The Long-Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades
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Nunn, Nathan. 2008. The long-term effects of Africa's slave trades.
Quarterly Journal of Economics 123(1): 139-176.
Published Version doi:10.1162/qjec.2008.123.1.139
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THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES*
NATHAN NUNN
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 To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical
documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number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 had an
adverse effect on economic development.
I. INTRODUCTION
Africa’s economic performance in the second half of the twentieth
century has been poor. One, often informal, explanation for
Africa’s underdevelopment is its history of extraction, characterized
by two events: the slave trades and colonialism. Bairoch
(1993, p. 8) writes that “there is no doubt that a large number
of negative structural features of the process of economic underdevelopment
have historical roots going back to European colonization.”
Manning (1990, p. 124) echoes Bairoch but focuses
on the slave trades, writing, “Slavery was corruption: it involved
theft, bribery, and exercise of brute force as well as ruses. Slavery
thus may be seen as one source of precolonial origins for modern
corruption.”
Recent empirical studies suggest that Africa’s history can
explain part of its current underdevelopment. These studies focus
on the link between countries’ colonial experience and current
economic development (Grier 1999; Englebert 2000a, 2000b;
* A previous version of this paper was circulated under the title “Slavery, Institutional
Development, and Long-Run Growth in Africa.” I am grateful to the editor,
Edward Glaeser, and three anonymous referees for comments that substantially
improved this paper. I also thank Daron Acemoglu, Robert Bates, Albert Berry,
Loren Brandt, Jon Cohen, Bill Easterly, Stanley Engerman, Azim Essaji, Joseph
Inikori, Martin Klein, Pat Manning, Ted Miguel, Jim Robinson, Aloysius Siow, Ken
Sokoloff, Dan Trefler, Chris Udry, Jeffrey Williamson, and seminar participants
at the University of British Columbia, the University of California Los Angeles,
the University of California San Diego, Harvard University, the University of
Michigan, New York University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of
Rochester, the University of Southern California, the University of Toronto, York
University, the CIFAR, the SED Conference, the CEA Meetings, the SSHA Meetings,
the ITAM Summer Camp in Macroeconomics, the IEHC, the NBER, and the
WGAPE meetings for valuable comments and suggestions. I thank Maira Avila
and Ken Jackson for excellent research assistance.
C 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2008
139
140 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001, 2002; Bertocchi and
Canova 2002; Lange 2004). However, the other important event
in Africa’s history, its slave trades, has yet to be examined empirically.
There are reasons to expect that the slave trades may have
been at least as important as official colonial rule for Africa’s development.
For a period of nearly 500 years, from 1400 to 1900, the
African continent simultaneously experienced four slave trades.
By comparison, official colonial rule lasted from 1885 to about
1960, a total of approximately 75 years.
This paper provides the first empirical examination of the importance
of Africa’s slave trades in shaping subsequent economic
development. In doing this, I construct measures of the number
of slaves exported from each country in Africa in each century between
1400 and 1900. The estimates are constructed by combining
data from ship records on the number of slaves shipped from
each African port or region with data from a variety of historical
documents that report the ethnic identities of slaves that were
shipped from Africa. I find a robust negative relationship between
the number of slaves exported from each country and subsequent
economic performance. The African countries that are the poorest
today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken.
This finding cannot be taken as conclusive evidence that the
slave trades caused differences in subsequent economic development.
An alternative explanation that is just as plausible is that
countries that were initially the most economically and socially
underdeveloped selected into the slave trades, and these countries
continue to be the most underdeveloped today. In other words, the
slave trades may be correlated with unobserved country characteristics,
resulting in biased estimates of the effect of the slave
trades on economic development.
I pursue a number of strategies to better understand the reason
behind the relationship between slave exports and current
economic performance. First, I review the evidence from African
historians on the nature of selection into the slave trades. I also
use historic data on pre–slave trade population densities to examine
whether it was the less developed parts of Africa that selected
into the slave trades. Both sources of evidence show that it was
actually the most developed areas of Africa that tended to select
into the slave trades. I discuss the reason behind this seemingly
paradoxical relationship in detail. Second, I use instruments to
estimate the causal effect of the slave trades on subsequent economic
development. The instruments are the sailing distances
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 141
from each country to the nearest locations of demand for slave
labor in each of the four slave trades. Like the OLS coefficients,
the IV coefficients are negative and significant, suggesting that
increased extraction during the slave trades caused worse subsequent
economic performance.
I then explore the precise channel of causality underlying the
relationship between slave exports and economic development.
Using historical evidence as a guide, I examine whether the procurement
of slaves through internal warfare, raiding, and kidnapping
resulted in subsequent state collapse and ethnic fractionalization.
I find that the data are consistent with these channels.
These findings complement the research of Engerman and
Sokoloff (1997, 2002), which shows that slavery in the New World
resulted in the evolution of institutions that were not conducive
to economic growth.1
My results show that not only was the use of
slaves detrimental for a society, but the production of slaves, which
occurred through domestic warfare, raiding, and kidnapping, also
had negative impacts on subsequent development.
The paper is structured as follows. In the following section, I
provide a description of Africa’s slave trades, providing a detailed
historical overview of the manner in which slaves were procured
and the resulting adverse effects. In Section III, I describe the
construction of the slave export figures. Section IV documents
the correlations that exist in the data, and Section V turns to
the issue of causality. In Section VI, guided by the historical evidence,
I examine the potential channels of causality. Section VII
concludes.
II. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Between 1400 and 1900, the African continent experienced
four simultaneous slave trades. The largest and most well-known
is the trans-Atlantic slave trade where, beginning in the fifteenth
century, slaves were shipped from West Africa, West-Central
Africa, and Eastern Africa to the European colonies in the New
World. The three other slave trades—the trans-Saharan, Red Sea,
and Indian Ocean slave trades—were much older and pre-dated
the trans-Atlantic slave trade. During the trans-Saharan slave
trade, slaves were taken from south of the Saharan desert to
1. Also see Lagerl¨of (2005) and Mitchener and McLean (2003) for related
evidence.
142 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
Northern Africa. In the Red Sea slave trade, slaves were taken
from inland of the Red Sea and shipped to the Middle East and
India. In the Indian Ocean slave trade, slaves were taken from
Eastern Africa and shipped either to the Middle East and India
or to plantation islands in the Indian Ocean.
A number of characteristics of Africa’s slave trades make
them distinct from previous slave trades. First, the total volume
of slaves traded was unprecedented. During the trans-Atlantic
slave trade alone, approximately 12 million slaves were exported
from Africa. Another 6 million were exported in the other three
slave trades. These figures do not include those who were killed
during the raids or those who died on their journey to the coast.
The total effect of the slave trades, according to calculations by
Patrick Manning (1990, p. 171), was that by 1850 Africa’s population
was only half of what it would have been had the slave trades
not taken place.
Africa’s slave trades were also unique because, unlike previous
slave trades, individuals of the same or similar ethnicities
enslaved one another. This had particularly detrimental consequences,
including social and ethnic fragmentation, political instability
and a weakening of states, and the corruption of judicial
institutions.
The most common manner in which slaves were taken was
through villages or states raiding one another (Northrup 1978;
Lovejoy 1994). Where groups of villages had previously developed
into larger-scale village federations, relations between the villages
tended to turn hostile (e.g., Azevedo 1982; Inikori 2000; Hubbell
2001). As a result, ties between villages were weakened, which in
turn impeded the formation of larger communities and broader
ethnic identities. Kusimba (2004, p. 66) writes that “insecurity
confined people within ethnic boundaries constructing spheres of
interaction.” Because of this process, the slave trades may be an
important factor explaining Africa’s high level of ethnic fractionalization
today. This is significant for economic development given
the established relationship between ethnic fractionalization and
long-term economic growth (Easterly and Levine 1997).
Because of the environment of uncertainty and insecurity
at the time, individuals required weapons, such as iron knives,
spears, swords or firearms, to defend themselves. These weapons
could be obtained from Europeans in exchange for slaves, who
were often obtained through local kidnappings. This further
perpetuated the slave trade and the insecurity that it caused,
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 143
which in turn further increased the need to enslave others to
protect oneself (Mahadi 1992; Hawthorne 1999, pp. 108–109).
Historians have named this vicious cycle the “gun–slave cycle”
(e.g., Lovejoy 2000) or the “iron–slave cycle” (e.g., Hawthorne
2003). The result of this vicious cycle was not only that communities
raided other communities for slaves, but also that members of
a community raided and kidnapped others within the community.
Well-documented examples come from the Balanta of modern day
Guinea-Bissau, the Minyanka of modern day Mali (Klein 2001),
and the Makua, Chikunda, and Yao of East Central Africa (Alpers
1969, pp. 413–414, 1975, p. 225; Isaacman 1989, pp. 191–192, 196).
Generally, the consequence of internal conflict was increased
political instability and in many cases the collapse of preexisting
forms of government (Lovejoy 2000, pp. 68–70). In sixteenthcentury
northern Senegambia, the Portuguese slave trade was a
key factor leading to the eventual disintegration of the Joloff Confederation,
which was replaced by the much smaller kingdoms of
Waalo, Kajoor, Baol, Siin, and Saalum. Further south, in southern
Senegambia, the same pattern is observed. Prior to the slave
trades, complex state systems were in the process of evolving.
However, this evolution stagnated soon after the arrival of the
Portuguese in the 15th century (Barry 1998, pp. 36–59). Similar
patterns of instability have also been documented in Eastern
Africa (e.g., Isaacman [1989]; Mbajedwe [2000]). In the late
19th century, the slave trades resulted in the disintegration of the
Shambaa kingdom, the Gweno kingdom, and the Pare states in
East Africa’s Pangani valley (Kimambo 1989, p. 247; Mbajedwe
2000, pp. 341–342).
The most dramatic example may be the Kongo kingdom of
West-Central Africa. As early as 1514, the kidnapping of local
Kongo citizens for sale to the Portuguese had become rampant,
threatening social order and the King’s authority. In 1526,
Affonso, king of Kongo, wrote to Portugal complaining that “there
are many traders in all corners of the country. They bring ruin to
the country. Every day people are enslaved and kidnapped, even
nobles, even members of the king’s own family” (Vansina 1966,
p. 52). This break-down of law and order was partly responsible
for the weakening and eventual fall of the once powerful state
(Inikori 2003). For many of the other Bantu-speaking ethnicities,
stable states also existed in earlier periods, but by the time the
slave trades were brought to an end, few ancient states remained
(Colson 1969, pp. 36–37).
144 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
Preexisting governance structures were generally replaced by
small bands of slave raiders, controlled by an established ruler or
warlord. However, these bands were generally unable to develop
into large, stable states. Colson (1969, p. 35) writes that “both
the bands and the new states they created retained an air of
improvisation. Few band leaders were able to hand power to a
legitimate successor. Even where a band leader had become the
ruler of a state, succession remained a problem. Leadership was
a personal role, rather than an established office.”
The slave trades also contributed to political instability by
causing the corruption of previously established legal structures.
In many cases, it became common to obtain slaves by falsely accusing
others of witchcraft or other crimes (Koelle 1854; Northrup
1978; Lovejoy 2000). Klein (2001, p. 59) writes that “communities
began enslaving their own. Judicial penalties that formerly had
taken the form of beatings, payment of compensation or exile,
for example, were now converted to enslavement.” Often, leaders
themselves supported or even instigated this abuse of the judicial
system (Mahadi 1992; Hawthorne 1999, 2003; Klein 2001).
To protect themselves and their communities from being raided,
leaders often chose to pay slaves as tribute, which were often
obtained through the judicial system. Hawthorne (1999, 2003)
provides detailed studies of this process among the Cassanga of
modern day Guinea Bissau. The chief of the Cassanga used the
“red water ordeal” to procure slaves and their possessions. Those
accused of a crime were forced to drink a poisonous red liquid. If
they vomited, then they were judged to be guilty. If they did not
vomit, they were deemed not guilty. However, for those that did
not vomit this usually brought death by poisoning. Their possessions
were then seized and their family members were sold into
slavery.
Evidence from research showing a relationship between a
country’s history of state development and subsequent economic
performance suggests that these effects of the slave trades may be
important for current economic development (Bockstette, Chanda,
and Putterman 2002; Chanda and Putterman 2005). Others have
argued that Africa’s underdevelopment is a direct result of state
failure, which stems from Africa’s weak and unstable precolonial
political structures (Herbst 1997, 2000). Because Africa’s slave
trades were an important factor affecting political underdevelopment,
they may be a central reason behind Africa’s weak states
today.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 145
III. SLAVE EXPORT DATA
Because I am interested in examining the effects of the slave
trades that resulted because of the procurement of slaves, my
measure of interest is the total number of slaves taken from
each country during the four slave trades between 1400 and
1900.2
I use two types of data to construct the slave export estimates.
The first are data that report the total number of slaves
exported from each port or region in Africa. I refer to these as shipping
data. For the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the data are from
the updated version of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
constructed by Eltis et al. (1999). The database records information
for 34,584 voyages from 1514 to 1866. The shipping data are
originally from various documents and records located around
the world. Because, in most European ports, merchants were required
to register their ships and declare the volume and value of
goods transported for each ship and voyage, typically, there exists
a number of different registers and documents. In the database,
77% of the trans-Atlantic slave voyages after 1700 have shipping
information from more than one source; the average number of
sources for each voyage is six. It is estimated that the database
contains 82% of all trans-Atlantic slaving voyages ever attempted
(Eltis and Richardson 2006).
Data for the early period of the Atlantic slave trade not covered
by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database are from Elbl
(1997). For the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and trans-Saharan slave
trades, data are from Austen (1979, 1988, 1992). The data are
based on estimates from all available documents, records, and accounts
by observers and government officials on the location and
volume of slave exports.
With the shipping data one can calculate the number of slaves
that were shipped from each coastal country. However, this does
not give an accurate indication of where slaves were originally
captured. Slaves shipped from the ports of a coastal country may
have come from a country located further inland. To estimate the
number of slaves shipped from the coast that came from inland
countries, I also use a second source of data that reports the ethnic
identity of slaves shipped from Africa. This information comes
from a variety of sources, such as records of sale, slave registers,
2. Ideally, I would also like to include people that entered into local domestic
slavery. However, the necessary data to construct these estimates do not exist.
146 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
slave runaway notices, court records, church records, and notarial
documents.
There were a number of ways of identifying the ethnicity
or “nation” of a slave. The easiest was often by a slave’s name.
Slaves were often given a Christian first name and a surname
that identified their ethnicity (e.g., Tardieu [2001]). As well, a
slave’s ethnicity could often be determined from ethnic markings,
such as cuts, scars, hairstyles, or the filing of teeth (Karasch 1987,
pp. 4–9). Oldendorp (1777, p. 169) writes that “the people of all
Negro nations are marked with certain cuts on the skin. As far
as I have been able to learn from the Negroes themselves, these
serve to distinguish one nation from another.”
Because slaves were legally defined as property, those engaged
in the buying and selling of slaves had a strong incentive to
correctly identify the birthplace or “nation” of slaves (Wax 1973).
Moreno Fraginals (1977, p. 190) writes that “the slave trade was
the business that involved the greatest amount of capital investment
in the world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
And a business of this size would never have kept up a classificatory
scheme had it not been meaningful (in overall general terms,
in keeping with reality) in designating in a very precise way the
merchandise that was being traded.”
Information on the ethnicities of slaves shipped during the
trans-Atlantic slave trade come from 54 different samples, totalling
80,656 slaves, with 229 distinct ethnic designations reported.
Table I summarizes information about the samples used
in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The table reports the location,
the years covered, the number of slaves, and the number of ethnicities
that could be identified for each sample. Similar tables for
the other three slave trades are reported in Nunn (2007).
The ethnicity data for the Indian Ocean slave trade come
from six samples, with a total of 21,048 slaves and 80 different
ethnicities reported. The data for the Red Sea slave trade are from
two samples: one from Jedda, Saudi Arabia, and the other from
Bombay, India. The samples provide information for 67 slaves,
with 32 different reported ethnicities. For the trans-Saharan slave
trade two samples are available: one from central Sudan and the
other from western Sudan. The samples provide information on
the origins of 5,385 slaves, with 23 different ethnicities recorded.
The shipping data from Austen (1992) also provide additional
information on which caravan slaves were shipped on, the city
or town that the caravan originated in, the destination of the
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 147
TABLE I
SLAVE ETHNICITY DATA FOR THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
Num. Num.
Location Years ethnic. obs. Record type
Valencia, Spain 1482–1516 77 2,675 Crown records
Puebla, Mexico 1540–1556 14 115 Notarial records
Dominican Republic 1547–1591 26 22 Records of sale
Peru 1548–1560 16 202 Records of sale
Mexico 1549 12 80 Plantation accounts
Peru 1560–1650 30 6,754 Notarial records
Lima, Peru 1583–1589 15 288 Baptism records
Colombia 1589–1607 9 19 Various records
Mexico 1600–1699 28 102 Records of sale
Dominican Republic 1610–1696 33 55 Government records
Chile 1615 6 141 Sales records
Lima, Peru 1630–1702 33 409 Parish records
Peru (Rural) 1632 25 307 Parish records
Lima, Peru 1640–1680 33 936 Marriage records
Colombia 1635–1695 6 17 Slave inventories
Guyane (French Guiana) 1690 12 69 Plantation records
Colombia 1716–1725 33 59 Government records
French Louisiana 1717–1769 23 223 Notarial records
Dominican Republic 1717–1827 11 15 Government records
South Carolina 1732–1775 35 681 Runaway notices
Colombia 1738–1778 11 100 Various records
Spanish Louisiana 1770–1803 79 6,615 Notarial records
St. Dominique (Haiti) 1771–1791 25 5,413 Sugar plantations
Bahia, Brazil 1775–1815 14 581 Slave lists
St. Dominique (Haiti) 1778–1791 36 1,280 Coffee plantations
Guadeloupe 1788 8 45 Newspaper reports
St. Dominique (Haiti) 1788–1790 21 1,297 Fugitive slave lists
Cuba 1791–1840 59 3,093 Slave registers
St. Dominique (Haiti) 1796–1797 56 5,632 Plantation inventories
American Louisiana 1804–1820 62 223 Notarial records
Salvador, Brazil 1808–1842 6 456 Records of manumission
Trinidad 1813 100 12,460 Slave registers
St. Lucia 1815 62 2,333 Slave registers
Bahia, Brazil 1816–1850 27 2,666 Slave lists
St. Kitts 1817 48 2,887 Slave registers
Senegal 1818 17 80 Captured slave ship
Berbice (Guyana) 1819 66 1,127 Slave registers
Salvador, Brazil 1819–1836 12 871 Manumission certificates
Salvador, Brazil 1820–1835 11 1,106 Probate records
Sierra Leone 1821–1824 68 605 Child registers
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1826–1837 31 772 Prison records
Anguilla 1827 7 51 Slave registers
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1830–1852 190 2,921 Free africans’ records
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1833–1849 35 476 Death certificates
148 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
TABLE I
(CONTINUED)
Num. Num.
Location Years ethnic. obs. Record type
Salvador, Brazil 1835 13 275 Court records
Salvador, Brazil 1838–1848 7 202 Slave registers
St. Louis/Goree, 1843–1848 21 189 Emancipated slaves
Senegal
Bakel, Senegal 1846 16 73 Sales records
d’Agou´e, Benin 1846–1885 11 70 Church records
Sierra Leone 1848 132 12,425 Linguistic and British
census
Salvador, Brazil 1851–1884 8 363 Records of manumission
Salvador, Brazil 1852–1888 7 269 Slave registers
Cape Verde 1856 32 314 Slave census
Kikoneh Island, 1896–1897 11 185 Fugitive slave records
Sierra Leone
caravan, and in some cases the ethnic identity of the slaves being
shipped.
To illustrate how I combine the ethnicity data with the shipping
data to construct my estimates I use an example, which is
shown in Figure I. The figure is a hypothetical map of the western
coast of Africa, with each square representing a country.
From the shipping data, I first calculate the number of slaves
shipped from each coastal country in Africa. In this example
100,000 slaves were shipped from Country A and 250,000 were
shipped from Country C. The problem with relying on the shipping
data alone is that many of slaves shipped from Country A may
have come from Country B, which lies landlocked behind Country
A. Then, using the ethnicity data, I calculate the ratio of slaves
from each coastal country relative to any landlocked countries located
inland of the coastal country. This requires that I map ethnicities
to countries and aggregate up to the country level. In practice,
this step relied on a great amount of past research by African
historians, linguists, and ethnographers. The sources most heavily
used are Koelle (1854), Murdock (1959), Curtin (1969), Higman
(1984), and Hall (2005).
Assume that the ratio of slaves from Country A relative to
Country B is 4 to 1. This ratio suggests that 20% of the slaves
shipped from Country A were actually from Country B. Therefore,
the estimated number of slaves from Country B is 20,000
and from Country A is 80,000. Assume that the ratio of slaves
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 149
FIGURE I
An Artificial Map of the West Coast of Africa
FIGURE II
Ethnic Boundaries Defined by Murdock (1959) and Modern Political Boundaries
150 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
from Country C to D to E is 3 to 1 to 1. The same procedure
then yields an estimate of 150,000 slaves from Country C and
50,000 each from Countries D and E. In practice, these calculations
are performed separately for each slave trade. As well, because
slaves were increasingly taken from further inland as each
slave trade progressed, the calculations are also performed separately
for each of the following time periods: 1400–1599, 1600–
1699, 1700–1799, 1800–1900.3
Because ethnicities tended to be much smaller than countries,
the mapping of ethnicities into countries generally is not
problematic. This is illustrated in Figure II, which shows African
ethnicities based on Murdock’s (1959) classification, as well as
modern political boundaries. From the figure it is apparent that
ethnicities are much smaller than modern boundaries, and therefore
ethnicities generally map cleanly into one country.4
An important assumption in this procedure is that slaves
shipped from a port within a country are either from that country
or from countries directly to the interior. However, in reality, some
slaves shipped from a country’s coast may have originated from a
neighboring coastal country. In Nunn (2007), using three samples
of slaves for which we know both the ethnicity of the slaves and the
port that they were shipped from, I test the validity of this assumption
and the overall accuracy of the estimation procedure. I find
that for each of the three samples my procedure correctly identifies
the origins of between 83% and 98% of the slaves in the samples.
A second source of measurement error arises because slaves
from the interior will tend to be underrepresented in the ethnicity
samples. This is because only slaves who survived the voyage
outside of Africa are in the ethnicity samples. All else equal, the
further inland a slave originated, the longer the journey was, and
the more likely it was that he or she died along the way. Because
the rates of mortality during the slave trades were extremely high,
this form of measurement error may be significant.5
However, as I
show formally in the Appendix, the undersampling of slaves from
3. See Nunn (2007) for all of the finer details of the construction procedure.
4. In instances where an ethnicity is located in more than one country, I
map the ethnicity into the multiple countries using land area as weights. This is
explained in detail in Nunn (2007).
5. Estimates of cross-Atlantic mortality rates ranged from 7% to 20% depending
on the time period and the length of the voyage (Curtin 1969, pp. 275–286;
Lovejoy 2000, p. 63). Death rates during the trek to the coast are known with less
certainty, but estimates range from 10% to 50% (Vansina 1990, p. 218; Lovejoy
2000, pp. 63–64).
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 151
the interior results in OLS estimates that are biased toward zero.
As well, one can use instruments that are uncorrelated with the
measurement error to derive consistent estimates. I do this in
Section V.B.
After the data have been constructed, I have estimates of
the number of slaves shipped from each country in Africa during
each of the four slave trades during four different time periods:
1400–1599, 1600–1699, 1700–1799, 1800–1900. Table II reports
the estimated total number of slaves exported from each country,
as well as the total disaggregated by slave trade. Overall,
the estimates are consistent with the general view among African
historians of where the primary slaving areas were. During the
trans-Atlantic slave trade, slaves were taken in greatest numbers
from the “Slave Coast” (Benin and Nigeria), West-Central Africa
(Zaire, Congo, and Angola), and the “Gold Coast” (Ghana). All of
these countries appear among the top exporting countries on the
list. Ethiopia and Sudan are also among the top exporting countries
because they were the primary suppliers of slaves shipped
during the Red Sea and Saharan slave trades. The low number of
slave exports from South Africa and Namibia confirms the view of
African historians that these areas exported “virtually no slaves”
(Manning 1983, p. 839). The relative magnitudes of exports from
geographically close countries are also consistent with the qualitative
evidence from the African history literature. Manning (1983,
p. 839) writes that “some adjoining regions were quite dissimilar:
Togo exported few slaves and the Gold Coast many; Gabon exported
few slaves, and the Congo exported many.” The estimates
are consistent with Manning’s observation. Exports from Togo are
far less than from Ghana, and exports from Gabon are less than
from the Republic of Congo.
IV. BASIC CORRELATIONS: OLS ESTIMATES
I begin by examining the relationship between past slave exports
and current economic performance. I normalize the total
number of slaves taken from each country by its size, measured
by land area.6
Figure III shows the relationship between the natural
log of the number of slaves exported in all four slave trades
6. Alternative measures of country size are also possible. As I show in Table
A.2 in the Appendix, using the average population of a country between 1400 and
1900 yields nearly identical results. Similarly, using arable land area rather than
land area also yields essentially identical results.
152 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
TABLE II
ESTIMATED TOTAL SLAVE EXPORTS BETWEEN 1400 AND 1900 BY COUNTRY
Trans- Indian Trans- Red All slave
Isocode Country name Atlantic Ocean Saharan Sea trades
AGO Angola 3,607,020 0 0 0 3,607,020
NGA Nigeria 1,406,728 0 555,796 59,337 2,021,859
GHA Ghana 1,614,793 0 0 0 1,614,793
ETH Ethiopia 0 200 813,899 633,357 1,447,455
SDN Sudan 615 174 408,261 454,913 863,962
MLI Mali 331,748 0 509,950 0 841,697
ZAR Democratic 759,468 7,047 0 0 766,515
Republic of Congo
MOZ Mozambique 382,378 243,484 0 0 625,862
TZA Tanzania 10,834 523,992 0 0 534,826
TCD Chad 823 0 409,368 118,673 528,862
BEN Benin 456,583 0 0 0 456,583
SEN Senegal 278,195 0 98,731 0 376,926
GIN Guinea 350,149 0 0 0 350,149
TGO Togo 289,634 0 0 0 289,634
GNB Guinea-Bissau 180,752 0 0 0 180,752
BFA Burkina Faso 167,201 0 0 0 167,201
MRT Mauritania 417 0 164,017 0 164,434
MWI Malawi 88,061 37,370 0 0 125,431
MDG Madagascar 36,349 88,927 0 0 125,275
COG Congo 94,663 0 0 0 94,663
KEN Kenya 303 12,306 60,351 13,490 86,448
SLE Sierra Leone 69,607 0 0 0 69,607
CMR Cameroon 66,719 0 0 0 66,719
DZA Algeria 0 0 61,835 0 61,835
CIV Ivory Coast 52,646 0 0 0 52,646
SOM Somalia 0 229 26,194 5,855 32,277
ZMB Zambia 6,552 21,406 0 0 27,958
GAB Gabon 27,403 0 0 0 27,403
GMB Gambia 16,039 0 5,693 0 21,731
NER Niger 133 0 0 19,779 19,912
LBY Libya 0 0 8,848 0 8,848
LBR Liberia 6,790 0 0 0 6,790
UGA Uganda 900 3,654 0 0 4,554
ZAF South Africa 1,944 87 0 0 2,031
CAF Central African 2,010 0 0 0 2,010
Republic
EGY Egypt 0 0 1,492 0 1,492
ZWE Zimbabwe 554 536 0 0 1,089
NAM Namibia 191 0 0 0 191
BDI Burundi 0 87 0 0 87
GNQ Equatorial Guinea 11 0 0 0 11
DJI Djibouti 0 5 0 0 5
BWA Botswana 0 0 0 0 0
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 153
TABLE II
(CONTINUED)
Trans- Indian Trans- Red All slave
Isocode Country name Atlantic Ocean Saharan Sea trades
CPV Cape Verde Islands 0 0 0 0 0
COM Comoros 0 0 0 0 0
LSO Lesotho 0 0 0 0 0
MUS Mauritius 0 0 0 0 0
MAR Morocco 0 0 0 0 0
RWA Rwanda 0 0 0 0 0
STP S˜ao Tom´e & Principe 0 0 0 0 0
SWZ Swaziland 0 0 0 0 0
SYC Seychelles 0 0 0 0 0
TUN Tunisia 0 0 0 0 0
FIGURE III
Relationship between Log Slave Exports Normalized by Land Area,
ln(exports/area), and Log Real Per Capita GDP in 2000, ln y
between 1400 and 1900 normalized by land area and the natural
log of per capita GDP in 2000.7
As shown in the figure, a negative
7. Because the natural log of zero is undefined, I take the natural log of 0.1. As
I show in the Appendix, the results are robust to the omission of these zero-export
countries.
154 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
relationship between income and slave exports is apparent in the
raw data.
I further examine this relationship by controlling for other
country characteristics that are also potentially important for current
income. My baseline estimating equation is
(1) ln yi = β0 + β1 ln(exportsi/areai) + Ciδ + Xiγ + εi,
where ln yi is the natural log of real per capita GDP in country
i in 2000, and ln(exportsi/areai) is the natural log of the total
number of slaves exported between 1400 and 1900 normalized by
land area. Per capita GDP data are for the year 2000 and are
from Maddison (2003). Ci is a vector of dummy variables that
indicate the origin of the colonizer prior to independence. These
are included to control for the other significant event in Africa’s
past, colonial rule. Xi is a vector of control variables that are meant
to capture differences in countries’ geography and climate.
OLS estimates of (1) are reported in Table III. The first column
reports estimates of (1) with colonizer fixed effects only. In
the second column, I also include controls that capture the potential
importance of geography for long-term economic development:
distance from the equator, longitude, minimum monthly
rainfall, average maximum humidity, average minimum temperature,
and proximity to the ocean measured by the natural log of
coastline divided by land area. All factors, except longitude, influence
whether a country has a tropical climate, which affects
the prevalence of infectious disease and agricultural productivity
(Kamarck 1976; Sachs et al. 2001). Longitude is also included to
capture differences between the eastern and western parts of the
African continent.8
In both specifications, the estimated relationship
between slave exports and per capita income are negative
and statistically significant.
One concern with the estimates in columns (1) and (2) is
that they may be biased because of the inclusion of small islands
and North African countries in the sample. In column (3), I omit
island and North African countries, dropping Morocco, Algeria,
Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Seychelles, Mauritius, Comoros, S˜ao Tom´e
and Principe, and the Cape Verde Islands. As shown, dropping
these countries makes little difference. The estimated coefficient
8. A related concern is that the slave exports variable may simply capture a
West African fixed effect. I show in the Appendix that the results are robust to
also controlling for region fixed effects.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 155
TABLE III
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SLAVE EXPORTS AND INCOME
Dependent variable is log real per capita GDP in 2000, ln y
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
ln(exports/area) −0.112∗∗∗ −0.076∗∗∗ −0.108∗∗∗ −0.085∗∗ −0.103∗∗∗ −0.128∗∗∗
(0.024) (0.029) (0.037) (0.035) (0.034) (0.034)
Distance from 0.016 −0.005 0.019 0.023 0.006
equator (0.017) (0.020) (0.018) (0.017) (0.017)
Longitude 0.001 −0.007 −0.004 −0.004 −0.009
(0.005) (0.006) (0.006) (0.005) (0.006)
Lowest monthly −0.001 0.008 0.0001 −0.001 −0.002
rainfall (0.007) (0.008) (0.007) (0.006) (0.008)
Avg max humidity 0.009 0.008 0.009 0.015 0.013
(0.012) (0.012) (0.012) (0.011) (0.010)
Avg min −0.019 −0.039 −0.005 −0.015 −0.037
temperature (0.028) (0.028) (0.027) (0.026) (0.025)
ln(coastline/area) 0.085∗∗ 0.092∗∗ 0.095∗∗ 0.082∗∗ 0.083∗∗
(0.039) (0.042) (0.042) (0.040) (0.037)
Island indicator −0.398 −0.150
(0.529) (0.516)
Percent Islamic −0.008∗∗∗ −0.006∗ −0.003
(0.003) (0.003) (0.003)
French legal origin 0.755 0.643 −0.141
(0.503) (0.470) (0.734)
North Africa 0.382 −0.304
indicator (0.484) (0.517)
ln(gold prod/pop) 0.011 0.014
(0.017) (0.015)
ln(oil prod/pop) 0.078∗∗∗ 0.088∗∗∗
(0.027) (0.025)
ln(diamond −0.039 −0.048
prod/pop) (0.043) (0.041)
Colonizer fixed Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
effects
Number obs. 52 52 42 52 52 42
R2 .51 .60 .63 .71 .77 .80
Notes. OLS estimates of (1) are reported. The dependent variable is the natural log of real per capita
GDP in 2000, ln y. The slave export variable ln(exports/area) is the natural log of the total number of slaves
exported from each country between 1400 and 1900 in the four slave trades normalized by land area. The
colonizer fixed effects are indicator variables for the identity of the colonizer at the time of independence.
Coefficients are reported with standard errors in brackets. ∗∗∗, ∗∗, and ∗ indicate significance at the 1%, 5%,
and 10% levels.
for slave exports remains negative and significant, and the magnitude
of the estimated coefficient actually increases.9
9. One may also be concerned that the inclusion of the countries in southern
Africa—namely South Africa, Swaziland, and Lesotho—may also be biasing the
results. As I report in the Appendix, the results are robust to also omitting this
156 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
In column (4), I include additional control variables to account
for potential differences between islands or North African countries
and the rest of Africa. Two core differences between North
Africa and the rest of Africa is that North African countries are
predominantly Islamic and that they all have legal systems based
on French civil law. To capture these differences, I also include
a measure of the percent of the population that is Islamic and
a French legal origin indicator variable. I also include a North
Africa fixed effect and an island fixed effect. As shown, including
these additional control variables does not affect the slave exports
coefficient, which remains negative and statistically significant.
The final factor that I control for is differences in countries’
endowments of natural resources. In column (5), I also control
for the natural log of the annual average per capita production
between 1970 and 2000 of gold, oil, and diamonds. As shown, controlling
for countries’ production of these natural resources does
not alter the results.10
In column (6), I simultaneously include all
control variables and drop islands and North African countries
from the sample. Again the results remain robust.11
The estimated magnitudes of the relationship between slave
exports and income are not only statistically significant but also
economically meaningful. Calculating the standardized beta coefficients
of the estimates, one finds that a one-standard-deviation
increase in ln(exports/area) is associated with between 0.36 to
0.62 standard deviation decrease in log income. If for purely illustrative
purposes one interprets the OLS estimates as causal, then
according to the estimate from column (5), for a country initially
with the mean level of income of $1,249, a one-standard-deviation
decrease in the slave export variable will raise income to $1,864,
which is a 50% increase in income.
V. ECONOMETRIC ISSUES: CAUSALITY AND MEASUREMENT ERROR
Although the OLS estimates show that there is a relationship
between slave exports and current economic performance, it
group of countries. The table also shows that the estimates are robust to the
omission of potentially influential observations.
10. Looking at Figure III, one can see that Equatorial Guinea (GNQ), which
has a low value of slave exports and has recently witnessed extremely rapid economic
growth because of the discovery of large offshore oil reserves, is a potential
outlier. As I show in the Appendix, the results are also robust to the omission of
Equatorial Guinea from the sample.
11. The island and North Africa indicator variables drop out of the equation
when island and North African countries are omitted from the sample.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 157
remains unclear whether the slave trades have a causal impact on
current income. An alternative explanation for the relationship is
that societies that were initially underdeveloped selected into the
slave trades, and these societies continue to be underdeveloped today.
Therefore, we observe a negative relationship between slave
exports and current income, even though the slave trades did not
have any effect on subsequent economic development. In this section,
I pursue two strategies to evaluate whether there is a causal
effect of the slave trades on income. First, using historic data and
qualitative evidence from African historians, I evaluate the importance
and characteristics of selection into the slave trades. As
I will show, the evidence suggests that selection was important,
but it was usually the societies that were the most prosperous,
not the most underdeveloped, that selected into the slave trades.
Given this evidence, it is unlikely that the strong relationship
between slave exports and current income is driven by selection.
Instead, selection will tend to bias the OLS estimates towards
zero. Second, I use the distance from each country to the location
of the demand for slaves as instruments for slave exports. The IV
(instrumental variables) results confirm the OLS estimates.
V.A. Historical Evidence on Selection during the Slave Trades
A large proportion of the early trade between Africans and
Europeans was in commodities other than slaves. During this
time, only societies with institutions that were sufficiently developed
were able to facilitate trade with the Europeans. Between
1472 and 1483, the Portuguese sailed south along the west coast
of West-Central Africa, testing various points of entry, looking for
trading partners. They were unable to find any societies north of
the Zaire river that could support trade. Vansina (1990, p. 200)
writes that “the local coastal societies were just too small in terms
of people and territory; their economic and social institutions were
too undifferentiated to facilitate foreign trade.” Sustained trade
did not occur until the Portuguese found the Kongo kingdom, located
just south of the Zaire river. Because the Kongo kingdom had
a centralized government, a national currency, and well-developed
markets and trading networks, it was able to support trade with
the Europeans.
When European demand turned almost exclusively to slaves,
the preference to trade with the most developed parts of Africa
continued. Because the more prosperous areas were also the most
densely populated, large numbers of slaves could be efficiently
158 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
FIGURE IV
Relationship between Initial Population Density and Slave Exports
obtained if civil wars or conflicts could be instigated (Barry 1992;
Inikori 2003). As well, societies that were the most violent and
hostile, and therefore the least developed, were often best able
to resist European efforts to purchase slaves. For example, the
slave trade in Gabon was limited because of the defiance and
violence of its inhabitants toward the Portuguese. This resistance
continued for centuries, and as a result the Portuguese were forced
to concentrate their efforts along the coast further south (Hall
2005, pp. 60–64).
Using data on initial population densities, I check whether it
was the more prosperous or less prosperous areas that selected
into the slave trades. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2002)
have shown that population density is a reasonable indicator of
economic prosperity. Figure IV shows the relationship between
the natural log of population density in 1400 and ln(exports/area).
The data confirm the historical evidence on selection during the
slave trades.12
The figure shows that the parts of Africa that were
12. The relationship is similar if one excludes island and North African countries,
or if one normalizes slave exports by population rather than land area.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 159
the most prosperous in 1400, measured by population density,
tend also to be the areas that were most impacted by the slave
trades.
A second potential source of selection may be that societies
that initially had domestic slavery may have selected into the
slave trades. If this is the case, then the estimates may be biased
by a negative relationship between domestic slavery and
subsequent economic development, similar to that documented
by Engerman and Sokoloff (1997, 2002) in the Americas.
The historic evidence indicates that in the areas of Africa
that were part of the older Islamic slave trades there was domestic
slavery, but it is unclear whether domestic slavery was a cause
or a consequence of the external slave trades. Whether the parts of
Africa that were untouched by the Islamic trades had chattel slavery
prior to European contact has been the subject of an old debate
among African historians (e.g., Fage [1962]; Rodney [1970]). Since
this debate, evidence has been brought forth suggesting that domestic
slavery may not have existed prior to the trans-Atlantic
slave trade. Hilton (1985) provides evidence showing that in the
sixteenth century, words that originally meant “servant” or “prisoner”
were altered to take on the meaning of a “traded slave.”
Historian and Anthropologist Jan Vansina (1989), using more detailed
linguistic data, confirms Hilton’s finding, showing that in
West Central Africa there was no word for slave. Vansina maps
the origin of the word “pika,” which originally meant servant, but
took on the meaning of “traded slave.” The word originated at the
coastal ports engaged in the slave trade and spread to the inland
communities that were also involved in the trade (Vansina 1989,
1990). Recent studies of other regions also suggest that prior to the
external slave trade domestic slavery did not exist (e.g., Harms
[1981]; Inikori [2000]; Hall [2005, p. 16]).
V.B. Instrumental Variables
The second strategy that I pursue is to use instruments that
are correlated with slave exports, but are uncorrelated with other
country characteristics. This strategy has the added benefit of
yielding potentially consistent estimates even though slave exports
are measured with error. If the instruments are also uncorrelated
with the measurement error in slave exports that arises
from the undersampling of slaves from the interior, then unlike
OLS, IV yields consistent estimates.
160 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
As instruments for slave exports, I use the distances from
each African country to the locations where slaves were demanded.
The validity of the instruments relies on the presumption
that although the location of demand influenced the location
of supply, the location of supply did not influence the location of
demand. If sugar plantations were established in the West Indies
because the West Indies were close to the western coast of Africa,
then the instruments are not valid. However, if instead many
slaves were taken from western Africa because it was relatively
close to the plantation economies in the West Indies, then the instruments
are potentially valid. According to the known history
of the slave trades, it was the location of demand that influenced
the location of supply and not vice versa. The location of the demand
for African slaves was determined by a number of factors,
all unrelated to the supply of slaves. In the West Indies and the
southern United States, slaves were imported because of climates
suitable for growing highly valued, globally traded commodities
such as sugar and tobacco. The existence of gold and silver mines
was a determinant of the demand for slaves in Brazil. In the
northern Sahara, Arabia, and Persia, slaves were needed to work
in salt mines, and in the Red Sea area slaves were used as pearl
divers.
The instruments measure the distance from each country to
the most important destinations in each of the slave trades. The
four instruments are
1. The sailing distance from the point on the coast that is closest
to the country’s centroid to the closest major market of
the Atlantic slave trade. I use the nine largest importers
of slaves, which are Virginia, USA; Havana, Cuba; Haiti;
Kingston, Jamaica; Dominica; Martinique; Guyana; Salvador,
Brazil; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.13
2. The sailing distance from the point on the coast that is
closest to the country’s centroid to the closest of the two
major slave destinations of the Indian Ocean slave trade:
Mauritius and Muscat, Oman.
3. The overland distance from a country’s centroid to the closest
port of export for the trans-Saharan slave trade. The
markets are Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Benghazi, and Cairo.
13. Data on slave imports are from Eltis and Richardson (2006). There is a
significant drop in the volume of slave imports between the ninth and tenth largest
markets. Because of this natural break, I use the top nine markets.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 161
FIGURE V
Example Showing the Distance Instruments for Burkina Faso
4. The overland distance from a country’s centroid to the closest
port of export for the Red Sea slave trade. The ports
are Massawa, Suakin, and Djibouti.14
The instruments are illustrated in Figure V, which shows the
four distances for Burkina Faso. The ports in each of the four
slave trades are represented by different colored symbols, and the
shortest distances by colored lines. Details of the construction of
the instruments are given in the Appendix.15
The IV estimates are reported in Table IV. The first column
reports estimates without control variables, the second column
includes colonizer fixed effects, and the third and fourth columns
include colonizer fixed effects and geography controls. In column
(4), the sample excludes islands and North African countries.
14. For island countries, one cannot reach the ports of the Saharan or Red
Sea slave trades by traveling overland. For these countries I use the sum of the
sailing distance and overland distance.
15. An alternative strategy is to also include the distance from the centroid
to the coast (which is also shown in Figure V) as an additional instrument, since
this distance is part of the total distance to the markets in the Indian Ocean and
trans-Atlantic slave trades. The results are essentially identical if this distance is
also included as an additional instrument.
162 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
TABLE IV
ESTIMATES OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SLAVE EXPORTS AND INCOME
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Second Stage. Dependent variable is log income in 2000, ln y
ln(exports/area) −0.208∗∗∗ −0.201∗∗∗ −0.286∗ −0.248∗∗∗
(0.053) (0.047) (0.153) (0.071)
[−0.51, −0.14] [−0.42, −0.13] [−∞, +∞] [−0.62, −0.12]
Colonizer fixed No Yes Yes Yes
effects
Geography controls No No Yes Yes
Restricted sample No No No Yes
F-stat 15.4 4.32 1.73 2.17
Number of obs. 52 52 52 42
First Stage. Dependent variable is slave exports, ln(exports/area)
Atlantic distance −1.31∗∗∗ −1.74∗∗∗ −1.32∗ −1.69∗∗
(0.357) (0.425) (0.761) (0.680)
Indian distance −1.10∗∗∗ −1.43∗∗∗ −1.08 −1.57∗
(0.380) (0.531) (0.697) (0.801)
Saharan distance −2.43∗∗∗ −3.00∗∗∗ −1.14 −4.08∗∗
(0.823) (1.05) (1.59) (1.55)
Red Sea distance −0.002 −0.152 −1.22 2.13
(0.710) (0.813) (1.82) (2.40)
F-stat 4.55 2.38 1.82 4.01
Colonizer fixed No Yes Yes Yes
effects
Geography controls No No Yes Yes
Restricted sample No No No Yes
Hausman test .02 .01 .02 .04
(p-value)
Sargan test (p-value) .18 .30 .65 .51
Notes. IV estimates of (1) are reported. Slave exports ln(exports/area) is the natural log of the total number
of slaves exported from each country between 1400 and 1900 in the four slave trades normalized by land area.
The colonizer fixed effects are indicator variables for the identity of the colonizer at the time of independence.
Coefficients are reported, with standard errors in brackets. For the endogenous variable ln(exports/area), I
also report 95% confidence regions based on Moreira’s (2003) conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) approach.
These are reported in square brackets. The p-value of the Hausman test is for the Wu–Hausman chi-squared
test. ∗∗∗, ∗∗, and ∗ indicate significance at the 1%, 5%, and 10% levels. The “restricted sample” excludes island
and North African countries. The “geography controls” are distance from equator, longitude, lowest monthly
rainfall, avg max humidity, avg min temperature, and ln(coastline/area).
The first-stage estimates are reported in the bottom panel of
the table. The coefficients for the instruments are generally negative,
suggesting that the further a country was from slave markets,
the fewer slaves it exported.16
The exception is the distance
16. The specifications assume a linear first-stage relationship. The estimates
are similar if one also allows for a nonlinear relationship between slave exports
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 163
from the Red Sea ports, which is never significant, and is even
positive in one specification.
The second-stage estimates are reported in the top panel.
Because the first stage F-statistics are low, I also report conditional
likelihood ratio (CLR) confidence intervals. The estimates
for ln(exports/area) are all negative and statistically significant.
In column (3), the confidence interval is unbounded, which is a
consequence of the low first-stage F-statistic. The point estimates
range from −0.20 to −0.29. These magnitude are significantly
larger than the magnitudes of the OLS estimates. This is not
surprising, because the measurement error in the slave export estimates
and the selection of the initially most prosperous societies
into the slave trades are both expected to bias the OLS estimates
towards zero.
A potential concern with the Table IV estimates is that the
distances to the slave markets may be correlated with distances
to other locations that are important for economic development.
The likelihood of this can be assessed by estimating the reduced
form relationship between the distance instruments and income
within Africa and outside of Africa.17
I find that within Africa, the
four distance instruments are positively correlated with income,
and all coefficients, except for the Red Sea coefficient, are highly
significant. Being further from slave markets was good for growth.
However, outside of Africa, there is no clear relationship between
the distance instruments and income. If the results of Table IV are
driven by the relationship between the distances to slave markets
and distances to other locations, then one would expect to also
observe a positive relationship between the distance measures
and income outside of Africa. However, this is not the case.
Overall, the IV results confirm the negative relationship between
slave exports and income estimated by OLS. They also suggest
that the OLS estimates may even be a lower bound estimate
of the strength of the slave trade–income relationship.
VI. POSSIBLE CHANNELS OF CAUSALITY
I now turn to the channels through which the slave trades
may have affected economic development. I view this analysis as
and the distance instruments. The results are also similar if one uses the average
or median distance to the ports in each trade, rather than the minimum distance.
17. I thank Ted Miguel for suggesting this check.
164 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
FIGURE VI
Relationship between Slave Exports and Current Ethnic Fractionalization
preliminary and exploratory. With only 52 observations it is not
possible to pin down the precise channels and mechanism underlying
the relationships with any reasonable degree of certainty.
My strategy here is to simply investigate whether the data are
consistent with the historic events described in Section II.
An important consequence of the slave trades was that they
tended to weaken ties between villages, thus discouraging the
formation of larger communities and broader ethnic identities. I
explore whether the data are consistent with this channel by examining
the relationship between slave exports and a measure
of current ethnic fractionalization from Alesina et al. (2003). As
shown in Figure VI, there is a strong positive relationship between
the two variables.18
This is consistent with the historic
accounts of the slave trades impeding the formation of broader
ethnic identities.
This consequence of the slave trades is important because of
the increasing evidence showing that ethnic fractionalization is an
18. The results are also similar if other measures of ethnic fractionalization
are used.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 165
important determinant of a variety of factors necessary for economic
development. Since the seminal article documenting the
link between ethnic diversity and economic growth by Easterly
and Levine (1997), subsequent research by La Porta et al.
(1999), Alesina et al. (2003), Aghion, Alesina, and Trebbi (2004),
and Easterly, Ritzan, and Woolcock (2006) looks more deeply
into why ethnic fractionalization is important for development.
These studies find that ethnic diversity is important for social
cohesion, domestic institutions, domestic polices, and the quality
of government. As well, Alesina, Baquir, and Easterly (1999),
Miguel and Gugerty (2005), and Banerjee and Somanathan
(2006) find that ethnic fractionalization reduces the provision of
public goods, such as education, health facilities, access to water,
and transportation infrastructure, all of which are important for
economic development.
A second, and closely related, consequence of the slave trades
was the weakening and underdevelopment of states. To examine
whether the data are consistent with this channel, I consider
the relationship between slave exports and the level of state development
following the slave trades. To do this I use a measure
of precolonial state development from Gennaioli and Rainer
(2006). The measure is constructed using ethnographic data from
Murdock (1967) on the indigenous political complexity of ethnic
groups, measured by the number of jurisdictional hierarchies beyond
the local community. The original measure ranges from 0 to
4, with 0 indicating “stateless” societies and 4 indicating societies
with “large states” (Murdock 1967, p. 52). Using this data, Gennaioli
and Rainer (2006) construct a measure of the proportion of
a country’s indigenous population that belongs to an ethnic group
that falls into category 2, 3, or 4.
The relationship between slave exports and nineteenthcentury
state development is shown in Figure VII. The negative
relationship between slave exports and state centralization shown
in the figure is consistent with the historic accounts of the slave
trades causing long-term political instability, which resulted in
weakened and fragmented states.
Recent empirical research shows that a country’s history of
state development is an important determinant of current economic
performance. Bockstette, Chanda, and Putterman (2002)
and Chanda and Putterman (2005) find that “state antiquity,”
measured using an index of the depth of experience with statelevel
institutions, is positively correlated with real per capita GDP
166 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
FIGURE VII
Relationship between Slave Exports and Nineteenth-Century State Development
growth between 1960 and 1995. Looking within Africa, Gennaioli
and Rainer (2006) find that countries with ethnicities that had
centralized precolonial state institutions today provide more public
goods, such as education, health, and infrastructure.
Herbst (1997, 2000) also focuses on the importance of state
development for economic success, arguing that Africa’s poor
economic performance is a result of postcolonial state failure,
the roots of which lie in the underdevelopment and instability of
precolonial polities. Herbst (2000, chaps. 2–4) argues that because
of a lack of significant political development during colonial rule,
the limited precolonial political structures continued to exist after
independence.19
As a result, Africa’s postindependence leaders
inherited nation states that did not have the infrastructure
necessary to extend authority and control over the whole country.
Many states were, and still are, unable to collect taxes from
their citizens, and as a result they are also unable to provide a
minimum level of public goods and services.
19. On the continuity between Africa’s precolonial and postcolonial political
systems also see Hargreaves (1969, p. 200).
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 167
FIGURE VIII
Paths of Economic Development Since 1950
A corollary of Herbst’s argument is that the impact of the
slave trades may have been felt most strongly after colonial independence.
This is because this is when precolonial political structures
suddenly increased in importance, as they became central
determinants of the success of the newly formed state. Using
Figure VIII, I examine whether the evolution of incomes since
1950 is consistent with this hypothesis. The figure shows average
per capita GDP between 1950 and 2000 for two groups of African
countries.20
One group consists of the 26 countries with the lowest
measures of ln(exports/area), and the other is the 26 countries
with the highest measures of ln(exports/area). As shown in the figure,
throughout the period low-slave-export countries are richer
on average than high slave export countries. Also interesting, however,
is the difference in the evolution of income between the two
groups of countries. Although the low-slave-export countries were
richer in the early 1950s when most countries were still under
colonial rule, the income gap between the two groups increased
20. The averages are weighted by each country’s population in 2000.
168 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
significantly over time and became most pronounced after the late
1960s and early 1970s, when most countries had gained indepen-
dence.21
This pattern is consistent with the slave trades affecting
early state development, which may have mattered during colonial
rule but mattered much more after independence. Because
those parts of Africa that were most severely impacted by the
slave trades tended to have the least developed political systems,
after independence these countries continued to have weak and
unstable states, as well as slower economic growth.
VII. CONCLUSIONS
Combining data from shipping records and data from historical
documents reporting slave ethnicities, I have constructed
estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country in
Africa during Africa’s four slave trades. I found a robust negative
relationship between the number of slaves taken from a country
and its subsequent economic development.
I pursued a number of strategies to better understand if
the relationship is causal or spurious. If countries that were initially
underdeveloped selected into the slave trades, and if these
countries continue to be underdeveloped today, then this may explain
the observed relationship between slave exports and current
income. I first reviewed the historical evidence on the characteristics
of African societies that were most affected by the slave
trades. The qualitative and quantitative evidence show that it
was actually the most developed parts of Africa, not the least developed,
that tended to select into the slave trades. I also used
the distances from each country to the locations of the demand
for slaves as instruments to estimate the causal effect of the slave
trades on economic development. The IV estimates confirmed the
OLS results, suggesting that increased extraction during the slave
trades resulted in worse economic performance.
I then examined the channels of causality underlying the relationship
between slave exports and economic development. I
showed that the data are consistent with historic accounts suggesting
that the slave trades impeded the formation of broader
ethnic groups, leading to ethnic fractionalization, and that the
21. In 1950 only four African countries were independent. Ethiopia had never
been colonized, and Liberia, South Africa, and Egypt had previously gained independence.
By 1969, 42 of Africa’s 52 countries had gained independence, and by
1976, 48 countries were independent.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 169
slave trades resulted in a weakening and underdevelopment of
political structures.
APPENDIX
A. Deriving the Bias from the Undersampling of Slaves from the
Interior
In this section I show that the undersampling of slaves from
the interior of Africa will result in OLS estimates of the effect
of slave exports on income that are biased toward zero. To see
this, denote the true number of slaves taken from country i by s∗
i ,
the observed number of slaves by si, distance to the coast by di,
and economic development by yi. All variables are expressed as
deviations from means. Assume the true relationship between the
number of slaves exported and distance to the coast is given by
(2) s∗
i = −αdi + εi,
where α > 0 and εi is i.i.d. drawn from a normal distribution. The
relationship between the observed number of slaves exported, si,
and the distance to the coast, di, is given by
(3) si = s∗
i − γ di + νi,
where γ > 0 and νi is uncorrelated with εi. The true relationship
between slave exports and development is given by
(4) yi = −βs∗
i + ωi,
where β > 0 and ωi is uncorrelated with all other variables.
If one estimates yi = bsi + ξi by OLS, then the estimated relationship
between si and yi is
(5) ˆb = i si yi
i s2
i
.
Substituting (2) into (3) gives
(6) si = −(α + γ )di + εi + νi.
Similarly, (2) and (4) give
(7) yi = βαdi − βεi + ωi.
170 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
Substituting (6) and (7) into (5) and taking the plim of ˆb gives
(8) plim ˆb = −β
σ2
s∗ + γ ασ2
d
σ2
s∗ + 2γ (α + γ )σ2
d + σ2
ν
,
where σ2
s∗ = α2
σ2
d + σ2
ε .
First, consider the case when the only source of measurement
error is classical measurement error. Then γ = 0 and (8) reduces
to the standard formula for attenuation bias: plim ˆb = −β[σ2
s∗ /
(σ2
s∗ + σ2
ν )].
Next, consider the measurement error introduced by the undersampling
of slaves from the interior. The result of this is that
the underestimation of slave exports is increasing in a country’s
distance from the coast: γ > 0. Looking at (8), it is apparent that
2γ (α + γ ) > γ α, and therefore the presence of nonclassical measurement
error also biases the estimated coefficient toward zero,
reinforcing the attenuation bias resulting from classical errors in
variables.
B. Data
Real per capita GDP data are from Maddison (2003). Land
area, which is used to calculate ln(export/area), ln(coastline/area),
and population density in 1400, is measured in millions of square
kilometers, and is from Parker (1997). Historic population figures,
measured in thousands of people, are from McEvedy and Jones
(1978). For some groups of smaller countries, population data are
only disaggregated to a regional level. In these cases the data are
disaggregated to the country level using the distribution of population
in 1950 from the United Nations. Data on the identity of
the colonizer before independence are from the Political Regimes
and Regime Transitions in Africa, 1910–1994 data set, which is
described in Bratton and van de Walle (1997).
Distance from the equator is the absolute value of the latitude
of each country’s centroid, measured in degrees. Longitude is the
longitude of each country’s centroid, also measured in degrees. The
centroid of each country is calculated using the Centroid Utility in
ArcGIS. For five countries where the centroid falls outside the land
borders of the country (Gambia, Somalia, Cape Verde, Mauritius,
and Seychelles) the point within the country closest to the centroid
is used. The location on the coast that is closest to each country’s
centroid is identified using the Proximity Utility in ArcGIS.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 171
TABLE A.1
SUMMARY STATISTICS
Variable Mean Std. dev. Min Max N
ln real per capita GDP in 2000 7.13 0.83 5.38 9.27 52
ln(exports/area) 3.26 3.89 −2.30 8.82 52
ln(exports/pop) 9.26 3.68 3.91 14.4 52
Distance from equator 13.6 9.86 0.2 36 52
Longitude 16.7 20.2 −24.0 57.8 52
Lowest monthly rainfall 8.87 16.1 0 69 52
Avg max humidity 71.7 11.9 35 95 52
Avg min temperature 8.75 7.49 −9.0 19 52
ln(coastline/area) −0.24 3.24 −4.61 6.98 52
Island indicator 0.10 0.30 0 1 52
Percent Islamic 35.3 39.1 0 100 52
French legal origin 0.65 0.48 0 1 52
North Africa indicator 0.10 0.30 0 1 52
ln(gold prod/pop) −7.48 5.66 −13.8 3.08 52
ln(oil prod/pop) −6.71 4.03 −9.21 3.24 52
ln(diamond prod/pop) −5.49 2.40 −6.91 2.19 52
Atlantic distance 7.38 3.28 3.64 16.40 52
Indian distance 6.93 4.24 0.03 16.78 52
Saharan distance 3.51 1.57 0.31 6.64 52
Red Sea distance 3.44 1.47 0.06 6.47 52
TABLE A.2
ROBUSTNESS AND SENSITIVITY CHECKS
Specification Coef. Std. Err. N R2
Normalizing slave exports by average −0.103∗∗∗ (0.035) 52 0.77
population from 1400 to 1900
Omitting zero slave export countries −0.104∗∗ (0.041) 41 0.84
Omitting N. Africa, islands, −0.140∗∗∗ (0.040) 38 0.70
GNQ, LSO, SWZ, and ZAF
Including five region fixed effects −0.099∗∗ (0.036) 52 0.80
Omitting influential observations −0.091∗∗∗ (0.031) 42 0.90
Notes. The table reports OLS estimates of (1), with the full set of control variables from Table III
included. The dependent variable is the natural log of real per capita GDP in 2000, ln y. Each row of the
table reports estimates from one regression. ∗∗∗, ∗∗, and ∗ indicate significance at the 1%, 5%, and 10% levels.
The “five region fixed effects” in row 4 are North, West, Central, East, and South Africa. In row 5, influential
observations were omitted if Cook’s distance was greater than 4/N, where N is the number of observations.
Lowest monthly rainfall is the average total rainfall, measured
in millimeters, in the driest month of the year. Average
maximum humidity is the average of the maximum afternoon humidity,
measured in percent, during the hottest month of the year.
Average minimum temperature is the lowest average monthly
172 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
temperature measured in degrees Celsius. The data are from
meteorological data taken over a 30-year period and reported in
Parker (1997). Countries’ total coastline, which is used along with
land area to calculate ln(coastline/area), is measured in thousands
of kilometers and is from Parker (1997).
The percent Islamic variable is the percentage of a country’s
population that is Islamic. The data are from Parker (1997). Data
on countries’ legal origins are from La Porta et al. (1999). All countries
in the sample are coded as being either British common law
or French civil law countries. Data on the production of diamonds,
crude petroleum, and mined gold are from the British Geological
Survey’s World Mineral Statistics and World Mineral Production.
All three variables are measured as the natural log of the average
annual production per thousand inhabitants from 1970 to 2000.
Diamonds include both gemstones and industrial diamonds and
are measured in thousands of carats. Crude petroleum is measured
in thousands of tonnes, and mined gold is measured in
kilograms.
Ethnic fractionalization is from Alesina et al. (2003). The
measure of nineteenth-century state development is from Gennaioli
and Rainer (2006).
When taking the natural log of variables that may take on the
value of zero, I replace the zero observations with 1 × 10n
, where
n is the largest integer value possible subject to 1 × 10n
being less
than the smallest nonzero observation in the data.
The distance instruments measure the shortest sailing
distances to the locations of demand in the trans-Atlantic and
Indian Ocean slave trades and the shortest overland distances
to the locations of demand in the Red Sea and trans-Saharan
slave trades. The distances are calculated using the great
circle distance between two locations. The formula for this is
dij = (arccos{sin(Lai) sin(Laj) + cos(Lai) cos(Laj) cos(Loi − Loj)}×
111.12)/1000, where dij is the distance in thousands of kilometers
between location i and j, Lai is the latitude of location i in degrees,
and Loi is the longitude of location i in degrees. When calculating
the sailing distances, I do not allow ships to sail across land or
through the Suez Canal, which was not completed until 1869. For
voyages from northern Africa in the trans-Atlantic slave trade,
I calculate the sailing distance through the Strait of Gibraltar to
the closest market in the Atlantic Ocean. For the distance from
these countries in the Indian Ocean slave trade, I calculate the
sailing distance through the Mediterranean Sea, and then south
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF AFRICA’S SLAVE TRADES 173
around the Cape of Good Hope. When calculating distances from
East African countries during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and
from West African countries during the Indian Ocean slave trade,
I calculate the sailing distance around the Cape of Good Hope.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
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