Mon Aug 21 11:23:58 EDT 2006
Published by EH.NET (August 2006)
Gareth Austin, _Labour, Land and Capital: From Slavery to Free Labour
in Asante, 1807-1956_. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press,
2005. xxiv + 589 pp. $75 (hardcover), ISBN: 1-58046-161-1.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Nathan Nunn, Department of Economics,
University of British Columbia.
In recent years, Africa's underdevelopment has been of growing
concern for policy makers, not to mention for those living within
Africa. Despite this, research on Africa remains relatively neglected
by development economists. Instead, research has tended to focus on
India and China. Even more neglected is research on the relationship
between Africa's pre-colonial and colonial history and post-colonial
economic development. Gareth Austin's book fills this void by
providing a detailed analysis of the history of rural Ghana's economy
between 1807 and 1956. This book is a valuable addition to this area
of research.
The book's twenty chapters are organized into seven parts. Part I
(chapters 1 to 4) describes the conceptual framework and historical
context. Part II (chapters 5 to 7) discusses land tenure, labor
institutions, and credit and capital arrangements. Part III
(chapters 8 to 10) analyzes the political economy of slavery and
pawning, the importance of gender and kinship for production, and the
implications these had for welfare and conflict. Part IV (chapters
11 to 13) examines the economy's transition from slavery to cash-crop
farming, describing in detail the British abolition of slavery and
the subsequent use of coerced labor. Parts V and VI (chapters 14 to
19) examine factor markets in the first half of the twentieth
century, during a time when coerced labor was on the decline. The
final part of the book is chapter 20, where the author discusses his
conclusions.
The book seems to be targeted more to historians than to economic
historians or economists. This is illustrated by the fact that in
the introduction the author takes considerable effort to define basic
concepts such as "markets," "factor markets," "property rights," and
"economic rents." Despite this economists and economic historians
will still be interested in many parts of the book. The chapters
that are likely of the most interest to economists, particularly
development and trade economists, are chapters 8 and 13.
In chapter 8, Austin tests whether slavery in Asante was _rational_.
That is, whether it was a profit maximizing response to a scarcity of
labor relative to land. Austin does this by comparing the costs of
free labor to slave labor using data that he assembles in chapter 6.
As the author notes, the analysis of this chapter is the first
empirical comparison of the costs of free labor and slave labor in a
pre-colonial African society.
In chapter 13, Austin examines whether the ending of Asante slavery
can be explained by the rapid specialization in cocoa farming at the
time. Unlike previous studies that test for the effect of
specialization of production on domestic institutions, Austin finds
that economic specialization did not affect the institution of
slavery within Asante. He concludes that the institutional changes
were exogenous to the economic changes occurring at the time. This
chapter adds valuable evidence to our knowledge of the effect of
comparative advantage and specialization of production on domestic
institutions.
Overall, the book provides a rich, well thought out, and well written
analysis of the history of rural Ghana's economy between 1807 and
1956.
Nathan Nunn's publications include "Historical Legacies: A Model
Linking Africa's Past to its Current Underdevelopment," _Journal of
Development Economics_ (forthcoming).
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