All this to say that Citizen and Subject is a must read for anyone interested in the economic development and economic history of African countries. press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Pinson

The third: it is clearer what the paper is about

Beautiful pictures! and a brilliant weather. My mum's hometown. Do take the Eggs to the Bastille if you have time, astonishing view. If you have even more time, you can hike down back to town.

Thanks! Writing to you in dm!

The problem is very common in economic history. I assume it is also common in many other fields. I'd love to see the different approaches people have to tackle the problem. Please RT! Thanks! 3/3

So for example you are working with data for a country, organized in admin units that are slightly different in each year because some units are split, and other are united. Often you can find an aggregation giving ou a consistent map in all time years. 2/3

Thank you so much for the reference!

In a similar spirit, though not in metrics, there is the Unjournal @unjournal.bsky.social founded by @daaronr.bsky.social

Haha! Yes!

In the end, French colonialism was cheap, except perhaps in the very last decades, mostly because of independence wars, and colonies received very little public aid.

The soldiers sent by France to fight in Indochina & Algeria received wages paid by the French government. They used their wage to consume goods, a large share of which were imported. This alone goes a long way into accounting for the trade deficits of French colonies.

We show that the deficits were compensated not by French public or private transfers of capital, but by military expenditure spent locally in the colonies, notably during the independence wars.

But, Jacques Marseille would reply, what about the trade deficits? how were they compensated? For the paper, we (painfully) tried to reconstruct as many items as we could of the balance of payments of French colonies.

If we use the OECD definition of aid to compute the development aid given by France to its colonies, we find a figure of 0.21% of GDP on average. This is lower than French development aid today (0.55% of French GDP), and less than a third of the 0.7% UN target.