The 2010 earthquake in Haiti has exposed the extreme vulnerability of a society where the state and the economy simultaneously fail to deliver. The Dominican Republic has witnessed several phases of rapid economic growth since the 1870s and, from the 1970s onwards, a sustained process of...

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti has exposed the extreme vulnerability of a people living in a country where the state and the economy simultaneously fail to deliver. Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, has witnessed several phases of strong economic growth since the 1870s and an encouraging...

This is the first study to present a unified quantitative account of African commodity trade in the long 19th century from the zenith of the Atlantic slave trade (1790s) to the eve of World War II (1939). Drawing evidence from a new dataset on export and import prices, volumes, composition and...

The field of African economic history is in resurgence. This paper reviews recent and on-going research contributions and notes strengths in their wide methodological, conceptual and topical variety. In these strengths there is also a challenge: different methodological approaches may also...

This paper aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent wide data set on African population extending into the pre-1950 era. We investigate the reliability and the validity of the current population databases with the aim of working towards a...

Given difficult to access pre-colonial forms of surplus extraction, African colonial governments faced severe constraints to raise revenue for incipient colonial state formation. This paper compares the ways in which the British and the French dealt with this challenge in a quantitative...