Is the slave trade responsible for African underdevelopment?
A paper by Nathan Nunn argues that it is:
Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development.It would be strange if the slave trade didn't have some effect on the current development status of Africa. The slave trade only ended in the early to mid 19th century. However, as I previously noted,
[T]he estimates arrived at here make it clear that for most of the first two centuries of the modern era, nearly as many Europeans were forcibly taken to Barbary and worked or sold as slaves as were West Africans hauled off to labor on plantations in the Americas.Yet the European experience of slavery hasn't left it underdeveloped.
Or has it? The two European countries most affected by the Barbary slave trade were Italy and Spain, both of which were, until relatively recently, underdeveloped economically compared to the rest of Western Europe.
Within the memory of many alive now, Germany and Japan were essentially obliterated, and yet the two countries are among the wealthiest on earth. The Germans and Japanese obviously have what it takes to overcome such devastation, namely work ethic, high IQs, and good governmental and social institutions.
The Africans would seem to lack what it takes to overcome their legacy of the slave trade. Or so at least I conclude.
posted by Dennis Mangan @ 7:22 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance.
It is perhaps time to hum the mantra Correlation is not causation.
It could be that lower IQ in those areas leads the people to be less concerned about slavery and more accepting of people among them helping slavers grab people ...
I wouldn't say that Italy was underdeveloped economically compared to the rest of Europe until relatively recent times. It was ahead of the continent in finance during the Renaissance. But it was not a united state when many where, and they suffered for it in the long run as nation states like France began to consolidate. France and Spain(with parts of Italy were basically colonies of France and Spain)and to a lesser extent the Papacy ran Italy.
You could also say that Italy just peaked earlier with the Romans, who in my opinion, were organized, warlike, ruthless and expansionist, innovative, all very un-italian traits.
Oddly enough (or not oddly enough) the most productive, economically advanced, industrial and wealthiest parts of Italy in recent times were up north, closest to the Swiss, Austrians and Germans.
I'd also say that the Mongol yoke severly stunted the Russians, politically and economically.
Technology lag, accumulated over a millennium, is what made Africa vulnerable to the slave trade. Forced exportation of human capital was predictable, given the labor demand in other accessible locales. It was more viable to capture and sell tribal competitors, to gain technology, rather than to kill them outright for the marginal opportunity of not starving or being eaten.
So how do we explain the backwardness of the Americas and Australia on first Europeon contact?
Likewise, how do we account for China's relatively advanced situation despite a long history of slavery etc?
Dennis,
I've just kicked off reading Adam Hochschild's 'King Leopold's Ghost'.
Africans have been selling other Africans long before the caravels sailed over the horizon. Nothing to do with Honkey.
However, what the Germans and the Japanese have which the Africans (and the British...and, at the moment, the Americans, sadly) lack is a concept best described in, perhaps unsurprisingly, German - that of 'Schwerpunkt, the ability and desire to work together to a common goal.
IQ might not be necessarily as important as nationalism - provided the smart guys are leading the nations.
Hidden variable time! It may be that some characteristic of populations in certain areas of Africa made them more vulnerable to slavers in the old days and leaves them less adept at economic development today. Perhaps the g-factor?
Can't remember the details but somebody wrote a paper which came to pretty much the opposite conclusion, though it dealt with colonisation rather than slavery). It showed that the degree of European colonisation and economic development were positively correlated. So what one loses with loses slavery can be made up with by technology transfer and other forms of trade.
There are some major differences between the plight of Africa during it's slave trade and the plight of the Europeans suffering from slavery as well.
The Atlantic slave trade, once it established a grip on the African continent, became the continents economic backbone. Slaves were being exported in huge numbers from areas that were already suffering from labor/population shortages. Slaves were traded mostly for booze, guns, textiles, cloth (which was mainly from western regions of Africa) and cowries (in other words, relatively useless items). In addition to this, raw goods production nearly halted during the 400 year period of the Atlantic trade.
With a dwindling population, interethnic tensions at a high (due to slave raiding and interracial wars, many of which were incited by Europeans to produce more war captives to be sold as slaves,), corrupt and powerful merchant kings, and the entire economy revolving around the slave trade, Africa was in though shape at the time of the abolition of the trade.
With no one to sell slaves to a crisis of the aristocracy developed and kings began to lose power and the economy of the slaving regions was decimated. Soon after this the Empires of Europe set their sights on actually owning this land.
Merchants and disease had previously kept out colonists from Europe, but with advancement in medical technology and the dissolution of powerful merchant states, Africa was ripe for conquest.
Ethnic tensions had become very pronounced by the slave trade, and at the time of the partition of Africa many inter-tribal conflicts were raging. To make matters worse for all, the partition struck boundaries at the whim of European leaders, with no regard for the ethnicities of the people actually living there. Many times ethnic groups would be split in half along colonial rule and even lumped together with rival tribes.
Is it any surprise that Africans today have failed to establish any sort of national unity amongst themselves? Decolonization left them poor, short on manpower and ethnically divided. Infection, corruption and unjust international trade laws have kept this continent in exactly the same depressed state that it was left in as a direct result of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Steven Sabo
PS
Sorry for such a long post!
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