The economic history of Africa is a highly emerging field on the international level. After the publication of Acegmoglu/Johnson/Robinson’s “reversal of fortune”-paper in 2002, the field received increasing attention by scholars from various backgrounds, from economics as well as history. Besides an enormous enrichment of our empirical knowledge on African history, the recent two decades of research also renewed methodological debates among historians and development economists. These debates are typical for the current state of the economic history discipline in general and therefore stand topical for the Bayreuth Economic History Initiative with its Master-Programm “History and Economics”. Connecting to the expertise of the DFG-Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple” we dedicate a guest-professorship to the field, which is sponsored by the DAAD. In the next two years, we will have a guest-professor in the field teaching at the university of Bayreuth, with one workshop per term will be open to interested international scholars and students.

The first workshop will open the debate with a panel discussion about the achievements and shortcomings of the most recent academic research in African Economic History. We invited prominent international scholars as well as our guest-professors to this digital workshop.

The panel is followed by two talks on the “economic history of poverty” hold by our first guest professor, George Bob-Milliar (Kumasi/Ghana) and Mariama Marciana Kuusaana (Kumasi/Ghana).