Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor

A rapidly expanding body of literature on colonial public finance have significantly enhanced our understanding of early-century fiscal capacity building efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the contributions from a widely used but invisible source of government revenue – that of forced labor – have so far been left out of the picture. Exploiting data on labor corvée schemes in French Africa between 1913-1937 (the prestations), this is the first paper to provide lower-bound estimates of how much this in-kind form of revenue may have enhanced colonial budgets. I show that in most places such labor taxes constituted the most important component of early colonial state revenue. My results imply that historical studies on fiscal capacity building efforts need to make a greater effort to estimate and integrate this significant source of state income into their analysis.