Economic History
Authors: Frankema Ewout 
Published: February 2021

The study of Africa’s economic past has experienced phases of growth and decline. In the 1960s to 1980s scholarly interest in African economic history surged. Major themes, such as slavery and the slave trades, agricultural development, colonial economic policy, demography, poverty, and growth and structural change, invited discussion and sometimes heated debate. Dependency and Marxist perspectives dominated the literature of the 1970s and 1980s and the influential “formalist-substantivist” debate within economic anthropology addressed the validity of Western, capitalist models of rational economic behavior to study non-Western or non-capitalist societies. The early literature did much to recover the making by Africans of their own economic histories, including in internal trade (and commodity currencies) before colonial rule, and in researching the initiative/agency of Africans in expanding agricultural production for the market, especially in West Africa from “legitimate commerce” onward. It also laid the foundation for quantitative approaches, which are currently expanding in many directions. Growing numbers of historians from Africa, Europe, and North America inspired the foundation, in 1974, of the field journal African Economic History, published by the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin. In the 1990s the field coped with diminishing interest, and Marxist perspectives lost terrain. Many of the leading scholars of the “first generation” retired or branched off into other emerging fields, such as global history. Historians in the United States turned their backs on number-crunching economic historians. The field may also have suffered from rising pessimism concerning Africa’s economic future. Whatever the causes, the fading attention given to African economic history occurred at a time when Africans themselves were overcoming a period of intensive political and economic distress (see Hopkins 2009, cited under The “New” African Economic History). The foundation of the African Economic History Network in 2011 marked a renaissance within African economic history that became evident in the late 2000s. Scholars of The “New” African Economic History developed new quantitative and comparative approaches, using new data sources. They tended to make lesser use though of anthropological approaches and the rich ethnographic literature of Africa than earlier scholarship had done. Methodologically, the field saw a divide between scholars who combine the qualitative and quantitative approaches common in economic history and a new branch—often referred to as “historical economics”—that leans strongly toward the methods of applied economics, with an increasing emphasis on “causal identification.” Chances that the current wave of interest in the economic past of Africa will wither away again appear much lower these days. International development agencies are focusing increasingly on sub-Saharan Africa as the front line in their fight against global poverty. Climate change, demographic growth, Africa’s “green revolution,” new trade agreements (e.g., the African Continental Free Trade Area [AfCFTA]), and the shifting gravity centers of the global economy in general all forge a broad public interest in the long-term dynamics of African economies. Moreover, contrary to the 1990s, renewed optimism has emerged regarding the opportunities of African economies to outgrow poverty. This article focuses mainly, though not exclusively, on the work produced by economic historians, most of whom are united in the African Economic History Network (AEHN), that can be associated with The “New” African Economic History. This bibliography gives little attention to North Africa, but it does include some key references on the economic history of South Africa.