The Slave Trade's Impact on Africa's Economic Development

[Guy Berger]

If you go to www.nber.org you can download a copy of an earlier draft of this paper. Looks very intriguing though from reading only the abstract I am inclined to believe that there is no causal link and that the correlation is driven by other factors.

February 15, 2008, 6:30 pm

The Slave Trade's Impact on Africa

Volumes have been written about the cruelty of slavery, the economic impact of slavery on the U.S. economy and the lasting effects of slavery on African Americans. Now comes Harvard University economist Nathan Nunn with this argument: "The African countries that are the poorest today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken."

Writing in the current issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Nunn describes what he says is "the first empirical examination of the Africa's slave trades in shaping subsequent economic development." He painstakingly constructs – from shipping records and other all sorts of other documents — measures of the number of slaves exported from each African country between 1400 and 1900. From 54 different samples of the transatlantic slave trade, he tracks 80,656 slaves from 229 distinct ethnic identities. He also has data on 21,048 slaves shipped across the Indian Ocean, 5,385 slaves who were moved across the Saharan trade and 67 slaves (with 32 different ethnicities) who crossed the Red Sea.

Nunn cautions that the data doesn't prove that the slave trade caused today's economic disappointments in Africa; it could be that slaves were drawn from the most unfortunate countries in the first place. But he argues that, in fact, the evidence shows that slaves tended to come from the most developed – not the least developed – parts of Africa. "The data are consistent with historic accounts suggesting that the slave traders impeded the formation of broader ethnic groups, leading to ethnic fractionalization, and that the salve trades resulted in a weakening and underdevelopment of political structures," Nunn concludes. – David Wessel

Edited February 19, 2008 by Guy

[connoisseur series500]

I've read something similar somewhere, perhaps it was "Africa: History of a Continent," by Reader. I can't remember if that was the correct source. I think the thesis was that the loss of manpower and subsequent fragmentation and perversion of social relations led to a prolonged backwards mentality. African "nations" were slow to embace concepts of nation-states, and tribalism persisted. The latter comment doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the effects of slavery; but it is a particular phenomenon of many African areas.

[Jazzmoose]

This certainly cannot be thought of in any way as a new idea.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I can't see this article, Guy. Is it likely to be its only publication anywhere?

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

African "nations" were slow to embace concepts of nation-states, and tribalism persisted.

For a detailed exposition of this issue, see "Black man's burden: Africa and the curse of the nation state" by Basil Davidson.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I'm sure the slave trade did have an effect, but maybe not in the way one would expect.

What was happening in some places in the latter half of the 19th century, before the "Scramble for Africa", was the development of a middle class of commercial traders (ie non-monopolistic). This hasn't been studied enough, I think, but it was certainly happening in Asante, Buganda and Kongo, and probably elsewhere. These traders were, without exception, expropriated by the European colonists, because they were competing with the European firms which were the ones supposed to benefit from the operation.

It's possible to conceive that, had larger domestic markets existed, this bourgeoisie could have formed earlier and could have been more powerful. Maybe a more powerful bourgeoisie in Africa would have made colonisation a less tempting idea? (And of course, it's the bourgeoisie that could have made the nation-states of Africa run, as happened in Europe and America.)

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Further thoughts.

From what I know of their societies and the structure and history of their states, it seems likely that the Soninke, Mandinke, Hausa, Sosso/Susu and Songhai were developing indigenous middle classes before the scramble for Africa. And it seems certain that the Wolof were; the Jolof Empire, a voluntary union, broke up into its constituent six Wolof kingdoms as a result of the coastal kingdoms seeing more advantage in trading with the French; a view that would almost certainly have originated within trading interests.

Following the slave trade's abolition, European traders turned to other goods, which is mainly what caused such middle class development as arose in Africa (though not in the areas in which trans-Saharan trade hd been important since the beginning of the ninth century). This Atlantic trade would have started earlier, in the absence of the slave trade.

Of course, had there been no slave trade, the funds that really made the Industrial Revolution take off through railway development, might well have been insufficient for that task. With a slower Industrial Revolution, a faster development of an indigenous middle class of traders, and the absence of the Maxim and Gatling guns, Africa would probably not have been colonised. But with a slower Industrial Revolution, the entire history of the world would be different.

MG

[mikeweil]

Guayanaian historian Walter Rodney published a book with the same basic thesis in 1972!!!

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Edited February 20, 2008 by mikeweil

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

One of the big problems with this sort of thing is that they tend to treat Africa as if it were homogenous. And of course it isn't; it's probably the least homogenous of the continents. So different mixtures of peoples, different cultures, different climates and different environments (and different rates of climate change) will all lead to different development paths (or the lack of them). To establish a theory like this soundly, it would be necessary to control for all of those variables and most people can't - perhaps, indeed, no one could.

Nonetheless, if the basic research - on numbers taken from each locality - is well done, that's good, because it can be used for a number of different purposes.

MG

[Niko]

I can't see this article, Guy. Is it likely to be its only publication anywhere?

MG

on the guy's homepage you can download his papers including this one

http://www.econ.ubc.ca/nnunn/research.htm

[Guy Berger]

This certainly cannot be thought of in any way as a new idea.

Yeah -- the thesis certainly isn't new. But this paper is probably one of the first to tackle this question with analytical rigor.

I have some thoughts on this but probably will not post them until the weekend.

Guy

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I can't see this article, Guy. Is it likely to be its only publication anywhere?

MG

on the guy's homepage you can download his papers including this one

http://www.econ.ubc.ca/nnunn/research.htm

Thanks very much.

MG

[danasgoodstuff]

Seems like the writer of the above referenced article has done their homework which is certainly a good thing...but it also makes sense to me that the bigger impact on today's probs would be the failures and abuses of post-slavery policy here and there. Of course, those failures may just be a measure of how hard it is to undo the effects of a pernicious evil like slavery. Also the abstract quoted above seems to assume that the formation of the nation-state is a good thing/the only way forward/whatever, not sure I'd take that as a given... not that I know jack about this subject really, but it's interesting - history does affect now in so many ways but there are so many ways to read its 'lessons' since there are no do overs to test them against.