The Phenomenon of Slave Trades in Africa: multiple approaches to historical dynamics

Details

Supervisors

Cassan, Guilhem

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences économiques, orientation générale, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

This work aims at deepening the analysis made by professor Nathan Nunn in his pivotal work Nunn (2008), concerning the effects of the African Slave Trades over current (year-2000) per capita GDP outcomes in African countries. By passing through the presentation of the general context of African dynamics over trends in ethnic groups, populations and wealth (Chapter I), we review the core literature on the topic (Chapter II) and we then focus on the original work by Nunn (Chapter III). Then, we propose our personal analyses and reinterpretations of the data coming from Nunn (2008). In Chapter IV, we replicate Nunn's data and lead some further analysis on relevant subsamples of the original dataset by the author. Chapters V and VI are dedicated to further analyses based on our original panel dataset. We use our rearranged data to both replicate Nunn's data in a panel-shaped regression frame (Chapter V), and then we look for further counter-evidence by analyzing the interactional effects of the rate of exportation of enslaved people per country over per capita GDP, accounting also for the year-interactional effects for each relevant subsample of African countries (Chapter VI). We find relevant divergences among the subsets we analyzed in each of our analyses. We challenge the overall Nunn's conclusions over his whole sample, as we posit that the actual, relevant dynamics in the effects of the Slave Trades over African economies are the ones identified by the so-called "top-19-exporting-countries subset", i.e. a subset of our sample that accounts for the 19 countries that exported the highest number of human beings. These 19 countries represent more than 95.5% of the total number of enslaved human beings in Africa and systematically shows counter-evident findings with respect to Nunn (2008). As they show tendencies in effects that contradict Nunn's conclusions, we call for better evidence and further research on the topic, in order to better understand – starting from this contradiction – the real, actual effects of the Slave Trades on the economies of African countries.