by Africa contains the widest between-country variations in income inequality globally, with the top 10% of the region controlling almost 56% of total income. The roots of many issues underlying this inequality go back to the colonial era. Yet, international development scholars and practitioners are, understandably, often concerned with analysing contemporary challenges in an attempt to solve them. Limited data availability from Africa’s colonial period adds to the difficulty of studying the historical causes of inequality.
Since 2019, the African Long-term Inequality Trends (AFLIT) research network has been collecting data and analysing the colonial origins of current-day inequalities in Africa. AFLIT is centred at the Faculty of Economic History at Lund University but has research partners around the world. The project’s primary methodological approach is the production of social tables to study between-group inequality. A social table is a historical method for estimating income distribution and economic inequality within a society at a specific point in time. It categorises different social groups—elites, middle classes and labourers—based on their estimated population size and average income (see image).
“My background in anthropology and my work with small-scale farmers in Africa have shaped my focus—I really want to include them. They are often left out of historical narratives because they are difficult to track, so it has always been my ambition to make sure they are represented. Some 15 years ago, my former supervisor led a project on exploitation during the colonial era, and that’s where the idea of using social tables came up. I picked up on it, and I’ve been working with it ever since,” Ellen Hillbom, Professor of Economic History at Lund University and coordinator for AFLIT, told DDRN in a recent interview.
AFLIT has produced full social tables for Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and Uganda, with work ongoing for Angola and the other former Portuguese colonies, Malawi, Mauritius, Nigeria, Tanzania (Tanganyika and Zanzibar), Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Research Findings
AFLIT’s main research findings thus far are that:
- income inequality increased in all cases over the study period, roughly between the 1910s to 1960s
- levels of inequality are impacted by the presence of Europeans—and to a lesser degree, Asians—in the wage or agricultural sectors
- there have been unequal opportunities for African groups to profit from commercial opportunities
Professor Hillbom and collaborators lay out these findings in a 2024 paper analysing income inequality and commercialisation using data from the six countries with completed social tables. All studied economies are predominantly agrarian. Colonial mining economies in Africa, such as the Belgian Congo and Zimbabwe, were not part of the study.
A crucial mechanism for increased inequality in the six cases is that colonial powers introduced monetisation and export-oriented commercialisation of agriculture in their occupied territories. By creating markets for agricultural products, colonialism puts a monetary value on such products—meaning that individuals with significant ownership can increase their wealth. This process, in turn, leads to heightened income inequality.
The presence of mainly European expats heavily impacts how the profits from commercialisation are distributed and, therefore, the level of between-group inequality. Non-Africans, where present, secure a large share of the profits either through farming and business or indirectly through higher salaries. More opportunities were available for African groups to benefit from export sectors when non-Africans were less prevalent. In such cases, the inequality between African classes is higher.
The paper also finds evidence that inequality is higher in colonial economies exporting more capital-intensive agricultural commodities such as livestock because of the higher barrier of entry into the export sector.
Botswana: A Case in Point
“Take Botswana, for example: even before colonial rule, there were significant differences in how many cattle people owned. But because there was no export market to sell them to, that wealth did not translate into monetary income, which means it didn’t show up as income inequality. Colonial capitalism changed that,” Professor Hillbom said.
Colonial Botswana is Professor Hillbom’s primary area of expertise. It was a research collaboration starting in 2012 with Jutta Bolt, currently Professor of Global Economic History at the University of Groningen, to produce social tables for the country that eventually sparked the idea of establishing a research network to study income inequality during the colonial period across Africa.
Botswana is a case that strongly illustrates AFLIT’s findings. Studies show that the nature of chieftainship in Botswana changed under colonialism in the sense that the social contract between ruler and subject was no longer just about patronage but a capitalist class relationship through which chiefly families could build personal wealth, creating new income inequalities. After 1930, the British started to develop Botswana’s cattle export industry. In the absence of significant amounts of white settlers, the large-scale cattle-owning African elite could use its economic advantage to dominate the growing sector.
While large-scale herders grew their wealth by participating in colonial trade, the colonial economy pushed the lower African classes into poverty. Botswana’s original role in the British imperial economy was to act as a labour reserve for the mineral industry in the neighbouring Union of South Africa. Britain and South Africa implemented a series of taxes and other policies suppressing producers. Such taxes pressured local Botswana chiefs to send their subjects to work in the mines to earn a wage used to pay the colonial taxes. With thousands of men migrating to work in South Africa, most societies in Botswana lost their economic self-sufficiency, impoverishing and transforming them into communities defined by the supply of cheap labour. As a result, wealth inequality between the lower classes and the elites had increased by the time Botswana achieved independence—75% of Botswana’s total cattle herd was in the hands of 15% of the population.
Botswana is today an upper-middle-income country. The nation’s population has also seen living standards rise dramatically thanks to the redistribution of profits from its vast diamond reserves. Yet, Botswana remains one of the world’s most unequal countries, with the same elite group of large-scale cattle owners dominating the political landscape until the Botswana Democratic Party’s (BDP) unexpected defeat—the first in its history—in the 2024 elections.
The Significance of Historical Perspectives for Development
Understanding the historical roots of present-day development challenges is crucial for formulating strategies and policies to combat such issues. Professor Hillbom believes that studying international development and economic history go hand-in-hand, although the fields remain significantly divided. She explains: “I think that these two subjects go really well together, but I also understand that development studies are very present-focused for natural reasons, that there are a whole lot of challenges today, and having this historical research maybe isn’t something that is necessarily prioritised at African universities.“
On the other hand, Professor Hillbom notes that most economic-historical investigations are done on Global North cases since the majority of research is being conducted in Global North nations by individuals from those countries. “You could fill libraries with [research on the] British industrialisation, whereas there are comparatively few researchers working on the economic history for Africa, Asia and Latin America. But I think it’s growing. There is a growing interest in the economic history of the world outside Europe and North America,” she said.
This trend is highlighted not least by the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize winners in economics, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson. They argue that different types of European colonialism have determined which institutions—inclusive or extractive—form in a particular territory. In each instance, over time, minor variations in inherited institutions interact with critical junctures, leading to growing economic divergence. How Europe colonised the United States differs from Botswana, for example. The authors have popularised their thesis in the book Why Nations Fail.
The argument is far from perfect. It has been criticised for being Eurocentric in how it describes development and for ignoring that “inclusive” institutions are also a legacy of extractive colonialism, such as slavery in the US. Nonetheless, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson deserve credit for reintroducing the developmental impacts of colonialism through institutions into the mainstream.
AFLIT’s research is based on detailed statistical studies of individual cases, while the works of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson aim to produce a general theory of inequality applicable across contexts and continents. Both approaches, however, seek to show how historical developments matter for current-day inequality in Africa and the wider world. Professor Hillbom emphasises that AFLIT’s next phase is “to get our calculations accepted by other major inequality research groups so that they show up in their networks and get cited and used to a greater extent”. The causes of inequality are global in scope. They can only be understood with insights from all regions.
Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONIMCS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT
