Africa's Development in Historical Perspective ed. by Emmanuel Akyeampong et al. (review)

Africa's Development in Historical Perspective presents sixteen selected papers from a 2010 conference in Accra meant to tap the policy potential of situating Africa's modern lag behind the pace of economic development in other parts of the world within the dynamics of the continent's longer-term history. Although respected historian Emmanuel Akyeampong is both lead editor and local organizer of the gathering, the meeting coincided with the National (U.S.) Bureau of Economic Research (Africa Project) conference in the same city involving the three other editors, and apparently designers, of the volume, who are political economists at Harvard and active in the NBER. Bates and Robinson are associated with theoretically promising efforts to contextualize economics in Africa (but not African economics) in local institutions, while Nunn is an inventive contributor to a more recent, and elaborately statistical, effort. This project in which he is involved seeks to correlate modern data sets with past conditions taken as proxies for the promise of modern development—but, which in practice are more often seen as the obstacles inhibiting development. The distinction between "economics in Africa" and "African economics" is also the contrast between attempting to understand Africans' pasts according to the concepts of modernity (which is the model, particularly the concept of political "states," that structures this volume) and entering into Africans' own rather different worlds, few of which are premised on large, anonymous, highly militarized, and coercive institutions. The question in this reviewer's mind is the extent to which the terms of the presumed outcome can explain the process of transitioning toward modernity, bridging the disparity between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that has underlain all of modern sociology.

The volume is structured around a standard political economic model of development that correlates early modern Europe's successful "take-off" with "conditions of economic growth" projected to recur elsewhere. If the relationships detected in Europe are to have any applicability to policies intended to create propitious conditions in Africa, of course, the approach ignores the well-known fallacy of confusing correlation of selected abstract aspects of infinitely multiplistic contexts with historical causation. The specific model in question has a certain ironic appeal in attributing economic growth in the small western European appendage to Asia's vastness to state investments in internal productivity and public accountability that followed from the confinement of inherently expansive and expensive military monarchies in so small a space. Kings had to invest to survive, and militarization opened the path to modernity, with accompanying accountability eventually growing to public assemblies that overturned the authoritarian rulers who had created them. Escalating militarization in popular hands culminated in two world wars and—as the proponents seem not to notice, though Engels did—also in the age of global imperialism that swept over Africa.

An introduction reviews the competing literatures on what Ken Pomeranz famously termed "the Great Divergence" but makes little analytical use of the papers to follow, even though they are laid out around the categories of measurable (quantitatively when possible) conditions seen as fostering development, as they may be discerned in Africa's past. Christopher Ehret's masterful capacities in historical linguistics allow him to dive deeply into past millennia—up to 35,000 years—to detect what he classes as evidence of African world leadership, or at least priority, in the classic conditions constituting early "civilization." It is a compelling thesis, though he glosses the words and (inevitably mute) archaeology that comprise his evidence in terms of "kingdoms" and other modern abstractions rather than probing their semantic and thus motivating historical contexts.

The controlling hypothesis finds development potential particularly in large, ideally dense, populations like those in Europe, and so three papers on population levels come next...