The challenge of studying inflation in pre-colonial Africa

• This paper studies the issue of inflation in pre-colonial West Africa. In a recent publication, it was argued that there was substantial inflation in West Africa already in the seventeenth century. In this paper, data from the Gold Coast is reported, in order to show that the prices of slaves, used in recent previous research for analyzing inflation, is a bad 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.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Ekonomisk historia (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economic History (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Inflation

Markets

Africa

Pre-colonial

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)