Who Writes African Economic History?

ABSTRACT

Much has been said about the rise, or ‘renaissance’, of African economic history. What has received far less attention is who is producing this research. Using a complete dataset of articles in the top four economic history journals, I document the rise in African economic history in the last two decades. I show that although there has indeed been an increase in papers on Africa, it has included little work by Africans. I then attempt to explain why this is so, and motivate why this should matter. The good news is that, mostly owing to efforts by the academic community, more is being done to encourage African inclusion. I conclude with a few suggestions on how to make more African scholars part of the renaissance of African economic history.

KEYWORDS:

• economic history
• Africa
• bibliometric
• citations

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

This paper is prepared for a special issue of Economic History of Developing Regions. I am grateful also to Felix Meier zu Selhausen for sharing statistics about the African Economic History Network, and to Kudzai Chidamwoyo, Calumet Links, Lisa Martin, and Heinrich Nel for their data collection efforts. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the African Economic History workshop at Stellenbosch University on 15 April 2019. I received helpful comments from Gareth Austin, Fran Marco Gracia, Alfonso Herranz-Loncán, Nobungcwele Mbem, Felix Meier zu Selhausen, Elie Murard, Amy Rommelspacher and Krige Siebrits. I particularly appreciate the fruitful discussions with the many LEAP visitors and, in particular, with Erik Green, who has done much to expand African economic history on the continent.

Notes

2 The textbook is used as prescribed material in at least four African countries.

3 This assumption is probably more valid during the last few decades. As Austin (2018) noted in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge University in October 2018, this assumption was certainly not true in earlier years, including during the original 1960s to mid-1980s era of fairly plentiful research on African economic history.

4 Although nationality would have been the preferred measure, the nationality of authors is not readily available. The results, though, are unlikely to change substantially for Africa.

5 Again, this may be specific to the top four economic history journals. Nigerian scholar Joseph Inikori (2002), although now based in the US, has made a major contribution to the economic historiography of the British Industrial Revolution.

6 The authors document, for example, how Nathan Nunn’s seminal contribution on slavery is excluded from the list of papers because ‘Africa’ is neither mentioned in the title, abstract nor keywords of the paper.

7 Doyle et al. (2019) reveal, for example, how African patients were over-diagnosed with sexually transmitted diseases.

8 The controls do matter, though, if Africa papers are systematically more likely to be published in later issues or lower down the list (or, for some odd reason, with longer titles or fewer pages).

9 As one commentator notes, there are few incentives for scholars outside Africa to engage with African scholars. Many of the colonial archives are in London, Paris or Lisbon, and the rewards on visiting African archives are not always apparent from the outset. This could change if funding agencies require some form of African participation – either to include African students or to partner with local research teams – when doing research on Africa.

10 The exchange is in both directions. In 2019, associate professor Erik Green is spending a year on sabbatical at Stellenbosch University.