The statistical records that have been collected, systematized and synthesized here provide a quantitative basis to challenge and shape existing narratives on African economic development from the nineteenth-twentieth centuries. However, the history of counting and registering people is as old as documented history – with taxation, it is a central part of a state’s effort to govern. The word “statistics” itself derives from “state” and statistical records are primarily the historical footprint of states. We see what the states knew about themselves, what they cared to find out, and their chosen projected image. In this chapter, we give an overview of the history of census taking in Africa, and further evaluate the basis of the architecture of knowledge that colonial and postcolonial states have left behind. It is particularly important to clarify what kind of questions the state records can answer, and where other evidence sources will have to be used, as this chapter sets the ground for the empirical analysis presented in the three following chapters. The chapter concludes with a view toward further research, in particular the use of other data sources, to expand “new economic history” beyond the colonial period and the use of the colonial records.

What is “new” and what is “old” in the economic history of Africa? The chapter presents the “new African economic history” and summarizes and considers the emerging themes and contributions of the last two decades. Examining the differences in the approaches taken by economists and historians when interpreting social and economic change in the African past, the chapter identifies the central research questions, and seeks to bridge gaps in the use of methods. The chapter sets out an agenda for African economic history that goes beyond the divide of “causal history” and “compression of history” (Austin 2008, Fenske 2010). A decade of research, particularly using colonial records, has extended the quantitative boundary of investigation and allowed for a richer economic history of the twentieth century in Africa, which has hitherto focused on the persistent negative effect of institutions on economic performance and the persistence of economic failure. The recognition and substantiation of historical economic and institutional change are important, since a dismissal of both economic growth and state formation as failed projects in the twentieth century risks not learning from history: The key is to understand under what circumstances states developed, and under which they did not.

The interest in the economic history of Africa in recent influential economic research has been motivated by using econometric techniques to explain Africa’s relative poverty today. It has combined evidence from the very recent past (typically GDP per capita today) with evidence capturing some historical event (slave exports, colonial settlers, and geographical variables) to find some root cause of the relative underdevelopment of African economies. Thus, this analysis of economic growth in Africa has given the impression that African economics have been stuck in zero growth equilibrium for centuries. A longer time perspective makes it clear that growth has recurred in African economies in several periods. The chapter presents new GDP estimates for the colonial period, and discusses other historical proxies of GDP growth, such as terms of trade. New data shows that periods of economic growth are not new in Africa, and thus seeks to place the recent decades of “Africa rising” in historical perspective.

The new African economic history used econometric methods and quantitative data to make big claims about the causes of Africa’s current relative poverty vis-à-vis the rest of the world, especially the wealthy countries in the West. At first historians did not respond to these claims, as Hopkins (2009) pointed out, while African economic historians tended to warn about the “compression of history” (Austin, 2009). This book has sought to summarize some of my own research and that of many other economic historians whose research has contributed to a decompression of history by providing long-term historical time series on some of the central metrics of economic development: wages, poverty, living standards, taxation, and economic growth.

How have African states evolved over time? This chapter addresses the prominent debate in the social sciences concerning the role and persistence of “institutions” and examines the composition of government revenues, as well as the level of tax extraction, for all territories in Africa from 1890 to 2010. The chapter builds on a database with consistent long time series on government revenues for the entire continent, thus opening up new lines of inquiry into the evolution of African statehood.The chapter presents real per capita tax rates for countries across the 20th century and makes some analytical contributions, by proposing typologies of development patterns in taxation. Trends in taxation are not uniform, and some countries follow distinct paths. This takes us some way toward distilling what the relevant empirical and theoretical questions are – those that could and should be asked about levels and trends in taxation in African countries across the twentieth century. The chapter presents a general continent-wide trend in taxation (subject to much country variation), where increases in taxation from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the 1960s and into the 1970s are seen, followed by a decrease in the 1980s.

There is a long history of poverty in Africa. However, the most influential narrative of African poverty tells a story that takes place over a very short period of time. The history of Africa by numbers as told by the World Bank starts in the 1980s with the first Living Standards Measurement Surveys. The story is also a very narrow one. In general, there is a disconnect between the theoretical and historical underpinnings of how we understand and define poverty in Africa and how it has been quantified in practice. This chapter reviews how particular types of poverty knowledge have gained prominence and thus shaped the historical narrative of poverty in Africa. It summarizes recent work on living standards. New sources on real wages and evidence from anthropometric research allow perspectives on trends and relative levels in living standards back to the 1890s and until today. This raises the possibility that the narrative of African poverty that was born in the 1980s is a historical anomaly. Such a perspective may also offer a better perspective from which to reach a historical comparative verdict on the more recent “Africa rising” narrative.