Marlous van Waijenburg

Marlous van Waijenburg

Assistant Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School
Marlous van Waijenburg

Marlous van Waijenburg (Ph.D History 2017, Northwestern University) is an Assistant Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School, and Afilliate Assistant Professor at AAAS. Before joining Harvard, she was a post-doctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan.

Professor van Waijenburg’s main research agenda centers on the long-term development patterns of African economies. To date, her projects have focused on material living standards, fiscal capacity building efforts, coercive labor market institutions, skill accumulation, and inequality. Recently, she added a second research line on the business history of the transatlantic slave trade, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Publications

“(Un)principled Agents: Monitoring Loyalty after the End of the Royal African Company Monopoly” Business History Review (forthcoming 2023, with Anne Ruderman).

"What About the Race Between Technology and Education in the Global South? Comparing Skill-premiums in Colonial Africa and Asia." Economic History Review (forthcoming 2023, with Ewout Frankema).

Frankema, Ewout, and Marlous van Waijenburg. "Bridging the Gap with the ‘New’ Economic History of Africa." Journal of African History (forthcoming 2023, with Ewout Frankema).

"Inequality Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa from Precolonial Times to the Present." African Affairs 122, no. 486 (January 2023): 57–94 (with Ewout Frankema and Michiel de Haas).

"Fiscal Development under Colonial and Sovereign Rule." In Global Taxation: How Modern Taxes Conquered the World, edited by Philipp Genschel and Laura Seelkopf, 67–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022 (with Ewout Frankema).

"From Coast to Hinterland: Fiscal State Formation in British and French West Africa, c. 1880–1960." In Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Africa and Asia, c. 1850–1960, edited by Ewout Frankema and Anne Booth, 161–192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019 (with Ewout Frankema).

"Africa Rising? A Historical Perspective." African Affairs 117, no. 469 (October 2018): 543–568 (with Ewout Frankema).

"Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor." Journal of Economic History 78, no. 1 (March 2018): 40–80.

"Metropolitan Blueprints of Colonial Taxation? Lessons from Fiscal Capacity Building in British and French Africa, 1880-1940." Journal of African History 55, no. 3 (September 2014): 371–400 (with Ewout Frankema).

"Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880–1965." Journal of Economic History 72, no. 4 (December 2012): 895–926 (with Ewout Frankema).

 

People