While Ghana is a classic case of economic growth in an agricultural-export colony, scholars have queried whether it was sustained, and how far its benefits were widely distributed, socially and regionally. Using height as a measure of human well-being we explore the evolution of living standards...

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...

In this paper we evaluate the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the world context, colonialism had very heterogeneous effects, operating through many mechanisms, sometimes encouraging development sometimes retarding it. In the African case, however, this...

The role of factor endowments and institutions as drivers of socio-economic change and development is a central theme in economic and agrarian history. The common approach is to identify either factor endowments or institutions as triggers of change. Meanwhile, institutions and factor endowments...

This paper addresses the long-term impact of Sub-Saharan Africa’s indigenous systems of slavery on its political and economic development, based on an analytical survey of the literature and data collected from anthropological records. We develop a theory to account for this based on the...

The partition of German Togoland after WWI provides a natural experiment allowing to test what impact colonial policies really had. Using a data set of recruits to the Ghana colonial army 1908-1955, we find literacy and religious beliefs to diverge at the border between British and French...

The Nieboer–Domar hypothesis has proved to be a powerful tool to identify the economic conditions under which slavery is more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. It states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery was more likely to become a vital...

There has been a recent surge in research on long term African development. For this research agenda to be fruitful and its theories, it is crucial to have consistent estimates of economic change. This paper contributes with a new GDP time series for Ghana, 1891-1954. The series implies a...