Does land abundance explain African institutions?

Fenske, James (2011): Does land abundance explain African institutions?

Abstract

The land abundance view of African history uses factor endowments to explain patterns of land rights and slavery before colonial rule. Population density and institutional outcomes have, however, been jointly shaped by the same geographic forcing variables. In a cross section of global societies, I find that historic land rights, slavery, and population density are each predicted by environmental features such as land quality and terrain ruggedness. I discuss whether these patterns support particular theories of land rights and slavery, and whether there is evidence for institutional persistence in the present.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Land tenure; slavery; polygyny; states; Africa
• Subjects: N - Economic History > N5 - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment, and Extractive Industries > N57 - Africa ; Oceania; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O1 - Economic Development > O10 - General

References

Acemoglu, D., Cantoni, D., Johnson, S., and Robinson, J. A. (2009). The consequences of radical reform: The French Revolution. Working Paper.

Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., and Robinson, J. (2005). The rise of Europe: Atlantic trade, institutional change, and economic growth. American Economic Review, 95(3):546{579.

Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., and Robinson, J. A. (2001). The colonial origins of comparative development: An empirical investigation. The American Economic Review, 91(5):1369{ 1401.

Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., and Robinson, J. A. (2003). An African Success Story: Botswana. In Search of Prosperity: Analytical Narratives on Economic Growth. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Adjuik, M., Bagayoko, M., Binka, F., Coetzee, M., Cox, J., Craig, M., Deichman, U., deSavigny, F. E. D., Fraser, C., and Gouws, E. (1998). Towards an atlas of malaria risk in Africa: First technical report of the Mapping Malaria Risk in Africa collaboration. MARA/ARMA, Durban.

Agiri, B. (1974). Aspects of socio-economic changes among the Awori Egba and Ijebu Remo communities during the nineteenth century. Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 7(3):465{483.

Agiri, B. (1981). Slavery in Yoruba Society in the 19th century, pages 123{148. The Ideology of Slavery in Africa. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills.

Ajayi, J. F. A. and Smith, R. (1964). Yoruba warfare in the nineteenth century.

Ajisafe, A. K. (1964 [1924]). History of Abeokuta. Fola Bookshops, Abeokuta.

Altonji, J., Elder, T., and Taber, C. (2005). Selection on observable and unobservable variables: Assessing the eectiveness of Catholic schools. Journal of Political Economy, 113(1):151{184.

Austin, G. (2004a). Markets with, without, and in spite of states: West Africa in the pre-colonial nineteenth century. Working Paper.

Austin, G. (2004b). Sub-Saharan Africa: land rights and ethno-national consciousness in historically land abundant economies, pages 276{293. Land Rights, Ethno-nationality and Sovereignty in History. Routledge, London.

Austin, G. (2005). Labour, land, and capital in Ghana: from slavery to free labour in Asante, 1807-1956. University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY.

Austin, G. (2008a). Resources, techniques, and strategies south of the Sahara: revising the factor endowments perspective on African economic development, 1500-2001. The Economic History Review, 61(3):587{624.

Austin, G. (2008b). The \reversal of fortune" thesis and the compression of history: Perspectives from African and comparative economic history. Journal of International Devel- opment, 20(8):996{1027.

Austin, G. (2009a). Coercion and markets: Integrating economic and social explanations of slavery in precolonial West Africa, c. 1450-1900. Paper Presented at the World Economic History Congress, Utrecht.

Austin, G. (2009b). Factor markets in Nieboer conditions: Pre-colonial West Africa, c. 1500-c. 1900. Continuity and Change, 24(01):23{53.

Banerjee, A. and Iyer, L. (2005). History, institutions, and economic performance: The legacy of colonial land tenure systems in India. American Economic Review, 95(4):1190{ 1213.

Berry, S. (1988). Property rights and rural resource management: The case of tree crops in West Africa. Cahier des sciences humaines, 24(1):3{16.

Bertocchi, G. and Canova, F. (2002). Did colonization matter for growth? An empirical exploration into the historical causes of Africa's underdevelopment. European Economic Review, 46(10):1851{1871.

Besley, T. (1995). Property rights and investment incentives: Theory and evidence from Ghana. Journal of Political Economy, 103(5):903{37.

Biobaku, S. O. (1952). An historical sketch of Egba traditional authorities. Africa, 22(1):35{ 49.

Bloom, D. E. and Sachs, J. D. (1998). Geography, demography, and economic growth in Africa. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1998(2):207{295.

Bowen, T. J. (1857). Central Africa: Adventures and missionary labors in several countries in the interior of Africa, from 1849 to 1856. Sheldon, Blakeman, New York.

Bubb, R. (2009). States, law, and property rights in West Africa. Working Paper.

Burton, R. F. (1863). Abeokuta and the Cameroons Mountains: An exploration. Tinsley Brothers, London.

Byeld, J. (1996). Women, marriage, divorce and the emerging colonial state in Abeokuta (Nigeria) 1892-1904. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 30(1):32{51.

Champness, E. M. (1907). The life-story of Thomas Champness. C. H. Kelly.

Chandler, T. and Fox, G. (1974). 3000 years of urban growth. Academic Press.

Collier, P. and Gunning, J. W. (1999a). Explaining African economic performance. Journal of Economic Literature, 37(1):64{111.

Collier, P. and Gunning, J. W. (1999b). Why has Africa grown slowly? The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 13(3):3{22.

Dell, M. (2009). The persistent eects of Peru's mining Mita. Working Paper.

Dowd, J. (1917). Slavery and the slave trade in Africa. Journal of Negro History, 2(1):1{20.

Easterly, W. and Levine, R. (2003). Tropics, germs, and crops: How endowments in uence economic development. Journal of Monetary Economics, 50(1):3{39.

Engerman, S. L. and Sokolo, K. L. (1997). Factor endowments, institutions, and dierential paths of growth among new world economies, pages 260{304. How Latin America Fell Behind. Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914. Stanford University Press.

Fage, J. D. (1969). Slavery and the slave trade in the context of West African history. Journal of African History, 10(3):393{404.

Fenoaltea, S. (1975). The rise and fall of a theoretical model: The manorial system. Journal of Economic History, 35(2):386{409.

Fenoaltea, S. (1984). Slavery and supervision in comparative perspective: A model. The Journal of Economic History, 44(3):635{668.

Fischer, G., Shah, M., Velthuizen, H., and Nachtergaele, F. O. (2002). Global Agro-Ecological Assessment for Agriculture in the 21st Century: Methodology and results. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis/Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Laxenburg and Rome.

Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L. (1974). Time on the cross: The economics of American Negro slavery. Little, Brown and Company, Boston.

Gallup, J. L. and Sachs, J. D. (2001). The economic burden of malaria. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 64(1,2):85{96.

Gennaioli, N. and Rainer, I. (2007). The modern impact of precolonial centralization in Africa. Journal of Economic Growth, 12(3):185{234.

Goody, J. (1969). Inheritance, property, and marriage in Africa and Eurasia. Sociology, 3(1):55{76.

Goody, J. (1980). Slavery in time and space, pages 16{42. Asian and African Systems of Slavery. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Gordon, R. G. and Grimes, B. F. (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world. SIL International, Dallas, TX.

Greif, A. (2006). Institutions and the path to the modern economy: Lessons from medieval trade. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Grindal, B. T. (1972). An ethnographic classication of the Sisala of northern Ghana. Ethnology, 11(4):409{424.

Hagos, F. and Holden, S. (2006). Tenure security, resource poverty, public programs, and household plot-level conservation investments in the highlands of northern ethiopia. Agri- cultural Economics, 34(2):183{196.

Hanes, C. (1996). Turnover cost and the distribution of slave labor in Anglo-America. The Journal of Economic History, 56(2):307{329.

Hartwig, G. W. (1979). Changing forms of servitude among the Kerebe of Tanzania, pages 261{287. Slavery in Africa: historical and anthropological perspectives. University of Wisconsin Press.

Herbst, J. (2000). States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton University Press.

Hill, P. (1985). Comparative West African Farm-slavery Systems, volume 2 of Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, pages 33{50. Frank Cass, London. Hopkins, A. G. (1973). An economic history of West Africa. Columbia University Press, New York.

Ilie, J. (1995). Africans: the history of a continent. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Inikori, J. E. (1999). Slaves or Serfs? A Comparative Study of Slavery and Serfdom in Europe and Africa, pages 49{75. The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Indiana Univ Press.

Isaacman, A., Stephen, M., Adam, Y., Homen, M. J., Macamo, E., and Pililao, A. (1980). \Cotton is the mother of poverty": Peasant resistance to forced cotton production in Mozambique, 1938-1961. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 13(4):581{ 615.

Kjekshus, H. (1977). Ecology control and economic development in East African history. University of California Press.

Kopyto, I. (1987). The internal African frontier: The making of African political culture, pages 3{84. The African frontier: The reproduction of traditional African societies. Indiana University Press.

Kopyto, I. and Miers, S. (1977). African `slavery' as an institution of marginality. Slavery in Africa: historical and anthropological perspectives, pages 3{81.

Lagerl�of, N. P. (2009). Slavery and other property rights. Review of Economic Studies, 76(1):319{342.

Law, R. (1995). From Slave Trade to \Legitimate" Commerce. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

LeSage, J. P. and Pace, R. K. (2009). Introduction to spatial econometrics. CRC Press.

Losi, J. B. O. (1924). History of Abeokuta. Bosere Press, Lagos, Nigeria.

Lovejoy, P. E. (1978). Plantations in the economy of the Sokoto Caliphate. Journal of African History, pages 341{368.

Lovejoy, P. E. (2000). Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge University Press.

Lynn, M. (1997). Commerce and economic change in West Africa: The palm oil trade in the nineteenth century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Mabogunje, A. L. (1961). Some comments on land tenure in Egba Division, western Nigeria. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 31(3):258{269.

Maddox, G. (2006). Sub-Saharan Africa: An Environmental History. Abc-Clio Inc.

Mahadi, A. and Inikori, J. E. (1987). Population and capitalist development in precolonial West Africa: Kasar Kano in the nineteenth century, pages 62{73. African Population and Capitalism: Historical Perspectives. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin.

Mann, K. (2007). Slavery and the birth of an african city: Lagos, 1760-1900.

McCann, J. (1999). Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800-1990. Heinemann.

Miers, S. and Klein, M. A. (1998). Introduction. Slavery & Abolition, 19(2):1{15.

Murdock, G. P. (1959). Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History. McGraw-Hill.

Murdock, G. P. (1967). Ethnographic atlas. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Nelson, A. and Deichmann, U. (2004). African Population Database Version 4. United Nations Environment Programme, Sioux Falls, SD, USA.

North, D. C. (1991). Institutions. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1):97{112.

North, D. C. and Thomas, R. P. (1971). The rise and fall of the manorial system: A theoretical model. The Journal of Economic History, 31(4):777{803.

North, D. C. and Weingast, B. R. (1989). Constitutions and commitment: The evolution of institutional governing public choice in seventeenth-century England. Journal of Economic History, 49(4):803{832.

Northrup, D. (1979). Nineteenth-century patterns of slavery and economic growth in southeastern Nigeria. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 12(1):1{16.

Nunn, N. (2008). The long-term eects of Africa's slave trades. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1):139{176.

Nunn, N. (2009). The importance of history for economic development. Annual Review of Economics, 1(1):1{28.

Nunn, N. and Puga, D. (2007). Ruggedness: The blessing of bad geography in Africa. Working Paper.

Oroge, E. A. (1971). The institution of slavery in Yorubaland with particular reference to the nineteenth century.

Oroge, E. A. (1975). The fugitive slave question in Anglo-Egba relations 1861-1886. Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 8(1):61{80.

Pallinder-Law, A. (1973). Government in Abe.okuta, 1830-1914, with Special Reference to the E.gba United Government, 1898-1914. sn].

Poirier, D. J. (1980). Partial observability in bivariate probit models. Journal of Economet- rics, 12(2):209{217.

Price, G. N. (2003). Economic growth in a cross-section of nonindustrial countries: Does colonial heritage matter for Africa? Review of Development Economics, 7:478{495.

Roberts, R. and Miers, S. (1988). The end of slavery in Africa, pages 3{68. The end of slavery in Africa. University of Wisconsin Press.

Rodney, W. (1966). African slavery and other forms of social oppression on the Upper Guinea coast in the context of the Atlantic slave-trade. Journal of African History, 7(3):431{443.

Ryder, A. F. C. (1965). A reconsideration of the Ife-Benin relationship. Journal of African History, 6(1):25{37.

Sappington, J. M., Longshore, K. M., and Thompson, D. B. (2007). Quantifying landscape ruggedness for animal habitat analysis: A case study using bighorn sheep in the mojave desert. Journal of Wildlife Management, 71(5):1419{1426.

Spear, T. T. (1997). Mountain farmers: Moral economies of land and agricultural develop- ment in Arusha and Meru. James Currey; University of California Press, Oxford; Berkeley, Calif.

Tambiah, S. J. and Goody, J. (1973). Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Tertilt, M. (2005). Polygyny, fertility, and savings. Journal of Political Economy, 113(6):1341{1371.

The Author (2010). Land abundance and economic institutions: Egba land and slavery, 1830-1914. Working Paper.

Thornton, J. (1992). Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680. Cambridge University Press.

Uchendu, V. C. (1979). Slaves and slavery in Iboland, Nigeria, pages 121{132. Slavery in Africa: historical and anthropological perspectives. University of Wisconsin Press.

Wagner, G. (1949). The Bantu of western Kenya. With special reference to the Vugusu and Logoli. Oxford University Press, London.

Watson, J. L. (1980). Introduction: Slavery as an institution, open and closed systems, pages 1{15. Asian and African systems of slavery. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Webb, J. L. A. (1995). Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change Along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850. University of Wisconsin Press.

Wint, W. and Rogers, D. (2000). Predicted distributions of tsetse in Africa. Report and data- base prepared by Environmental Research Group Oxford Ltd and TALA Research Group.