Africa by Morten Jerven

Author:Morten Jerven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2015-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

Source: Szereszewski 1965.

Szereszewski’s estimates indicate a period of rapid growth in the Gold Coast colony (Szereszewski 1965). If the assumed relative stagnation in traditional consumption is not taken into account,2 GDP per capita in Ghana more than tripled over two decades (1891–1911). This statistic implies a very high growth rate in the export economy and a 6.5 percent growth in per capita GDP over these two decades. In my own research, I put together a historical series of colonial statistics that demonstrated that the growth was sustained into the 1950s (Jerven 2014b).

This rapid expansion facilitated improvements in living standards and diets. Moradi, Austin and Baten associate GDP growth with marked increases in the mean height of Ghanaian people who were born during the period of rapid expansion of cocoa production in the Gold Coast at the turn of the twentieth century, indicating that the increase in cash crop production fueled widespread development in Ghana during the colonial period (Moradi et al. 2013).3 However, the cocoa boom and the economic growth in the countries that depended on this crop eventually petered out. In Ghana, economic growth ended prematurely because the state taxed cocoa peasants very heavily during the 1960s. (Some of this taxation was indirect because the government allowed the cedi to become grossly overvalued.) Growth continued in Ghana’s neighbor, Côte d’Ivoire, until the late 1970s, when depressed world market prices led to stagnation and a decline in cocoa earnings. As Tony Hopkins has pointed out, the economy of Côte d’Ivoire had a slow start because of the discriminatory agricultural policies of French colonial administrators, but then it grew quickly after independence because the new state was favorably disposed to cocoa production (Hopkins 1973: 218–19).

The literature on African economic development has already moved away from a ‘compression of history’, the methodological error of conflating data from two different time periods and ignoring data from the intervening years. More recent trends focus on analyzing and evaluating trajectories of economic development during the colonial and postcolonial periods (Austin 2008b; Jerven et al. 2012; Bowden et al. 2008). Particularly for the Gold Coast and Ghana, there is mounting direct and indirect evidence of periods of economic expansion and increases in living standards during the colonial period. Moradi reports that members of the cohort born between 1905 and 1920 were taller than members of the cohort born in 1880–93 ‘by an astonishing 2 cm on average[,] implying a considerable improvement in the physical quality of life’ (Moradi 2008: 1113; see also Moradi et al. 2013).4 Frankema and Waijenburg collected nominal wages from colonial records and used price data from the same sources to measure the trends in real wages. They found that real wages began growing in the 1910s and grew rapidly in the 1920s, and that growth was sustained into the 1960s (Frankema and van Waijenburg 2012). Gareth Austin argues that the expansion in the production of cash crops did not cause a net deficit in food production in the area and that the

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