The life course of economic history as an autonomousacademic sub-discipline is marked by two key transitions: the Cliometric revolution of the 1960s and a second, more recent, revolution in which persistence studies have caught most of the attention (Cioni et al. 2021). This second revolution...

Recent studies on African economic history have emphasized the structural impediments to African growth, such as adverse geographical conditions and extractive colonial institutions. The evidence is mainly drawn from cross-country regressions on late 20th century income levels, assuming...