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The Economic History of Africa: Renaissance or False Dawn?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2018

Denis Cogneau
Denis Cogneau*
Affiliation:
École d’économie de Paris, Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)
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Abstract

Though it is currently benefiting from a renewal of interest, the economic history of Africa raises intense methodological controversies that are echoed in two books recently published by Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers and Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong. A large proportion of these controversies relate more generally to the differences between economists and historians, at least in terms of their dominant practices. In its quest for the institutional “fundamentals” of economic development, much research in this field is content to work with a summary and imperfect base of data, an approach that Jerven is right to criticize. Analyses often suffer from an insufficient knowledge of social contexts, and compress historical time between a “before” and a “now.” They also rely on debatable statistical assumptions. Nevertheless, though extant archives present limitations that are both qualitative (the sources are predominantly colonial) and quantitative, a modest renaissance remains a possibility and would offer more space for better controlled comparative analyses.

Type
The Economics of Contemporary Africa
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 539 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © Éditions EHESS 2018 

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Footnotes

This article was translated from the French by Cecilia Falgas-Ravry and edited by Chloe Morgan and Nicolas Barreyre.

References

1. Jerven, Morten, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Jerven, Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong (London: Zed Books, 2015).

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3. Jerven, Poor Numbers, 109.

4. Austin is a historian and economist specializing in Africa, and was Jerven's supervisor during his PhD thesis. See Austin, Gareth, “The ‘Reversal of Fortune’ Thesis and the Compression of History: Perspectives from African and Comparative Economic History,” Journal of International Development 20, no. 8 (2008): 996 – 1027CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Jerven borrows this expression from Branko Milanović’s remarks on Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's critique of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, http://glineq.blogspot.fr/2014/08/my-take-on-acemoglu-robinson-critique.html.

6. For instance, the article by Daron Acemoglu, Tristan Reed, and James A. Robinson entitled “Chiefs: Elite Control of Civil Society and Economic Development in Sierra Leone” (NBER Working Paper, no. 18691, 2013), which considers the institution of “paramount chiefs” in Sierra Leone (put in place under British rule), is not directly affected by Jerven's criticism, which targets other work by Acemoglu and Robinson.

7. These journals represent the linguistic universe of Jerven's references. As he himself recognizes, his analyses contain relatively few discussions of French-speaking African countries.

8. Collier, Paul, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done about It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Acemoglu, Daron and Robinson, James A., Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (London: Profile Books, 2012)Google Scholar. By choosing to address a nonspecialist audience, Jerven is clearly trying to counter this type of work; the book by Collier, an Oxford professor and former research director at the World Bank, is explicitly mentioned in the last paragraph of the conclusion of Africa: “The bottom line is that there is no bottom billion” (Jerven, Africa, 132).

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15. As Jerven reminds us in Africa, p. 1, recalling the front pages that the Economist devoted to Africa between 2000 and 2011.

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18. See http://www.aehnetwork.org.

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20. His generalization based on the case of Ghana (where GDP was revised by 60 percent following a change of standard measurement) could also be considered too hasty. See Tédou, Joseph, “Tribune,” Statéco 108 (2014): 99 – 101Google Scholar, for a discussion of the Cameroonian case.

21. See, for example, Deaton, Angus and Heston, Alan, “Understanding PPPs and PPP-based National Accounts,” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2, no. 4 (2010): 1 – 35Google Scholar.

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23. Deaton, Angus, The Analysis of Household Surveys: A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. In his commentary on Poor Numbers in Politique africaine 133 (2014): 177 – 81, Nicolas van de Walle reminds us that demand for African statistics rarely comes from African societies themselves, but rather from foreign funding bodies, albeit in a necessarily limited way. Mesplé-Somps makes a similar point in “L'Afrique et ses statistiques.”

25. See, for example, Sandefur, Justin and Glassman, Amanda, “The Political Economy of Bad Data: Evidence from African Survey and Administrative Statistics,” Journal of Development Studies 51, no. 2 (2015): 116 – 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which notably discusses the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's funding of the diphtheria, tetanus, and polio (DTP) vaccination.

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28. A state of affairs that prompted me to set up, with others, a data-collection program focused on public finances, socioeconomic data, and military conscription archives, the results of which are currently being analyzed.

29. A good example of this is the controversy surrounding “data” about the 1942 – 1943 Bengal famine. Several authors have pointed out flaws in Amartya Sen's conclusion that there was no deficit in agricultural production during this period, arguing that some British officers preferred to emphasize problems with distribution and speculation rather than a bad harvest that would have justified direct food relief efforts. See Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Tauger, Mark B., “The Indian Famine Crises of World War II,” British Scholar 1, no. 2 (2009): 166 – 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gráda, Cormac Ó., Famine: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

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31. Jerven, Poor Numbers, 78 – 79.

32. See above, note 24.

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35. The divide between economic history and analytical economy dates back to even older controversies like the “battle of methods” (Methodenstreit) that opposed Carl Menger and Gustav von Schmoller in 1883. Joseph A. Schumpeter gives a partisan account of this debate in his History of Economic Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 814.

36. This affects even the measuring operations that seem the most mechanical, as Stephen Jay Gould shows in The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. Norton and Company, 2006).

37. Easterly, William and Levine, Ross, “Africa's Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112, no. 4 (1997): 1203 – 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is interesting to note that according to the Atlas Narodov Mira, France also exhibits a certain degree of ethno-linguistic fragmentation due to its Basque and Breton minorities.

38. On the historical construction of ethnicity as an important political factor, see Amselle, Jean-Loup and M'Bokolo, Elikia, eds., Au cœur de l'ethnie. Ethnies, tribalisme et État en Afrique (Paris: La Découverte, 1985)Google Scholar; and Posner, Daniel N., Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the topic of inequality, see Cogneau, Denis, L'Afrique des inégalités. Où conduit l'histoire (Paris: Éd. Rue d'Ulm, 2007)Google Scholar.

39. Discussed in Austin, Gareth, “Resources, Techniques, and Strategies South of the Sahara: Revising the Factor Endowments Perspective on African Economic Development, 1500 – 2000,” Economic History Review 61, no. 3 (2008): 587 – 624CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These factor endowments are of course not fixed, and demographic growth puts both institutions and existing regulation mechanisms under pressure, especially when it entails a spike in underemployment and unemployment. On the transition from a world of scarce work, where social dependency was an essential component of political communities and interpersonal relationships, to a world of precarious work, see Ferguson, James, “Declarations of Dependence: Labour, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 2 (2013): 223 – 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Cogneau and Dupraz, “Institutions historiques et développement économique en Afrique.”

41. For a comparative analysis by a political scientist, see Boone, Catherine, Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chap. 4, “Taxing Rich Peasants: Regime Ideology as Strategy.” Differing attitudes to the central state are explored in MacLean, Lauren M., Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa: Risk and Reciprocity in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, an anthropological investigation conducted at the border between the two countries.

42. Cogneau, Denis and Moradi, Alexander, “Borders that Divide: Education and Religion in Ghana and Togo since Colonial Times,” Journal of Economic History 74, no. 3 (2014): 694 – 728CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cogneau, Denis, Mesplé-Somps, Sandrine, and Spielvogel, Gilles, “Development at the Border: Policies and National Integration in Côte d'Ivoire and Its Neighbors,” World Bank Economic Review 29, no. 1 (2015): 41 – 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cogneau, Denis and Rouanet, Léa, “Living Conditions in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, 1925 – 1985: What Do Survey Data on Height Stature Tell Us?” Economic History of Developing Regions 26, no. 2 (2011): 55 – 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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45. Jerven refers to estimates by Robert Szereszewski, Structural Changes in the Economy of Ghana, 1891 – 1911 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965). He also relies on Gareth Austin's findings in Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807 – 1956 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), and on the estimates of the purchasing power of different salaries found in Frankema, Ewout and van Waijenburg, Marlous, “Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880 – 1965,” Journal of Economic History 72, no. 4 (2012): 895 – 926CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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50. Bongaarts, John and Casterline, John, “Fertility Transition: Is Sub-Saharan Africa Different?” Population and Development Review 38, no. 1 (2013): 153 – 68CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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55. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.

56. See for example Bates, Robert E., Coatsworth, John H., and Williamson, Jeffrey, “Lost Decades: Postindependence Performance in Latin America and Africa,” Journal of Economic History 67, no. 4 (2007): 917 – 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. Using these country names does not, of course, mean ignoring the fact that these states and their borders are recent constructs. The literature on these borders has highlighted the differentiation processes they entailed and the constraints they imposed, but also the new political and commercial opportunities they opened up for certain actors. See Asiwaju, Anthony Ijaola, Western Yorubaland under European Rule, 1889 – 1945 (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Miles, William F. S., Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria and Niger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Nugent, Paul, Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier: The Life of the Borderlands since 1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. See also Cogneau, Mesplé-Somps, and Spielvogel, “Development at the Border.”