Fifty years of African economic history

ABSTRACT

The article summarizes the evolution of the study of African economic history during the past half century. It does so, not by attempting to assess the mountain of evidence that is now available, but by identifying the intellectual impulses that have shaped the contours of the subject. Six main phases have influenced several generations of postgraduate students who have been drawn to the study of Africa: modernization theory, the dependency thesis, Marxism, the Annales school, postmodernism, and, most recently, the new economic history. The discussion identifies the common features of these schools as well as their differences. Entrants to the subject, it is argued, should take encouragement from past achievements, which have opened frontiers of knowledge and set standards, but they should also be aware that the latest is not necessarily the best, nor is it always as novel as its advocates commonly suppose. Familiarity with historiographical trends enables newcomers to relate their own work to that of their predecessors. In this way, they can find room to express their own individuality and ensure that their creativity carries the subject forward.

Keywords:

• African history
• economic development

JEL Code:

• B0
• N0
• N17

Notes

2 Tribute should be paid here to pioneers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who founded the journal, African Economic History (https://uwpress.wisc.edu/journals/journals/aeh.html) in 1975, and particularly to Paul Lovejoy (York University, Toronto), who edited it for 30 years; and to Gareth Austin (Cambridge University), who initiated the informal network that led Morten Jerven (Edinburgh University) and Erik Green (Lund University) to found the African Economic History Network (https://www.aehnetwork.org/) in 2011, and are part of the team that manages its affiliate, the African Economic History Newsletter.

3 A measure of the increase in knowledge and refinement of analysis is provided by contributions to the Journal of African Economies, which was founded by the Oxford economist, Paul Collier, in 1990.

4 It is strange, to take one example, that the new institutional economics makes little reference to the rise of the cliometric ‘revolution’ in the 1960s or to subsequent evaluations of its achievements and limits.

5 In the sense that academic enquiry takes place within boundaries formed by the dominant paradigm.

6 Samir Amin’s (1971) L’Afrique de l’Ouest bloquée, translated as Neocolonialism in West Africa (Amin 1973), was also influential but covered a more limited region and dealt mainly with the post-independence period.

7 The early ‘Africanist’ nationalist historiography was seen to have favoured great states and great men, who were treated as protected precursors of the decolonized present.

8 GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) is commonly introduced to undergraduates beginning courses in statistics but applies at all levels of the subject. Many decades on, Edward Tufte’s presentation of this acronym in his statistics class at Princeton remains unforgettable.

9 An illuminating analogy can be found in the debate over what became known as democratic peace theory, which rose to prominence during the 1980s and 1990s but lost impetus as problems of definition and method (notably reverse causality and multicollinearity) emerged.

10 Jutta Bolt (University of Lund) is undertaking a study of African population that will begin in the early nineteenth century and will use mission records among other sources. Angus Dalrymple-Smith and colleagues at Wageningen University have launched the African Commodity Trade Data Base project covering the period 1730 to 2010. Ewout Frankema’s research programme, ‘Is Poverty Destiny?’, will assemble material on foreign investment in Africa between 1880 and 1960.