Improving knowledge about African historical demography is essential to addressing current population trends and achieving deeper understanding of social, economic, and political change in the past and present. I use census and parish register data from Tanganyika to address the origins of twentieth-century population growth, to describe how major changes in fertility and child mortality began in the 1940s, and to emphasise the significance of the large rise in fertility between the 1940s and 1970s. Through this work and my wider survey of parish registers in Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia, I consider the relationships between power, evidence, and meaning in these data sources. Alongside the macro gaps in Africa's population history are significant microsilences — lacunae in the sources and data which reflect the hegemonic structures within which they were produced. I suggest a moral demography approach to their analysis, borrowing from the reflexive and dialectic method found in studies of moral economy.

This article focuses on formerly enslaved children at the turn of the twentieth century, exploring their contributions to discourses about childhood, labor, and stigma in Senegal's colonial towns. Drawing on records for over 1,600 so-called ‘liberated minors’, children who entered state guardianship after official recognition of their liberation from slavery, and on a variety of other sources, the article investigates both broad trends and individual experiences of work, mistreatment, conflict, and — sometimes — defiance. I argue that while many liberated minors seemed to accept their circumstances, others complained, disobeyed, or ran away, thereby challenging lingering stigmas and highlighting ways the state fell short of the anti-slavery and humane ideals touted by some officials. Attentive, insofar as records allow, to the actions and perspectives of liberated minors, the article contributes to the growing literature on the history of children and youth in Africa and to scholarship on post-emancipation societies.

The historical and social science literature is divided about the importance of metropolitan blueprints of colonial rule for the development of colonial states. We exploit historical records of colonial state finances to explore the importance of metropolitan identity on the comparative development of fiscal institutions in British and French Africa. Taxes constituted the financial backbone of the colonial state and were vital to the state building efforts of colonial governments. A quantitative comparative perspective shows that pragmatic responses to varying local conditions can easily be mistaken for specific metropolitan blueprints of colonial governance and that under comparable local circumstances the French and British operated in remarkably similar ways.

This article uses the extensive documentation of Africans liberated from slave vessels to explore issues of identity and freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It tracks the size, origin, and movement of the Liberated African diaspora, offers a preliminary analysis of the ‘disposal’ of African recaptives in societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and assesses the opportunities Liberated Africans had in shaping their post-disembarkation experiences. While nearly all Liberated Africans were pulled at least partly into the Atlantic wage economy, the article concludes that recaptive communities in Freetown and its hinterland most closely met the aspirations of the Liberated Africans themselves while the fate of recaptives settled in the Americas paralleled those who were enslaved.