Sinds Juli 2012 is Frankema hoogleraar en leerstoelhouder van de Rural and Environmental History Group aan Wageningen University. Frankema’s onderzoek en onderwijsagenda richten zich op een beter begrip van de lange termijn ontwikkelingsgeschiedenis van (voormalige) ontwikkelingsregio’s (Afrika, Latijns Amerika, Azië). (ewout.frankema@wur.nl)

Is Poverty Destiny? Exploring Long Term Changes in African Living Standards in Global Perspective

Africa has recently become a new frontier area in research on the historical roots of global inequality. This NWO VIDI project seeks to broaden the empirical basis for long term African welfare analysis using previously unexplored colonial archives and focusing on understudied areas and time periods. While there is consensus that African economies, to various degrees, expanded in response to international market integration during the colonial era, there is widespread disagreement on the question to which degree ordinary Africans actually benefitted as well as to which extent the colonial era represented a break with pre-colonial economic and political developments, particularly during the 19th century. Exploring historical archives with data on African trade, rural production systems, commodity prices, missionary activities and colonial government accounts, this research project seeks to develop a long-term comparative perspective on the development of African living standards in British West Africa, British Southern Africa and Portuguese Africa. The research team led by Professor Ewout Frankema consists of two PhD students, Angus Dalrymple-Smith and Kleoniki Alexopoulou, one Post-graduate researcher, dr. Dacil Juif, and a number of rotating research assistants. The project contains a strategy to disseminate its results to non-academic audiences and seeks to support the development of African research capacity in collaboration with international partners united in the African Economic History Network. The project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and is scheduled for 2013-2018.

Is Poverty Destiny? A New Empirical Foundation for Long-Term African Welfare Analysis

This ERC Starting Grant project aims to create a new empirical foundation for the study of long-term African welfare development, in order to provide new impetus to the debate on the root causes of African poverty. What is missing is a systematic account of long-term welfare development that connects the colonial era to the post-colonial era on the basis of temporally consistent and internationally comparable living standard indicators. The lack of such an empirical foundation has left important research questions unresolved. Firstly, did African income levels fall behind those of the rest of the world during the deep economic and political crises of the late 20th century or long before that? Secondly, to what extent did ordinary Africans benefit from the expansion of colonial trade and foreign investment between 1880 and 1960? Thirdly, to what extent has African welfare growth been constrained by structural development impediments, such as adverse geographical conditions? The project make use of the largely unexploited wage and price statistics from colonial archival sources and connects these to existing post-colonial wage and price series, in order to compare long-term trajectories of African welfare development to those of other world regions, using the available datasets on historical living standards for Europe, Asia and Latin America. The observed intra-African variation in these trajectories will be explored by integrating the key sources of long-term economic growth (geography, institutions, trade) into a single analytical framework. The research team led by Professor Ewout Frankema consists of two PhD students, Michiel de Haas and Kostadis Papaioannou, one Post-graduate researcher, dr. Pieter Woltjer, and a number of rotating research assistants. This project is part of the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme, ERC Grant Agreement nº 313114 and is scheduled for 2012-2017

Other projects

RHI-10506 Introduction to International Development Studies (BA Int. Dev. Studies)
Social Science Group, Wageningen University
Period 1: 2012, 2013, 2014
Introduction into the key themes of international development studies, confronting the major theoretical approaches to real-world developments. The course analyses global development themes from a historical perspective.

RHI-10806 Economics and Governance in Historical Perspective (BA Econ. & Governance)
Social Science Group, Wageningen University
Period 1: 2012, 2013, 2014
Introduction into the key developments in European economic growth and policy since 1945, focusing on how the development of the European Union, the Bretton Woods system, and the design of European agricultural and environmental policies have affected post-war economic growth in Europe and the Netherlands.

Colonialism and Development in Comparative Perspective  (MA History)
Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University
Period 3: 2010, 2012, 2013
A Master-thesis writing tutorial that guides students in the selection of a topic and prepares them for thesis-writing. Thematically the tutorial focuses on long-run comparative paths of socio-economic and political development in former European colonies in Asia, Africa and Latin America (1492-2000).

Collapse? Balancing Growth with Scarcity  (BA History)
Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University
Period 3: 2011, 2012, 2013
The transition from pre-industrial to industrial societies has significantly increased the impact of human societies on the environment. However, the tensed relation between man and the environment is not just a recent phenomenon. For thousands of years human societies have exploited limited natural resources to produce food and obtain fuel, fibres and building materials. This course explores specific historical cases as well as long-term global developments in the relation between people and the environment.

Introduction to World History  (BA History)
Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University
Period 4: 2012
General introduction into the key themes and debates of world history, 1000-2000 AD.

Wealth and Poverty in the Americas  (MA History)
Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University
Period 2-3: 2010, 2011
The repressive and extractive features of Spanish colonial rule, in contrast to the cooperative and liberal features of British colonial rule, have long been taken as the conventional explanation for the ‘reversal of fortune’ in the American hemisphere. In recent years this view has been attacked by scholars arguing that Spanish institutions were different, but not necessarily ‘inferior’, nor ‘bad’ for growth. In this research seminar students review the academic debate, the hypotheses and the available evidence to gain a deeper understanding of the historical determinants of global inequality.