The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa

By Nathan Nunn, Léonard Wantchekon. 2011

1,383 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a recent study, Nunn (2008) examines the long-term impacts of Africa’s slave trade. He finds that the slave trade, which occurred over a period of more than 400 years, had a significant negative effect on long-term economic development. Although the article arguably identifies a negative causal relationship between the slave trade and income today, the analysis is unable to establish the exact causal mechanisms underlying this reduced-form relationship. In this article, we examine one of the channels through which the slave trade may affect economic development today. Combining contemporary individual-level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group, we ask whether the slave trade caused a culture of mistrust to develop within Africa. Initially, slaves were captured primarily through state organized raids and warfare, but as the trade progressed, the environment of ubiquitous insecurity caused individuals to turn on others—including friends and family members—and to kidnap, trick, and sell each other into slavery (Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle 1854; P. E. H. Hair 1965; Charles Piot 1996). We hypothesize that in this environment, a culture of mistrust may have evolved, which may persist to this day. We show that current differences in trust levels within Africa can be traced back to the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. Combining contemporary individual-level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group, we find that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today. Evidence from a variety of identification strategies suggests that the relationship is causal. Examining causal mechanisms, we show that most of the impact of the slave trade is through factors that are internal to the individual, such as cultural norms, beliefs, and values. (JEL J15, N57, Z13)

Subfields: Demography, Information Systems, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d66b868250c9bdb81781bb2ad3c2253e2d11cde8

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Citations in the corpus

Long Live Keju! The Persistent Effects of China’s Civil Examination System (2020, neutral): “[65] Nunn, Nathan and Leonard Wantchekon.”
Domestic Institutions as a Source of Comparative Advantage (2013, neutral): “Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) examine the mechanism involved.”
Seeds of distrust: conflict in Uganda (2012, methodology): “This result is partially different from Nunn and Wantchekon (2011), who ﬁnd that a past history of enslavement has a negative effect on all dimensions of trust, including trust in relatives.”
The Value of Democracy: Evidence from Road Building in Kenya (2015, neutral): “It has been argued by historians, political scientists, and economists that this phenomenon has hampered the economic performance of many countries, particularly in Africa (Bates 1983; Mamdani, 1996; Easterly and Levine 1997; Herbst, 2000; Alesina et al 2003; Alesina and La Ferrara 2005; Posner, 200”
The Impact of Violence on Individual Risk Preferences: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2015, background): “There is also evidence that war and violence limit the accumulation of human capital (Blattman & Annan, 2010) and erode trust (Nunn & Wantchekon, 2011).”
The Empire is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy (2016, positive): “9 Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) identify cultural norms and formal institutions as two separate channels of the effect of slave trade in Africa.”
Violence Against Women: A Cross-Cultural Analysis for Africa (2016, methodology): “When direct matching is impossible, we use the dataset constructed by Nunn and Wantchekon (2011), which provides a concordance between the ethnicities in the Afrobarometer and those in the Ethnographic Atlas.”