Robert Colvile’s excellent article on Prince Charles’s misunderstanding of the causes of African poverty provides a good opportunity to take a closer look at Africa’s economic history.
African poverty was not caused by colonialism, capitalism or free trade. As I have noted before, many of Europe’s former dependencies became rich precisely because they maintained many of the colonial institutions and partook in global trade. African poverty preceded the continent’s contact with Europe and persists today. That is an outcome of unfortunate policy choices, most of which were freely chosen by Africa’s leaders after independence.
Like Europe, Africa started out desperately poor. The late Professor Angus Maddison of Groningen University has estimated that, at the start of the Common Era, average per capita income in Africa was $470 per year (in 1990 dollars). The global average was roughly equal to that of Africa. Western Europe and North Africa, which were parts of the Roman Empire, were slightly better off ($600). In contrast, North America lagged behind Africa ($400). All in all, the world was both fairly equal and very poor.
The origins of global inequality, which saw Western Europe and, later, North America, power ahead of the rest of the world, can be traced to the rise of the Northern Italian city-states in the 14th century and the Renaissance in the 15th century. By 1500, a typical European was about twice as rich as a typical African. But the real gap in living standards opened only after the Industrial Revolution that started in England in the late 18th century and spread to Europe and North America in the 19th century.
In 1870, when Europeans controlled no more than 10 percent of the African continent (mostly North and South Africa), Western European incomes were already four times higher than those in Africa. Europe, in other words, did not need Africa in order to become prosperous. Europe colonized Africa because Europe was prosperous and, consequently, more powerful. Appreciation of the chronology of events does not justify or defend colonialism. But it does help explain it.
Africa’s fortunes under colonial rule varied. Much progress was made in terms of health and education. Maddison estimates that in 1870, there were 91 million Africans. By 1960, the year of independence, the African population grew more than threefold – to 285 million. The OECD estimates that over the same time period the share of the African population attending school rose from less than 5 percent to over 20 percent. On the down-side, Europeans treated Africans with contempt, and subjected them to discrimination and, sometimes, violence.
That violence intensified during Africa’s struggle for independence, as the colonial powers tried to beat back African nationalists. As a result, African leaders took over countries where repression of political dissent was already firmly established. Instead of repealing censorship and detention laws, however, African leaders kept and expanded them.
It was precisely because the colonial rule was so psychologically demeaning to Africans in general and nationalist leaders in particular that post-independence African governments were so determined to expunge many of the colonial institutions. Since rule of law, accountable government, property rights, and free trade were European imports, they had to go. Instead, many African leaders chose to emulate the political arrangements and economic policies of a rising power that represented the exact opposite of Western free market and liberal democracy – the Soviet Union.
Emulating the USSR in the 1960s was not altogether irrational. During the 1930s, the country underwent speedy industrialization, transforming a nation of peasants into a formidable power. Industrialization came at the cost of some 20 million lives, but it allowed the USSR to triumph over Hitler’s Germany (at a cost of an additional 27 million lives). By the early 1960s, the country not only produced massive amounts of steel and armaments but also seemed poised to win the scientific contest with the West, when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space on April 12, 1961.
The astonishing wastefulness and backwardness of the Soviet economy did not become apparent until the 1970s. By that time, unfortunately, the socialist bacillus infected much of Africa, which adopted the one-party government that destroyed accountability and the rule of law, undermined property rights and, consequently, growth. Price and wage controls were imposed, and free trade gave way to import substitution and autarky.
Africa’s love affair with socialism persisted until the 1990s, when, at long last, Africa started to reintegrate into the global economy. Trade relations with the rest of the world were somewhat liberalized and African nations started to deregulate their economies, thus climbing up the rankings in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report.
That said, even today, Africa remains the least economically free and most protectionist continent in the world. That – and not free trade – is the problem.
Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
Republished from CapX.
You left a very gab in your writing, what about the 400 years of slavery and it’s effect where strong men women and children were taken away from the continent do you think these people will be able to compete on the same level NO
This is ridiculous. It discounts slavery, Eurpoean violence as a staple in and outside of Africa and, that the industrial revolution in Europe would not have been possible without the exploitation of Africa.
I thank your article is garbage, full of untruths.
This piece is so illiterate and coated with so much pablum that it deserves to be treated with utter ignominy. But I will hold my nose and provide a rebuttal.
To discuss African economic condition from such a broad historical perspective with a cursory mention of colonialism and wilful erasure of the catastrophic impact slavery is mind boggling.
“As I have noted before, many of Europe’s former dependencies became rich….” Seriously? Let me set aside the colonial depredations of Africa by Europeans where for instance upon its departure from Guinea Conakry in 1958 the French oppressors under Charles de Gaulle ripped out even telephones and burnt files and archives containing administrative protocols simply because Sekou Toure dared to declare that Guinea preferred “freedom in poverty to prosperity in chains.” Every structure the French erected they destroyed. But India’s experience presents a much sharper contradiction of your fictionalised history:
The economic situation of the colonies, particularly that of India, worsened dramatically under British colonisation. At the time the British arrived, India’s share of the world economy was 23% but by the time the British was humiliated out of India, it was down to below 4%.
Britain’s economic rise was financed by the depredation of its colonies in general and India particularly. The British industrialisation was primarily premised on the de-industrialisation of India. By breaking the thumbs of Indian weavers, smashing their looms and imposing crushing tariffs and duties on what was left of India’s textile export, the British saw to the annihilation of the Indian textile industry – reducing Indian weavers to mere beggars.
The British proceeded to ship Indian raw materials back to Britain, processed same and then flooded the world market with the processed products of the “dark and satanic mills of Victorian Britain.” Thus, India went from a world-renowned exporter of top quality finished cloths to being an importer of British-finished cloths. India’s share of world export went from 27% to 2%.
By the end of the 19th century, India became essentially the most lucrative British cash cow and the magnet for the highest concentration of the highest paid British civil servants. In effect, India was made to pay for its own oppression and exploitation.
The wealthy Victorian British families that made their money out of slave trade (one fifth of the wealthy class in Victorian Britain owed their wealth to exporting 3 million Africans across the oceans as chattels). In 1833, when slavery was abolished, a compensation of £20 million was paid to these peddlers in human misery.
Between 15 and 29 million Indians died of starvation during the British-instigated famines – 4 million died in the Great Bengal Famine alone during WWII because Winston Churchill deliberately, as a matter of British Imperial Government policy, diverted essential supplies from civilians in Bengal to the reserve stockpiles of the British soldiers. This gives a big lie to any notion that the British sought to bring enlightenment and civilization to the benighted corners of the world. What could be a more practical demonstration of savagery and inhumanity than the foregoing examples?
It is a bit rich to oppress, degrade, exploit, torture, maim and kill people for over 200 years and then celebrate the fact that democracy resulted from it all!
Finally, during WWI, one-sixth of all British soldiers that fought in that war were Indian, 54,000 Indians lost their lives, 65,000 wounded, and 4,000 remained missing or imprisoned. Indian taxpayers had to cough up £100 million in that time’s money. India supplied 70 million rounds of ammunition, 600,000 rifles and machine guns, and 42 million garments were stitched and sent out of India to aid the war effort. 1.3 million Indian personnel served in that war, 173,000 animals and 370,000,000 tons of supplies were shipped out of India to support the war. The value of the predation of India by Britain in this period alone stands at £8 billion in today’s money. During WWII, 2.5 million Indians served in uniform. Of Britain’s total war debt of £3 million, £1.25 million was owed to India and was never repaid to this day. As it was in India, so it was in Africa also.
You ought to bury your head in abject shame for this dim-witted attempt at rewriting history.
The hostility toward the truth is understandable, but truth is truth.
Black-Africans were the most isolated humans in the world. That isolation along with numerous factors resulted in sub-Saharan Africa being “left behind” relative to other people’s. The gulf between the Europeans and Black-Africans was massive. Most Blacks at time of European exploration of Africa were living primitively- no writing, no wheel, no fork, no chair, no fishing nets, often no numbers past 2 and no concept of future-time. Simply look at vintage footage of Africans from even as late as the 1930’s. European, Arab, and Chinese travelers all encountered the same thing, Africans living essentially a Stone-Age existence. Not always, but more often than not. What kingdoms there were in Africa were comparatively short and none attained a level of civilization close to that of Europe, Japan, and China. Remember, the kingdoms still had no wheel. No roads, no carriages, no use of beasts of burden, no plow. Black-Africa never had a nation-state, never had an Industrial Revolution, and, most significantly, never had an Enlightenment that, as with Europe, wholly changed the way of perceiving the world and Nature. Other groups increased in intelligence because they had extensive trade with others, as well as result of the challenges that cold-winter presented. It requires much more effort to survive in sub-freezing Switzerland than it does to survive in Africa. You had to more plan ahead, learn how to preserve food, learn how to hunt in winter and fish when water is frozen over. Even today, Central Africa has some of the lowest average IQ’s in all the world. Europeans, Arabs, and Chinese all exploited the fact that Blacks were less developed and of less cognitive ability. The problems in Africa today, the problems experienced today by Black-Americans are in part result of racial disparity in cognitive ability and differences in behaviors that result from biological differences. Blacks lagged BEFORE colonization and slavery. The truth we are not supposed to acknowledge is that for reason of geography and climate, Blacks did not evolve as much as other ancestral-groups. There are many, many Black individuals who have higher IQ than most Asians / Whites / Arabs. But AS A GROUP they have the lowest average intelligence, and are as a group the most impulsively violent. There is no country in earth wherein the rate of criminal violence of Blacks is not greater than that of Whites and Asians, Average Black IQ is closing the gap modestly now that Blacks are no longer cut off from the rest of the world. The Aboriginals were also isolated and have low average IQ as result. Whites isolated on the Canary Islands also had low IQ as result. Simply put, if you were isolated you did not increase in intelligence as fast as those who were not isolated. Which is logical, and expected.
Liberalism cannot acknowledge the truth because it up-ends their entire narrative on social-Justice and racism. It undermines BLM. It destroys their dogma that all racial inequality if result of bigotry. Because of the threat that race-truth constitutes to Liberal ideology, Liberalism suppresses the truth. It punishes scientists, researchers who speak truth. It produces a climate of fear in Science and Medicine to dissuade individuals in the fields from going near the topic. “The races are equal.” is Liberalism’s “Great Lie”. Liberalism attempts to crush anyone who threatens to expose that lie.