A Drought-Induced African Slave Trade?

Levi Boxell

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Historians have frequently suggested that droughts helped facilitate the African slave trade. By introducing a previously unused dataset on historical rainfall levels in Africa, I provide the first empirical answer to this hypothesis. I demonstrate how negative rainfall shocks and long-run shifts in the mean level of rainfall increased the number of slaves exported from a given region and can have persistent effects on the level of development today. Using a simple economic model of an individual's decision to participate in the slave trade, along with observed empirical heterogeneity and historical anecdotes, I argue that consumption smoothing and labor allocation adjustments are the primary causal mechanisms for the negative relationship between droughts and slave exports. These findings contribute to our understanding of the process of selection into the African slave trade and have policy implications for contemporary human trafficking and slavery.

Keywords: slave trade; climate; droughts; consumption smoothing; human trafficking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N37 N57 O15 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-03-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-his and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/69853/1/MPRA_paper_69853.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/81291/9/MPRA_paper_81291.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/81924/1/MPRA_paper_81924.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Droughts, conflict, and the African slave trade (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:69853

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().