[Marxism] Slavery and underdevelopment

[Roger Baker]

     Walter Rodney wrote extensively about how slavery destroyed the African
 labor force and  nascent African economies in his classic book, "How Europe
 Underdeveloped Africa," published in 1982 by Howard university Press.

     Not only were the economies destroyed, they have never been
 allowed to recover because of  the unremitting imperialism, encouragement
of civil  wars, and exploitation of the continent by European and US 
capitalists.





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Louis Proyect" <lnp3 at panix.com>
To: "Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition" 
<marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 3:14 PM
Subject: [Marxism] Slavery and underdevelopment


> The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades
> Nathan Nunn
> NBER Working Paper No. 13367
> September 2007
>
> ABSTRACT
> Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave
> trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and
> historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates
> of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave
> trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of
> slaves exported from a country and current economic performance.
> To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the
> historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use
> instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave
> trades have had an adverse effect on economic development.
>
> full: http://www.econ.ubc.ca/nnunn/empirical_slavery.pdf
>
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