The Cash Crop Revolution, Colonialism and Legacies of Spatial Inequality: Evidence from Africa

Philip Roessler, Yannick I Pengi, Robert Marty, Kyle Sorlie Titlow and Nicolas Van de Walle

No 2020-12, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: We analyze the long-term effects of colonial cash crop extraction in Africa. Our concep¬tual framework focuses on the dynamic, interactive effects of geography, trade and colonial¬ism in the context of Africa’s structural change from the slave trades to export agriculture. The adoption of cash crops shifted the loci of economic production to smallholder farmers in areas suitable for cultivation. Concurrently, the cash crop revolution—tied to European industrialization—led to the diffusion of economic imperialism beyond coastal Africa. Imperial extractive economies fueled infrastructural development in highly-suitable zones but dislocated production linkages to Europe and stymied the economic differentiation that otherwise might have occurred. The result was economic agglomeration at the site of production but with limited spillovers to nearby areas. Using agro-climatic suitability scores and historical data on the source location of more than 95 percent of all exports across 38 African states, we find that colonial cash crop production exhibited a large and positive long-run effect on local development in terms of urbanization, road infrastructure, nighttime luminosity and house¬hold wealth. These effects rival or surpass other geographic and historical forces frequently linked to subnational development in Africa. Exploring causal mechanisms, we show that path dependence due to colonial infrastructure investments is the more important channel than continued advantages in agricultural productivity. We also find that the positive local effects of colonial cash crop extraction came at the expense of surrounding areas and thereby entrenched deep spatial inequalities.

Keywords: agriculture; colonialism; spatial inequality; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F63 N57 O13 O18 Q17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-evo, nep-his and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f1ca642c-0f89-43c2-ac2c-09d2b3b5b393 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2020-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().