The economic history of Sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by geographically and temporally dispersed booms and busts. The export-led ‘cash-crop revolution’ in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial era is a key example of an economic boom. This thesis examines how external influences and local realities shaped the nature, extent and impact of the ‘cash-crop revolution’ in colonial Uganda, a landlocked country in central east Africa, where cotton and coffee production for global markets took off following completion of a railway to the coast. The thesis consists of five targeted ‘interventions’ into contemporary debates of comparative African development. Each of these five interventions is grounded in the understanding that the ability of rural Africans to respond to and benefit from trade integration during the colonial era was mediated by colonial policies, resource endowments and local institutions. The first chapter reconstructs welfare development of Ugandan cash-crop farmers. Recent scholarship on historical welfare development in Sub-Saharan Africa has uncovered long-term trends in standards of living. How the majority of rural dwellers fared, however, remains largely elusive. This chapter presents a new approach to reconstructing rural living standards in a historical context, building upon the well-established real wage literature, but moving beyond it to capture rural realities, employing sub-national rural survey, census, and price data. The approach is applied to colonial and early post-colonial Uganda (1915–70), and yields a number of findings. While an expanding smallholder-based cash-crop sector established itself as the backbone of Uganda’s colonial economy, farm characteristics remained largely stagnant after the initial adoption of cash crops. Smallholders maintained living standards well above subsistence level, and while the profitability of cash crops was low, their cultivation provided a reliable source of cash income. At the same time, there were pronounced limits to rural welfare expansion. Around the time of decolonization, unskilled wages rose rapidly while farm incomes lagged behind. As a result, an urban–rural income reversal took place. The study also reveals considerable differences within Uganda, which were mediated to an important extent by differential resource endowments. Smallholders in Uganda’s banana regions required fewer labour inputs to maintain a farm income than their grain-farming counterparts, creating opportunities for additional income generation and livelihood diversification. The second chapter zooms in on labour migration which connected Belgian-controlled Ruanda-Urundi to British-controlled Buganda, the central province of Uganda on the shores of Lake Victoria. The emergence of new labour mobility patterns was a key aspect of economic change in colonial Africa. Under conditions of land abundance and labour scarcity, the supply of wage labour required either the ‘pull’ forces of attractive working conditions and high wages, or the ‘push’ forces of taxation and other deliberate colonial interventions. Building upon primary sources, I show that this case diverges from the ‘conventional’ narrative of labour scarcity in colonial Africa. I argue that Ruanda-Urundi should be regarded as labour abundant and that migrants were not primarily ‘pushed’ by colonial labour policies, but rather by poverty and limited access to agricultural resources. This explains why they were willing to work for low wages in Buganda. I show that African rural employers were the primary beneficiaries of migrant labour, while colonial governments on both sides of the border were unable to control the course of the flow. As in the first chapter, this chapter highlights that the effects of trade integration on African rural development were uneven, and mediated by differences in resource endowments, local institutions and colonial policies. The third chapter zooms out of the rural economy, evaluating the broader opportunity structures faced by African men and women in Uganda, and discussing the interaction of local institutions and colonial policies as drivers of uneven educational and occupational opportunities. The chapter engages with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf (2016) to show how selection biases in, and Eurocentric interpretations of, parish registers have provoked an overly optimistic account of European influences on the educational and occupational opportunities of African men and women. We confront their dataset, drawn from the marriage registers of the Anglican Cathedral in Kampala, with Uganda’s 1991 census, and show that trends in literacy and numeracy of men and women born in Kampala lagged half a century behind those who wedded in Namirembe Cathedral. We run a regression analysis showing that access to schooling during the colonial era was unequal along lines of gender and ethnicity. We foreground the role of Africans in the spread of education, argue that European influences were not just diffusive but also divisive, and that gender inequality was reconfigured rather than eliminated under colonial rule. This chapter also makes a methodological contribution. The renaissance of African economic history in the past decade has opened up new research avenues to study the long-term social and economic development of Africa. We show that a sensitive treatment of African realities in the evaluation of European colonial legacies, and a critical stance towards the use of new sources and approaches, is crucial. The fourth chapter singles out the role of resource endowments in explaining Uganda’s ‘cotton revolution’ in a comparative African perspective. Why did some African smallholders adopt cash crops on a considerable scale, while most others were hesitant to do so? The chapter sets out to explore the importance of factor endowments in shaping the degrees to which cash crops were adopted in colonial tropical Africa. We conduct an in-depth case study of the ‘cotton revolution’ in colonial Uganda to put the factor endowments perspective to the test. Our empirical findings, based on an annual panel data analysis at the district-level from 1925 until 1960, underscore the importance of Uganda’s equatorial bimodal rainfall distribution as an enabling factor for its ‘cotton revolution’. Evidence is provided at a unique spatial micro-level, capitalizing on detailed household surveys from the same period. We demonstrate that previous explanations associating the variegated responses of African farmers to cash crops with, either the role of colonial coercion, or the distinction between ‘forest/banana’ and ‘savannah/grain’ zones, cannot explain the widespread adoption of cotton in Uganda. We argue, instead, that the key to the cotton revolution were Uganda’s two rainy seasons, which enabled farmers to grow cotton while simultaneously pursuing food security. Our study highlights the importance of food security and labour seasonality as important determinants of uneven agricultural commercialization in colonial tropical Africa. The fifth and final chapter further investigates the experience of African smallholders with cotton cultivation, providing a comparative explanatory analysis of variegated cotton outcomes, focusing in particular on the role of colonial and post-colonial policies. The chapter challenges the widely accepted view that (i) African colonial cotton projects consistently failed, that (ii) this failure should be attributed to conditions particular to Africa, which made export cotton inherently unviable and unprofitable to farmers, and that (iii) the repression and resistance often associated with cotton, all resulted from the stubborn and overbearing insistence of colonial governments on the crop per se. I argue along three lines. Firstly, to show that cotton outcomes were diverse, I compare cases of cotton production in Sub-Saharan Africa across time and space. Secondly, to refute the idea that cotton was a priori unattractive, I argue that the crop had substantial potential to connect farmers to markets and contribute to poverty alleviation, particularly in vulnerable, marginal and landlocked areas. Thirdly, to illustrate how an interaction between local conditions and government policies created conducive conditions for cotton adoption, I zoom in on the few yet significant ‘cotton success stories’ in twentieth century Africa. Smallholders in colonial Uganda adopted cotton because of favourable ecological and marketing conditions, and policies had an auxiliary positive effect. Smallholders in post-colonial Francophone West Africa faced much more challenging local conditions, but benefitted from effective external intervention and coordinated policy. On a more general level, this chapter demonstrates that, from a perspective of rural development, colonial policies should not only be seen as overbearing and interventionist, but also as inadequate, failing to aid rural Africans to benefit from new opportunities created by trade integration.

中文翻译：

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乌干达殖民地的农村生计和农业商业化：外部影响与当地现实的结合

撒哈拉以南非洲的经济历史以地理和时间上分散的繁荣与萧条为特征。在殖民时期，撒哈拉以南非洲部分地区以出口为导向的“现金作物革命”是经济繁荣的一个重要例子。本论文探讨了外部影响和当地现实如何塑造了乌干达殖民地“中部作物”的性质，范围和影响，乌干达是东非中部一个内陆国家，在乌干达完成了一项国际贸易之后，全球市场的棉花和咖啡生产开始腾飞。铁路到海岸。论文包括针对非洲比较发展的当代辩论的五种有针对性的“干预”。这五种干预措施的每一项都基于这样的理解，即非洲殖民地时期农村非洲人应对贸易一体化并从中受益的能力是由殖民政策，资源end赋和地方机构所调节的。第一章重构了乌干达经济作物农民的福利发展。最近关于撒哈拉以南非洲历史福利发展的奖学金揭示了生活水平的长期趋势。但是，大多数农村居民的生活状况仍然很难确定。本章介绍了一种在历史背景下重建农村生活水平的新方法，该方法以完善的实际工资文献为基础，但超越了它，它利用地方农村调查，人口普查和价格数据来捕捉农村的现实。该方法适用于殖民地和早期殖民时期的乌干达（1915-70年），并产生了许多发现。虽然发展中的以小农为基础的现金作物部门确立了自己的地位，成为乌干达殖民经济的支柱，但在最初采用经济作物后，农业特征基本停滞不前。小农户的生活水平远高于维持生计的水平，而经济作物的利润率很低，但他们的耕种提供了可靠的现金收入来源。同时，农村福利的扩大受到明显限制。在非殖民化时期，非熟练工人的工资迅速上涨，而农业收入却落后了。结果，发生了城乡收入逆转。该研究还揭示了乌干达内部的巨大差异，这些资源在很大程度上受到资源differential赋差异的影响。乌干达香蕉地区的小农户维持农业收入所需的劳动力投入少于谷物农作物，从而为增加创收和生计多样化创造了机会。第二章重点介绍了将比利时控制的卢安达-乌伦迪（Ruanda-Urundi）与英国控制的布干达（Buganda）进行的劳动力迁移，布干达是维多利亚湖岸乌干达的中部省份。新的劳动力流动模式的出现是殖民非洲经济变化的一个关键方面。在土地充裕和劳动力稀缺的情况下，有偿劳动力的供应要么需要具有吸引人的工作条件和高工资的“拉力”，要么需要征税的“推力”和其他蓄意的殖民干预措施。我以主要资料为基础，表明此案与非洲殖民地非洲劳动力短缺的“传统”叙述不同。我认为，应将卢安达·乌伦迪视为丰富的劳动力，而移徙者并非主要是受到殖民劳工政策的“推动”，而是因为贫困和获得农业资源的限制。这就解释了为什么他们愿意为Buganda工作以低薪。我表明，非洲农村的雇主是移徙工人的主要受益者，而边界两侧的殖民地政府却无法控制流动的过程。与第一章一样，本章着重指出，贸易一体化对非洲农村发展的影响是不均衡的，并受到资源end赋，地方机构和殖民政策差异的影响。第三章缩小了农村经济的范围，评估了乌干达非洲男人和女人所面临的更广泛的机会结构，并讨论了当地机构与殖民政策的相互作用，这些因素是教育和职业机会不均衡的驱动因素。本章与Meier zu Selhausen和Weisdorf（2016）的最近一篇文章进行了互动，以展示教区居民登记册的选择偏见和以欧洲为中心的解释如何激起欧洲人过分乐观地解释了欧洲对非洲男女教育和职业机会的影响。 。我们根据乌干达1991年的人口普查，对取自坎帕拉英国国教大教堂的婚姻记录中的数据集，并表明，在坎帕拉出生的男女的识字和算术趋势落后于在那米伦比大教堂结婚的人落后半个世纪。我们进行了回归分析，结果表明，在殖民时代，就性别和种族而言，上学机会是不平等的。我们展望了非洲人在教育传播中的作用，认为欧洲的影响不仅具有扩散性，而且具有分裂性，性别不平等在殖民统治下得到了重新配置，而不是消除。本章还提供了方法论上的贡献。过去十年中非洲经济历史的复兴为研究非洲的长期社会和经济发展开辟了新的研究途径。我们表明，在评估欧洲殖民地遗产时，对非洲现实的敏感对待，至关重要的是使用新资源和新方法的关键立场。第四章从比较非洲的角度阐述了资源end赋在解释乌干达“棉花革命”中的作用。为什么一些非洲小农采用大面积的经济作物，而其他大多数人却犹豫不决？本章旨在探讨要素end赋在塑造热带非洲殖民地采用经济作物的程度上的重要性。我们对乌干达殖民地的“棉花革命”进行了深入的案例研究，以检验要素end赋的观点。我们的经验发现是基于1925年至1960年在地区一级进行的年度面板数据分析得出的，强调了乌干达赤道双峰降雨分布对其“棉花革命”的推动因素的重要性。证据是在一个独特的空间微观层次上提供的，利用了同期的详细家庭调查得出的结论。我们证明，先前的解释将非洲农民对经济作物的不同反应与殖民胁迫的作用或“森林/香蕉”和“热带草原/粮食”地区之间的区别相关联，无法解释乌干达棉花的广泛采用。相反，我们认为，棉花革命的关键是乌干达的两个雨季，这使农民能够在追求粮食安全的同时种植棉花。我们的研究强调了粮食安全和劳动力季节性的重要性，这是热带殖民非洲农业商业化不平衡的重要决定因素。第五章也是最后一章进一步研究了非洲小农种植棉花的经验，对各种棉花产量进行了比较解释性分析，尤其着重于殖民地政策和后殖民政策的作用。本章挑战了被广泛接受的观点，即（i）非洲殖民棉花项目始终失败，（ii）这种失败应归因于非洲特有的条件，这使出口棉花本来就不可行，对农民无利可图，并且（iii）通常与棉花有关的压抑和抵抗力 所有这些都是由于殖民地政府对作物本身的顽固顽强坚持。我从三方面争论。首先，为了证明棉花的结果是多种多样的，我比较了撒哈拉以南非洲地区跨时空的棉花生产案例。其次，为了反驳棉花在先验上没有吸引力的观点，我认为该作物具有将农民与市场联系起来并为减轻贫困做出贡献的巨大潜力，特别是在脆弱，边缘和内陆地区。第三，为了说明当地条件和政府政策之间的相互作用如何为棉花的采用创造有利条件，我将重点介绍二十世纪非洲为数不多但意义重大的“棉花成功案例”。由于有利的生态和销售条件，乌干达殖民地的小农采用了棉花，政策具有辅助的积极作用。后殖民时期的西非法语国家的小农面临着更具挑战性的当地条件，但得益于有效的外部干预和协调政策。从更广泛的层面上讲，本章表明，从农村发展的角度来看，殖民政策不仅应被视为霸道和干预主义，而且应被视为不充分的，不能帮助非洲农村人民从贸易一体化创造的新机会中受益。