Historical Roots of Its Underdevelopment Emmanuel

Africa poses the development challenge of our time. Once devastated by famine and mired in poverty, India and much of Asia are now growing economically. While Africa’s economies too are now growing, in many African countries, people are just now returning to the levels of per capita income they enjoyed more than a half century ago. 1 Th e current poverty and the widespread economic decline following independence in Africa have led to a great deal of research by development economists and political scientists (Bates 1981 ; Easterly and Levine 1997 ; Ndulu et al. 2007 ; Sachs and Warner 1997 ). Yet this work is oft en very policy focused and does not place Africa within the larger processes that created the Great Divergence in the early modern and modern worlds (Pomeranz 2000 ). Th is is somewhat odd, because the adoption of a much more historical approach has revolutionized research on comparative economic development in the past fi ft een years. For example, the economic divergence that took place in the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is now seen as deeply rooted in the diff erent institutional structures created during the colonial period (Bruhn and Gallego 2012 ; Dell 2010 ; Engerman and Sokoloff 1997 , 2011 ). It is commonplace, though not uncontroversial, to blame Africa’s economic problems on its economic, political, and perhaps social institutions. It is less common to fi nd studies that situate these