Leo Dolan

uexternado.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

🗓 17 February 2026 🕚 11:00 Bogotá | 17:00 CET | 16:00 GMT 🎙 “The Economics of Forced Labour: Mining in Twentieth-Century Colonial Africa” 🌍 Virtual | In English
If you’d like to join:
uexternado.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

@UExternado
Colombia has launched a new Master’s in Economic History — and, seemingly because every other economic historian was busy, they’ve asked me to give the opening masterclass.
Link below

The column in the Liberation Day chart labeled "Tariffs Charged to the US" for South Africa is actually the US bilateral trade deficit divided by SA exports to the US: (14.7 - 5.8) / 14.7 = 60%. Kinda not what a tariff rate is! #econsky #tariffs

My contribution to the AEHN open access textbook on African economic history is out! Africa’s Lost Decades, 1974-1994 www.aehnetwork.org/textbook/afr...

Great paper! If the so-called "resource curse" was largely a Cold War-era phenomenon, and the last 30 years were a different story in development outcomes, then if we're entering Cold War 2.0, could this reactivate political backsliding, potentially reviving the latent resource curse mechanism?

<em>The Economic History Review</em> | EHS Journal | Wiley Online Library Despite significant advances in the quantitative study of African history, the Portuguese colonial empire remains an underexplored topic. This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of work....

Permanent links to both the paper and article here.
doi.org/10.1111/ehr....

www.aehnetwork.org/blog/forced-...

Here are the links to my recently published EHR paper and AEHN blog on forced labour in colonial Africa:

Living Standards and Forced Labour: A Comparative Study of Colonial Africa, 1918–74
tinyurl.com/2p8k6fhf
Forced to Change? Factor Endowments, Monopsony....
tinyurl.com/2p9cwsra

Congrats Federico!

The Blueprint for Winning the Race for Critical Minerals The U.S. faced a similar predicament in the 1950s, and undertook an initiative that solved the problem.

People worry a lot about looming mineral shortages but this is a solvable problem as it has been solved in the past.

In this article in Time, I look back at the response to previous fears of shortages:

time.com/7202047/cold...

With all the recent chatter about the Benguela Railway, including in this Economist article, I thought I’d share an extract about its original construction which reads like something out of a Mad Max movie. Source: Adventures in Africa by J.B. Thornhill (1915)
www.economist.com/middle-east-...

Nice! I would have expected much greater trade between Ethiopia and its neighbor, particularly Kenya.

I have a little paper out in the latest issue of the Industrial History Review (a special issue on new frontiers in African economic history) that looks at spatial variation in living standards and purchasing power in French West Africa around 1950. revistes.ub.edu/index.php/Hi...

Until 1963, Companhia de Diamantes de Angola relied on forced labour in its diamond mines, making it arguably the last major employer in colonial Africa to uphold such practices. My IHR blog examines the economic forces that sustained this system and what finally brought about its end. #Angola