Droughts, Conflict, and the African Slave Trade

Boxell, Levi (2017): Droughts, Conflict, and the African Slave Trade.

Abstract

Historians have frequently suggested that droughts helped facilitate the African slave trade. By introducing a previously unused dataset on 19th century rainfall levels in Africa, I provide the first empirical answer to this hypothesis. I show that negative rainfall shocks and long-run shifts in the mean level of rainfall increased the number of slaves exported from a given region and may have had a persistent impact on the level of development today. Using geocoded data on 19th century African conflicts, I show that these drought conditions also increased the likelihood of conflict, but only in the slave exporting regions of Africa. I also explore the role of household desperation, the internal African slave market, and disease outbreaks in explaining the negative relationship between droughts and slave exports. I find limited evidence for for these alternative mechanisms, with household desperation having the most empirical support. These results contribute to our understanding of the process of selection into the African slave trade.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: slave trade; conflict; climate; droughts
• Subjects: N - Economic History > N3 - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy > N37 - Africa ; Oceania; N - Economic History > N4 - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation > N47 - Africa ; Oceania; 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 > O15 - Human Resources ; Human Development ; Income Distribution ; Migration; Q - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics ; Environmental and Ecological Economics > Q5 - Environmental Economics > Q54 - Climate ; Natural Disasters and Their Management ; Global Warming

References

Adhvaryu, Achyuta, Namrata Kala, and Anant Nyshadham. 2015. “Booms, Busts, and Household Enterprise: Evidence from Coffee Farmers in Tanzania.” Working Paper.

Barrios, Salvador, Bazoumana Ouattara, and Eric Strobl. 2008. “The Impact of Climatic Change on Agricultural Production: Is it Different for Africa?” Food Policy, 33(4): 287–298.

Behrendt, Stephen, A.J.H. Latham, and David Northrup. 2010. The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader. Oxford University Press.

Brecke, Peter. 1999. “Violent Conflicts 1400 A.D. to the Present in Different Regions of the World.” Paper prepared for the 1999 Meeting of the Peace Science Society (International) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Brooks, George E. 2003. Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. James Currey.

Calderone, Margherita, Jean-Francois Maystadt, and Liangzhi You. 2015. “Local Warming and Violent Conflict in North and South Sudan.” Journal of Economic Geography, 15(3): 649–171.

Candido, Mariana P. 2013. An African Slaving Port in the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland. New York:Cambridge University Press.

Corno, Lucia, and Alessandra Voena. 2015. “Selling Daughters: Age at Marriage, Income Shocks and Bride Price Tradition.” Working Paper.

Crost, Benjamin, Claire Duquennois, Joseph H. Felter, and Daniel I. Rees. 2015. “Climate Change, Agricultural Production and Civil Conflict: Evidence from the Philippines.” Working Paper.

Curtin, Philip D. 1975. Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade. University of Wisconsin Press.

Dalton, John T., and Tin Cheuk Leung. 2014. “Why is Polygyny More Prevalent in Western Africa?: An African Slave Trade Perspective.” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 62(4): 599–632.

Dalton, John T., and Tin Cheuk Leung. 2015a. “Being Bad by Being Good: Captains, Managerial Ability, and the Slave Trade.” Working Paper.

Dalton, John T., and Tin Cheuk Leung. 2015b. “Dispersion and Distortions in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” Journal of International Economics, 96(2): 412–425.

Dias, Jill R. 1981. “Famine and Disease in the History of Angola c. 1830-1930.” The Journal of African History, 22(3): 349–378.

Eltis, David, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert Klein. 1999. “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM.”

Fenske, James, and Namrata Kala. 2015. “Climate and the Slave Trade.” Journal of Development Economics, 112: 19–32.

Fenske, James, and Namrata Kala. 2017. “1807: Economic Shocks, Conflict and the Slave Trade.” Journal of Development Economics, 126: 66–76.

Geggus, David. 1989. “Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records.” The Journal of African History, 30(1): 23– 44.

Greene, William. 2002. “The Bias of the Fixed Effects Estimator in Nonlinear Models.” Working Paper.

Hoogeveen, Johannes, Bas Van Der Klaauw, and Gijsbert Van Lomwel. 2011. “On the Timing of Marriage, Cattle, and Shocks.” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 60(1): 121–154.

Hsiang, Solomon M., Marshall Burke, and Edward Miguel. 2013. “Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict.” Science, 341.

Iyigun, Murat, Nathan Nunn, and Nancy Qian. 2017. “Winter is Coming: The Long- Run Effects of Climate Change on Conflict, 1400-1900.” Working Paper.

Jappelli, Tullio, and Luigi Pistaferri. 2010. “The Consumption Response to Income Changes.” Annual Review of Economics, 2(1): 479–506.

Klein, Herbert S. 1997. “African women in the Atlantic slave trade.” In Women and Slavery in Africa. ed. Claire Robertson and Martin A. Klein, Chapter African Wo.

Kurukulasuriya, Pradeep, and Robert Mendelsohn. 2008. “A Ricardian Analysis of the Impact of Climate Change on African Cropland.” African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 2(1).

Lovejoy, Paul E. 2012. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. New York:Cambridge University Press.

Lovejoy, Paul E., and David Richardson. 1995. “British Abolition and its Impact on Slave Prices Along the Atlantic Coast of Africa, 1783-1850.” Journal of Economic History, 55(1): 98–119.

Mann, Michael E., Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes. 1998. “Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past Six Centuries.” Nature, 392(6995): 779–787.

Mann, Michael E., Zhihua Zhang, Scott Rutherford, Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Drew Shindell, Caspar Ammann, Greg Faluvegi, and Fenbiao Ni. 2009. “Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly.” Science, 326(5957): 1256–1260.

Miller, Joseph C. 1976. Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola. Oxford University Press.

Miller, Joseph C. 1982. “The Significance of Drought, Disease and Famine in the Agriculturally Marginal Zones of West-Central Africa.” Journal of African History, 23(1): 17–61.

Morduch, Jonathan. 1995. “Income Smoothing and Consumption Smoothing.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 9(3): 103–114.

Newitt, Malyn. 1995. A History of Mozambique. C. Hurst & Co.

Nicholson, Sharon E. 1986. “The Spatial Coherence of African Rainfall Anomalies: Interhemispheric Teleconnections.” Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology, 25(10): 1355– 1381.

Nicholson, Sharon E. 2001. “A Semi-Quantitative, Regional Precipitation Data Set for Studying African Climates of the Nineteenth Century, Part I. Overview of the Data Set.” Climatic Change, 50(3): 317–353.

Nicholson, Sharon E., David J. Nash, Brian M. Chase, Sefan W. Grab, Timothy M. Shanahan, Dirk Verschuren, Asfawossen Asrat, Anne-Marie Lezine, and Mohammad Umer. 2013. “Temperature Variability Over Africa During the Last 2000 Years.” The Holocene, 23(8): 1085–1094.

Nunn, Nathan. 2008. “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(1): 139–176.

Nunn, Nathan. 2012. “74th IAES Conference Keynote Address.” 29

Nunn, Nathan, and Diego Puga. 2012. “Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography in Africa.” Review of Economics and Statistics, 94(1): 20–36.

Nunn, Nathan, and Leonard Wantchekon. 2011. “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa.” American Economic Review, 101(7): 3221–3252.

Obikili, Nonso. 2015. “The Impact of the Slave Trade on Literacy in West Africa: Evidence from the Colonial Era.” Journal of African Economies, 25(1): 1–55.

Reyburn, Rita, Deok Ryun Kim, Michael Emch, Ahmed Khatib, Lorenz Von Seidlein, and Mohammad Ali. 2011. “Climate Variability and the Outbreaks of Cholera in Zanzibar, East Africa: A Time Series Analysis.” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 84(6): 862–869.

Rosenzweig, Mark R., and Kenneth I. Wolpin. 1993. “Credit Market Constraints, Consumption Smoothing, and the Accumulation of Durable Production Assets in Low-Income Countries: Investments in Bullocks in India.” Journal of Political Economy, 101(2): 223.

Rosenzweig, Mark R., and Oded Stark. 1989. “Consumption Smoothing, Migration, and Marriage: Evidence from Rural India.” Journal of Political Economy, 97(4): 905.

Sekhri, Sheetal, and Adam Storeygard. 2014. “Dowry Deaths: Response to Weather Variability in India.” Journal of Development Economics, 111: 212–223.

Sparks, Randy. 2014. Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Harvard University Press.

Whatley, Warren. Forthcoming. “The Gun-Slave Cycle in the 18th Century British Slave Trade.” Explorations in Economic History.

Whatley, Warren, and Rob Gillezeau. 2011. “The Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on Ethnic Stratification in Africa.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 101(3): 571–576.

Wooldridge, Jeffrey M. 2002. Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. 1997. A Modern Economic History of Africa. East African Educational Publishers.

Zhou, Guofa, Noboru Minakawa, Andrew K. Githeko, and Guiyun Yan. 2004. “Association Between Climate Variability and Malaria Epidemics in the East African Highlands.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101(8): 2375–2380.