Category: Economic History

The state in Africa is a colonial state

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Map of Africa from 1583

The default unit of analysis for many economists when dealing with national economics is the state. Yet, in economics textbooks 鈥榯he state鈥� is often assumed to be a neutral actor exogenous to economic processes. It is assumed to be the same 鈥� in essence – everywhere. This conception is based on a Eurocentric view of the state, which assumes all states are ahistorical Westphalian nation states based on Enlightenment principles. However, states are not neutral, but deeply shaped by historical processes. Analyses of 鈥榮tates鈥� in economics – country analyses, country data, evaluations of so-called 鈥榤acroeconomic fundamentals鈥� – must be rethought by taking the complexities of the state in Africa into account in their conceptualisations, analyses and policy proposals. In this piece, I unpack how the African state evolved as a colonial project and the implications of it being mischaracterized as neutral state.

A state like no other

The state in Africa has been mischaracterized as a neutral institution devoid of a problematic history which affects its present. In its simplest terms, the state is an institution of governing, i.e., a political organization whose main aim is to establish and maintain security, law and order within its geographic jurisdiction. In economics, the state is discussed and perceived as a one size-fit-all institution, one that is and must be similar in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The African state, in particular, has been presented as if it is similar to other states, especially in Europe and the United States of America to which it must aspire.

Moreover, the African has been evaluated and judged on the basis of other perceived progressive states, especially those on the western hemisphere. That states are the same is both untrue, misleading, and ahistorical. African states are very different from other states as they are products of conquest, colonialism, genocides, epistemicides and slavery. It was created to support these processes and it still dispenses them mainly through violence. Those who colonised African countries did so not only to access markets and raw materials, but to displace epistemologies and decentre the colonized; and in the process they centered the colonising countries as the centre of knowledge production and essence of humanity. This is the origin of the superiority of liberal economics as the dominant way of understanding and doing economics in Africa.

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The Ideal Amount of Work and Leisure

Hritic GautamLeave a comment

Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, has attracted significant attention for his in which he advises Indian youth to work 70 hours a week to contribute to the nation鈥檚 growth. Mr. Murthy,  who also happens to be the father-in-law of the UK鈥檚 Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, supports his advice by drawing parallels to the post-war recoveries of Germany and Japan. He suggests that Indian corporate leaders should similarly consider increasing employees鈥� working hours to enhance productivity

In my view, Mr. Murthy鈥檚 advice is ignorant and misinformed at best, or highly malicious at worst. In either case, it is profoundly misguided. In this blog, we will critically assess his statement, examining both its intent and factual accuracy. This discussion will also lead to broader reflections on the themes of work and leisure

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Walt Rostow鈥檚 development theory shows that capitalism relies on brutal violence

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Economist Walt Rostow advanced an influential development theory while working as an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow鈥檚 advocacy of murderous violence in Vietnam flowed directly from his theory of how to promote capitalist growth.

Commonsense notions of development associate it with capitalist modernization. Such notions assume that cumulative economic growth enables poor countries to become more like rich ones.

To facilitate such growth, policymakers, international institutions, and many academics urge poor countries and their populations to adopt modern ways of thought and action, dispensing with familial or communal loyalties and embracing the benefits of capitalist markets and impersonal bureaucracies.

Those who adopt this perspective insist that such modernization will be beneficial for developing societies in the long run, even though there will always be those who lose out and seek to resist the process. However, since the benefits of economic growth and cultural change outweigh the losses, it is legitimate to forcefully suppress such opposition.

No thinker was more influential in theorizing and popularizing such notions of development underpinned by violent coercion than Walt Whitman Rostow (1916鈥�2003).

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Colonialism and Indian Famines: A Response

Tirthankar RoyLeave a comment

Tamoghna Halder criticized one of my writings on nineteenth-century Indian famines. Halder distorts my views and wrongly implies that I suppressed data. He misreads the very nature of the Indian famine debate, thinking it is about facts. It is not. It is about method, about how economic historians and development scholars should read the history of climatic shocks. The piece demands a response and a clarification of the issues involved.

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Colonialism and the Indian Famines: A response to Tirthankar Roy

Tamoghna Halder5 Comments

Responding to Sullivan and Hickel’s recently published research article (in ) and an opinion article (in ), Tirthankar Roy, points out how the authors are wrong in claiming that British colonial policies caused several famines in India. All that is fine, except that these articles neither investigate nor come up with any original claim regarding the causes of famines in colonial India. The central claim in their research article is that capitalism did not necessarily result in an improvement of human welfare in the 19th century – contrary to the relatively popular belief that it did. In the opinion piece, they argue the same, but solely with a focus on the negative impact of British colonial policies in India in terms of excess deaths, decline in wages and living conditions. In order to support this distinct set of claims, among other supporting evidence and quantitative techniques, Sullivan and Hickel cite one existing claim (from prior literature) that colonial policies induced multiple famines in India. And yet, as the term colonialism has become a triggering point for Roy in recent years, he titles his as “Colonialism did not cause the Indian famines”. If the intention of Roy is to refute Sullivan and Hickel’s original claim, he fails at it miserably. If the intention of Roy is to weaken Sullivan and Hickel’s set of supporting evidence, one may argue that he does so at least partially, but that鈥檚 true only for the opinion piece (and not the research article). However, I will argue in this response why Roy fails to achieve even that! This leaves one to speculate Sir Tirthankar Roy’s real intentions, which is not the task of the current article.

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A Multilateral International Monetary System

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By Paulo L. dos Santos and

鈥淥ne of the chief contributions to peace that the Bretton Woods program offers is that it will free the small and even the middle-sized nations from the danger of economic aggression by more powerful neighbours. The lesser nation will no longer be obliged to look to a single powerful country for monetary support or capital for development, and have to make dangerous political and economic concessions in the process. Political independence in the past has often proved to be sham when economic independence did not go with it.鈥� 鈥擧enry Morgenthou Jr (1945)

The world economy has a Dollar problem. Reliance on the currency of a single country as the world鈥檚 chief way to organise trade, carry out financial settlements, and store value creates a series of inequitable economic imbalances and policy tensions鈥攂oth within the US and across the global economy. It bestows disproportionate economic and political power on the US government and financial institutions; exposes world trade and finance to聽聽originating in the Dollar zone; imposes huge costs on the world鈥檚 small and even middle-sized nations; and fuels聽聽in the US financial sector, bolstering its influence in that country鈥檚 political economy.

A Historical Problem

This problem is not new. In fact, the inability to develop an equitable and genuinely multilateral international monetary system is one of capitalism鈥檚 most striking institutional failures, going back to the early days of the industrial revolution. The gold standard of that time and its successors have always  some economies at the expense of others, and created  favouring the interests of creditors and capital, at the expense of debtors and wage earners. 

Only once in the history of capitalism did policy-makers from leading capitalist powers even consider the possibility of building a genuinely multilateral, equitable system: during the  on the post-World-War-II economic order. But despite the aspirations and statements of participants like John M Keynes and then-US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthou Jr, the Bretton Woods conference led to the creation of , under which foreign central banks could present dollars to the Federal Reserve for exchange into gold. 

That system effectively charged US authorities with the supply of the world鈥檚 ultimate international reserves. In this task they were constrained only by the willingness of central banks in other states to hold Dollars instead of gold. As French Finance Minister Giscard d鈥橢staing put it in the 1960s, this arrangement defined an  for the US economy, which enjoyed a lot of space for effectively issuing Dollars to acquire goods and assets overseas.

By the late 1960s, it became clear that the US economy  under the Bretton Woods system. Its steady  in international trade, fiscal pressures from its protracted, losing war in Vietnam, and increases in social spending in response to domestic political turmoil, led to growing trade deficits, mass outflows of Dollars, and concerns that US authorities would not be able to meet foreign demand for convertibility of greenbacks into gold. In response, the US unilaterally abandoned its commitment to convertibility in 1971.

Coming amidst a series of successful national liberation and anti-colonial struggles across the world, the US鈥檚 inability to sustain the Bretton Woods system fed hopes that a new, equitable international monetary order could be constructed. The 1974聽聽for a New International Economic Order explicitly pointed to the need for a new monetary system centered on the 鈥減romotion of the development of the developing countries and the adequate flow of real resources to them鈥� as means to dismantle 鈥渢he remaining vestiges of colonial domination鈥� and removing the obstacles in the way of international convergence in measures of economic development and living standards.

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Land and the Mortgage: History, Culture, Belonging

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By Daivi Rodima-Taylor and

The mortgaging of land, a risky practice usually treated as just an economic and legal contract, hasneeded a broader set of perspectives for a fuller, more humanist understanding. Most of the existing scholarly literature on land and mortgages has been written by economists and legal specialists, reflecting the perspectives of their disciplinary traditions. Lacking are assessments from a wider range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, drawing upon historical experiences, cultural meanings, and locally informed perspectives.

Our recent edited volume, drawing on historical and observational research in different parts of the world, is meant to help fill that gap. It examines mortgaging as a social and cultural phenomenon to show its origins, variation, and effects on human lives and communities. Here anthropologists, historians, and economists explore archival, printed, and ethnographic evidence about mortgage. The book shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. Tracing origins of land titling, pledging, and the mortgage in over millennia and incorporating findings from authors鈥� original field research, the book explores effects of government, bank, and aid agency attempts and impositions meant to encourage mortgage lending and borrowing.  It shows how these mix in practice, in different languages, currencies, and contexts, with locally rooted understandings, and how all parties have sought, and too often failed, to make adjustments. The outcomes of mortgage in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America challenge economic development orthodoxies, calling for a human-centered exploration of this age-old institution.  It must take account, we insist, of emotions, vulnerabilities, and histories of unexpected outcomes, as shown in different societies, cultures, and environmental and political conditions.

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The Malformation of West Africa

Abel B.S. Gaiya1 Comment

In 1927, Ladipo Solanke 鈥� co-founder of the West African Students Union (WASU) 鈥� published a book in which he argued that 鈥淚t took the white race a thousand years to arrive at their present level of advance: it took the Japanese, a Mongol race, 50 years to catch up with the white race, there is no reason why we West Africans, a Negro race, should not catch up with the Aryans and the Mongols in one quarter of a century.鈥� (Solanke, 1927: 58). All that would be needed to achieve this, for Solanke, would be 鈥渁 strong self-determination to take up and money to back up,鈥� as well as active cooperation among West Africans. Sir Henry J. Lightfoot-Boston, in an article titled Fifty Years Hence, prophesied a federation of West African territories by 1976 (Boahen, 1982: 40).

The fulfilment of such grand visions has continued to elude the region for decades. West Africans, and indeed many from outside the region, have not only underestimated the difficulty of development in general and in the region in particular, but have understated how crucial it is to examine the difficulties within a regional framework.

Developmental and Regional Difficulties

In the case of the former, the worldwide development experience since the 1960s and the multitude of crises in West Africa have demonstrated that development and stability are not merely matters of 鈥減olitical will鈥� or 鈥渟trong self-determination鈥�. Particularly for West Africa, there is a reason why the great empires and societies of the interior (the Western Sudan) which had the highest levels of integration with the rest of the world, elite Arabo-literacy rates and the largest empires in the pre-Atlantic period now rank the highest in poverty rates and the lowest in economic production, anglo-literacy rates, and many other measures of human development.

There is a reason why West Africa had the highest incidence of military coups in Africa following political independence (McGowan, 2003: 355); why the region is a major center of diffusive terrorism on the continent; and why it is experiencing a current climate of violence between farmers and pastoralists that is 鈥渦nprecedented in modern times鈥� (Brottem, 2021: 2). There is a reason why West Africa, along with Central Africa, has the highest transport costs and lowest transport quality in a continent which has the highest transport costs in the world (Teravaninthorn and Raballand, 2009: 17).

There is a reason why, according to the latest attempt to quantify political settlements of developing countries (Schulz and Kelsall, 2020), West Africa ranks the lowest in Africa in terms of virtually all the variables identified by Whitfield et al. (2015) as critical for industrial policy success. Yet presidential elections and development discourse within nations in West Africa continue to be dominated by simplistic narratives of 鈥済ood governance鈥�, 鈥渃orruption鈥� and 鈥減olitical will鈥�.

With regard to understating the importance of adopting a regional lens, this has been the case since the late colonial period when self-government began to be extended to the colonies on a territorial rather than regional basis. The movements for West African cooperation fostered by the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), its eventual rival, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and student organizations such as the West African Students Union (WASU) and the F茅d茅ration des 茅tudiants d’Afrique noire en France (FEANF) (Black African Students Federation in France) went into decline in West Africa as nationalist territorialism spread across the region in response to the expanded opportunities for legislative engagement which followed colonial acquiescence to some degree of self-rule (Boahen, 1982: 15). Efforts at creating regional federations, as pre-eminently envisaged by Kwame Nkrumah, did not succeed, and faded away after the fall of Nkrumah in 1966 (Serra, 2014: 21-22). Since then, 鈥淎lthough rhetorical support for integration exists, there is no dominant personality to articulate a vision and turn it into a crusade the way Nkrumah once did.鈥� (Lavergne and Daddieh, 1997: 105). There is also an absence of an 鈥渋ntegration culture鈥� in the region, among governments, business communities and ordinary people (Bundu, 1997: 38).

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