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Decolonizing with Data

The Cliometric Turn in African Economic History

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Handbook of Cliometrics

Abstract

Our understanding of Africa’s economic past – the causes and consequences of precolonial polities, the slave trade, state formation, the Scramble for Africa, European settlement, and independence – has improved markedly over the last two decades. Much of this is the result of the cliometric turn in African economic history, what some have called a “renaissance.” While acknowledging that cliometrics is not new to African history, this chapter examines the major recent contributions, noting their methodological advances and dividing them into four broad themes: persistence of deep traits, slavery, colonialism, and independence. We conclude with a brief bibliometric exercise, noting the lack of Africans working at the frontier of African cliometrics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Only slightly below per capita income in South Asia, at $1690.

  2. 2.

    Today, one out of six people on Earth live in Africa. That is likely to increase to one in four in 2050, and to one in three by 2100. See Pison (2017).

  3. 3.

    See Bertocchi (2016) for an extensive review of the slave trade legacies.

  4. 4.

    In a replication study with an updated dataset, Deconinck and Verpoorten (2013) confirm the authors’ results.

  5. 5.

    Hopkins’ empirical concerns would trigger a response from James Fenske, then a young Economics PhD graduate from Yale University. Fenske cited the interest in African economic history that Nunn’s work had generated, noting that these studies are “not distinguished by their broad theories, but by their careful focus on causal inference”(Fenske 2010, p. 177). Both Hopkins and Morten Jerven responded, with another response by Fenske (Hopkins 2011; Jerven 2011; Fenske 2011).

  6. 6.

    Missionaries had already arrived in South Africa during the eighteenth-century, setting up stations like Genandendal aimed at converting indigenous Khoesan people, but the expansion of Christian missionaries in South Africa and throughout the continent would mostly be a late nineteenth-century phenomenon.

  7. 7.

    In parallel to these two databases on research output, Google Scholar has risen to prominence lately. Unlike WoS and SCOPUS, Google Scholar gathers information about any published document – even those published as Working Papers. It therefore has a more extensive list of citations. It follows that the number of citations accounted for in this analysis will be significantly less than what may appear in a Google Scholar search.

  8. 8.

    These are Economic History Review, Journal of Economic History, European Review of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, Cliometrica, Economic History of Developing Regions, South African Journal of Economic History, Australian Economic History Review, African Economic History, Scandinavian Economic History Review, Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, Revista de Historia Economica, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Journal of European Economic History, Revista di Storia Economica, and Research in Economic History.

  9. 9.

    We tried several versions of the algorithm, but because the word “History” is not included in either their title, abstract, or keywords, our algorithm fails to classify the paper as EH. For future work, it might be useful to include historical topics – like the Atlantic slave trade, or colonialism – as part of the training algorithm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LEAP, Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Johan Fourie & Nonso Obikili

  2. Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Johan Fourie

Authors
  1. Johan Fourie
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  2. Nonso Obikili
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Correspondence to Johan Fourie .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. BETA/CNRS (UMR 7522), University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study, Strasbourg Cedex, France

    Claude Diebolt

  2. University of Wisconsin Department of Economics, La Crosse, WI, USA

    Michael Haupert

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Fourie, J., Obikili, N. (2019). Decolonizing with Data. In: Diebolt, C., Haupert, M. (eds) Handbook of Cliometrics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40458-0_69-1

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