The Gun-Slave Hypothesis is the long-standing idea that European gunpowder technology played a key role in growing the transatlantic slave trade. I combine annual data from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database and the Anglo-African Trade Statistics to estimate a Vector Error Correction Model...

Ralph Austen in African Economic History (1987) noted how few African countries explicitly choose capitalism on independence, and for those who did it was a default model or a residual pattern. '˜African socialism' was popular in the early decades of independence and pursued by several...

How states acquire the ability to raise taxes is a central question in the study of institutions and economic development in economic history. This paper uses new data on 'ËœNative Authorities', or African local governments, to investigate tax compliance under indirect rule in British Africa....

Contemporary African fiscal systems are usually portrayed as being subject to significant instability, which has negative consequences for public spending and development. However, this paper documents significant long-term fiscal stabilisation in Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger and Senegal...

The resource curse literature underscores the fact that extractive economies face challenges in diversifying their economies. What is less explored are the public finance challenges encountered in these economies when the extractive industries are completely privatized. Using a recently compiled...

This paper sheds new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa. We use patient registers from Western Uganda's earliest mission hospital to explore whether and how Christian conversion and mission education affected African health behaviour. A dataset of 18,600...

This study adds the case of a Belgian colony to a literature that has mainly focused on differences in school enrollment between French and British African territories. While most studies emphasize the supply- side, especially the constraints on missionary activity, we highlight the role of...

According to western observers, slavery was almost universal in Africa by the end of the slave trade era. I investigate the extent to which the international slave trades transformed the institutions of slavery in Africa. I use newly-developed data on travel time to estimate the inland reach of...

Why do large differences in fiscal capacity exist between states in the Global South? We construct a comprehensive new dataset of tax and revenue collection for 46 African polities from 1900 to 2015. Descriptive analyses show that many polities in Africa have been characterized by strong growth...

Agricultural output fluctuated worldwide after the emancipation of slaves. The usual explanation is that former slaveholders now lacked labor. This is not the full story: slaves were not just laborers but capital investments to support production. Using databases covering more than 40 years from...