The question whether institutions in Africa were shaped by the metropolitan identity of the colonizer or by local conditions is lively debated in the African economic history literature. In this paper we contribute to this debate by revealing regional differences in tax capacity in the...

This study contributes to African state and fiscal history by presenting a detailed comparison of the evolution of fiscal capacity in four countries in francophone West Africa – Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger and Senegal - over both the colonial and independent periods. While common patterns and...

There is a tight historical connection between endemic labour scarcity and the rise of coercive labour market institutions in former African colonies. This paper explores how mining companies in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia secured scarce supplies of African labour, by combining...

To what extent did capitalism come into being in Africa before 1850? If by capitalism we mean the production of goods for exchange by capitalists who combine their own capital and land with labor bought from free workers without land, then the accumulative historical evidence tells us that only...

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...

In this chapter, we have examined the changing market for African commodities in the decades before the British abolished their transatlantic slave trade. By constructing a new time series of the quantities and prices of goods imported from Africa in the customs ledgers we have shown that there...

This article uses Anglican marriage registers from colonial and post-colonial Uganda to investigate long-term trends and determinants of intergenerational social mobility among Christian African men. We show that the colonial era opened up new labour opportunities for our African converts...

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...