Publications
Publications
- March 2018
- Journal of Economic History
Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor
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
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.