Economic Development and Change in Islamic Africa

Researcher: Endre Stiansen
The project started in 1995 and was completed in 2000

Stiansen's research addresses economic change in the Sudan and Islamic Africa. Trained as a historian, he works on development in both the nineteenth and the present centuries and is particularly concerned with social and historical aspects of credit institutions. This has led to a detailed study of the Sudanese export and import trade in the mid-nineteenth century, several essays on Islamic banking, and a number of smaller articles on issues related to development finance.

Recently Stiansen edited, with Michael Kevane of Santa Clara University, a collection of essays on Kordofan, the Sudan, and, with Jane I. Guyer of Northwestern University, a book on African financial institutions in historical perspective. Currently he is working a collection of essays on financial institutions in Africa's political economy, and preparing a study of the Sudan's external debt.

Endre Stiansen studied in Bergen, Cairo, London and Santa Barbara (California) before he in 1994 received his Dr. Philos. degree from the University of Bergen. Subsequently he worked as a researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Bergen and was employed at Nordiska Afrikainstitutet as the Norwegian researcher. He finished his contract on 31 December 2000.