Empires of grain : state building and market integration in French West Africa, 1915-1950

Markets for millet and rice in the Western Sudan became much more integrated over the course of the twentieth century. Drawing on a new dataset of prices from across French West African colonies, this paper documents that price dispersion as measured by the coefficient of variation roughly halved from 1915 to 1940. Estimates of route-specific freight prices suggest that much of the decline in price gaps can be attributed to falling transport costs due to the introduction of mechanized transport. A market-supportive legacy of precolonial state-building, and particularly the Islamist states of the Fulani jihads and the Wassulu Empire of Samory Touré is also evident in the price data.