The Colonial Cash Crop Economy and Gender Inequality in Africa

• In Event: Colonial Legacies

Abstract

What accounts for gender inequality across countries in Africa? An influential scholarship points to colonialism as a critical juncture. After the imperial conquest, colonial governments sought to intensify the spread of commercial export agriculture to meet market demand in the metropole and improve the fiscal balance of their colonies. A voluminous qualitative and ethnographic literature documents the gendered-nature of colonial governments’ agricultural policies. Despite legacies of shared farming between men and women in many communities, colonial governments tended to only view men as ‘cash crop farmers.’ This is argued to have profoundly disrupted gender relations as men disproportionately benefited from the commercialization of land, agricultural extension services, income paid in the colonial currency and greater contact with the state. To date, however, this thesis has not been systematically tested due to a lack of data. We leverage a granular and comprehensive dataset on the spatial distribution of cash crop agriculture across 38 African countries from the late 1950s to fill this gap. We isolate the effects of colonial agricultural policies from extraction more broadly by comparing cash crop regions to mining ones. Our analysis combines this geographic data on historical primary commodity production with survey items on male and female land ownership, decision-making within the household, and gender norms. Instrumenting historical production with soil suitability for cash crops, we investigate whether the 19th century transition to modern export agriculture left a legacy of gender-based inequality.

Authors

• Philip Roessler, College of William & Mary

• Yannick Immanuel Pengl, ETH Zurich