Commodity Dependency in Lusophone Africa: Legacies of Empire

What countries export and to whom matters for their growth patterns, labour market structures, and crisis vulnerability (Abdon et al., 2010; Akyüz and Paolo, 2017; Felipe and Kumar, 2011; Storm and Naastepad, 2015). Recent empirical studies have documented a strong degree of persistence in export production capabilities across two eras of globalisation: 1897-1906 and 1998-2007 (Weber et al., 2021). Dependency scholarship theorised that the origins of commodity dependence are rooted in colonialism and the associated international division of labour (Amin, 1972). This theoretical strand has recently been revived (Kvangraven 2020). Contrary to the dualist North-South dichotomy that has frequently been attributed to dependency theory, Rodney warned that commodity dependence was not only engendered and perpetuated in the bilateral relations between coloniser and colonised, but also through the nested hierarchies of empires and the interplay of their different trajectories of development. Building on Rodney’s insight, this paper proposes that the mechanisms that engender and shape commodity dependence, are indeed shaped by these broader hierarchies. Specifically, different metropolis’ ability and willingness to facilitate domestic capital accumulation in the colonies matter to the productive structures and social relations of production that were established. Commodity dependence in former Portuguese colonies in Africa dramatically illustrates this point, by showing how the subordination of Portugal itself fostered the porous character of the capital infrastructure set up in the colonies, which was hard to overcome and persists until today. Using a critical political economy framework grounded in global history this paper uses historical time series data on trade and production and selected commodity case studies in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa to characterise continuities and ruptures in structures of production and exports. We show that colonial legacies continue to condition contemporary structures production, thereby demonstrating the limitations of a simplistic North-South dichotomy.