Economic history of Africa

Two important exceptions were Nubian Sudan, which was linked to Egypt by the Nile and Ethiopia, which could trade with the northern regions over the Red Sea.

Powerful states grew up in these regions such as Kush in Nubia (modern day Northern Sudan and Southern Egypt) and Aksum in Ethiopia.

The difficulties of cutting down the equatorial forest for farming have led to the suggestion that the primary expansion was along river valleys, a hypothesis supported by studies of fish names.

Nubia in Sudan likewise traded with interior African countries such as Chad and Libya, as well as with Egypt, China, India and the Arabian peninsula.

For most of the 1st millennium AD, the Axumite Kingdom in Ethiopia and Eritrea had a powerful navy and trading links reaching as far as the Byzantine Empire and India.

Though Islam had comparatively little impact on North Africa where large cities, literacy, and centralized states had been the norm, Muslims were far more effective at penetrating the Sahara than Christians had been.

Berber traders from the Sahel—a region south of the Sahara Desert—traded dates, copper, horses, weapons and cloth that they brought from north Africa in Camel trains.

[9] By 1000, the Bantu language-speaking people of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa developed extensive overseas trade with lands as far away as China and India, from which they received porcelain, beads, and Persian and Arab pots.

Cloth, vegetables, meat, and other goods were traded, and paid for using small seashells called cowries which were imported from East Africa.

[15] On the Swahili Coast to the southeast, the Sultan of Malindi sent envoys to the Chinese imperial palace in Nanjing Yongle bearing a giraffe and other exotic gifts.

Africa was exploited for commercial purposes because of another Portuguese goal: to find a route to India, which would open the entire Indian Ocean region to direct trade with Portugal.

The major European imperial powers in Africa were Portugal, Great Britain, France, and to a lesser extent Germany, Belgium, Spain and Italy.

The massive profits from trade and the arrival of guns lead to significant centralization and a number of states formed in the region such as the Ashanti Confederacy and Kingdom of Benin.

Many West-African natives, such as Seedies and Kroomen, served on European ships, and received regular pay, which greatly enhanced their status back home.

Conversely, there were those, like the British explorer and geographer William Winwood Reade, who drew on the accounts of slave traders to argue that the effects of slavery were positive.

[19] By the early 20th century, the view of slavery as a negative influence on Africa prevailed among professional academic historians in Europe and the United States.

In the 1970s, the debate on the economic impacts of the Atlantic trade increasingly turned on demographic estimates of slave exports in relation to continental birth rates.

[21] More recently, John K. Thornton has presented an argument closer to that of Fage, while Joseph Inikori, Patrick Manning and Nathan Nunn have argued that the slave trade had a long-term debilitating impact on African economic development.

[23] Nunn, in a recent econometric analysis of slave-exporting regions in all parts of Africa, found "a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves taken from a country and its subsequent economic development.

Called for by Portugal and organized by Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of Germany, its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, can be seen as the formalization of the Scramble for Africa.

The conference ushered in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, while simultaneously eliminating most existing forms of African autonomy and self-governance.

Mining for gems and precious metals such as gold was developed in a similar way by wealthy European entrepreneurs such as Cecil Rhodes.

To some colonizers, such as the British, the ideal colony was based on an open economy, actively engaged in world trade through the export of raw materials and the import of finished goods.

While these countries did finance some major infrastructure projects designed to facilitate trade, this was primarily to aid in the immediate extraction of valuable resources, and there was little to no investment into growing local business.

This meant African colonial economies were often export based, with little to no domestic manufacturing, resulting in the aforementioned trade dependence on Europe.

One method that colonial powers used to urge the native populations into participating in the larger economy was the requirement that taxes be paid in official currency.

[35] African countries gradually won their independence (with colonial-era boundaries intact), in most cases without prolonged violent conflict (exceptions include the Cameroon, Madagascar and Kenya).

The tendency towards single-party rule, outlawing political opposition, had the result of keeping dictators in power for many years, perpetuating failed policies.

For example, in Africa, property rights are not established or enforced in a way promoting economic activity, and many African nations still rely heavily on raw material exports for income.

Influential political include pre-colonial centralization, ethnic fractionalization, European settlement, natural resource dependence, and democracy.