How Black Sea Slave Raids Spurred State-Building and Urban Growth

What the Paper Asks

Volha Charnysh and Ranjit Lall investigate how slave-raiding in Eastern Europe—the region that supplied the world’s second-largest early modern slave source after West Africa—shaped long-run development. The authors ask whether exposure to repeated slave raids produced institutional responses that altered demographic, commercial, and urban trajectories over centuries.

New Data on the Black Sea Slave Trade

Charnysh and Lall compile a comprehensive historical dataset documenting at least 5 million people taken from 882 locations across Eastern Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries. This dataset allows the authors to map geographic variation in raid exposure and link it to modern economic and institutional outcomes.

How the Question Is Tested

The authors propose a defensive state-building mechanism: areas exposed to slave raids developed stronger military, administrative, and fiscal capacity as societies resisted capture and remained less integrated into slave markets. To assess this, they combine:

• Difference-in-differences estimates comparing long-run outcomes across places with varying raid exposure, and
• Instrumental-variables strategies to address potential endogeneity in where raids occurred.

These approaches use historical raid intensity as the treatment and modern urban, demographic, and commercial indicators as outcomes.

Key Findings

• Exposure to slave raids is positively associated with long-run urban growth and related measures of demographic and commercial development.
• Raided areas show evidence of more robust defensive infrastructure and higher levels of military, administrative, and fiscal capacity consistent with the proposed mechanism.
• The results indicate that the particular organization and structure of slave production matter for developmental legacies: outcomes following Black Sea raiding differ from patterns emphasized in studies of other slave trades.

Why This Matters

The paper highlights a historically contingent path by which external predation—here, slave raids—can incentivize institutional responses that spur certain forms of economic development. Charnysh and Lall caution against blanket generalizations from one regional slave-trade context (notably West Africa) to another, showing that the structure of coercion and the nature of integration into slave markets shape long-run political and economic trajectories.