The Causal History of Africa: A Response to Hopkins

In a recent paper for the Journal of African History, A.G. Hopkins writes that economists have spent the last decade writing a “new” economic history of Africa that has escaped the notice of historians. He labels the “ethnolinguistic fractionalization” and “reversal of fortune” theses as this literature's key insights. In this paper, I shall argue that the most valuable contributions to the new economic history of Africa are not distinguished by their broad theories, but by their careful focus on causal inference. I shall survey recent contributions to this literature, compare them with the “old” economic history of Africa, and revise Hopkins's advice to historians accordingly.