses populations, éternellement soumises à des envahisseurs, puis issues des pratiques esclavagistes, n'ont...

This paper is concerned with the economic history of immigrant Chinese in colonial Rabaul and its hinterland (in German, later Australian, New Guinea) over almost a century to the Independence of Papua New Guinea in 1975. It is a companion piece to another study concerned with how Tolai people...

At the end of the 1980s, Côte d'Ivoire entered a deep macroeconomic crisis that put an end to the often-praised 'Ivorian miracle'. After the death of the founding father Houphouet- Boigny, unrestrained political competition added to bad economic conditions and led to the nightmare of civil war....

William Lawrence Baillieu (1859-1936) founded one of Australia largest and most long-lasting family fortunes. He made his first fortune as a real estate agent and land developer in the Melbourne land boom of the 1880s, but lost almost everything in the crash of the early 1890s. Although the...

Nunn (2008) found a negative relationship between past slave exports and economic performance within Africa. Here we investigate these findings and the suggested causal pathway in further detail. Extending the sample period back in time we reveal that the coefficient on slave exports did not...

Colonial investments impacted long-run political and economic development, but we have little systematic evidence about their origins and spatial distribution. Combining novel data sources, I show that colonial investments were very unequally distributed within 16 British and French African...

Using taxation statistics, we estimate the income share held by top income groups in Australia over the period 1921-2002. We find that the income share of the richest fell from the 1920s until the mid-1940s, rose briefly in the post-war decade, and then declined until the early-1980s. During the...

Using taxation statistics, we estimate the income share held by top income groups in New Zealand over the period 1921-2002. We find that the income share of the richest fell during the 1930s, rose again after World War II, and steadily declined from the late-1950s until the mid-1980s. From the...