(Un)principled agents: monitoring loyalty after the end of the Royal African Company monopoly

The revocation of the Royal African Company's (RAC) monopoly in 1698 inaugurated a transformation of the transatlantic slave trade. While the RAC's exit from the slave trade has received scholarly attention, little is known about the company's response to the loss of its trading privileges. Not only did the end of the company's monopoly increase competition, but the unprecedented numbers of private traders who entered the trade exacerbated the company's principal-agent problems on the West African coast. To analyze the company's behavior in the post-monopoly period, we exploit a series of 292 instruction letters that the RAC issued to its slave-ship captains between 1685 and 1706, coding each individual command in the letters. Our database reveals two new insights into the company's response to its upended competitive landscape. First, the RAC showed a remarkable degree of organizational flexibility, reacting to a heightened principal-agent problem. Second, its response was facilitated by the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade, which gave the company a monitoring mechanism by virtue of the slave-ship captains who continually sailed to the West African coast

African Real Wages in Asian Perspective, 1880-1940

This paper offers time-series of urban unskilled labor wages and commodity prices in eight British African colonies (1880-1940) and shows that real wages were above subsistence level and rising, especially during the interwar years. Real wages in West Africa and Mauritius were even considerably higher than in some major Asian cities. Our results cast doubt onstudies emphasizing the existence of structural impediments to African economic growth. We also document an East-West divergence within Africa and argue this was caused byvariations in colonial land and labor market institutions, challenging the view that Africancolonial institutions were exclusively extractive.Africa, real wages, Asia, labour, commodity prices, labour market, divergence, colonial history

Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880-1965

Recent studies on African economic history have emphasized the structural impediments to African growth, such as adverse geographical conditions and extractive colonial institutions. The evidence is mainly drawn from cross-country regressions on late 20th century income levels, assuming persistent effects of historical causes over time. But to which extent has African poverty been a persistent phenomenon? Our study sheds light on this question by providing new evidence on long-term African growth-trajectories. We show that slave trade regressions are not robust for pre-1970s GDP per capita levels, or for pre-1973 and post-1995 growth rates. We calculate urban unskilled real wages of African workers in nine British African countries 1880-1965, adopting Allen’s (2009) subsistence basket methodology. We find that real wages were above subsistence level, rose significantly over time and were, in major parts of British Africa, considerably higher than real wages in Asian cities up to, at least the 1930s. We explain the intra-African variation in real wage levels by varying colonial institutions concerning land alienation, taxation and immigration.Africa, living standards, real wages, labor market, colonial institutions

Fiscal Development under Colonial and Sovereign Rule

This chapter explores differences in the making of a ‘modern’ fiscal state under colonial and sovereign rule. Focusing on African and Asian colonies (1820–1970) and their respective European metropoles, it argues that while the introduction of ‘modern’ taxes was part of an imperial diffusion process of fiscal reforms, these new taxes were embedded in a distinctly colonial political, social and economic logic. In contrast to the imperial metropoles, where ‘modern’ taxes built on organically grown tax bases, fiscal ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ co-existed in a dualistic system in the colonies. The comparison of fiscal development under colonial and sovereign rule helps to move beyond the Eurocentric bias in the historical tax literature and develop a more global theory of fiscal modernization