Short Abstract

How can colonial extraction be reconstructed, measured and connected to responsibility and redress? We invite comparative African studies of coerced labour, taxation, dispossession, firms and resources using historical, economic and legal approaches.

Long Abstract

How can evidence of coercion used to extract labour, revenue and resources support defensible accounts of loss, responsibility and redress? The growing recovery and digitization of colonial archives, company records, labour statistics, fiscal accounts and demographic evidence are making such reconstruction increasingly possible. Yet more evidence does not resolve key choices: how should coercion be delimited, losses valued, gains allocated among states, firms and intermediaries, and findings related to contemporary reparations claims? Records also remain uneven, documenting administrative receipts and employer costs more fully than informal compulsion and African losses.

This open panel invites comparative and case-based papers on how colonial extraction in Africa can be reconstructed, measured and interpreted. Contributions may examine coerced labour, wage repression, taxation, dispossession, concessionary companies, mining, agricultural extraction, or other bounded practices whose victims, beneficiaries or transfers can be investigated. We welcome work examining how evidence supports claims about loss, benefit, responsibility and redress, without presuming a single measure or reparative formula.

The panel brings quantitative economic history into conversation with social and labour history, legal reasoning, political economy and corporate responsibility. Research on forced wage labour and taxation in Portuguese Angola and Mozambique provides one point of departure, while papers on other colonial settings and comparisons across empires are equally welcome. In the spirit of “African Prisms,” it asks how different archives, methods and disciplinary lenses clarify or alter what can be claimed about colonial extraction, who benefited, and what historical evidence can contribute to reparative debates.

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