Marlous van Waijenburg is an Assistant Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches in the MBA required curriculum.
Professor van Waijenburg’s main research agenda centers on the long-term development patterns of African economies. To date, her projects have focused on material living standards, fiscal capacity building efforts, coercive labor market institutions, skill accumulation, and inequality. Recently, she added a second research line on the business history of the transatlantic slave trade, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Professor van Waijenburg earned a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University. Before joining HBS, she was a post-doctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan.
- Featured Work
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While current levels of economic inequality in Africa receive ample attention from academics and policymakers, we know little about the long-run evolution of inequality in the region. Even the new and influential ‘global inequality literature’ that is associated with scholars like Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic and Walter Scheidel, has had little to say about Africa so far. This paper is a first effort to fill that void. Building on recent research in African economic history and utilizing the new theoretical frameworks of the global inequality literature, we chart the long-run patterns and drivers of inequality in Africa from the slave trades to the present. Our analysis dismantles mainstream narratives about the colonial roots of persistent high inequality in post-colonial Africa and shows that existing inequality concepts and theories need further calibration to account, amongst others, for the role of African slavery in the long-run emergence and vanishing of inequality regimes.
Historical research on the race between education and technology has focused on the West but barely touched upon ‘the rest’. A new occupational wage database for 50 African and Asian economies allows us to compare long-run patterns in skill premiums across the colonial and post-colonial eras (c. 1870–2010). Our data reveal three major patterns. First, skilled labour was considerably more expensive in colonial Africa and Asia than in pre-industrial Europe. Second, skill premiums were distinctly higher in Africa than in Asia. Third, in both regions, skill premiums fell dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, ultimately converging to levels long observed in the West. Our paper takes a first step to explain both the origins of the Africa–Asia gap and the drivers of global skill premium convergence, paying special attention to the colonial context that shaped demand, supply, and labour market institutions
This review article seeks to build bridges between mainstream African history and the more historically oriented branch of the ‘new’ economic history of Africa. We survey four central topics of the new economic history of Africa — growth, trade, labor, and inequality — and argue that the increased use of quantitative methods and comparative perspectives have sharpened views on long-term trajectories of economic development within Africa and placed the region more firmly into debates of global economic development. The revival of African economic history opens new opportunities for Africanist historians to enrich the interdisciplinary approaches they have taken to study questions of demography, poverty, slavery, labor, inequality, migration, state formation, and colonialism. These fruits, however, can only be reaped if the institutional boundaries between the fields of history and economic history are softened and both sides engage in greater mutual engagement. Our paper aims to move closer to a shared vision on the benefits and limitations of varying quantitative methods, and how these approaches underpin both more and less convincing narratives of long-term African development.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s recent economic boom has raised hopes and expectations to lift the regions’ ‘bottom millions’ out of poverty by 2030. How realistic is that goal? We approach this question by comparing the experiences of three front-runners of region-specific development trajectories – Britain’s capital-intensive, Japan’s labour-intensive, and Ghana’s land-extensive growth path, highlighting some historical analogies that are relevant for Africa, but often overlooked in the current ‘Africa rising’ debate. We draw particular attention to Africa’s demographic boom and the possibilities for a quick transition to labour-intensive export-led industrialization. Although our exercise in diachronic comparative history offers little hope for poverty eradication by 2030, we do see broadened opportunities for sustained African economic growth in the longer term.
Dominant theories of state formation and nation-building lean heavily on the classic European tale of the simultaneous development of a ‘fiscal state’ and a ‘nation state’. However, this Euro-centered narrative does not factor in that more than two-thirds of the world embarked on a path towards fiscal ‘modernization’ under colonial rule. Contrary to sovereign states, these countries were controlled by a foreign satellite government, and ideas of nationhood were either non-existent, weakly developed, or emerged exactly in opposition against the obligation to pay tribute to external rulers. This difference between the experience of sovereign and colonial states forces us to rethink the rationale and practice of fiscal modernization in large parts of the world.
We argue that while the introduction of modern taxes in the colonies followed pretty quickly after they had been implemented in the main European metropoles, there are four major ways in which the logic of colonial fiscal development (c. 1820-1970) was at odds with the European experience. First, ‘modern’ taxes came about without a complementary development of accountable government. Second, they were introduced absent independent military and monetary regimes. Third, welfare provision and the development of bureaucratic capacity remained modest in most colonies, certainly when compared to the standards enjoyed in the metropoles. Finally, these new taxes did not apply equally to all colonial inhabitants or companies. In contrast to the imperial metropoles, where 'modern' taxes built on organically grown tax bases, fiscal 'modernity' and 'tradition' co-existed in a dualistic system in the colonies. In short, the adoption of ‘modern’ taxes was not necessarily part of a wider process of fiscal ‘modernization’. The comparison of fiscal development under colonial and sovereign rule helps to move beyond the Eurocentric bias in the historical tax literature and develop a more global theory of fiscal modernization.
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.
The historical and social science literature is divided about the importance of metropolitan blueprints of colonial rule for the development of colonial states. We exploit historical records of colonial state finances to explore the importance of metropolitan identity on the comparative development of fiscal institutions in British and French Africa. Taxes constituted the financial backbone of the colonial state and were vital to the state building efforts of colonial governments. A quantitative comparative perspective shows that pragmatic responses to varying local conditions can easily be mistaken for specific metropolitan blueprints of colonial governance and that under comparable local circumstances the French and British operated in remarkably similar ways.
Recent literature on the historical determinants of African poverty has emphasized structural impediments to African growth, such as adverse geographical conditions, weak institutions, or ethnic heterogeneity. But has African poverty been a persistent historical phenomenon? This article checks such assumptions against the historical record. We push African income estimates back in time by presenting urban unskilled real wages for nine British African colonies (18801965). We find that African real wages were well above subsistence level and that they rose significantly over time. Moreover, in West Africa and Mauritius real wage levels were considerably higher than those in Asia.
- Journal Articles
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- Frankema, Ewout, Michiel de Haas, and Marlous van Waijenburg. "Inequality Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa from Precolonial Times to the Present." African Affairs (forthcoming). View Details
- Frankema, Ewout, and Marlous van Waijenburg. "What About the Race Between Technology and Education in the Global South? Comparing Skill-premiums in Colonial Africa and Asia." Economic History Review (2023). (Pre-published online January 7, 2023.) View Details
- Frankema, Ewout, and Marlous van Waijenburg. "Bridging the Gap with the ‘New’ Economic History of Africa." Journal of African History (forthcoming). View Details
- Frankema, Ewout, and Marlous van Waijenburg. "Africa Rising? A Historical Perspective." African Affairs 117, no. 469 (October 2018): 543–568. View Details
- 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. View Details
- Frankema, Ewout, and Marlous van Waijenburg. "Metropolitan Blueprints of Colonial Taxation? Lessons from Fiscal Capacity Building in British and French Africa, 1880-1940." Journal of African History 55, no. 3 (September 2014): 371–400. View Details
- Frankema, Ewout, and Marlous van Waijenburg. "Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880–1965." Journal of Economic History 72, no. 4 (December 2012): 895–926. View Details
- Book Chapters
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- Frankema, Ewout, and Marlous van Waijenburg. "Fiscal Development under Colonial and Sovereign Rule." In Global Taxation: How Modern Taxes Conquered the World, edited by Philipp Genschel and Laura Seelkopf, 67–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. View Details
- Frankema, Ewout, and Marlous van Waijenburg. "From Coast to Hinterland: Fiscal State Formation in British and French West Africa, c. 1880–1960." In Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Africa and Asia, c. 1850–1960, edited by Ewout Frankema and Anne Booth, 161–192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. View Details
- Research Summary
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Professor van Waijenburg’s research focuses on the historical roots of relative African poverty and state fragility. Where sufficiently reliable and comparable records exist, she creates new datasets from a range of qualitative and quantitative archival sources. The construction of economic indicators for periods where standardized data for Africa is generally lacking (usually pre-1960), has three major cross-disciplinary payoffs. First, these new empirical foundations allow us to scrutinize a number of deep-seated (mis)conceptions about Africa’s political and economic past. Second, data over longer time periods can reveal a number of slower moving changes that have taken place in African economies. And finally, such historical datasets better embed ‘Africa’s path’ in debates about the making of global economic inequality.
Her first book (in progress) analyzes the comparative nature and pace of colonial state-building efforts in Africa through the lens of taxation. Drawing on extensive archival work in Aix-en-Provence, Dakar, London, and Washington D.C., she constructed a public finance dataset that is comparable across time and space for nearly 30 British and French African colonies. This macro-perspective allows her to scrutinize contradicting narratives about colonial fiscal ambitions, to identify similarities and differences in colonizers’ strategies to fiscal and state capacity building, and to measure and explain the incidence of widely varying tax-payer burdens across colonial Africa. Most importantly, her analysis incorporates the “invisible” component of colonial public finance: the in-kind revenues that accrued to the state from forced labor practices. This dimension sets her study apart from an expanding and cross-disciplinary body of literature on historical tax systems. By approaching forced labor from a fiscal perspective, she not only seeks to broaden the conceptual framework of the historical ‘fiscal capacity building’ literature, but also to shed new light on the multifaceted role of colonial labor coercion practices.
- Awards & Honors
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2021: Recipient of a National Science Foundation Research Grant (No. 2116150, $329,925) for "Investing in Captivity: Financing the Transatlantic Slave Trade" with Anne Ruderman.
2020: Finalist for the bi-annual Stephen Ellis Prize for best article in African Affairs. For article: "Africa Rising? A Historical Perspective" (with Ewout Frankema).
2018: Winner of the International Economic History Association's triennial Dissertation Prize in the Twentieth Century category in 2018 for for "Financing the African Colonial State: Fiscal Capacity Building and Forced Labor" (Prize Category: Twentieth Century).
2013: Winner of the Economic History Association's Arthur Cole Price for best article published in The Journal of Economic History in 2012. For article: "Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880–1965." (with Ewout Frankema.)
2013: Winner of the Wageningen School of Social Sciences Publication Award for best article published in the social sciences in 2012 for “Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880-1965” (The Journal of Economic History) with Ewout Frankema.
2010: Winner of the IISG Volkskrant Thesis Prize for the best historical master’s thesis completed in the Netherlands, awarded by the International Institute for Social History and national newspaper ‘de Volkskrant’ for “Living Standards in British Africa in a Comparative Perspective, 1880–1945: Is Poverty Destiny?”
2010: Winner of Prize for Best Master’s Thesis Completed at the Faculty of the Humanities, awarded by Utrecht University for “Living Standards in British Africa in a Comparative Perspective, 1880–1945: Is Poverty Destiny?”
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