University of Gothenburg
  2. About the University
  3. Find staff
  4. Klas Rönnbäck

Klas Rönnbäck

Professor

Economic History
Telephone
+46 31-786 45 20
Mail
klas.ronnback@econhist.gu.se
Visiting address
Viktoriagatan 13 plan 6
41125 Göteborg
Room number
616
Postal address
Box 625
40530 Göteborg

About Klas Rönnbäck

On other web sites

Research areas

  • Economic development
  • Colonialism
  • Slavery
  • Capitalism

Research in progress

  • From bondage to the free labor market: wages, prices and living standards in the Caribbean for a century after emancipation
  • Reversal of fortune or persistence of wealth? Institutions and wealth inequality in a Caribbean plantation economy, 1750s to 1917
  • Slavery, economic development in the Atlantic economy, and the Great Divergence

Teaching areas

  • Global economic history
  • Economic history of slavery
  • Labour in economic and historical perspective

Selected publications

Rönnbäck, Klas (2023): “Revisiting the profitability of slavery: slave hiring rates and the return on investments in slaves in the antebellum U.S. South“,Journal of Global Slavery 8(1) 83-118.

Rönnbäck, Klas and Oskar Broberg (2022): “From defensive to transformative business diplomacy. The British South Africa Company and the end of chartered company rule in Rhodesia, 1910–1925”, Business History Review 96(4): 777-803.

Klas Rönnbäck & Oskar Broberg (2019): Capital and Colonialism: The Return on Investments in Africa, 1869-1969. Palgrave Macmillan.

Klas Rönnbäck (2016): Labour and Living Standards in Pre-Colonial West Africa: The Case of the Gold Coast. Routledge.