West Africa

Some Monday Links

Michalis Trepas Links , , , , , , , , ,

Redefining Death (National Review)

Some medical devices don’t mean to be racist, but they are (Psyche)

Monetary Meld (IMF)

And, inspired by this NOL discussion here,

A History of My Economic Opinions (Deirdre McCloskey)

This is a long, but enrapturing piece (I am not familiar with McCloskey’s work, which was also referenced en passant in another fresh NOL post). An excerpt:

I happened in 1958 to devour in the Andrew-Carnegie financed public library of Wakefield, Massachusetts the Russian prince Pyotr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) and the gullible American journalist John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). If I had instead come across Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom (1943) or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) I suppose I would have gotten a better grasp of market pricing, earlier. Many market-loving classical liberals came to liberalism by that free-market path, and were never socialists. Yet the socialism-to-liberalism route is very common in 20th century political biographies, such as Leszek Kołakowski’s or Robert Nozick’s or, to descend a couple of notches, D. N. McCloskey’s. (The contrary route from market liberal to state socialist is vanishingly rare.)

How the abolition of slavery led to imperialism

Brandon Christensen History , , , ,

I’ve been saying this for years, so it’s nice to see this out in the open. Behold:

Far from meaning the end of slavery as Western demand for enslaved persons fell, the 19th century saw slavery’s increase in West Africa as a different type of external demand arose. The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade north of the Equator in the first two decades of the 19th century transformed West African economies. It was one of the major factors in the series of economic crises and political revolutions that shaped West African politics until the advent of formal colonialism in the 1880s

This is from Toby Green, an excellent scholar of Africa in the UK.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. When things fall apart Jessica Moody, Africa is a Country
  2. Giving globalization a bad name Arnold Kling, askblog
  3. American slavery’s best essay in years Wilfred Reilly, Quillette
  4. Zara Steiner, historian, 1928-2020 Paul Kennedy, Financial Times

A brief (but very good) history of West Africa

Brandon Christensen History ,

Just in time for the weekend:

What took the place of the colonial trading economy was an over-centralized political system, with the state adding the roles of banker, industrialist and landlord to that of merchant monopolist and bureaucratic provider. A dispersed population of small farmers constituted its material base and, with the state apparatus weighing down so heavily on a captive peasantry, something had to give.

There is much, much more here. From the economic anthropologist Keith Hart. Happy Friday to all.