Preliminary Programme

Scholarship on the impact of the Great Depression on colonial Africa is fragmented and limited, despite its occurrence during a crucial time, in the middle of the era of European colonial rule. By the early 1920s, the European powers had put in place financially self-sustaining colonial territories, geared towards expanding agricultural and mineral exports. Not long after, the Depression reduced the global demand for such exports, affecting the profitability and viability of export farming and mining, and putting pressure on the revenue basis of colonial states. We know little, however, about the extent to which the global economic downturn affected the welfare of ordinary Africans. In this study, we use district-level imprisonment statistics from British colonial Africa to trace the depth and duration of the Great Depression’s impact. Comparing trends of imprisonment rates for ca. 150 districts during the period 1928-38, we provide a uniquely fine-grained inroad into the Depression’s uneven impact on the welfare of broad sections of the African population. We argue that imprisonment spikes are a suitable proxy for increased social distress, as they signify increased levels of property crime, debt and tax default, even though we cannot entirely rule out that increased imprisonment are also related to greater coercion. We hypothesize that the impact of the Depression on social distress was greatest in districts that were urbanized and dependent on expatriates (public sector, mines, plantations, settler farms), as well as areas which relied strongly on labour migration and (inflexible) perennial export crops. Conversely, the impact was less pronounced in places with resilient indigenous economies, and those reliant on (flexible) annual crops. (Show less)

High within-country economic inequality is associated with poor long-term economic performance, especially in developing countries. Over the past few years, economic history research on inequality has been booming and investigations have now started to establish the degree of inequality in colonial Africa and Asia. Most of these studies, however, are concerned with assessing inequality at the national level, thereby missing substantial regional variations within these countries. This paper gauges the degree of inequality in ca. 30 provinces (called residencies) of colonial Indonesia in the 1920s. It employs statistics from colonial income taxes in combination with figures on wages, land distribution and agricultural production in order to estimate income inequality for the different provinces. Using both cross-sectional and panel analyses, the relationship between globalization and the levels and trends in inequality are explored (Show less)

Fiscal modernization is key for long-run economic development. This is the first study to estimate the effect of state capacity expansion on labor coercion as taxation, a practice known as corvée labor. To do so, I construct a new database covering eighteen Indonesian provinces over thirty-two years (1874-1905). I find that local state expansion increased corvée labor use. Increasing state capacity thus need not necessarily induce fiscal modernization. However, national-level policy centralized state finances by replacing corvée with a poll tax. Local officials thus only slowed the movement away from corvée. Opposing interests of different state actors are therefore key in understanding this facet of fiscal modernization. (Show less)