Authors:

  • Jeffrey Williamson

Excerpt

An Economic Rationale for the African Scramble: The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1845-1885. Jeffrey Williamson, May 2015, Paper. "This is the first study to present a unified quantitative account of African commodity trade in the long 19th century from the zenith of the Atlantic slave trade (1790s) to the eve of World War II (1939). Drawing evidence from a new dataset on export and import prices, volumes, composition and net barter terms of trade for five African regions, we show that Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a terms of trade boom that was comparable to other parts of the ‘global periphery’ from the late 18th century up to the mid-1880s, with an exceptionally sharp price boom..." Link