type="main" <p>Through a case study of cocoa-farming in Ghana, this article takes up the long-running but recently neglected debate about the ‘cash crop revolution’ in tropical Africa during the early colonial period. It focuses on the supply side, to test the much criticized but never...</p>

Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson have dramatically challenged the tendency of economists to confine their empirical search for the causes of economic growth to the recent past. They argue that the kind of institutions established by European colonialists, either protecting private property or...

1. Introduction / Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara -- 2. Labour-intensive industrialization in global history : an interpretation of East Asian experiences / Kaoru Sugihara -- 3. The industrious revolutions in East and West / Jan de Vries -- 4. Proto-industrialization and labour-intensive...