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Africa as a Success Story

We argue that pre-modern African institutions, including economic ones, were organized mostly to stop political centralization emerging. In this they were successful, since in 1880 there were probably 20,000 independent polities in Africa. This plausibly had negative economic effects since African societies were not organized to maximize economic growth, but other perfectly rational objectives. Moreover, the small political scale and nature of economic institutions made Africa very vulnerable to exploitation as a consequence of European commercial and colonial expansion. This created a series of path dependent events—such as the slave trade and colonialism, which have impoverished and destabilized the continent.

Working Paper

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