Ranjit Lall wins APSA award for paper on slave-raiding in Eastern Europe

Associate Professor of International Political Economy Ranjit Lall has won the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Politics and History Section’s David Brian Robertson Best Paper Award for his co-authored paper on the economic impact of slave-raiding in Eastern Europe.

The award is presented annually for the best paper in the field of politics and history presented at the previous annual meeting.

‘Consequences of the Black Sea Slave Trade: Long-Run Development in Eastern Europe’, co-authored with Volha Charnysh, explores how slave raids – military operations with the goal of seizing people to be sold or forced into slavery – shaped Eastern Europe’s long-run economic development. The paper has now been accepted for publication in the American Political Science Review.

Eastern Europe was the largest source of slaves in the early modern world after West Africa. Drawing on a rich new dataset, Ranjit and Volha estimate that at least five million people were enslaved across Eastern Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries, which is comparable to the transatlantic slave trade in proportional demographic terms. 

In the paper, they find that – unlike in Africa – raided areas went on to enjoy faster urban growth and higher levels of long-run demographic and commercial development. They argue that these results reflect an economically advantageous process of defensive state-building linked to raided societies’ resistance to and lack of integration into the slave trade. 

A key message of the paper, therefore, is that the structure of slave production conditions its developmental legacies, cautioning against drawing generalisations from the African context.

Ranjit said: 

“I’m delighted that our paper has been recognised in this way, as I believe that the history of slave-raiding in Eastern Europe – and outside Africa more generally – has been seriously neglected by social scientists. 

“The paper is part of a broader project that studies the historical legacies of slave-raiding in an explicitly comparative context, shedding light on why this practice has produced such divergent economic and political outcomes around the world and over time. I am convinced that the comparative study of organised systems of slavery is only just beginning.”

Ranjit and Volha will be formally presented with the award at the Politics and History business meeting on Friday, 12 September.