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  • March 2018
  • Article
  • Journal of Economic History

Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor

By: Marlous van Waijenburg
  • Format:Print
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Abstract

Although recent studies on African colonial tax systems have deepened our understanding of early fiscal capacity building efforts in the region, they have largely ignored the contributions from a widely used but invisible source of state revenue: that of labor contributions. Exploiting data on corvée systems in French Africa, this is the first article to make these in-kind taxes “visible” by estimating a lower bound of how much they augmented governments' revenue base. Revealing that labor taxes constituted in most places the largest component of early colonial budgets, I argue that studies on historical taxation need to make a greater effort to integrate this significant source of government revenue into their analysis.

Keywords

Colonial Institutions; Labor Coercion; Taxation; Africa

Citation

van Waijenburg, Marlous. "Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor." Journal of Economic History 78, no. 1 (March 2018): 40–80.
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About The Author

Marlous van Waijenburg

Business, Government and the International Economy
→More Publications

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