Northwest Africa from colonial to global shipping
Résumé
In this chapter, it will be analyzed the historical path of evolution of the northwest African port network during the colonial age. We explore the way how both maritime façades (Ducruet and Zaidi, 2012) introduced their hinterlands in the economic dynamics of the globalization process. The most of ports studied were under the French colonial rule (excepting the ports of the Canary Islands) and they represented the functioning of extractive institutions (Acemoglu et al. 2001). This chapter is focused on the analysis of port indicators such as throughput (see below), that make possible to observe the regional port hierarchies and the port concentration processes from a long run perspective. As individual example cases, we will deeply expose the cases of Algiers, Dakar, Las Palmas and Casablanca, where the port indicators are almost completed for this period (throughput, tonnages, fuel supplies, commodities, etc.). The period selected includes the two first waves of port modernization (1880s-1930s), until the eve of the container revolution who transformed the whole maritime industry in a global scale (Harlaftis, Tenold and Valdaliso, 2012). This will be the next stage of our research project for these regions of the African continent. Finally, from a methodological scope, this chapter deals with the path-dependence literature on ports which begin to expand these topics in Africa (Debrie, 2010; Lombard and Ninot, 2012; Mohammed-Cherif and Ducruet, 2015).
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