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The Challenge of Studying Inflation in Precolonial Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 November 2017

Klas Rönnbäck
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Abstract:

This article studies the issue of inflation in precolonial West Africa. In a recent publication, it was argued that there was substantial inflation in West Africa as early as the seventeenth century. In this article, data from the Gold Coast is reported, in order to show that the prices of slaves, used in recent previous research to analyze inflation, is a poor proxy for the prices of other traded commodities. Contrasting the case of the Gold Coast to that of Dahomey, it is furthermore shown that different societies in West Africa experienced different trends around the same period of time, cautioning against generalizations about broader regions.

Résumé:

Cet article étudie la question de l’inflation en Afrique de l’ouest avant la colonisation. Dans une publication récente, on a fait valoir qu’il y avait une inflation substantielle en Afrique de l’ouest dès le XVIIe siècle. Cet article analyse les données de la Côte de l’Or afin de montrer que le prix des esclaves utilisé dans les recherches précédentes pour analyser l’inflation est un mauvais substitut pour comprendre le prix des autres marchandises échangées. En comparant le cas de la Côte de l’Or à celui du Dahomey, on constate en outre que différentes sociétés d’Afrique de l’Ouest ont connu des tendances différentes au cours de la même période; ceci nous met donc en garde contre les généralisations sur des régions plus vastes.

Type
Critical Historiography
Information
History in Africa , Volume 45 , June 2018 , pp. 5 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2017 

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