Workshop on climate, geography and African economic history

This week I attended an ERSA economic history workshop and want to briefly report just how interesting it was.The theme was climate, geography and African economic history and there were a number of interesting papers.

James Fenske (in a paper with Namrata Kala) spoke about climate and the slave trade. They examine the influence of African factors on the supply of slaves, specifically environmental shocks. They have port-level data for the transatlantic slave trade as well as temperature, climate and climate shocks. Places that were cooler had higher productivity, lower mortality and more slavery (than warmer regions that typically had more tse tse flies and malaria). In warmer (drier) years these places experienced climate shocks that increased the cost of slavery and reduced the supply of slaves. They then go on to link this to modern development outcomes using light density at night to proxy for economic activity. The areas around the ports that received cold temperature shocks at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade are poorer today! In other words, their better agricultural productivity could not make up for the fact that they lost more people to slavery and had the institutions that made them lose people to slavery. Check out James' web site for the paper, slides and a link to a Vox.EU post. The paper is also a great example of thorough work. It controls for everything and checks robustness from every angle.

Ed Kerby also presented interesting work in the Kenyan railways from a paper with Remi Jedwab and Alex Moradi.The full title is History, path dependence and development: Evidence from colonial railroads, settlers and cities in Kenya. Their focus is on urban emergence, persistence and optimality using the exogenous placement of the so-called "lunatic line" as a natural experiment. The analysis shows that colonial railroads causally determined the location of European settlers, which in turn decided the location of the main cities of the country at independence. Railroads declined and settlers left after independence, yet cities persisted. The paper has some really interesting data and use of "placebo lines" to test the robustness of the results. It is well worth the read if you are interested in economic geography and economic history.

Alfonso Herranz-Loncan and Johan Fourie also presented some first-round work on the social savings of the South African railways. It is a paper to look forward to as we talk about modern day extension of infrastructure in South Africa.

And there were some other interesting papers on local labour markets, on settlement patterns and on climate change in Africa. All round a big success (the people + the Noordhoek venue + the visit to the District 6 museum). A special word of thanks is due to ERSA and Johan Fourie for making the workshop possible.

History and GIS

This week I am at an ERSA organised workshop on the use of geographical information systems (GIS) in the analysis of economic history. For the occasion Johan Fourie brought out Alex Moradi of Sussex University and after the first afternoon there are already some interesting points to write about.

Alex explained that historical GIS is about structuring, mapping and analysing geographies of the past. It is a way of interrelating information from different sources - some of it spatial. GIS software can be used as a database management tool (layers are key), for analysing data (clustering, spatial autocorrelation) and visualising finished products (make your own maps). We will be learning more about that tomorrow.

For someone who is interested in geographical economics I found Alex's borders example interesting. Geography, like altitude or latitude variables are not really used as an explanatory variables, but rather as a way to help identify differences or discontinuities. I look forward to his inputs on our research ideas.

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Historical perspectives from Stellenbosch

It has gone quiet on this blog since the end of my research leave in June, but this week I am at the World Economic History Congress and I am finding lots of inspiration for blogs.

The theme of this year's congress is The roots of development and the first session featured James Robinson (of Why nations fail-fame) on the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Colonialism had heterogeneous effects depending on interactions with the density of indigeneous peoples, the disease environment etc. He played up the insitutions angle looking at three types of colonies: those that had some kind of polity before the scramble for Africa, those that received large numbers of white settlers and the others, and imaged what things would have looked like if there were no colonialisation. It is a longer story, but with trade, aid and the cold war kept constant he concluded that colonialisation did not benefit development in Africa (he had a whole example of the problems of indirect rule in Sierra Leone).

The presentation did not mention the new Easterly and Levine paper on the European origins of economic development, discussed here by Johan Fourie. I also wonder about those colonies that had some kind of polity and are a key part of the counterfactual - Lesotho, Swaziland, Rwanda are all small and relatively homogeneous. What role for geography in this story?

The afternoon also had some interesting papers and I attended the session on the Maddison project where issues of measurement and data collection were discussed. It is clear that economic historians have key contributions to make to current debates about, growth, development and inequality.

Stay tuned for more, I am here for the whole week.

 

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Posts that I liked

I recently came across pages and posts that I quickly want to share:

• Future Cape Town has a new web page. Lots of news and views for someone who is interested in cities.
• I'm still looking for something similar for Joburg. If you know about anyone writing about Johannesburg from a urban economics, geography, even town planning perspective, please send in a comment and a link. In the meantime I have come across a nice blog arguing that Joburg rocks!
• Finally, it is not a geography story, but I enjoyed Johan Fourie's latest post on economic history, his study of the 18th century Cape Colony and what it means for the colonisation of Mars. Private space flight is in the news, Voyager is heading into interstellar space and one day we might have companies out on Mars!

Enjoy.