Understanding the legacy of slavery in eastern Nigeria: the case of the ohu system- In collaboration with Chima Korieh, Marquette University 

In this research project we propose to our knowledge the first quantitative investigation of the legacy of slavery in Africa on contemporary social, economic and political outcomes. Though the preponderance of evidence from the Americas suggests the legacies there are negative, a literature in African studies emphasizes qualitative differences between domestic slavery in Africa and elsewhere, leading one to hypothesize that the consequences may be different, specifically less pernicious. Our focus is on Nkanuland in eastern Nigeria and the descendants of people known as ohus a social status close to slaves as understood in the contemporary social science literature. The descendants of ohus are readily identified and in the study-area live in separate villages making them easy to distinguish. These villages coexist with other villages which include nobody of ohu descent. We propose to survey individuals in these two sets of villages to examine the effects of being the descendant of slaves. Our focus is on the impact of this status on individual incomes, asset ownership, education, occupation and social mobility, but we will also examine the consequences for political participation and office holding. We will also examine the impacts on social capital and how the legacy of ohu descent influences marriage patterns and social networks.

Biography 

An economist and political scientist, Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the relationships between political power and institutions and prosperity. His work explores the underlying causes of economic and political divergence both historically and today and uses both the mathematical and quantitative methods of economics along with the case study, qualitative and fieldwork methodologies used in other social sciences.
 
Robinson has a particular interest in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and is a Fellow at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. He taught a summer school at the University of the Andes in Bogotá between 1994 and 2022. He has conducted fieldwork and collected data in Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. He has published three books co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, an Institute Professor of Economics at MIT. The first, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, proposed a theory of the emergence of and stability of democracy and dictatorship. Their second book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (translated into 41 languages since its publication in 2012), pulled together much of their joint research on comparative development and proposed a theory of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. Their most recent book, The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty, examines the incessant and inevitable struggle between states and society, and gives an account of the deep historical processes that have shaped the modern world.