Volumes have been written about the cruelty of slavery, the economic impact of slavery on the U.S. economy and the lasting effects of slavery on African Americans. Now comes Harvard University economist Nathan Nunn with this argument: “The African countries that are the poorest today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken.”

 

Writing in the current issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Nunn describes what he says is “the first empirical examination of the Africa’s slave trades in shaping subsequent economic development.” He painstakingly constructs – from shipping records and other all sorts of other documents — measures of the number of slaves exported from each African country between 1400 and 1900. From 54 different samples of the transatlantic slave trade, he tracks 80,656 slaves from 229 distinct ethnic identities. He also has data on 21,048 slaves shipped across the Indian Ocean, 5,385 slaves who were moved across the Saharan trade and 67 slaves (with 32 different ethnicities) who crossed the Red Sea.

 

Nunn cautions that the data doesn’t prove that the slave trade caused today’s economic disappointments in Africa; it could be that slaves were drawn from the most unfortunate countries in the first place. But he argues that, in fact, the evidence shows that slaves tended to come from the most developed – not the least developed – parts of Africa. “The data are consistent with historic accounts suggesting that the slave traders impeded the formation of broader ethnic groups, leading to ethnic fractionalization, and that the salve trades resulted in a weakening and underdevelopment of political structures,” Nunn concludes. – David Wessel