Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor

Marlous van Waijenburg

The Journal of Economic History, 2018, vol. 78, issue 1, 40-80

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.

Date: 2018
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Working Paper: FINANCING THE AFRICAN COLONIAL STATE: THE REVENUE IMPERATIVE AND FORCED LABOUR (2015)
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