Global Economic History Seminar: Smith goes to Sokoto: how close was precolonial Northern Nigeria to modern economic growth?

Monday 9th's meeting of the Global Economic History Seminar, 5-6.30 pm in the Audit Room, focusses on the largest state in precolonial Africa, the 19th-century Sokoto Caliphate. Tom Westland (Wageningen University) presents on 'Smith goes to Sokoto: how close was precolonial Northern Nigeria to modern economic growth?' See below for abstract and speaker's mini-bio. All welcome! Gareth Austin

Smith goes to Sokoto: how close was precolonial Northern Nigeria to modern economic growth?

Tom Westland

Wageningen University

Abstract Modern economic growth primarily involves the shifting of workers from agricultural to non-agricultural occupations. The probability that they will do so is a function of two key variables: whether or not agricultural productivity is high enough to allow farmers to be 'released' from agricultural occupations without jeopardising food security, and whether or not labour productivity in non-agricultural activities is high enough relative to labour productivity in agriculture to make the sectoral switch worthwhile. Estimating agricultural and non-agricultural productivity is therefore crucial to understanding the conditions in which structural change can occur. This paper offers new estimates of sectoral labour productivity in early colonial Northern Nigeria (c.1905-c.1925), using district-level archival tax records to estimate the output of workers in a number of economically important sectors, such as arable, livestock, textiles, metalworking, and retail and wholesale trade. It also compares Northern Nigerian land productivity to other benchmark economies using the standard calories/hectare measure. The paper suggests that Northern Nigerian arable agriculture was relatively productive in international terms, which can help to explain its high degree of urbanisation and rural handicraft industry, though the gap between non-agricultural productivity and agricultural productivity was quite high, at least in the main urban centres.

A related earlier work is Tom's co-authored article with Emiliano Travieso, which won the Economic History Society's T.S. Ashton Prize, is 'What happened to the workshop of West Africa? Resilience and decline of handicraft textiles in colonial northern Nigeria, 1911-52', Economic History Review, 77:4, pp. 1314-35. 

Bio
Tom Westland is a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University and Research, where he is working on a project to explain the economic divergence between Southeast Asia and tropical Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has a PhD in economic history from the University of Cambridge, where his dissertation won the Ellen McArthur prize for the best PhD thesis in economic history in the university that year.

Gareth Austin, Research Director of King's College, Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of Economic History (1928), University of Cambridge