Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been absent from recent debates about comparative long-run growth owing to the lack of data on aggregate economic performance before 1950. This paper provides estimates of GDP per capita on an annual basis for eight Anglophone African economies for the period since 1885, raising new questions about previous characterizations of the region's economic performance. The new data show that many of these economies had levels of per capita income which were above subsistence by the early twentieth century, on a par with the largest economies in Asia until the 1980s. However, overall improvements in GDP per capita were limited by episodes of negative growth or “shrinking”, the scale and scope of which can be measured through annual data.

由于缺乏 1950 年之前的总体经济表现数据，撒哈拉以南非洲 (SSA) 一直没有出现在最近关于比较长期增长的辩论中。本文提供了 8 个非洲英语国家经济体的人均 GDP 估计数自 1885 年以来的这段时期，对该地区经济表现的先前特征提出了新的问题。新数据显示，到 20 世纪初，这些经济体中的许多经济体的人均收入水平超过了维持生计的水平，与 1980 年代之前的亚洲最大经济体持平。然而，人均 GDP 的总体改善受到负增长或“萎缩”事件的限制，其规模和范围可以通过年度数据来衡量。