Consequences of the Black Sea slave trade: Long-run development in Eastern Europe

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• Department of Political and Social Sciences

We investigate the developmental consequences of slave-raiding in Eastern Europe, the largest source of slaves in the early modern world after West Africa. Drawing on a wide-ranging new dataset, we estimate that at least 5 million people were enslaved from 735 locations across the region between the 15th and 18th centuries. We hypothesise that, over time, slave raids encouraged an economically advantageous process of defensive state-building linked to raided societies' resistance to and lack of integration into the slave trade. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables strategies, we find that exposure to raids is positively associated with long-run urban growth and several related indicators of demographic and commercial development. Consistent with our posited mechanism, raided areas constructed more robust defences and attained higher levels of administrative, military, and fiscal capacity. Our findings suggest that the structure of slave production conditions its developmental legacies, cautioning against drawing generalisations from the African context.