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. Joseph Inikori inventively adapts his longstanding demography-driven model attributing West Africa’s seeming failure to develop to the depletion of viably large consumer markets by the Atlantic exports of slaves. David N. Weil reviews the epidemiology of malaria to conclude that it did not significantly inhibit population growth in a continent routinely viewed as crippled by low densities of population; does this calculation implicitly also place the blame on the slave trade? Perhaps not, since Patrick Manning next updates his revolutionary (1990) modeling of African populations lost to slaving by recognizing the undercounts in early colonial censuses to propose higher earlier populations that support Africa’s developmental prospects but contradict Inikori’s fashioning of disabling losses to slaving. The sensitivity of this kind of quantitative modeling to the data needed to support it could not be clearer, and the methodological challenge of finding relevant data—or creating plausible proxies for them—becomes the implicit theme of the book.

The remaining chapters are arranged according to the categories of the controlling model. “Culture” is not defined but nevertheless seems to be a catch-all term for unquantifiable context taken as given, here featuring an African echo of Weber’s Protestant Ethic as “entrepreneurship,” leading to two well-researched studies of the African traders who thrived on late-nineteenth-century European commercial investments in the Gold Coast (Akyeampong) and the Yoruba areas around Lagos (Ayodeji Olukoju). The analytically productive contrast lies in the differing investments those two groups of African entrepreneurs made with the profits of their successes. The implicit, only partial but still telling, accent on sources and uses of capital highlights the glaring limitation of the framework guiding the volume: in economic terms, it is a model of factor endowments that highlights only labor (“population, demography”) and land (scale of political organization) and all but omits capital, or rather assumes it as generated, all but automatically, by the magic of free markets. Political economists of other persuasions, of course, know better. Only Jean-Philippe Platteau turns to the ethnography of “entrepreneurship” in African terms, in a quite useful review of the ample—but in this volume otherwise ignored—accounts of African views of such personal wealth as “witchcraft,” or greedy self-aggrandizement at others’ expense.

Gareth Austin extends the story of agile African responses to markets opened by colonial-era transportation infrastructure to cocoa production in the same areas, replacing the once-conventional “vent for surplus” model of growth based on seeing such endowments in Africa as underutilized with a further accent on creative entrepreneurship. Gervase Clarence-Smith implicitly hints at the same point with a detailed review of artisan spinning and weaving technologies that eastern Africans continued to employ even in the context of massive imports of Indian Ocean textiles and modern mass production.

In a similar accent on African creativity, Linda Heywood describes the building of the urban architecture in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Kongo capital, later the Catholic see of São Salvador, though without accounting for the substantial investment it represented or for the relationship to Africa of people she terms “Atlantic creoles.” John Thornton cites a newly-discovered set of letters from early-nineteenth-century rulers of Dahomey, the paradigmatic African warrior-state, to suggest that issues of internal security, and, implicitly, also European-style fiscal-military state development, rather than outright hunts for captives to sell as slaves, motivated its notoriously constant military campaigns.

Richard Reid presents the violence that pervaded nineteenth-century Africa as demonstrating further the growth capacities of African economies as specifically comparable to the state militarization credited with launching economic growth in Europe, except for its “fragility” in Africa owing to low population densities, dependence on imported weapons, and the European intervention it provoked. Does the logic of a comparison seeking similarities dissolve in a conclusion negating all the basic premises? With so much promise emerging in nineteenth-century Africa, if not before, Robert Bates finds more irony than answers to the seeming paradox of why Africa subsequently fell so far behind the pace in the “imperial peace” that terminated the productivity attributed to destruction. Bates contemplates this possibility with a statistical review of coded extracts from two colonial-era compilations of ethnographic reports (Human Relations Area Files and Standard Cross-Cultural Sample) to propose measures of markers of development coinciding with military strength, political scale, and even “democracy.” His responsible admonitions about the limits of the data he has created raise doubts about the utility of the exercise but also move the volume toward an econometric finale in the intricately, and abstractly, mathematical style of editor Nunn and a circle of other economists and numerically-inclined political scientists.

Warren Whatley applies a highly formal method of “causal history” to attempt, imaginatively to say the least, to correlate intense phases of Atlantic slaving in the past with “absolutist,” and presumed developmentally retarding, political structures in modern Africa. Does his idea of strong, implicitly militarized, political power inhibiting development conflict with the prevailing model’s assertions of its potential for growth, at least in Europe? Nunn’s similarly styled statistical contribution codes and then correlates accessible, but highly disparate, databases to calibrate the obvious educational consequences of Protestant and Catholic missions in Africa, though without linking the specifics of his conclusions to the volume’s focus on development.

A particularly misplaced application of economic modeling is the chapter by Isaías Chaves, Stanley L. Engerman, and James Robinson, which purports to explain why Africans never incorporated the wheel into their costly systems of transporting goods on the heads of human carriers. This essay exemplifies the fallacy of data-driven research strategies, as it rests on available data, in this case from British railways in colonial Gold Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, and concludes (via a lengthy chain of guesstimates) on high calculated “social rates of return” on capital invested directly in the rail operations. The rhetoric is phrased to leave readers wondering why nineteenth-century Africans, presumed economically rational, had not calculated the advantages of a technology that did not yet exist, according to the accounting benefits accruing to a modern occupying military power. They never mention the readily available historical alternative, transportation by water, in which Africans invested significantly, achieving accompanying economic growth. To save earlier Africans from appearances of (non-economic) irrationality, the authors point out that both the emperor of Ethiopia and the sultan of Zanzibar resisted offers to construct railways for sound strategic reasons: they feared that such construction might invite invasion and foreign advantage at the expense of local populations, which were precisely the colonial, not social in any inclusive sense, “rates of return” that they deduced. They do not seem to recognize the contradiction in logic as well as method and thus leave open the question of the side on which irrationality may lie.

The review format leaves no space to detail the remaining methodological extremes attained by these statistical reductions of human behavior to existing quantifiable proxies, even for the intended variables, but historians will sense them as substituting economists’ generalized abstractions for the flows of specific contextualized motivations that they see as accounting for all human actions. Historians thus view development as a process rather than as the static institutions intended here to account somehow for change. The statistical generation of artificial data comes at the expense of their relevance to the actions they are purported to explain. Their remoteness from human reality parallels the illogic of this volume’s attempt to project modelings of modernity into African pasts. Neither promises great utility in guiding Africans through the processes of development it is meant to promote.