DIVERGENCE IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT: The Curious Case of Coffee Production in the Lake Kivu Region (First Half Twentieth Century)

This article offers new insight into the reasons for diversity in rural development and speaks to a major debate in economic history. The New Institutional Economy approach promotes the idea of long-term economic underdevelopment as a consequence of colonialism. However, this approach tends to over-generalize historical processes and over-simplify the reasons for divergence in development. Many historians have criticized such bold explanations. They stress that the diversity of local conditions and the varying reactions of people to colonialism and capitalism have resulted in different and regionally distinct paths of economic development. This article endorses such criticism and advances a complex multi-caused model in order to explain diversity in rural development. By highlighting and critically assessing several plausible explanations, this article argues that the development of coffee production in the Lake Kivu region primarily contrasted because of an interplay of differences in land availability (demography) and in indigenous precolonial landholding systems that were enhanced during the colonial period due to judicial differences (colony versus mandate).