The New Economic History of Africa

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to promote the revival of African economic history. Poverty, the most pressing issue confronting the continent, has received world-wide publicity in recent years. Yet historians have continued to neglect the history of economic development, which is central to the study of poverty, in favour of themes that have their origins in the Western world rather than in Africa. However, there is now an exceptional opportunity to correct the balance. Unknown to most historians, economists have produced a new economic history of Africa in the course of the past decade. This article introduces and evaluates two of the most important contributions to the new literature: the thesis that Africa has suffered a ‘reversal of fortune’ during the last 500 years, and the proposition that ethnic fragmentation, which has deep historical roots, is a distinctive cause of Africa's economic backwardness. These arguments are criticized on both methodological and empirical grounds. But they are also welcomed for their boldness, their freshness and their potential for re-engaging historians in the study of Africa's economic past – not least because it is relevant to Africa's economic future.

The Causal History of Africa: A Response to Hopkins

“…Bubb (2009) has used regression discontinuity to search for differences in policy outcomes on opposite sides of the border between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. These papers and other similar contributions are those to which Hopkins (2009) should have looked in seeking the "new" economic history of the African continent.…”

“…In a recent paper for the Journal of African History, Hopkins (2009) writes that the economic history of Africa by the close of the 1980s "was in failing health; in the 1990s its public appearances were limited." He explains this by invoking the general decline of economic history and the rise of postmodernism.…”

“…Notably, the relatively new literature on African environmental history (Beinart, 2000;Fairhead and Leach, 1996;Harms, 1987;Kreike, 1996;McCann, 1999) is inseparable from the economies of the peoples who have transformed the continent's landscape. Hopkins (2009) notes that, while historians have turned from the subject, economists have spent the past decade writing "a new type of economic history of Africa." While this is true, Hopkins (2009) errs in identifying the "reversal of fortune" thesis of Acemoglu et al (2002) and (apparently) Nunn (2008) and the "ethnolinguistic fractionalization" thesis of Easterly and Levine (1997) as the twin forefronts of this literature.…”

“…Hopkins (2009) notes that, while historians have turned from the subject, economists have spent the past decade writing "a new type of economic history of Africa." While this is true, Hopkins (2009) errs in identifying the "reversal of fortune" thesis of Acemoglu et al (2002) and (apparently) Nunn (2008) and the "ethnolinguistic fractionalization" thesis of Easterly and Levine (1997) as the twin forefronts of this literature. While his focus is on "big ideas," what originally set the "new" economic history apart was its particular focus on quantitative methods.…”

“…I argue that studies with careful research designs and a focus on causation have been the most credible recent contributions to the "new" economic history of Africa. Rather than counseling historians to undertake context-specific case studies that engage with the big ideas of the "new" economic history of Africa, Hopkins's (2009) advice should have been for historians to draw on their knowledge of specific contexts to find cases where it is possible to uncover plausible causal mechanisms. These can tell us how history matters for modern African development or how institutions and economies functioned in the past.…”