Resources, techniques, and strategies south of the Sahara
Revising the factor endowments perspective on African economic development, 1500-20001
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3209953 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gareth Austin (London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 587-624 |
| Publication date | 2008-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Economic History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2007.00409.x |
| OpenAlex | W2066804487 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 94 |
| References cited | 140 |
This article seeks to revise and re-apply the factor endowments perspective on African history. The propositions that sub-Saharan Africa was characterized historically by land abundance and labour scarcity, and that the natural environment posed severe constraints on the exploitation of the land surplus, are broadly upheld. Important alterations are suggested, however, centred on the seasonality of labour supply, Ruf's concept of 'forest rent', and, for precolonial economies, the role of fixed capital. This revised endowments framework is then applied in order to explore the long-term dynamics of economic development in Africa, focusing on how the economic strategies of producers and political authorities created specific paths of change which shifted the production possibility frontiers of the economies concerned, and ultimately altered the very factor ratios to which the strategies had been responses
Capital (architecture · Development economics · Economic geography · Economic system · Economics · Economy · Factors of production · Geography · Macroeconomics · Market economy · Natural resource · Natural resource economics · Order (exchange · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Politics · Production (economics · Scarcity · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies
Histoire économique de l'Afrique
The Politics of Poverty
Slavery in Africa, 1804–1936
The Origins of Globalization
The Difficulties in Launching the Escudo Monetary Zone
The ‘reversal of fortune’ thesis and the compression of history
Explaining and Evaluating the Cash Crop Revolution in the “Peasant” Colonies of Tropical Africa, ca. 1890–ca.1930
Slave trades, kinship structures and women's political participation in Africa
Social Capital as a Determinant of Economic Growth in Africa
The Reversal of Fortune Thesis Reconsidered
An Industry Vanishes
Slavery and Slaving in African History
Writing history backwards or sideways
The Permanent Effects of Transportation Revolutions in Poor Countries
The Economic History of Africa
Coping with the Double Crisis
Potlatch and the articulation of modes of production
Regional Elite Numeracy Formation in Sub-Saharan Africa During the 17 th to 19 th Century and Its Path-Dependent Relationship with Today’s Health Outcomes
Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History
Long run agricultural land expansion, booms and busts
Democracy, Development and Industrial Policy in Nigeria
African Growth Recurring
The Causal History of Africa
The missing boys
Why Is Africa Poor
Long-Term Dynamics of the State in Francophone West Africa
The State and Scope of the Economic History of Developing Regions
Seasonal Hunger in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, 1900-40
South African Living Standards in Global Perspective, 1835–1910
Factor endowments, vent for surplus and involutionary process in rural developing economies
The Developmental State and Labour-Intensive Industrialization
The Long-Term Effects of Extractive Institutions
Economic inequality in Latin America and Africa, 1650 to 1950
The colonial gap
Six decades after independence
The political economy of nation formation in modern Tanzania
Beyond Robert Jackson
The Political Demography of Conflict in Modern Africa
The ILO and the Political Economy of Labour Policy Making in Nigeria, 1930–1960
Retracted
Land tenure and investment incentives
Elite persistence in Sierra Leone
A study of scarcity
West Africa in the Southeast Asian Mirror
Colonial legacies and contemporary commercial farming outcomes
State-Led Agricultural Intensification and Rural Labour Relations
Skill, race, and wage inequality in British Tanganyika
The gun-slave hypothesis and the 18th century British slave trade
Human development in Africa
Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions
Factor markets in Nieboer conditions
Rubber will not keep in this country”
Measuring African development
On the Causes of the A frican Slave Trade
The Contribution of African Women to Economic Growth and Development in the Pre-Colonial and Colonial Periods
The curious incident of the franc in the Gambia
Labour and Land in Ghana, 1874–1939
Why agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa remains low compared to the rest of the world – a historical perspective
Order, Openness, and Economic Change in Precolonial Southern Africa
Poverty's Pasts
Moving Beyond Colonial Control? Economic Forces and Shifting Migration From Ruanda-Urundi to Buganda, 1920–60
Vent for surplus or productivity breakthrough? The G hanaian cocoa take‐off, c. 1890–1936
The limiting factor
Reciprocal Comparison and African History
Against Diffusion
On the Size and Shape of African States1
Something New out of Africa
What "Development" Does to Work
An unlevel playing field
Slavery, Statehood, and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa
Big Questions and Big Data
Past and Presentism
Towards a History of Mass Violence in the Etat Indépendant du Congo, 1885-1908
European Trade, Colonialism, and Human Capital Accumulation in Senegal, Gambia and Western Mali, 1770-1900
The Failure of Cotton Imperialism in Africa
The green, the grey and the blue
Challenging the de-industrialization thesis
Land abundance and economic institutions
Firm profitability and forced wage labour in Portuguese Africa
What about the race between education and technology in the Global South? Comparing skill premiums in colonial Africa and Asia
Global Slavery in the Making of States and International Orders
Introduction
The biological standard of living in early nineteenth-century West Africa
The effect of settler farming on indigenous agriculture
Measuring rural welfare in colonial Africa
Institutions for the taking
What happened to the workshop of West Africa? Resilience and decline of handicraft textiles in colonial northern Nigeria, 1911-52
African agricultural productivity and the transatlantic slave trade
Agrarian Populism in Colonial and Postcolonial Malawi
Global and local forces in deindustrialization
What happened to the theory of African capitalism
Histoire économique de l'Afrique
Dependence, Unfreedom and Slavery in Africa
Reorganizing the Escudo Zone
Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1680
The Roots of rural poverty in Central and Southern Africa
Cocoa, custom, and socio-economic change in rural Western Nigeria
African economic history
Cotton, colonialism, and social history in sub-Saharan Africa
Forests of gold
The rise and fall of the South African peasantry
Capitalism and apartheid
Transforming traditional agriculture
More people, less erosion
Misreading the African Landscape
Maize and Grace
Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana
Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth Among New World Economies
Land relations under unbearable stress
Asian and African Systems of Slavery
Economy and society in pre-industrial South Africa
Settlement, trade and polities in the seventeenth century Gold Coast
Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
The migrant cocoa-farmers of southern Ghana
Women in Africa
The enigma of colonialism
Indigenous Agricultural Revolution
Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa
The conditions of agricultural growth
States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control
The Political economy of hunger
Indigenous Credit Institutions in West Africa, c.1750-c.1960
African Population and Capitalism
The theory of the optimising peasant 1
Slow Death for Slavery
From Slave Trade to 'Legitimate' Commerce
Africans
Cocoa Pioneer Fronts since 1800
The Advance of African Capital
The Settler Economies
Labour supplies in historical perspective
Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy
The Political Economy of Pondoland 1860–1930
Decolonization and African Society
An Economic History of South Africa
Farming systems and agrarian change in West Africa
Malthus controverted
Why poor people get rich
Controversies about capitalism and apartheid in South Africa
Africa and the International Economy, 1800-1960
Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-63
African Connections
Ecological Change and Pre-Shakan State Formation
African Economic Experiments in Colonial Natal 1845-1880
Burundi
The Historian and the Precolonial African Economy
The Economics of the Developing Countries
The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production
Structural Changes in the Economy of Ghana 1891–1911
The Rise of Entrepreneurs in Nigerian Motor Transport a Study in Indigenous Enterprise
The Development of Motor Transport in the Gold Coast, 1900–39
Population, Prosperity and Poverty
Assessing Productivity in Precolonial African Agriculture and Industry 1500-1800
The Ecology of Survival
The Kingdom of Kongo
British Abolition and its Impact on Slave Prices Along the Atlantic Coast of Africa, 1783–1850
An Economic History of Kenya and Uganda 1800–1970
Precolonial African Industry and the Atlantic Trade, 1500-1800
River of Wealth, River of Sorrow. The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891
Irrigation and Soil-Conservation in African Agricultural History
Trade and Politics Behind the Slave Coast
Food Production and Family Labour in Southern Malawi
Nourishing a Stateless Society During the Slave Trade
The Origins of African Population Growth
Demography and History in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1550–1750
Lango Agriculture during the early Colonial Period
The lure of Bambuk gold
The Canoe in West African History
Iron is iron 'til it is rust
Measuring the Immeasurable
The Slave Trade and Decentralized Societies
Plantations in the Economy of the Sokoto Caliphate
Decline or Survival? Iron Production in West Africa from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries
The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade
No Kings, No Lords, No Slaves’
The Horse in West African History
Rural Industry and Appropriate Technology
The Cash-Crop Revolution in Tropical Africa
The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom
The World Economy
Geography, Demography, and Economic Growth in Africa
Akokoaso
Transformations in Slavery
Report on Industrialisation and the Gold Coast
Africa's Economic Performance
The Children of Woot
Agricultural Seasonalily and the Organization of Manufacturing in Early Industrial Economies
Historical Estimates of World Population
Trees in fields in Southern Zimbabwe
Population Growth and Poverty in Machakos District, Kenya
Agriculture and Land Use in Ghana
"Efficient but Poor" Revisited
Economic Transition in Africa
Ghana in Africa and the World
| Unique citing works | 94 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4,95 |
| Citation span | 2007 - 2026 (20) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 93 |