Perhaps the only product more important than that of the palm tree is rice, the staple food, usually eaten every day. It is often hard for outsiders to grasp the centrality of rice to daily existence in Sierra Leone. Before the expedition of Pedro da centra, archaeological evidence suggests that people have occupied Sierra Leone for at least twenty-five hundred years, and early migrations, expeditions, and wars gave the country its diverse cultural and ethnic mosaic.
Traders and missionaries, especially from the north, were instrumental in spreading knowledge of tools, education, and Islam. The emergence of a modern national identity, however, did not begin until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Bunce Island, off the coast of Freetown, became one of the centers of the West African slave trade.
Over two thousand slaves per year were channeled through this port, thus increasing the incidence of warfare and violence among the local population. The slaves were especially valued off the coast of South Carolina on rice plantations, where it was discovered they had considerable agricultural expertise.
Relations have been generally cordial among them, and Sierra Leone has largely avoided the racial tension characteristic of other parts of the world. In the recent electioneering period, for instance, one family may have children fighting for opposing sides, a fact which makes the violence difficult, as well as deeply and personally felt. When ethnic problems do arise, they often do so around the time of national elections, when politicians become accused of catering to the desires of one particular constituency or region usually their own ethnic group in order to gain votes.
Other migrants had been ex-slaves from America who had fought for the British during the Revolutionary War. The colony was dedicated to demonstrating the principles of Christianity, civilization and commerce.
In British Parliament passed the Emancipation Act, and slavery was finally abolished. By , over 50, freed slaves had been settled in Freetown. Known as Krios, the repatriated settlers of Freetown today live in a multi-ethnic country. Though English is the official language, Krio is widely spoken throughout the country allowing different tribal groups a common language. Sierra Leone gained independence on the 27th of April and the Republican status on the l9th April Since independence there have been many changes in the socio- political, and economic spheres.
The outbreak of the war in Sierra Leone caused set back to many areas in the country. The conflict in Sierra Leone started in March when fighters of the Revolutionary United Front RUF launched a war from the east of the country near the border with Liberia to overthrow the government. To what extent this is a reflection of methodological problems or actual, historical patterns of differing inequality levels remains an open question.
Another issue is whether to compare the results against other contemporary societies, or instead against colonies with a similar duration since their establishment. The estimated levels of inequality for Sierra Leone in seem consistently lower than for all contemporary settler colonies—including Brazil and all estimates of wealth inequality from the United States of the early nineteenth century.
The estimated level of inequality in Sierra Leone is also lower than for many settlements of the same duration time from settlement to observation , as the Sierra Leone Colony was in —such as Utah, Missouri, and the early Cape Colony. The only previously studied early modern region that recorded comparable levels of inequality at a similar duration was Massachusetts, even if these estimates relied on probate inventories as opposed to census data.
Using newly unearthed census data for early nineteenth century Sierra Leone, we are able to study wealth inequality in a large sample of households in the colony. As previous research on historical inequality in Africa has been scarce, this is a valuable contribution to the literature. The data available in the primary sources only allow us to study the distribution of rural wealth. Although this could be seen as a drawback, most rural settler colonies relied on, and developed around, urban trading hubs.
It is likely that there existed differences between rural and urban wealth that we are not able to capture in this study, with levels of inequality potentially higher in the urban part of the colony Freetown. This pattern would, however, not be unique to Sierra Leone, and the urban elites of Freetown were arguably likely to have been comparatively poorer than those residing in many American port cities. Thus, the difference between urban and rural inequality levels was potentially smaller in Sierra Leone than in, for instance, settler colonies in the Americas.
Our results show that inequality levels in rural Sierra Leone in were lower than those recorded in any previous studies of contemporary rural settlements in Africa and the Americas. In a global context, the distribution of resources in rural Sierra Leone was at this time still comparatively egalitarian and on a par with the low inequality levels found in an early rural settler colony such as seventeenth-to-eighteenth century Massachusetts.
The expansion of the frontier into the interior of the Sierra Leone peninsula had, at least by , thus seemingly not led to a situation of heavily concentrated resource distribution. Our data shows that some of the inequalities certainly might be attributed to the duration of settlement, as more luxurious housing, for example, was more common in the villages settled the earliest.
Duration cannot, however, account for all differences, as some of the largest farms were located in more recently settled villages. Some of the inequalities might furthermore be attributable to differences in the factor endowments so that the wealthy households in some villages might have gotten rich from trading or from forestry, whereas agriculture dominated in many other parts of the colony. We do, however, believe that our results also show that the egalitarian ideals on which the colony had been founded had an impact on inequality by shaping the type of institutional arrangements that emerged in the colony, most importantly by providing a framework for how land could be acquired by the settlers.
In conclusion, the case set a valuable example of how ideals can shape the institutions that drive inequality, and potentially contributes to further research on how and why inequality levels tended to increase over time in so many of the settler colonies.
Birgier, colleagues at the Unit for Economic History at the University of Gothenburg, the attendees at the VI Meeting of the African Economic History Network Brighton, October two anonymous referees and the editors for their valuable comments on previous drafts of this paper. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from Helge Axelsson Johnson Foundation. Remaining errors and omissions are our own. Abad , L. Persistent inequality? Trade, factor endowments, and inequality in republican Latin America.
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Most of these freed slaves would probably have stayed locally - if only due to the expense and difficulties of finding their way back to Africa or to a different location. However, some of these freed men would offer their services to the Royal Navy which was always short of personnel.
A lesser number would join the British Army. These black warriors displayed their courage as being the equal of any white men and often earned the admiration of the officers that they served. It was with this background that in Dr Henry Smeathman proposed a scheme for founding a colony for black men discharged from the army and navy.
This was the period just after the American Revolutionary War and so there were a number of veterans with no particular place to call home. An area in West Africa was to be set aside for this purpose. In some such black men and women arrived on the coast. In the year following, , Nembana, a Timni chief, sold a strip of land to Captain John Taylor for the use of the free community of settlers, their heirs and successors under the protection of the British government.
The first settlement struggled in the harsh environment and with not all the local Africans being pleased to see these black men and women who had taken on many of the customs and even the language of the Europeans.
Powerful backers from Britain, including William Wilberforce, lobbied for an expanded scheme with additional support.
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