Smith Goes to Sokoto: How Close was Precolonial Northern Nigeria to Modern Economic Growth?’

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• Dr Tom Westland (Wageningen University)
• Monday 09 March 2026, 17:00-18:30
• Audit Room, King's College, Cambridge: to receive zoom link please subscribe at https://lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/subscribe/history-global-economic-history at https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/event-series/global-economic-history.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Gareth Austin.

Modern economic growth primarily involves the shifting of workers from agricultural to non-agricultural occupations. The probability that they will do so is a function of two key variables: whether or not agricultural productivity is high enough to allow farmers to be ‘released’ from agricultural occupations without jeopardising food security, and whether or not labour productivity in non-agricultural activities is high enough relative to labour productivity in agriculture to make the sectoral switch worthwhile. Estimating agricultural and non-agricultural productivity is therefore crucial to understanding the conditions in which structural change can occur. This paper offers new estimates of sectoral labour productivity in early colonial Northern Nigeria (c.1905-c.1925), using district-level archival tax records to estimate the output of workers in a number of economically important sectors, such as arable, livestock, textiles, metalworking, and retail and wholesale trade. It also compares Northern Nigerian land productivity to other benchmark economies using the standard calories/hectare measure. The paper suggests that Northern Nigerian arable agriculture was relatively productive in international terms, which can help to explain its high degree of urbanisation and rural handicraft industry, though the gap between non-agricultural productivity and agricultural productivity was quite high, at least in the main urban centres.

This talk is part of the Global Economic History Seminar series.

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