Research Agenda (I welcome propositions for co-authoring)

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• Death and Destruction: Estimating the Social Costs of European Modernity and the Counterfactual Costs of Pre-colonial Political Centralization in Africa

  • Although war (Tilly, 1975) and plague (Voigtländer and Voth, 2013) have been instrumental in explaining the "Rise of the West", and their scale limited precolonial state formation in Africa (Herbst, 2000), there has been a tendency to neglect these "sacrificial generations" of European modernity in comparative analyses of European and African development. Europe has been "the most violent place in human history" (Lee, 2013:1), and therefore “No one would wish Europe’s history of international wars on Africa” (Herbst, 2000: xvii) despite the benefits of precolonial political centralization observed even in Asia. Yet some have either stated the European experience in neutral terms (therefore neglecting the sacrificial generations), or praised Europe's bloody geopolitical accumulations and state formations by abstracting from the bloodiness and focusing on the results. One author even notes that "many developing countries are apparently locked in a...disadvantageous position: they are not subject to the bellicist pressures that impelled state building in early modern Europe…” (Saylor, 2014). This paper attempts to bring these sacrificial generations to explicit focus by providing quantitative estimates for the number of war-related deaths which sub-Saharan Africa could have incurred in with a Eurasian-level population density and state centralization, given African terrain, ecological diversity, land quality and other geo-climatic factors. It geo-codes data from the Conflict Catalogue and other data sources and applies spatial econometric methods.

• Regimes of International Development: A History of Development Assistance Since 1500

  • The rise of mercantilism and capitalism in the early modern era came with unprecedented economic, military and social aggression which touched all continents in various ways, especially the European periphery and semi-periphery, the Americas and Africa. This book puts the developmental impacts of foreign incursions into a three-dimesional model covering development aid and assistance, development policy space and access to foreign markets. The early modern was characterized by negative provisions from foreign mercantile actors across each of these three dimensions for the global periphery and semi-periphery. It charts out the various strartegies of dissent and international reform advocated by thinkers around the world.. This therefore serves as a historical background to Eric Helleiner's exposition of Sun Yat-sen as the first to propose multilateral development finance.

• The Hidden Developmental Roles of Import-Oriented Traders: Lobbyists for Trade Infrastructure, Bastions against Excessive Protectionism, and Investors in Domestic Production

• African Rulers and the Variation in Success in Consolidation of Power in response to 19th Century European Incursions

  • As the first responders to modern European incursions on the African continent in the 19th century, why were Egypt's Muhammad Ali Pasha and Imerina's Radama I able to successfully consolidate power domestically while other rulers like Ashanti's Mensa Bonsu and Abyssinia's Tewodros II unable to successfully do so? How do political settlements account for this variation? This is part of a broader project to apply the political settlements approach to understanding precolonial variation in economic performance.

• Explaining Regime Persistence under Competitive Clientelism: Gowon, Babangida and Obasanjo in Nigeria

  • Nigeria, being characterized by ethno-religious fragmentation, inter-regional economic inequalities and fraught precolonial legacies, has a highly fluid and fecklessly pluralist political system. It is one of the first African countries to experience postcolonial civil war, and it has had 15 changes to the head of state since independence. This has had disastrous effects on levels of political corruption (which significantly serves to provide side-payments as a cost of maintaining power) and absence of politically-insulated industrial policy implementation agencies. Using political settlements analysis, I examine why Yakubu Gowon (r. 9 years), Ibrahim Babangida (r. 8 years), and civilian president, Olusegun Obasanjo (r. 8 years), had unusually longer regime duration than average (2.4 years, max 4.6 years), and why Murtala Mohammed (r. 0.5 years), Muhammadu Buhari (r. 1.7 years), Ernest Shonekan (r. 0.2 years) and Abdulsalami Abubakar (r. 1 year) had the shortest regime duration. I assess the implications for industrial policy implementation during the various regimes.

• Regional Political Settlements and Regional Industrial Policy Success in Nigeria's First Republic

• African Varieties of Capitalism and Social Embeddedness

• Production Regimes, Inequality and Varieties of Capitalism: Commodities Producers, Large Industrial Economies, and Small, Open and Niche Industrial Economies

• Growth, Development and Catch-Up: Disentangling Concepts and Debates

• A Structural-Dynamic Model of Development Thought since the Early Modern Period

  • Mainstream historiography of economics and development economics tends towards what Perrotta (1993: 21) calls precursorism – i.e. taking the history of liberal economic thought as THE history of economic thought, thereby neglecting or misrepresenting their development thought and policy through which they moved up the economic ladder (Chang, 2002). This occurs through the selective exposure of economics students to texts, theories and doctrines of the past which were not always the most widely read in their day and did not have the most influence (Reinert and Reinert, 2018; Reinert, 2011).  Other tactics include homogenizing and mischaracterizing the mercantilist and “neo-mercantilist” arguments which preceded liberal economic thought (Schaeffer, 1981; Perrotta, 1993; Perrotta, 2013); skewing the history of physiocracy and ignoring its wide and varied critiques (Kaplan and Reinert, 2019); neglecting the history of economic policy (Reinert and Daastol, 2004); and circumscribing the geographical scope of the history of economic thought (especially to England and the U.S., France and Western Europe). Yet “The very idea of economic development, however, was an early mercantilist innovation” (Reinert and Reinert, 2011: 13). Indeed, Jomo and Reinert (2006: vii) demonstrate “the continuity in thinking on economic development” from the 17th to post-World War Two era. The tendency within global capitalism for such a skewed ideostructure is the reason why the student of development economics in particular and of economics in general, must proactively “de-precursorize” their learning of the subject after coming to ideo-structural consciousness. Progress has been made by scholars such as Sophus Reinert, Erik Reinert, Koen Stapelbroek, Antonio Trampus, Cosimo Perrota, and others, to address these biases within Europe, and by Eric Helleiner, Antulio Rosales and others beyond Europe. I present a simple heuristic for navigating through the idea space of development economics by highlighting the structural localization of the wider canon within a cycle of catch-up, dominance, and relative decline. Economic thought tends towards economic nationalism for developing countries (contingent upon the pressures of war, economic crisis and dominance of agrarian or feudal classes), liberalism when they become industrialized (with hidden canonical dualism and the Krugmanian vice prevailing with regards to policy), and once again economic nationalism when they enter into relative industrial decline. I catalogue these trends across the world since the 17th century until the 20th.

• Contextualizing Grievance and Contesting Polarities across Social Debates: Cross-Analysis, Structural Analysis and Baseline Assessment (CASABA)

  • Injustices and grievances abound in human history. The expansion of written intellectual power, political power, economic power and democratic ethnics among marginalized groups has enabled a surge in studies and claims of past and present injustices across a wide range of dimensions. Debates about gender relations, racism, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and so on, have therefore become common topics of discourse and impassioned arguments. Each of these subjects is highly complex, yet consistent patterns of simplifications and extreme positions emerge on both sides of debate. When women's rights are discussed, men's rights emerge reactively; when 'black lives matter' advocacy surges, 'all lives matter' reacts; when modern Atlantic slavery is the focus, critics argue that "everyone enslaved themselves and each other"; when Western imperialism and colonialism are discussed, non-Western imperialism is pointed to. There are therefore recurrent tendencies towards essentialism and self-righteousness on the part of accusers, dilution on the part of the reactionaries, and moralization of the phenomenon by all sides. Both sides of the extremes are just as dangerous - for instance, bad, badly-constructed and insadequately complemented anti-racial policies (such as badly constructed welfare and affirmative action policies) can actually be more destructive for the targeted marginalized group than passive racism; and vindictive extremist feminist positions can alienate potential allies and therefore stifle mobilization. Nuance is therefore important for better mobilization of allies, humbler attitudes, establishment of truth, and effectiveness of solutions (MATE). I present a heuristic that lay audiences and academic ones can use to critically assess grievances, and which satisfies the concerns of both sides of debates (oppositional and propositional) to reduce, but not eliminate, the gap of disagreement.

• Economics and Trans-Existential Politics: The Economic Philosophy and Intellectual Politics of Population Size, Welfare, Mortality and  Trans-existential Counterfactuals

• “They Do Not Represent My Religion”: A Core-Periphery Model of Religious Ideologies

• Complex Christianity (Book)

  • This book focuses on the often neglected earthly and non-earthly structural underpinnings of several biblical notions and doctrines, from salvation, national judgement, evidentialism and theodicy to gender relations, slavery, religious law, science, and political economy.

• Weird fictional academic working papers under a fictional "Center for Hypernatural Research (CHR)" within the "Asiri-verse" (Asiri is Hausa for mystery) of a novel I am writing under the supernatural genre.