The Challenge of Studying Inflation in Precolonial Africa

Abstract

Abstract:This article studies the issue of inflation in precolonial West Africa. In a recent publication, it was argued that there was substantial inflation in West Africa as early as the seventeenth century. In this article, data from the Gold Coast is reported, in order to show that the prices of slaves, used in recent previous research to analyze inflation, is a poor proxy for the prices of other traded commodities. Contrasting the case of the Gold Coast to that of Dahomey, it is furthermore shown that different societies in West Africa experienced different trends around the same period of time, cautioning against generalizations about broader regions.