Transcript Leonard Wantchekon: How the slave trade created mistrust and held back GDP growth in West Africa

00:01 The level of trust is really, really important for growth. Not only does it make people get along it also makes transaction costs lower. It’s also affected by the ability of individuals to work together and to put collective effort into advancing the development goals.

00:25 I’m originally from the Benin Republic, in the central part of the country, close to the Kingdom of Dahomey, one of the states that had been heavily involved in the slave trade. The reason why I decided to look into the history of the slave trade.

00:43 Growing up, I have heard several forms of cultural expression that tend to link the slave trade to trust. For instance, when a ten year old boy is talking about you know, another ten year old boy, the way you say that somebody is not reliable, cannot be trusted, you will say he is going to “make you disappear”. He’s going to “sell you”.

01:13 And I also noticed throughout the history of Africa, particularly Benin, communities tend to fragment. because of a lack of trust.

01:30 The question we wanted to answer is to look at very rigorously using detailed statistical information about the slave trade to understand exactly the way its affected economic development in Africa today, to understand the mechanism and to be able to propose policy recommendations, institutional reforms that will help us overcome that history.

02:00 I think there are two things that are very, very important to understand about the slave trade. The first is, originally it was highly centralised, you know, like, war captives and convicts. But then because the demand became very high, European states and European companies involved in the slave trained and armed a group of Africans that were raiding communities and supplying slaves. But then, communities that were victims were made to believe that the best way for them to be protected is by buying weapons.

02:38 But then to buy the weapon, you have to raid your neighbour or trick your neighbour into slavery, you know? So as a result, the slave trade pit communities, neighbours against neighbours. It’s something that happened across 2 or 3 or 4 generations. This is the real origin of mistrust.

03:02 What we wanted to test is to look at the slave trade and its impact on trust today, and second, to see whether this is driven by intergenerational transmission of mistrust, because, those who were impacted directly, basically taught their descendants not to trust anyone. To be able to establish this causal relationship, we need to find what we call the instrumental variable. We use distance from the coast, because distance from the coast is something exogenous.

03:32 Communities that are close to the coast were far more likely, to be part of a slave population than those who are further away from the coast. The coast is not associated with low trust in India or in other Asian countries and it’s correlated with trust in the continent most affected by the slave trade, which is Africa.

03:57 That suggests the relationship is causal. What we find in this story is that anywhere between 16 to 25% of the variation in trust level and economic development can be explained, by the involvement in international slave trade. This is bad news.

04:22 But from 84 to 75% are explained by non-historical factors, like education, like income, like quality of government and so on. And that’s good news.

04:41 I never consider history is destiny. Very interested in communities and individuals that refuse to be victims of history, you know, to do something to overcome historical legacies. Policy can help overcome this legacy in a major, major way.

05:05 The international slave trade is not destiny. I grew up in a, you know, family of subsistence farmers. When I started university, I also became a major pro-democracy activist. I was expelled from the university for five years and then I came back and I was arrested and I spent about 18 months in prison. After escaping I went to Canada and went back to school and then to study economics.

05:36 I was close to being fired from the PhD programme. I managed, despite that, to get a job at a top university, Yale University, and then six years later, I was fired. So, it’s important that people know that this guy was close to being expelled from his PhD programme, he has been fired from Yale University. A key lesson from my research and from personal experience, is that the past does not define who you are.