African Economic History

Existing studies of business pressure group activity have examined individual chambers of commerce. This article considers the neglected theme of federated metropolitan chambers of commerce in the British Empire with a case study of an important business pressure group—the Joint West Africa Committee (JWAC) of the Liverpool, Manchester, and London Chambers of Commerce. It highlights, on the one hand, the tension between colonial officials and merchants over the content and direction of colonial policy. It also examines, on the other hand, the negotiation of divergent interests among the collaborating chambers themselves. In all, the JWAC was beleaguered by frequent internal questioning of its efficacy and relevance, recurring duels with the imperial and colonial governments, and the challenges of two world wars and decolonization. Its history suggests the relative autonomy of the state vis-à-vis national capital.

Ayodeji Olukoju

The Pressure Group Activity of Federated Chambers of Commerce: The Joint West Africa Committee and the Colonial Office, c. 1903–1955

联邦商会压力集团活动：西非联合委员会与殖民办公室，约1903-1955年

This article offers new insight into the reasons for diversity in rural development and speaks to a major debate in economic history. The New Institutional Economy approach promotes the idea of long-term economic underdevelopment as a consequence of colonialism. However, this approach tends to over-generalize historical processes and over-simplify the reasons for divergence in development. Many historians have criticized such bold explanations. They stress that the diversity of local conditions and the varying reactions of people to colonialism and capitalism have resulted in different and regionally distinct paths of economic development. This article endorses such criticism and advances a complex multi-caused model in order to explain diversity in rural development. By highlighting and critically assessing several plausible explanations, this article argues that the development of coffee production in the Lake Kivu region primarily contrasted because of an interplay of differences in land availability (demography) and in indigenous precolonial landholding systems that were enhanced during the colonial period due to judicial differences (colony versus mandate).

Sven Van Melkebeke

Divergence In Rural Development: The Curious Case of Coffee Production in the Lake Kivu Region (First Half Twentieth Century)

农村发展的分歧：基伍湖地区咖啡生产的奇特案例（二十世纪上半叶）

This essay focuses on the demographic consequences of entanglement in the Danish possessions on the Gold Coast in West Africa. Two sets of data will be analyzed, one on the European composition of the Danish enclaves and discusses demographic trends and ruptures, the other on the Eurafrican population in the Danish enclaves. The first part of the study focusses on the survival of the European personnel in the Danish possessions on the Gold Coast. Similar to the experience of other European trading nations in West Africa, the Guinea Coast was a "White Man's Grave" for the Danish personnel as about half of the newly arrived staff members died within the first year on the coast. The second part deals with the employment and careers of the Eurafricans, i.e., the children of Danish fathers and local African or Eurafrican women. While the Danish authorities enlisted some of the Eurafrican boys as military staff members, the fate of the Eurafrican girls was unclear. In contrast to the Europeans, the Eurafrican population seldom succumbed to the coastal climate. Instead, demographic data suggests that their life expectancy was relatively high, at least compared to that of the European personnel.

Holger Weiss

The European and Eurafrican Population of the Danish Forts on the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast

18世纪黄金海岸丹麦堡垒的欧洲和欧非人口

This article contributes to the debates surrounding "New African Economic History" by exploring the feasibility of constructing a time series of economic growth in Nigeria spanning the whole twentieth century. Currently most datasets for African economies only go back to 1960. The sources for their creation exist, but these valuable colonial data remain underutilized. This is an exploratory paper in a project aiming to create measures of economic growth through the twentieth century for a sample of African economies. The paper offers a systematic discussion of the different available datasets on population, agricultural production and income for the country. It finds that the existing data, often presented as facts, are more accurately described as projections based on assumptions. If these assumptions are already made in the production of the data, this precludes empirical testing of important questions. The main lesson is that any African economic history investigation must both begin and end with a critical analysis of the quantitative data, and must further be supported by careful qualitative evaluation.

Morten Jerven

Controversy, Facts and Assumptions: Lessons from Estimating Long Term Growth in Nigeria, 1900–2007

争议、事实与假设：从尼日利亚1900-2007年长期增长估算中汲取的教训

This article examines conflicts around questions of policy formulation and the intrusion of private interests in official actions which arose between factions in the early British colonial administration in the Gold Coast. The circumstances surrounding the transfer of administrative control from the Company of Merchants to the Colonial Office generated distrust and hostility between two British factions on the coast: merchants and metropolitan appointees. Mercantile resentment stemmed from fear that metropolitan control was likely to erode the gains of the previous administration and undermine their commercial interests, since newly appointed officials lacked local knowledge and had no commercial or personal ties to the Gold Coast. These circumstances provided fertile grounds for the conflicts that embroiled officials of the colonial administration from 1844. However, when allowed the opportunity to influence administrative policy, merchants adopted cordial relations with the new officials and readily offered their cooperation. This study suggests that we cannot assume that colonial administrations functioned as coherent units. Another implication is that uncritically accepting the "colonizer" and "colonized" dichotomy obscures many important differences within each category and blinds us to the important social and political implications of these internal divisions.

Kofi Takyi Asante

"Intimate Knowledge of the Country": Factionalism in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast Administration

"对国家的深入了解"：19世纪中叶黄金海岸行政中的派系主义

From Subsistence Farmers To Guardians of Food Security and Well-BeingShifts and Continuities in Female Labor Relations in Tanzania (1800–2000) Karin Pallaver1 (bio) ABSTRACT This paper combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to provide a long-term analysis of the major shifts in the history of female labor relations in Tanzania from the late precolonial period to 2000. The first part of the paper focuses on the nature and quality of the available sources on the history of the population of Tanzania. The sources' problems and limits are presented along with data on the population and its composition. The second part of the paper is devoted to analyzing the shifts and continuities in female labor relations for four cross-sections (1800, 1900, 1950, and 2000) in connection to major historical processes, such as the development of long-distance caravan trade, the establishment of the colonial economy, and post-independence Ujamaa policy (Tanzanian socialism). The main aim of the article is to investigate the main shifts and continuities in female labor relations and understand what has been historically distinctive about the work that Tanzanian women performed in different epochs. The article employs the methodology and taxonomy developed by the "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500–2000" at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. KEYWORDS gender, women, labor, agriculture, Eastern Africa [End Page 67] Introduction This article aims to contribute to the study of female labor relations in Tanzania by using the methodology and taxonomy developed by the "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500–2000" at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. In a previous work in which I analyzed the history of labor relations in Tanzania, I showed that reciprocal labor has remained the dominant labor relation for the entire period from 1800 to 2000. At the same time, that paper showed that important shifts in labor relations occurred as a consequence of the 19th-century development of long-distance trade and, later, the establishment of colonial rule, shifts that both increased the number of people in commodified labor and fostered the development of a new combination of labor relations. On the basis of this previous work, this article analyzes how these processes impacted female labor relations and asks what is distinctive about the work women performed. As Janet Bujra points out, a specific analysis of female labor might prove "markedly different" from one based on male labor in that "generalisations derived from the study of men do not—or do not always—extend to women."2 In their analytical bibliography on women in Tanzania published in the early 1980s, Ophelia Mascarenhas and Marjorie Mbilinyi provided a portrait of the development of the field of women's studies in the country and showed that the study of women was central in the two decades following independence, especially in relation to poverty and gender inequality.3 The theoretical framework underlying this work was that of socialist feminism, and the authors stressed issues surrounding the exploitation and oppression of women, focusing on political struggle and activism. Although their analysis was not mainly historical, they did find that the demand on women's productivity increased during the colonial period, while women's control over their products was reduced as compared to precolonial times.4 The colonial state's interest in the control and extraction of labor was deeply gendered. The colonizers regulated many aspects of African male laborers' economic and social lives, including the location of work, the crops they were allowed to produce and how many cattle they could own. The colonial state's interest in controlling women was instead largely focused on their sexuality and role in social reproduction. Women were seen primarily as food producers whose contribution "freed" men from family labor to make them available for wage labor.5 Indeed, studies of various rural areas in Tanzania have revealed that women worked longer hours than men and that historically men were more involved in cash-cropping while women held greater responsibility for food crops.6 This does not mean, however, that women did not actively react to [End Page 68] the impositions of the colonial state. As Thaddeus Sunseri...

Karin Pallaver

From Subsistence Farmers To Guardians of Food Security and Well-Being: Shifts and Continuities in Female Labor Relations in Tanzania (1800–2000)

从生计农民到食品安全与福祉的守护者：坦桑尼亚女性劳动关系的转变与延续（1800-2000）

The "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations"Putting Women's Labor and Labor Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa in a Global Context Karin Hofmeester (bio) ABSTRACT Women's work is often invisible in official censuses and statistics. The "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations" has developed a "Taxonomy of Labour Relations" and a method to collect data on labor relations that comprises all kinds of work, including work for the household and homestead, the family firm or farm, and self-employment in the so-called informal sector. In this article, we explain this method and give an overview of the results of data so far collected in various parts of the world, offering a comparative context for the data on sub-Saharan Africa. KEYWORDS gender, women, labor, production, market Introduction In 2007, the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam set up the "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations" (hereafter Global Collaboratory) to better understand the diverse forms [End Page 12] of labor relations worldwide. The first phase of this project involved data gathering. A large group of international scholars met during workshops, worked together online, and developed a large number of datasets containing data on the occurrence of all types of labor relations in several parts of the world during five cross sections in time: 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900, and 2000, thereby also developing a new "Taxonomy of Labour Relations" based on a shared set of definitions.1 Various subgroups have worked on different areas of the world, including the Ottoman Empire, the Lusophone world and sub-Saharan Africa. The first results for the latter were published in 2014 as a special section of History in Africa.2 The second phase of the Global Collaboratory project sets out in search of explanations for shifts in labor relations signaled in the first phase. We look for causes and consequences of these by looking in depth at possible explanatory factors, such as the role of the state, demography and family patterns, the role of economic institutions, and mechanisms that determine shifts in and out of self-employment.3 In this article we will first explain the background and the setup of the Collaboratory project as well as its taxonomy of definitions of labor relations. We will pay special attention to the methods used to include women's work, the efforts made so far to include Africa, and the ways these factors have shaped our project. We will then describe some preliminary outcomes of the project, signaling shifts in labor relations world-wide and per continent, paying attention to shifts in women's work wherever possible. We conclude the article with a first comparative analysis of major labor relations in sub-Saharan Africa as a background for the various case studies in this special issue. Background and Set-up of the Collaboratory Project Efforts to classify work according to the different human relations involved are not new. The oldest are the distinctions between man and woman, master and servant, and slave owner and enslaved. Alongside these distinctions came the notion of "class society" developed by various nineteenth-century thinkers, of whom Karl Marx is the most well-known. Central to this line of thinking is the rise of the proletariat, i.e. wage-dependent workers. The German scholar Werner Sombart (1863–1941) was perhaps the first to attempt to apply this concept to the entire occupational population of a country, in this case the German Empire in 1905.4 Sociologists and historians subsequently tried to apply these categories to the entire population of Europe (except Russia) for the past five centuries.5 Ethnographers, geographers, and archaeologists compared labor relations in market economies in the West and those in the rest of the world, sometimes (as Karl Pólanyi and anthropologists influenced by him tended to do) stressing the differences between the two.6 Finally, irrespective of time and place, historical and [End Page 13] contemporary occupational census takers, sociologists, and historians have increasingly struggled with definitions of work, influenced in part by the emerging feminist movement since the 1970s, which stressed the importance of the often unobserved work of women and children. One of the...

Karin Hofmeester

The "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations": Putting Women's Labor and Labor Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa in a Global Context

"全球劳工关系史协作研究"：将撒哈拉以南非洲妇女的劳动与劳工关系置于全球背景下

Introduction Karin Pallaver (bio) and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (bio) KEYWORDS gender, women, labor, production, business This special issue aims to examine the participation of women in the economy of several sub-Saharan African countries by looking into multiple forms of female labor in a historical and comparative perspective.1 To do so, the authors make reference and apply the methodological approach that has been developed by the "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations (1500–2000)," under the initiative of the International Institute of Social History (hereafter IISH) in Amsterdam.2 The history of labor in Africa became central in the field of African Studies after independence.3 Being strongly influenced by Marxist theory, the studies of the 1960s and 1970s focused on class formation and proletarianization and showed how a waged labor force developed during the colonial period and became stabilized from the 1940s onwards. This scholarship was particularly attentive to local African perspectives and experiences,4 and stressed the role of African wage laborers in independence movements, shedding light on the initiatives they developed under the power structures imposed by colonial rule.5 In this scholarship, the study of the impact of colonialism on African laborers was therefore critical. With its perpetual search for labor, the colonial state no doubt transformed labor and laborers in Africa. Nonetheless, [End Page 1] waged work never became the most important labor relation among African workers.6 As Bellucci and Eckert recently pointed out, in sub-Saharan Africa "the male proletarian does not represent the quintessential worker but is rather one among a number of categories of workers whose histories are connected."7 Among these workers, women no doubt played a critical role. Given the strong focus on wage labor, the role of African women was largely invisible in the early studies on African labor, as women, with very few exceptions, were very rarely involved in waged work. In the late 1970s, however, gender started to receive a new attention from scholars interested in the history of African labor.8 This new interest also stemmed from multiple studies by economists and social scientist who, starting from the 1960s, made important contributions to assess women's participation in the economies of western countries as well as of non-western ones, including sub-Saharan African states.9 Among them, Ester Boserup's Woman's Role in Economic Development was particularly important, as it stressed the need to include the domestic work that women performed in general studies of female labor.10 This produced an extensive volume of studies on gender and rural populations in Africa and on the role of women in economic development, that went beyond waged and urban labor and challenged universalist conceptions of labor and productivity and how Africans reinvented them.11 In the 1980s, however, studies of African female labor became critical towards Boserup's approach, in that it considered "women as pawns rather than actors."12 Preoccupied to show African women's agency and initiatives, these works stressed that women were not only victims of African patriarchy or the exploitation of the colonial state, but rather actively responded to socioeconomic changes. Works such as Judith Olmstead's on Ethiopia or Carolyn Clark's on Kikuyu women showed how women, even if working under structures of male dominance and patriarchal relations, were able to influence economic and social processes.13 Thanks to these perspectives, studies on women's labor history in Africa have significantly improved our understanding of precolonial African societies, the impact of colonialism, and post-independence trajectories.14 At the basis of the precolonial agrarian social organization was a gendered division of labor. Even if obviously characterized by local variations, men performed activities such as hunting, building houses, or preparing the land for cultivation, whereas women took care of the cultivation of food.15 Colonialism had no doubt a strong impact on African female laborers: their workload increased because men were away; they had reduced access to land and political power; their economic position often declined, both in relation to their former lives and vis-à-vis men; and they had limited access to formal western-type education and therefore to skilled and better paid jobs, due...

Filipa Ribeiro da Silva

Introduction

引言

Balancing Subsistence Agriculture and Self-Employment in Small BusinessesContinuity and Change in Women's Labor and Labor Relations in Mozambique, 1800–20001 Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (bio) ABSTRACT This article examines women's participation in the economy of Mozambique by looking into multiple forms of female work and labor relations in a historical perspective, covering the period from 1800 to 2000. To this aim, I present a tentative profile of the Mozambican female population and a preliminary analysis of women's activities in the different economic sectors, as well as of the ways in which they contribute to the economy of the household, the state and the market economy. This is done by examining different types of labor relations they appear involved in, comparatively to men, and by discussing main changes over time and possible explanatory factors. For this purpose, I use population counts, censuses, and statistical data produced by the Portuguese colonial state and the Mozambican government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, alongside reports from officials of the Portuguese colonial state and the concessionary companies. KEYWORDS gender, women, labor, business, agriculture [End Page 118] Introduction This article examines women's participation in the economy of Mozambique by looking into multiple forms of female labor and labor relations in a historical perspective, in the last two hundred years. To do so, I adopt and apply the new methodological approach that has been developed within the framework of Global Labor History over the last decade under the initiative of the International Institute of Social History (hereafter IISH). For this purpose, I use mainly population counts dating from as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as well as census data, reports from officials of the Portuguese colonial state and the concessionary companies operating in part of the territory of Mozambique, namely the Mozambique Company. Part of these sources are collected in different archives and libraries in Portugal. Others were produced by the Mozambican State in the 1980s and 1990s and in the first decades of the twenty-first century, such as censuses and statistical data. These are, for the most part, available online on the website of the Mozambican National Institute of Statistics.2 The methodological challenges posed by these sources will be discussed further in this text. In addition, I am also resorting to legislation on labor and women, information on main economic policies during the colonial period and after independence, as well as ethnographical and anthropological studies. Based on these source materials, I built a dataset on labor relations in Mozambique, which is used as the point of departure for this study.3 The classification of labor relations is based on the "Taxonomy of Labour Relations" (hereafter Taxonomy) developed by the "Global Collaboratory for the History of Labour Relations" (hereafter Global Collaboratory).4 This study aims, therefore, to analyze in comparative perspective the ways in which women and men have changed their engagement with the economy of the country, here broadly defined, and with the world of labor in four main chronological benchmarks (1800, 1900, 1950, 2000). These benchmark years have been chosen to allow us to assess the situation in key moments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely the situation before the European colonization,5 after the development of the colonial economy, and, finally, in the post-independence and post-civil war periods.6 The article is divided into four main sections. I start by discussing the sources used and the challenges they pose to the researcher in terms of chronological and geographical coverage, but also the issues they raise in terms of the criteria of classification of the population employed by the census-takers. This is followed by the presentation of a tentative profile of the Mozambican female population, in relation to the total population. To [End Page 119] do so, I pay attention to a couple of key demographic indicators, namely total population, geographical distribution, functional age groups, gender distribution, and marital status. In the third section of the paper, I offer a preliminary analysis of the participation of women in the Mozambican economy. To this aim, I look at the proportion of women that...

Balancing Subsistence Agriculture and Self-Employment in Small Businesses: Continuity and Change in Women's Labor and Labor Relations in Mozambique, 1800–2000

平衡生存农业和小企业自雇：莫桑比克女性劳动与劳动关系中的连续性与变迁，1800-2000年

Women's Labor Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa and The Global South Compared, 1800–2000 Karin Hofmeester (bio), Karin Pallaver (bio), and Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (bio) ABSTRACT This article places the research findings on women's work and gendered labor relations presented and discussed in this special issue in a broader and comparative perspective. We start by contextualizing and explaining main shifts and continuities in labor relations in sub-Saharan Africa in the last two hundred years. We then compare differences between women's and men's labor experiences and labor relations. To conclude we offer a comparative analysis of the main shifts and continuities in women's labor relations across several countries in the Global South. For this we draw on the case-studies analyzed in this special issue as well as on studies carried out for other African, South Asian and Latin American countries. The aim of this exercise is to show the potential of the "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations" methodology for both intra-African as well as trans-continental comparisons, in particular between countries and regions in the Global South. KEYWORDS gender, women, labor, colonialism, slavery [End Page 152] Introduction The case studies examined in the various articles included in this special issue have shown the potential of the "Taxonomy of Labour Relations" developed by the "Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations" (hereafter Global Collaboratory) at the International Institute of Social History for the study of gendered labor division and labor relations in sub-Saharan African countries. At the same time, they have illuminated the main continuities and shifts in the work performed by women in various African countries as well as the power and social relations they entailed. The final article of this special issue aims to show the potential of the methodology used by the Global Collaboratory both for comparisons between African countries, and for meaningful trans-continental comparisons, in particular between countries located in the Global South, where women's labor experiences and labor relations might have more in common with each other than with those of women in countries in the Global North. To this end, the article will be divided into three main sections. In the first one, we contextualize and explain the developments in labor relations in several sub-Saharan African countries, including those discussed in this special issue. The second section presents a comparative analysis of gendered labor relations in various sub-Saharan African countries. Next, and before our final remarks, we present and discuss a comparative assessment of the development of women's work and labor relations in various countries in the Global South. Labor Relations in Sub-Saharan African Countries (1800–2000) In the first article of this special issue Karin Hofmeester has discussed the persistence of reciprocal labor in sub-Saharan Africa comparatively to other parts of the world. This persistence is evident when we compare the development of labor relations in those sub-Saharan African countries that have so far been included in the analysis of the Global Collaboratory. In this section, we will discuss in a comparative perspective those case studies that, from the point of view of the collection of data, are in a more advanced stage of analysis: Mozambique, Angola, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.1 [End Page 153] The evidence gathered for these case-studies shows that until at least 1900 reciprocal labor remained the dominant type of labor relation in these sub-Saharan African countries. There were however some exceptions. In Mozambique, for example, in 1800 some forty-five percent of the total population worked under reciprocal labor relations, which is lower than the 73 percent on average in the African countries we studied so far (see Figures 1 and 2). The comparison confirms the predominance of reciprocal labor both for the colonial and the post-independence period. During the latter, a sizable share of the population of the countries examined remained engaged in reciprocal labor, amounting to thirty percent or more. However, in some countries such as Tanzania reciprocal labor remained exceptionally high during colonial rule and the post-independence period (see Figures 3 and 4). This was mainly due to a combination of labor...

Abbreviation	Afr. Econ. Hist.
Journal Impact	0.61
Quartiles(Global)	HISTORY(Q1)

ISSN	0145-2258, 2163-9108
h-index	13

Publication Information	Publisher: University of Wisconsin at Madison，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 1999，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:0.00%， Gold OA Rate: 0.00%

African Economic History

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