From Dani Rodrik:
The slave trade, whereby able-bodied Africans were shipped to other parts of the world and sold into slavery, was a despicable economic institution for sure. But did it also have long-run effects on the economic development of African countries? Yes, is the surprising answer of Nathan Nunn (pdf link):
I construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa, in each century between 1400 and 1900. The estimates are constructed by combining data from ship records on the number of slaves shipped from each African port or region with data from a variety of historical documents that report the ethnic identities of slaves that were shipped from Africa. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from each country and subsequent economic performance. The African countries that are the poorest today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken.
Nunn is careful to try to rule out reverse causation: he finds that the regions from which slaves were taken were, if anything, the more developed parts of Africa at the time.
The most likely explanation for the result? “[The] procurement of slaves through internal warfare, raiding, and kidnapping resulted in subsequent state collapse and ethnic fractionalization.”
There’s some interesting discussion in the comments there, too.
As an historian of Africa, I feel ambivalent about the paper. I have no argument with the basic point, that the trans-Atlantic slave trade (and to a lesser extent the trans-Saharan and Red Sea trades), along with the internal slave trades that developed in tandem, has had horrible long-term effects.But Nunn depends on too many simplistic, easily quantifiable metrics. It’s a terrible mistake to use twentieth-century ethnic categories to describe earlier periods. Assuming that those categories can be easily mapped is even worse. (Depending on Murdock’s work from the 1950s is yet worse!) Moreover, late 19th and 20th century history is important and can’t be boiled down to a few indicators. I think the basic point holds, but the details matter a lot. It’s fair enough to say that Africa was impoverished by the slave trade, but understanding Niger’s poverty requires knowing a lot more about the region’s history.
Thanks for your comment.
I agree with you that the data is faaaaaar from rock-solid. Data about large-scale history like this is always full of doubts; the data is strong enough to fuel informed speculation, imo, but not to prove a case one way or the other. In this case, I wouldn’t say the case is proved (or even that it can be proved), but I think the connection he’s arguing for is both intriguing and plausible.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I don’t think Nunn’s saying that history can “be boiled down to a few indicators”; rather, I think the argument is that the historic scale of the slave trade is a significant factor influencing current economic outcomes. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of other significant factors which are also influencing the current state of affairs.
My understanding was that fear of being taken for slavery directly caused many groups to fracture & flee their original locations & adopt different means of life, which in turn caused an immediate crash in development and standard of living and all that jazz. It’s one reason why the anthropological study of groups in the region is even mor ecomplicated than it would be otherwise; a lot of our data about early behavior in those regions, which early anthopologists took for being behaviors people had indulged in for millenia (since they had an incorrect concept of non-western cultures as being immutable), was in fact extremely recent coping behavior for cultures in crisis. Similar problems exist in the study of Native American cultures.
Interestingly, one of the theories I have seen advanced to explain economic regression in many areas of the world is the absence of social trust. In the West, cultural values and elaborate institutions have evolved that make it relatively easy for strangers to do business together. I don’t have a large business, and I regularly make deals worth five or six figures with people who I’ve met only through e-mail or brief telephone conversations; our society is set up to encourage that, by providing safety nets and methods by which people who don’t know one another can nonetheless establish sufficient trust to start a business relationship.
In Africa it doesn’t work that way. Pretty much the only contractual relationships that can be relied upon are those made with family or clan members, where the mechanisms of the family can force compliance with terms or honesty in dealing. This is a benefit in terms of trust; Uncle Ivan is probably a better risk than some guy I just met in Florida. But it’s a net detriment for the society, because the number of existing trust relationships is much smaller. I only have one Uncle Ivan; if he isn’t interested in the kind of business I want to do, I’m out of luck.
The theory blames the institutions, and by extension the colonial history, of Africa and similar locales, for this situation. But perhaps the actual answer lies closer to the individual level; when in historical time the people across the hill sold your lot as slaves, it’s much more difficult to be open to the idea of institutions that can build social trust between ‘stranger’ groups, and much more natural to trust Uncle Ivan only. The faction/fractionalization caused by slavery might well have semi-permanently undermined public openness to the larger, more abstract, social trust arrangements.