African time travellers: what can we learn from 500 years of written accounts?

In this paper we study 500 years of African economic history using traveller accounts. We systematically collected 2,464 unique documents, of which 855 pass language and rigorous data quality requirements. Our final corpus of texts contains more than 230,000 pages. Analysing such a corpus is an insurmountable task for traditional historians and would probably take a lifetime’s work. Applying modern day computational linguistic techniques such as a structural topic model approach (STM) in combination with domain knowledge of African economic history, we analyse how first hand accounts (topics) evolve across space, time and traveller occupations. Apart from obvious accounts of climate, geography and zoology, we find topics around imperialism, diplomacy, conflict, trade/commerce, health/medicine, evangelization and many more topics of interest to scholarship. We find that some topics follow notable epochs defined by underlying relevance and that travellers’ occupational backgrounds influence the narratives in their writing. Many topics exhibit good temporal and spatial coverage, and a large variation in occupational backgrounds adding different perspectives to a topic. This makes the large body of written accounts a promising source to systemically shed new light on some of Africa’s precolonial past.