De-compressing history? Pre-colonial states, economic change and the origins of colonial institutions in British Africa
نویسنده
چکیده
Colonial institutions in Africa were shaped by a variety of factors, including local conditions prior to colonial rule, the policies of the imperial power, and rapid economic change during and after the period of colonial conquest. This paper contributes to a growing literature on the origins and structure of colonial institutions. It examines a neglected but important part of colonial governments, namely local-level “native authorities” using a new dataset of native authority tax revenue in four countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Malawi). These data are combined with anthropological records on indigenous political organization as well as indicators of colonial-era economic change to examine how these factors interacted to create the institutional patterns of colonial rule, emphasizing the extent of sub-national variation in institutional capacity which emerged as a result.
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