Cover -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Preface -- 1 Introduction Gareth Austin -- 2 Environmental Impacts of Colonial Dynamics, 1400-1800: The First Global Age and the Anthropocene Amélia Polónia and Jorge M. Pacheco -- 3 Agricultural Intensification in Sub-Saharan Africa,...

While Ghana is a classic case of economic growth in an agricultural-export colony, scholars have queried whether it was sustained, and how far its benefits were widely distributed, socially and regionally. Using height as a measure of human well-being we explore the evolution of living standards...

The appearance of the first two syntheses of the literature on the economic failure of 'statist' policies in post-colonial Ghana, to 1983, and the subsequent economic liberalization, is an opportune moment at which to consider the state of the debate about the political economy of the country...

Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson have dramatically challenged the tendency of economists to confine their empirical search for the causes of economic growth to the recent past. They argue that the kind of institutions established by European colonialists, either protecting private property or...

This article seeks to revise and re-apply the factor endowments perspective on African history. The propositions that sub-Saharan Africa was characterized historically by land abundance and labour scarcity, and that the natural environment posed severe constraints on the exploitation of the land...

The Second Industrial Revolution created markets for new products for Ghana, rubber and then cocoa beans. Mechanised transport spurred the spread of cocoa planting. The paper estimates the resultant shift in factor ratios, and synthesises the data for prices of land-use rights and wages as the...