Pre-colonial centralisation, traditional indirect rule, and state capacity in Africa

ABSTRACT

What explains contemporary variation in state capacity across African states? Recent research has focused on the possible role played by colonial and pre-colonial institutions. This paper investigates the way in which colonial and pre-colonial institutions interacted to affect the public legitimacy and coercive capacity of African states on independence. A coherent configuration of historical institutions, pre-colonial centralisation combined with colonial indirect rule through traditionally legitimate rulers, contrasts with the incoherent and comparatively illegitimate configurations of pre-colonial decentralisation with traditional rule and pre-colonial centralisation with colonial non-traditional or direct rule. The paper tests the theoretical expectations in a historical instrumental-variables framework.

KEYWORDS:

• State-building
• state capacity
• colonialism
• economic history
• political development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christoffer Cappelen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1769-9589

Jason Sorens http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2031-8150

Notes

1. The only, partial exception came when some non-Muslim states recognised a Christian Ibo secession in the wake of a Muslim Hausa-Fulani takeover of the Nigerian state and anti-Ibo pogroms (Biafra).

2. The requirement of ‘pre-colonial population’ excludes countries such as Mauritius that were settled during colonialism.

3. Somalia was missing in the original data. We assigned a value of zero due to the absence of a government.

4. As noted in Section 4.2, we believe that this is a serious miscoding of Liberia, as it ignores the important Americo-Liberian state.