About
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, CC OOnt FRSC is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist.
Marlous van Waijenburg (Ph.D. Northwestern, History) is a comparative economic historian working on the long-term development of African economies, with a specific focus on the nature and legacies of colonialism. Her projects focus on material living standards, coercive labor market institutions, and colonial state building efforts, and speak to debates in African history, economic history, comparative politics, and development economics. Her work on real wages in British Africa with Ewout Frankema was, amongst others, awarded the Arthur Cole Prize for best article in The Journal of Economic History.
Currently, Van Waijenburg is working on the book version of her dissertation, which analyzed the comparative nature and pace of colonial state building efforts in Africa through the lens of taxation. The macro-view she employs in this project, combined with an explicit focus on the “invisible” component of colonial public finance – the in-kind revenues that accrued to the state from forced labor practices – allows her 1) to scrutinize contradicting narratives about colonial fiscal ambitions; 2) to identify similarities and differences in colonizers’ strategies to fiscal and state capacity building; and 3) to measure and explain the incidence of widely varying tax-payer burdens across colonial Africa. In August 2018, her doctoral thesis won the International Economic History Association’s tri-annual prize for best dissertation written in economic history world-wide between 2014-2017 (category 20th C.)
