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...

The majority of Africans in the colonial era pursued composite livelihood strategies of which commercial and subsistence agriculture were crucial components. So far, however, evidence on the contribution of these sources of non-wage income in African long-term welfare development is...

The increasing use of missionary church records in studies of African human capital formation appears both promising and problematic. We engage with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf (2016) to show how selection biases in church record data may provoke overly optimistic...