Preliminary Programme

Wed 24 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Thu 25 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Fri 26 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Sat 27 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.00

All days
Go back

Friday 26 March 2021 16.00 - 17.15
N-12 ECO24 Structural Change in African Economies since 1830: an Occupations Perspective
N
Networks: Africa , Economic History Chair: Jutta Bolt
Organizer: Gareth Austin Discussant: Ellen Hillbom
Adewumi Damilola Adebayo : Continuity and Change in the Occupational Structures of Southern Nigeria, 1891 - 2006
A research focussed on the quantitative history of occupational structures in colonial and post-colonial Southern Nigeria does not exist. Southern Nigeria, as defined by the colonial government, is a heterogeneous region of 13.6 million people (as reported in the 1952/53 census—far more populous than Ghana which had 4.1 million people ... (Show more)
A research focussed on the quantitative history of occupational structures in colonial and post-colonial Southern Nigeria does not exist. Southern Nigeria, as defined by the colonial government, is a heterogeneous region of 13.6 million people (as reported in the 1952/53 census—far more populous than Ghana which had 4.1 million people in 1948), constituted into major (the Yoruba, Igbo, Benin) and minor (the Niger Delta chiefdoms) ethnic groups. Its landmass of 79,880 square miles makes it as big as Great Britain, its coloniser. An understanding of continuities and changes in the occupational structures of Southern Nigeria from the last decade of the nineteenth century enables us to interpret in new ways the legacies of “legitimate commerce,” colonialism and the post-colonialism.
The region is an important site of inquiry given its significance as Nigeria’s link to the Atlantic world in the periods of transatlantic slavery and legitimate commerce (the premise for the emergence of wage-labour) during the precolonial era. The influence of (semi-)skilled ex-slaves and descendants of ex-slaves, coupled with the impact of Christian mission works in the field of Western education, contributed to the rise of formal employment during the colonial era. The first workers’ strike was recorded in 1897. It was the site of a “cash-crop revolution” in the 1890s, and its economy was already market-oriented by the 1940s. The bulk of government revenues in Southern Nigeria during the colonial period were derived from customs receipts. Petroleum, post-colonial Nigeria’s biggest revenue earner, was discovered in commercial quantity in Southern Nigeria in 1956. Seasonal and regular rural-urban migration has been a characteristic of Southern Nigerian urban centres since the beginning of the twentieth century.
The period covered in this paper, 1891-2006, is as far as reasonably reliable data on the entire region allows. Data includes census reports of 1866, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, which covered only Lagos. The first census to cover Southern Nigeria, taking account of 11 main ports and providing estimates for the hinterland, was in 1911. Subsequent reports are from the 1921, 1931, 1952/53, 1962/63, 1973, 1991, 2006 censuses. Data is supplemented with information from Urban Consumer Surveys (of 1955 and 1975). The paper is structured around tables on the primary, extractive, secondary and tertiary sectors, and on urbanisation, wage labour, and manufacturing. The research explores the challenges posed by child labour and the historical practice of pawnship which did not end until the late 1950s (although it was officially earlier), as well as a large informal economy especially in the post-colonial period not captured in official reports. (Show less)

Gareth Austin : The Comparative History of Occupational Structure and Urbanization across Africa: Design, Data and Findings
Authors: Gareth Austin and Leigh Shaw-Taylor, presented by the former.
The structure of African economies is generally considered to have changed little since the early colonial period, remaining focussed on primary-product exports and ‘subsistence’ food production. This paper offers a preliminary overview from the ‘AFCHOS’ project on The Comparative History of ... (Show more)
Authors: Gareth Austin and Leigh Shaw-Taylor, presented by the former.
The structure of African economies is generally considered to have changed little since the early colonial period, remaining focussed on primary-product exports and ‘subsistence’ food production. This paper offers a preliminary overview from the ‘AFCHOS’ project on The Comparative History of Occupational Structure and Urbanization Across Sub-Saharan Africa since 1830. The paper has three sections.
Section I describes how, in constructing country datasets, we have sought commensurability both across African and with the datasets developed by parallel projects on the occupational structures of Eurasia and the Americas. In order to do this without distorting the specificities of African conditions, we treat extractive industries as a separate sector, rather than counting it as a component of either the primary or secondary sector. This responds to the fact that extractive industries in Africa often have often had much less in common with other sectors than has been true of, for example, the coal mining industry in western European economies.
Section II discusses the key concepts used in the analysis of economic development in Africa. Particularly pertinent issues have been framed by one or other version of the distinction between ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ economic growth; Boserupian growth versus Gertzian ‘involution’; and the evolution of the ‘informal’ economy.
Section III outlines findings from the comparative dimension of the project, drawing on the draft chapters written for each of the countries involved. The Sierra Leone and South Africa censuses from 1831 and 1911 respectively, reflect the impact of probably the two largest structural changes of the nineteenth century: the transition from the Atlantic slave trade to ‘legitimate commerce’, in West (and eventually West-Central) Africa, and the mineral revolution that transformed the importance of South Africa within the world economy, from the 1860s-80s onwards.
Most of our data relate to the era since the 1918 Influenza pandemic. During this century, the population of Sub-Saharan Africa has increased perhaps six times. Remarkably, this very rapid demographic expansion has been accompanied by a) overall, not a fall but a modest rise in average living standards; b) as we show, a major shift in employment out of the primary sector, accompanied by rapid urbanization, especially after 1960. Despite ‘revolutionary’ development of export agriculture in tropical Africa, the proportion of the population engaged in feeding the rapidly expanding, increasingly urban, population has declined sharply, despite only moderate growth of food imports. This achievement, in terms of productivity and food security, has not received due recognition. Unsurprisingly, the shift from agriculture has been most pronounced in those African countries which were, or have now become, the wealthier ones, such as South Africa and Ghana; and least in the poorer countries, such as Malawi.
The main expansion in non-agricultural employment has been in services rather than manufacturing. But this does not necessarily imply ‘growth without development’. The dramatic growth in transport and distributive trades suggests increasing integration of national and regional markets. Africa has not industrialized, but its economic structure has continued to evolve. (Show less)

Erik Green, Rory Pilossof : Changes in the Occupational Structures in Malawi, c. 1930-2010: a Story of Structural Continuity?
Authors: Erik Green, Rory Pilossof and (in absentia) Wapulumuka Mulwafu
Malawi – a landlocked country in southern Africa and with an estimated GNI per capita of US$320 - qualifies as one of the poorest countries in the world. An important question occupying historians and to some extent economists is to ... (Show more)
Authors: Erik Green, Rory Pilossof and (in absentia) Wapulumuka Mulwafu
Malawi – a landlocked country in southern Africa and with an estimated GNI per capita of US$320 - qualifies as one of the poorest countries in the world. An important question occupying historians and to some extent economists is to what extent the country has remain among the poorest in the region throughout the twentieth century. In his famous paper ‘The Making of an Imperial Slum’ (1975) Vail argue that colonial Malawi lacked internal forces of development and that its colonial history was characterized by structural continuities. With that he meant that colonial economy of Malawi was characterized by poor-performing agriculture and a very small service and manufacturing sector. Its’ chief role in the region was to supply migrant labour to neighboring commercial centers, like the mines in South Africa and settler agriculture in Zimbabwe. Historians writing in the 1990s challenged this view, pointing especially of the importance of African production of cash crops, while neglecting manufacturing and service sectors. We still lack a systematic analysis of sectoral changes of Malawi’s colonial and post-colonial economy. This paper contributes to the debate on long-term economic development in Malawi by analyzing shifts in the occupational structure using the (PEST) sectoral framework. Our preliminary results show periods of growth in both the tertiary and secondary sectors, but overall lend support to Vail’s claim of structural continuities. (Show less)

Emiliano Travieso, Tom Westland : What Happened to the Workshop of West Africa? Trade, Taxes, and Textiles in Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1930s
The Sokoto Caliphate, occupying most of present-day northern Nigeria, was the core economy of the Central Sudan in the nineteenth century, and its walled cities, especially Kano, the largest commercial and manufacturing centre of pre-colonial West Africa. Its peasant farms and slave plantations, the latter of a scale comparable to ... (Show more)
The Sokoto Caliphate, occupying most of present-day northern Nigeria, was the core economy of the Central Sudan in the nineteenth century, and its walled cities, especially Kano, the largest commercial and manufacturing centre of pre-colonial West Africa. Its peasant farms and slave plantations, the latter of a scale comparable to Brazil's or the American South’s, produced grains, cotton, and indigo for a large domestic market. Their cotton textile handicraft industry achieved substantial scale economies in spinning, weaving, and dyeing, its signature blue-black cloth traded widely south of the Sahara as well as across it to North Africa. How did such a textile industry develop in labour-scarce West Africa? And why did it come to an end? In this paper, we use a newly digitised set of colonial sources to quantitatively measure the timing and extent of deindustrialization in Northern Nigeria as well as its effects on welfare, against the background of the Caliphate's economy in the late-nineteenth century. We rely on qualitative sources to discuss the (often elusive) motives behind policy changes in the period.
We argue that the development of northern Nigeria's unusually diversified pre-colonial economy resulted from a combination of structurally high transport costs (typical of a pre-industrial economy environmentally trapped between the Sahel and the forest belt) and a fiscal system that effectively subsidised textile production in the ‘core’ of the manufacturing economy while managing to keep urban grain prices low. Under British ‘indirect rule’ both things changed at once in 1911-12: the opening of the railway to Kano dramatically reduced transport costs to the Atlantic coast and a comprehensive tax reform eliminated the fiscal preference for the ‘textile belt' and led to rising food prices, affecting the real wages of spinners, weavers, and dyers. As a result, the northern Nigerian economy saw its natural comparative advantage on land-extensive agriculture strengthened, and relative, gradual deindustrialization took place over the two decades that followed.
By the 1930s, the former factory of West Africa had become a highly specialised agricultural exporter of groundnuts and cotton. But this was not, we argue, the result of a deliberate deindustrialising policy on the part of the British, but a consequence of northern Nigerians responding rationally and swiftly to the challenges and opportunities brought about by market forces both global and local: the effective opening up to international trade and the expansion of a domestic market in free labour resulting from the slow but momentous process of emancipation underway. The British administration’s motive for its part in these changes seems to have been largely fiscal economy, but its unintended consequences were a strengthening of the imperial division of labour. (Show less)



Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer