E Green
Biographic Data
| ID | 23203 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E Green |
| GIVEN NAMES | E |
| FAMILY NAME | Green |
| SIGNATURE | GREEN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7805-4696 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 111 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1912 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Theoretical foundations of the economics of slavery: Enslaved people as capital investments in the Atlantic world
Despite the prevalence of slavery in world history, our understanding of its persistence remains limited. Most previous studies focus primarily on slavery as a labour contract, indistinguishable from other coercive arrangements such as serfdom. More recent literature on slavery in the United States shows that enslaved people also played an important role as financial instruments. In this article, we extend the investigation by comparing slavery i…
Income Mobility before Industrialization: Evidence from South Africa’s Cape Colony
Attempts to measure social mobility before the twentieth century are frequently hampered by limited data. In this paper, we use a new source – annual, matched tax censuses over more than 70 years – to calculate intragenerational income mobility within a preindustrial, settler society, the Dutch and British Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa. Our unique source allows us to measure income mobility along several dimensions, helping to disenta…
Wages, Gender, and Coercion: Socio-Economic Stratification and Labour Practices among the Khoe in Early Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony
This study investigates the wages and labour contracts of Khoe workers in Graaff Reinet, a district on the Cape Colony's eastern frontier in the early nineteenth century. Using wage registers from 1801 to 1810, we offer the first individual-level analysis of wages for both male and female Khoe workers, examining payment forms, socio-economic stratification, and gendered wage dynamics. The findings highlight a persistently high reliance on in-kind…
Zuun Baruun Kherem, a medieval Eurasian center in Eastern Mongolia
Mongolia contains many urban sites of the medieval Kitan-Liao period (10th-12th centuries CE). The paired site of Zuun Baruun Kherem (ZBK) is a well-preserved example. The ZBK project aimed to examine the form and chronology of construction, the empty areas contained within many walled enclosures of this period, and the administrative use of these centers on the imperial frontier. Fieldwork was carried out primarily using hand augers to systemati…
Wealth and marriage at the Cape: Consanguineous Unions as a Strategy
Marriage is among the most fundamental social relationships undergirding the transmission of cultural norms and family property. How marital partnerships are formed is of considerable interest to a broad range of social scientists, particularly when and whether partners are sought from within the family or from the outside. We study the relatively high levels of cousin marriage characteristic of European settler families in the Cape Colony in the…
Early modern globalization and the extent of indigenous agency: Trade, commodities and ecology
This paper examines the responses of Indigenous nations and European companies to new trading opportunities: the Cree nations with the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and the Khoe nations with the Dutch East India Company [Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC)]. This case study is important because of the disparate outcomes. Within a few decades the Cree standard of living had increased, while Khoe nations had lost cattle and land. Standard histories…
Waar is beter dorp in Zuid Africa dan Stellenbos?’: What the Stellenbosch-Drakenstein Tax Censuses Reveal
In 1825, an unnamed Stellenbosch official paused his tax collection duties to pen a poem in the margins of the opgaafrol. His verses capture the frustrations of colonial administration but the records themselves–annual tax censuses spanning 1685 to 1844–offer a far richer window into the Cape Colony’s social and economic history. First established by the Dutch East India Company and later maintained under Batavian and British rule, the opgaafroll…
Handoffs and Equity: Impact of a Patient Distribution Model on Handoffs for Black Patients
Property Rights and Labour Relations: Explaining the Relative Success of Native Purchase Area Farmers in Southern Rhodesia, 1930-1965
In the 1930s the colonial authorities in Zimbabwe set aside geographical areas where Africans were allowed to purchase land. Despite having private property rights to land, a rare occurrence among Africans in colonial times, the performance of this group of farmers has rarely been investigated. In this article, we show that the average group of ‘native purchase’ farming households performed far better than the average African farmer in the native…
Did it pay to be a pioneer? Wealth accumulation in a newly settled frontier society
European settler colonies are often thought to have been characterised by a continued expansion of the landed frontier, which impacted the distribution of wealth across their settler populations. Hampered by a lack of data, few studies have been able to study this in depth. How does settlement timing affect wealth and wealth accumulation when frontier expansion is not a smooth, continuous process? Was it the case that pioneers reaped greater econ…
Democracy, Development and Industrial Policy in Nigeria: A Historical Contextualisation
The article places Nigeria’s political and economic challenges in historical and global context. As opposed to viewing democracy or development emerging simply as the ‘will of the people’ or ‘political will’, it encourages a historical and structural view of the phenomena. Sustained democratic institutions and intensive economic growth emerge under particular conditions where the continued maintenance of hegemony and gate-keeping extractive state…
Labour Control and the Establishment of Profitable Settler Agriculture in Colonial Kenya, c. 1920–45
CITATION: Fibaek, M. & Green, E. 2019. Labour control and the establishment of profitable settler agriculture in colonial Kenya, c. 1920–45. Economic History of Developing Regions, 34(1):72-110, doi:10.1080/20780389.2019.1581058
The substitutability of slaves: Evidence from the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony
The substitutability of the economic institution of slave labour has often been assumed as a given. Apart from some capital investment to retrain slaves for a different task, essentially their labour could be substituted for any other form of labour. This paper questions that assumption by using a longitudinal study of the Graaff-Reinet district on the eastern frontier of South Africa’s Cape Colony. We calculate the Hicksian elasticity of complem…
Building the Cape of Good Hope Panel
To study the intergenerational dynamics of productivity, social mobility and demographic change of any contemporary society is a challenge. To do this for a pre-industrial society at the southern tip of Africa seems almost impossible. Yet this is the purpose of the Cape of Good Hope Panel, an annual panel data set – still under construction – of Cape Colony settler tax records over almost two centuries. The transcription of this ambitious project…
The Land–Labour Hypothesis in a Settler Economy: Wealth, Labour and Household Composition on the South African Frontier
Traditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for child labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older, more densely populated farming regions. In this paper, we contribute to the debate by analysing the relationship between household composition and land availability in a closing frontier region, i.e. the Graaff-Reinet d…
Traditional Landholding Certificates in Zambia: Preventing or Reinforcing Commodification and Inequality
The formalisation of customary land rights in Africa, as an alternative to their privatisation, is gaining increasing attention from scholars and policy makers. In this article, we use findings from Petauke district in eastern Zambia to discuss the impact of such reforms, where so-called traditional landholding certificates were implemented by the Petauke District Land Alliance in 2010. Based on interviews with farmers, chiefs and the Alliance, w…
Coping with the Double Crisis: Lake Chilwa Recession and the Great Depression on Chisi Island in Colonial Malawi, 1930–1935
From Extensive to Involutionary Growth: A Dialectic Interpretation of the Boom and Busts of Cocoa Production in the Gold Coast
African economic history has undergone impressive revitalization in the past decade. Much of the recent work is, quite naturally, inspired by developments in economic history at large, and increasingly - indirectly or directly - using markets as the organizing principle in understanding how economies evolve over time. More specifically, recent work assumes that markets create the possibility to use resources more efficiently, which, theoretically…
Endogenous Processes of Colonial Settlement. The Success and Failure of European Settler Farming in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper comments on studies that aim to quantify the long-term economic effects of historical European settlement across the globe. We argue for the need to properly conceptualise «colonial settlement» as an endogenous development process shaped by the interaction between prospective settlers and indigenous peoples. We conduct three comparative case studies in West, East and Southern Africa, showing that the «success» or «failure» of colonial …
The Internationalization of Economic History: Perspectives from the African Frontier
In an interesting and thought-provoking paper recently published by the Economic History of Developing Regions, Johan Fourie and Leigh Gardner ask why relatively few papers from developing countries have been published in top-ranked economic history journals. They provide a number of tentative answers of which differences in academic traditions between regions seem to be an important one. In this paper, we contribute to this discussion by putting…
The Missing People: Accounting for the Productivity of Indigenous Populations in Cape Colonial History
Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative invest…
Was the Wage Burden Too Heavy? Settler Farming, Profitability, and Wage Shares of Settler Agriculture in Nyasaland, C. 1900–60
The historical role of European farming in Southern and Central Africa has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. A striking consensus exists in the Scholarly literature, namely that the success or failure of European farming in Southern Africa was to a large extent dependent upon the colonizers' access to and control over cheap labour, which they in turn could only access through strong support of the colonial state. Y…
The Economics of Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Cape Colony: Revising the Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis
The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has proved to be a powerful tool for identifying the economic conditions under which slavery was more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. It states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery was likely to become a vital alternative means of increasing production. These conditions have been identified for large parts of pre-colonial and semi-colonial Africa. The Nieboer-Domar hyp…
Agrarian Populism in Colonial and Postcolonial Malawi
This article analyses continuity and change of the agrarian doctrine in colonial and postcolonial Malawi. It engages in a classic debate about images and polices concerning African farming. The article argues that the agrarian doctrine must be related to the broader notion of agrarian populism, more specifically to Chayanov's notion of the logic of the peasant family farm. Employing this broader approach allows a striking continuity of the agrari…
State-Led Agricultural Intensification and Rural Labour Relations: The Case of the Lilongwe Land Development Programme in Malawi, 1968–1981
This article deals with cash crop production and its impact on labour relations in postcolonial African peasant agriculture. The focus is on the Lilongwe Land Development Programme (1968–1981) in Malawi. The aim of the programme was to enable African farmers to increase yields and make them shift from the cultivation of tobacco and local maize to groundnuts and high-yielding varieties of maize. The programme failed to meet its goals, because of c…
Facilitating Youth Participation in a Context of Forced Migration: A Photovoice Project in Northern Uganda
This paper describes a documentary photography (Photovoice) project conducted in 2007 with young people (ages 12 to 16) living in an internal displacement camp in northern Uganda during a time of great transition following more than 20 years of civil war. Twelve students were randomly selected from three schools after several weeks of instruction in English and photography. Over the course of six weeks, students used digital cameras to document l…
Health professionals, their medical interventions and uncertainty: A study focusing on women at midlife
The Economics of Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Cape Colony: Revising the Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis
The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has proved to be a powerful tool for identifying the economic conditions under which slavery was more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. It states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery was likely to become a vital alternative means of increasing production. These conditions have been identified for large parts of pre-colonial and semi-colonial Africa. The Nieboer-Domar hyp…
Traditional Landholding Certificates in Zambia: Preventing or Reinforcing Commodification and Inequality
The formalisation of customary land rights in Africa, as an alternative to their privatisation, is gaining increasing attention from scholars and policy makers. In this article, we use findings from Petauke district in eastern Zambia to discuss the impact of such reforms, where so-called traditional landholding certificates were implemented by the Petauke District Land Alliance in 2010. Based on interviews with farmers, chiefs and the Alliance, w…
The Missing People: Accounting for the Productivity of Indigenous Populations in Cape Colonial History
Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative invest…
Was the Wage Burden Too Heavy? Settler Farming, Profitability, and Wage Shares of Settler Agriculture in Nyasaland, C. 1900–60
The historical role of European farming in Southern and Central Africa has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. A striking consensus exists in the Scholarly literature, namely that the success or failure of European farming in Southern Africa was to a large extent dependent upon the colonizers' access to and control over cheap labour, which they in turn could only access through strong support of the colonial state. Y…
A Lasting Story: Conservation and Agricultural Extension Services in Colonial Malawi
Historians have written extensively about agricultural extension services and the linkages between colonial administrations and rural communities in British Africa. Most studies argue that it is possible to identify a qualitative shift in strategies between the inter- and the post-war periods. The former is characterized by modest attempts at promoting soil conservation, while the latter is described as a period when colonial governments in Briti…
Building the Cape of Good Hope Panel
To study the intergenerational dynamics of productivity, social mobility and demographic change of any contemporary society is a challenge. To do this for a pre-industrial society at the southern tip of Africa seems almost impossible. Yet this is the purpose of the Cape of Good Hope Panel, an annual panel data set – still under construction – of Cape Colony settler tax records over almost two centuries. The transcription of this ambitious project…
Endogenous Processes of Colonial Settlement. The Success and Failure of European Settler Farming in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper comments on studies that aim to quantify the long-term economic effects of historical European settlement across the globe. We argue for the need to properly conceptualise «colonial settlement» as an endogenous development process shaped by the interaction between prospective settlers and indigenous peoples. We conduct three comparative case studies in West, East and Southern Africa, showing that the «success» or «failure» of colonial …
Diversification or De-Agrarianization? Income Diversification, Labor, and Processes of Agrarian Change in Southern and Northern Malawi, Mid-1930s to Mid-1950s
This article investigates the links between market-oriented activities and subsistence production among peasant farmers in the Thyolo and Mzimba districts in Malawi from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The two districts were chosen because of their differences in terms of land-labor ratios, quality of soils, and structure of market engagement. Exploring the different paths of agrarian change in these two districts demonstrates that they were depe…
Labour Control and the Establishment of Profitable Settler Agriculture in Colonial Kenya, c. 1920–45
CITATION: Fibaek, M. & Green, E. 2019. Labour control and the establishment of profitable settler agriculture in colonial Kenya, c. 1920–45. Economic History of Developing Regions, 34(1):72-110, doi:10.1080/20780389.2019.1581058
The Internationalization of Economic History: Perspectives from the African Frontier
In an interesting and thought-provoking paper recently published by the Economic History of Developing Regions, Johan Fourie and Leigh Gardner ask why relatively few papers from developing countries have been published in top-ranked economic history journals. They provide a number of tentative answers of which differences in academic traditions between regions seem to be an important one. In this paper, we contribute to this discussion by putting…
State-Led Agricultural Intensification and Rural Labour Relations: The Case of the Lilongwe Land Development Programme in Malawi, 1968–1981
This article deals with cash crop production and its impact on labour relations in postcolonial African peasant agriculture. The focus is on the Lilongwe Land Development Programme (1968–1981) in Malawi. The aim of the programme was to enable African farmers to increase yields and make them shift from the cultivation of tobacco and local maize to groundnuts and high-yielding varieties of maize. The programme failed to meet its goals, because of c…
Phonological and Grammatical Aspects of Jargon in an Aphasic Patient: A Case Study
A study is made of one patient's aphasic jargon. His case history is reviewed and attention is drawn to the effects of Dilantin. The data consist of eleven tape recorded interviews and are submitted to phonological and grammatical analysis. The course of the patient's recovery indicates a decrease in distorted forms, no significant change in content-nouns, and an increase in verbs and indefinite noun phrases. Possibilities for further study are s…
The substitutability of slaves: Evidence from the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony
The substitutability of the economic institution of slave labour has often been assumed as a given. Apart from some capital investment to retrain slaves for a different task, essentially their labour could be substituted for any other form of labour. This paper questions that assumption by using a longitudinal study of the Graaff-Reinet district on the eastern frontier of South Africa’s Cape Colony. We calculate the Hicksian elasticity of complem…
The Land–Labour Hypothesis in a Settler Economy: Wealth, Labour and Household Composition on the South African Frontier
Traditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for child labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older, more densely populated farming regions. In this paper, we contribute to the debate by analysing the relationship between household composition and land availability in a closing frontier region, i.e. the Graaff-Reinet d…
From Extensive to Involutionary Growth: A Dialectic Interpretation of the Boom and Busts of Cocoa Production in the Gold Coast
African economic history has undergone impressive revitalization in the past decade. Much of the recent work is, quite naturally, inspired by developments in economic history at large, and increasingly - indirectly or directly - using markets as the organizing principle in understanding how economies evolve over time. More specifically, recent work assumes that markets create the possibility to use resources more efficiently, which, theoretically…
Agrarian Populism in Colonial and Postcolonial Malawi
This article analyses continuity and change of the agrarian doctrine in colonial and postcolonial Malawi. It engages in a classic debate about images and polices concerning African farming. The article argues that the agrarian doctrine must be related to the broader notion of agrarian populism, more specifically to Chayanov's notion of the logic of the peasant family farm. Employing this broader approach allows a striking continuity of the agrari…
Modern Agricultural History in Malawi: Perspectives on Policy-Choice Explanations
Development research is often associated with issues of policy. Researchers aim to increase our contextual and theoretical knowledge to enhance the creation of "good" development policies. One way of doing this is to identify and learn from harmful policies of the past. The objective of this article is to examine such policy-choice explanations by looking at the dominant understandings of the modern history of agriculture in Malawi. These perspec…
Recent Literature
Some Recent Advances in Syphilis and Gonorrhoea.-Threeadvances of great practical importance have been made in connection with syphilis: (i) the discovery of the specific organism of the disease by Schaudinn in I1905 has made possible the early diagnosis by the ultra-microscope at least a fortnight before any secondary symptoms appear; (2) Ehrlich's salvarsan has proved to be the most powerful weapon for the cure of syphilis, but has not been use…
Regionally Planning the Far East
Journal Article Regionally Planning the Far East Get access Elizabeth Green, Elizabeth Green Oakton, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Craighill Handy Craighill Handy Oakton, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 23, Issue 3, March 1945, Pages 394–404, https://doi.org/10.2307/2572305 Published: 01 March 1945
Regionalism and the New Political Philosophy of the U. S. A. and U. N. O
Journal Article Regionalism and the New Political Philosophy of the U. S. A. and U. N. O. Get access Elizabeth Green, Elizabeth Green Oakton, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Craighill Handy Craighill Handy Oakton, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 24, Issue 3, March 1946, Pages 267–273, https://doi.org/10.2307/2571477 Published:…
Regional Democracy Supplants Empire, West-Then East Notes on the Interweavings of Destiny: England, America, India
Journal Article Regional Democracy Supplants Empire, West-Then East Notes on the Interweavings of Destiny: England, America, India Get access Elizabeth Green, Elizabeth Green Oakton, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Craighill Handy Craighill Handy Oakton, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 25, Issue 4, May 1947, Pages 385–396, htt…
Phonological and Grammatical Aspects of Jargon in an Aphasic Patient: A Case Study
A study is made of one patient's aphasic jargon. His case history is reviewed and attention is drawn to the effects of Dilantin. The data consist of eleven tape recorded interviews and are submitted to phonological and grammatical analysis. The course of the patient's recovery indicates a decrease in distorted forms, no significant change in content-nouns, and an increase in verbs and indefinite noun phrases. Possibilities for further study are s…
Shorter note. Rebel on the Right. Henry Page Croft and the Crisis of British Conservatism, 1903-14. Larry L Witherell
Health professionals, their medical interventions and uncertainty: A study focusing on women at midlife
Modern Agricultural History in Malawi: Perspectives on Policy-Choice Explanations
Development research is often associated with issues of policy. Researchers aim to increase our contextual and theoretical knowledge to enhance the creation of "good" development policies. One way of doing this is to identify and learn from harmful policies of the past. The objective of this article is to examine such policy-choice explanations by looking at the dominant understandings of the modern history of agriculture in Malawi. These perspec…
Diversification or De-Agrarianization? Income Diversification, Labor, and Processes of Agrarian Change in Southern and Northern Malawi, Mid-1930s to Mid-1950s
This article investigates the links between market-oriented activities and subsistence production among peasant farmers in the Thyolo and Mzimba districts in Malawi from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The two districts were chosen because of their differences in terms of land-labor ratios, quality of soils, and structure of market engagement. Exploring the different paths of agrarian change in these two districts demonstrates that they were depe…
Diversification or De-Agrarianization? Income Diversification, Labor, and Processes of Agrarian Change in Southern and Northern Malawi, Mid–1930s to Mid–1950s
This article investigates the links between market-oriented activities and subsistence production among peasant farmers in the Thyolo and Mzimba districts in Malawi from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The two districts were chosen because of their differences in terms of land-labor ratios, quality of soils, and structure of market engagement. Exploring the different paths of agrarian change in these two districts demonstrates that they were depe…
Facilitating Youth Participation in a Context of Forced Migration: A Photovoice Project in Northern Uganda
This paper describes a documentary photography (Photovoice) project conducted in 2007 with young people (ages 12 to 16) living in an internal displacement camp in northern Uganda during a time of great transition following more than 20 years of civil war. Twelve students were randomly selected from three schools after several weeks of instruction in English and photography. Over the course of six weeks, students used digital cameras to document l…
A Lasting Story: Conservation and Agricultural Extension Services in Colonial Malawi
Historians have written extensively about agricultural extension services and the linkages between colonial administrations and rural communities in British Africa. Most studies argue that it is possible to identify a qualitative shift in strategies between the inter- and the post-war periods. The former is characterized by modest attempts at promoting soil conservation, while the latter is described as a period when colonial governments in Briti…
State-Led Agricultural Intensification and Rural Labour Relations: The Case of the Lilongwe Land Development Programme in Malawi, 1968–1981
This article deals with cash crop production and its impact on labour relations in postcolonial African peasant agriculture. The focus is on the Lilongwe Land Development Programme (1968–1981) in Malawi. The aim of the programme was to enable African farmers to increase yields and make them shift from the cultivation of tobacco and local maize to groundnuts and high-yielding varieties of maize. The programme failed to meet its goals, because of c…
Agrarian Populism in Colonial and Postcolonial Malawi
This article analyses continuity and change of the agrarian doctrine in colonial and postcolonial Malawi. It engages in a classic debate about images and polices concerning African farming. The article argues that the agrarian doctrine must be related to the broader notion of agrarian populism, more specifically to Chayanov's notion of the logic of the peasant family farm. Employing this broader approach allows a striking continuity of the agrari…
The Economics of Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Cape Colony: Revising the Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis
The Nieboer-Domar hypothesis has proved to be a powerful tool for identifying the economic conditions under which slavery was more likely to emerge as a dominant form of labour. It states that in cases of land abundance and labour shortages the use of slavery was likely to become a vital alternative means of increasing production. These conditions have been identified for large parts of pre-colonial and semi-colonial Africa. The Nieboer-Domar hyp…
The Internationalization of Economic History: Perspectives from the African Frontier
In an interesting and thought-provoking paper recently published by the Economic History of Developing Regions, Johan Fourie and Leigh Gardner ask why relatively few papers from developing countries have been published in top-ranked economic history journals. They provide a number of tentative answers of which differences in academic traditions between regions seem to be an important one. In this paper, we contribute to this discussion by putting…
The Missing People: Accounting for the Productivity of Indigenous Populations in Cape Colonial History
Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative invest…
Was the Wage Burden Too Heavy? Settler Farming, Profitability, and Wage Shares of Settler Agriculture in Nyasaland, C. 1900–60
The historical role of European farming in Southern and Central Africa has received a great deal of attention among scholars over the years. A striking consensus exists in the Scholarly literature, namely that the success or failure of European farming in Southern Africa was to a large extent dependent upon the colonizers' access to and control over cheap labour, which they in turn could only access through strong support of the colonial state. Y…
Endogenous Processes of Colonial Settlement. The Success and Failure of European Settler Farming in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper comments on studies that aim to quantify the long-term economic effects of historical European settlement across the globe. We argue for the need to properly conceptualise «colonial settlement» as an endogenous development process shaped by the interaction between prospective settlers and indigenous peoples. We conduct three comparative case studies in West, East and Southern Africa, showing that the «success» or «failure» of colonial …
Coping with the Double Crisis: Lake Chilwa Recession and the Great Depression on Chisi Island in Colonial Malawi, 1930–1935
From Extensive to Involutionary Growth: A Dialectic Interpretation of the Boom and Busts of Cocoa Production in the Gold Coast
African economic history has undergone impressive revitalization in the past decade. Much of the recent work is, quite naturally, inspired by developments in economic history at large, and increasingly - indirectly or directly - using markets as the organizing principle in understanding how economies evolve over time. More specifically, recent work assumes that markets create the possibility to use resources more efficiently, which, theoretically…
Building the Cape of Good Hope Panel
To study the intergenerational dynamics of productivity, social mobility and demographic change of any contemporary society is a challenge. To do this for a pre-industrial society at the southern tip of Africa seems almost impossible. Yet this is the purpose of the Cape of Good Hope Panel, an annual panel data set – still under construction – of Cape Colony settler tax records over almost two centuries. The transcription of this ambitious project…
The Land–Labour Hypothesis in a Settler Economy: Wealth, Labour and Household Composition on the South African Frontier
Traditional frontier literature identifies a positive correlation between land availability and fertility. A common explanation is that the demand for child labour is higher in newly established frontier regions compared to older, more densely populated farming regions. In this paper, we contribute to the debate by analysing the relationship between household composition and land availability in a closing frontier region, i.e. the Graaff-Reinet d…
Traditional Landholding Certificates in Zambia: Preventing or Reinforcing Commodification and Inequality
The formalisation of customary land rights in Africa, as an alternative to their privatisation, is gaining increasing attention from scholars and policy makers. In this article, we use findings from Petauke district in eastern Zambia to discuss the impact of such reforms, where so-called traditional landholding certificates were implemented by the Petauke District Land Alliance in 2010. Based on interviews with farmers, chiefs and the Alliance, w…
Labour Control and the Establishment of Profitable Settler Agriculture in Colonial Kenya, c. 1920–45
CITATION: Fibaek, M. & Green, E. 2019. Labour control and the establishment of profitable settler agriculture in colonial Kenya, c. 1920–45. Economic History of Developing Regions, 34(1):72-110, doi:10.1080/20780389.2019.1581058
Economics (27 works) · Geography (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · African history and culture studies (13 works) · Development economics (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Agriculture (12 works) · Economic growth (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (11 works)