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Thursday 13 April 2023 11.00 - 13.00
V-6 ECO10 Transitions in African Trade and Health
Västra Hamngatan 25 AK2 134
Networks: Africa , Economic History Chair: Felix Meier zu Selhausen
Organizers: Felix Meier zu Selhausen, Federico Tadei Discussant: Gareth Austin
Jutta Bolt, Jeanne Cilliers : The Health of Nations: Long-run Patterns of Disease in Africa
The ongoing pandemic has forcefully brought the importance of societal health into the public consciousness. With a renewed appreciation for the value of good health, many politicians and policymakers are eager to draw lessons from battles with pandemics in the past. The medical history of Africa stands out as a ... (Show more)
The ongoing pandemic has forcefully brought the importance of societal health into the public consciousness. With a renewed appreciation for the value of good health, many politicians and policymakers are eager to draw lessons from battles with pandemics in the past. The medical history of Africa stands out as a valuable untapped source of insight: African disease environments have exacted a significant toll on human life and energy throughout history and attempts to control endemic and epidemic occurrences have punctuated much of the twentieth century (Webb, 2013). Yet, the advancement of the field of medical research on the nature and spread of tropical and infectious diseases owes much to the African experience (Tilly, 2011). Key advances in infectious disease control – ring vaccination for smallpox; vector control and mass drug administration for malaria and other vector-borne diseases; preventative interventions in the spread of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis; and, recently, the development of a vaccine against Ebola are just a few examples of the knowledge spillovers of which have benefitted Africa and beyond (Rosenthal et al, 2020). While this topic has been well-studied for recent decades (WHO, 2016) the combination of infectious-disease, breakthroughs in modern medicine, and large-scale government-led public-health interventions was nowhere as concentrated as in Africa during the early twentieth century. Yet we know very little of how diseases spread, and how colonial governments responded to outbreaks during this period.
Using largely unexplored primary sources for former British colonies in Africa, this paper will map and explain the spatial distribution of disease and disease-specific health interventions during the first half of the 20th century, when large-scale basic health infrastructures and disease-focused interventions were established on the continent. Our objectives are twofold: first to deliver a comprehensive spatially defined dataset of disease for 11 former British African colonies from 1900-1960. Second, we aim to understand how and where colonial government interventions succeeded in curtailing epidemic episodes in the past, by providing the necessary social contextualization currently absent from this branch of historical epidemiology. (Show less)

Ewout Frankema, Felix Meier zu Selhausen : Africa’s Mineral Revolution in a Long-Term Trade Perspective
Trade is an important source of revenue for African governments due their limited fiscal capacity. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries most African export economies depended on tropical agriculture with the exception of South Africa, Zambia and Belgian Congo (Frankema, Williamson & Woltjer 2018). Over the course of ... (Show more)
Trade is an important source of revenue for African governments due their limited fiscal capacity. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries most African export economies depended on tropical agriculture with the exception of South Africa, Zambia and Belgian Congo (Frankema, Williamson & Woltjer 2018). Over the course of the 20th century, the majority of African countries experienced a mineral revolution, i.e. transitioned to become net mineral exporters. However, diversification of exports away from primary commodities towards manufacturing has not yet taken place. The rising share of mineral exports in African trade has given rise to a significant economic debate on the adverse effects of the resource curse (Auty 2001; Sachs & Warner 2001, 2005; Venables 2016; Mamo, Bhattacharyya & Moradi 2019), of economic growth and export diversification being lower in mineral-rich developing countries than in those without natural resources.
Creating a novel annual export and import database (African Commodity Trade Database - ACTD), at commodity level, of each African country for nearly two centuries (c. 1850 to the present), we trace the historical development of Africa’s merchandise export composition. Our long-term perspective allows us for the first time to explore: (i) the evolution and (ii) the possible implications of Africa’s mineral revolution in a comparative perspective. We first aim to establish the timing of the take-over of tropical agricultural exports, which dominated the 19th century after the demise of the slave trades, by mineral exports during the 20th century. Second, we assess whether the resource curse theory holds in a long-run African trade framework. Observing trade patterns and economic development prior and after the discovery we explore possible implications of Africa’s mineral revolution in terms of (a) government revenue, (b) public investment into education and health as well as associated outcomes, and (c) crowding-out other export commodities, leading to less diversified export packages. (Show less)

Federico Tadei, Michiel de Haas : Crops, Prices or Policies? Why Commodity Exports in British and French West Africa Diverged after the 1880s
Michiel de Haas, Wageningen University
Ewout Frankema, Wageningen University
Felix Meier zu Selhausen, Wageningen University
Federico Tadei, University of Barcelona

African terms of trade (export/import prices) peaked around the time of the colonial scramble in the 1880s before starting a precipitous decline that lasted until the mid-20th century (Frankema, Williamson ... (Show more)
Michiel de Haas, Wageningen University
Ewout Frankema, Wageningen University
Felix Meier zu Selhausen, Wageningen University
Federico Tadei, University of Barcelona

African terms of trade (export/import prices) peaked around the time of the colonial scramble in the 1880s before starting a precipitous decline that lasted until the mid-20th century (Frankema, Williamson and Woltjer 2018). The declining terms of trade had a major impact on African economies, which were highly reliant on export agriculture. Still, the effect seems to have been different in British and French colonies. Preliminary evidence suggests that the decline in terms of trade was more severe in French West Africa than in British Africa. Moreover, in British Africa, the declining terms of trade were compensated with faster increases in the volume of exports compared to French Africa.
In this paper, we investigate the timing and drivers of this decline and explore the reasons for diverging trajectories between French and British Africa. We evaluate three hypotheses. First, we explore commodity-specific explanations for a decline in the numerator (export prices), such as competition with Asia for rubber and palm oil, rapid production increases of cocoa in the market-leading economies of Ghana and Nigeria, and competition from non-tropical producers of cotton and groundnuts. Second, we consider how export prices were affected by trade policies related to dynamics both in the metropoles (industrial demand) and the colonies (colonial taxation, market power of trading companies, reaction of African producers). Third, we look at the ‘denominator’ (import prices) to see how changes in the composition and origin of imports influenced the differential trend in terms of trades. (Show less)

Bram van Besouw, Michiel de Haas : Export Expansion and Colonial Coercion in British Africa during the Great Depression
Africa saw major agricultural export growth in half century before 1930, driven by local producers who benefited from infrastructural expansion and proved highly responsive to market incentives. Tony Hopkins (1973/2019) has referred to this as Africa’s “open economy”. During the Great Depression, export prices collapsed. Nevertheless, volumes increased sharply. At ... (Show more)
Africa saw major agricultural export growth in half century before 1930, driven by local producers who benefited from infrastructural expansion and proved highly responsive to market incentives. Tony Hopkins (1973/2019) has referred to this as Africa’s “open economy”. During the Great Depression, export prices collapsed. Nevertheless, volumes increased sharply. At the same time, colonial states become more interventionist in agricultural production and markets.
We argue that these two developments – the price-volume paradox and increased colonial intervention – are related. Colonial revenues were highly dependent on commodity trade, through direct (poll) and indirect (trade) taxes. The Great Depression threatened these revenues, as prices declined and worsening terms of trade disincentivized African farmers to produce for global markets. With a poor understanding of African environments and facing austerity, colonial states were unable to effectuate major productivity gains in African agriculture. Instead, they resorted to direct taxes and other types of pressure (including direct coercion) to expand output.
We explore both qualitative and quantitative research strategies to investigate this nexus of declining prices, expanding production and coercive colonial intervention in eight British African colonies (1920-39). We analyse annual colonial reports and find that a wide range of policy measures were instituted to control agricultural production and markets during the Depression. Such measures included the foundation of state-led cooperatives, promulgation of numerous ‘byelaws’, ‘plant-more- crop’ campaigns, poll tax hikes, restrictions on mobility and urbanization, and control of the local press. We then measure imprisonment at the district level (264 districts, 4743 observations). Our initial findings suggest that imprisonment rates were counter-cyclical: when African barter terms of trade declined, imprisonment increased.
Our paper makes three broader contributions to the literature. First, we document that the drivers of export expansion in colonial Africa were changing over time, as Africa shifted from an economy that was mostly open to one that was heavily state-regulated. We show that the 1930s were a critical juncture in that development. Second, we show that colonial institutions were not static and uniform, but that they interacted with and transformed as a result of changing economic conditions. Third, we demonstrate that the Great Depression instigated major institutions changes, not just in the ‘core’ economies of Europe and the United States, were such changes have been extensive documented, but also in the peripheral commodity-exporting economies of British colonial Africa. (Show less)



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