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How Africans Shaped British Colonial Institutions: Evidence from Local Taxation

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How Africans Shaped British Colonial Institutions: Evidence from Local Taxation How Africans Shaped British Colonial Institutions: Evidence from Local Taxation JUTTA BOLT AND LEIGH GARDNER The institutions that governed most of the rural population in British colonial Africa have been neglected in the literature on colonialism. We use new data on local governments, or “Native Authorities,” to present the first quantitative comparison of African institutions under indirect rule in four colonies in 1948: Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Nyasaland, and Kenya. Tax data show that Native Authorities’ capacity varied within and between colonies, due to both underlying economic inequalities and African elites’ relations with the colonial government. Our findings suggest that Africans had a bigger hand in shaping British colonial institutions than often acknowledged. n 1980, historian and former colonial officer Anthony Kirk-Greene Idrew attention to the small number of European officers in British colo- nial governments in Africa. He called this the “thin white line” (Kirk- Greene 1980, pp. 38–41). Nevertheless, he did not consider the colonial administration in danger of collapse, since large numbers of Africans had roles in it, particularly in governing the rural interior. The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 2020). © The Economic History Association. doi: 10.1017/S0022050720000455. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Jutta Bolt is Associate Professor, Department of Economic History, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, and Faculty of Economics and Business, Department of Econometrics and Finance, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]. Leigh Gardner is Associate Professor, London School of Economics, Department of Economic History, London, United Kingdom, and a Research Affiliate in the Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa. E-mail: [email protected]. This paper has benefitted from the contributions of a number of people, particularly Ralph Austen, Gareth Austin, Robert Bates, Bas van Bavel, Catherine Boone, Steve Broadberry, Denis Cogneau, Yannick Dupraz, Johan Fourie, Ewout Frankema, Elliott Green, Michiel de Haas, Linda Heywood, Di Kilpert, Andrew Linke, Oliver Morrissey, Derek Peterson, Sandra de Pleijt, Maarten Prak, Marcel Timmer, John Thornton, Marlous van Waijenburg, Richard Waller, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. It has also gained from seminar and conference audiences at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, Lund University, New York University Abu Dhabi, Stellenbosch University, University of Nottingham, University of Southern Denmark, and Utrecht University, as well as the annual meetings of the African Economic History Network, the African Studies Association, the African Studies Association UK, the Economic History Association, and the Economic History Society. Attendees at the World Economic History Congress and the capstone conference of the National History Center’s conference on decolonization have also made valuable contributions. This research was supported by funding from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (grant number KAW 2016.0184) and the ESRC as part of the Spatial Inequalities in African Political Economy project (ES/R005753). Any remaining errors are our own. 1189 1190 Bolt and Gardner His observation is a salutary caution to writers on colonial institutions in Africa. Too much of the recent work on the legacies of colonial rule has focused on what happened in colonial capitals rather than in rural areas, and on the nature of national rather than local institutions (Bertocchi and Canova 2002; Lange, Mahoney, and vom Hau 2006; La Porta, Lopez- de-Silanes, and Shleifer 2008; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Easterly and Levine 2016). This work has been criticized for taking a Eurocentric approach to understanding colonial institutions, treating colonies as an institutional “blank slate,” which European colonizers could govern without reference to indigenous institutions (Bayly 2008). Others, however, have argued that indigenous and precolonial insti- tutions continued to be more important than national institutions in shaping African development through the colonial period and beyond (Gennaioli and Rainer 2007; Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2013, 2014; Bandyopadhyay and Green 2016). To support this argument, these papers correlate anthropological measures of African state centralization from the Murdock Atlas (Murdock 1967), interpreted as a measure of “pre-colonial” state capacity, with later economic and political outcomes. However, such correlations say little about how interactions with colonial governments may have influenced African institutions during the colo- nial period. Archibong (2018, 2019) is an exception, paying welcome attention to the relationship between African institutions and the colonial state in Nigeria. There is a rich qualitative literature on the ways in which Africans and African institutions responded to the evolving incentives of the colonial period (e.g. Mamdani 1996; Spear 2003). This work shows that African local governments, known at the time as “Native Authorities,” did not just preserve past institutions. Rather, the integration of African rulers into colonial administrations altered their sources of legitimacy and accountability, and both Africans and Europeans reinterpreted indigenous political traditions to suit changing circumstances. To date, however, the evidence used in these discussions has been largely anecdotal. This paper presents new data on the structure and capacity of Native Authorities for four British colonies, Nigeria, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Nyasaland (now Malawi), and Kenya, and uses these data to argue that the interaction of colonial officials and African elites during the colonial period created substantial variation in colonial institutions both within and between colonies. The data are based on a set of district- level surveys commissioned in 1948 for Lord Hailey’s five-volume report entitled Native Administration in the British African Territories (Hailey 1951). The surveys were completed by district officers and are now held How Africans Shaped British Colonial Institutions 1191 by the British National Archives.1 They asked a standard set of questions about the physical, economic, and demographic characteristics of each Native Authority area (of which there were often several in a district) and about the structure of the Native Authority, its finances, and its activities. They provide a rare quantitative and comparative account of these insti- tutions both within and between British colonies in Africa. These four colonies had a range of different types of colonial econo- mies and political structures. In 1950, Britain had 15 colonies in Africa, including some of the smallest in the region and some of the largest (see Figure 1). Their wide range of colonial histories makes it difficult to iden- tify representative cases. One reason for choosing these four is that they contained just over half of the African population under British rule in 1950 (52.7 percent, using population estimates from Frankema and Jerven (2014)). Using the widely cited typology developed by Samir Amin (1973), our selection includes colonies dominated by peasant production (Nigeria and the Gold Coast) and colonies with European settlers and large-scale expatriate production (Kenya and Nyasaland). The Gold Coast was one of British Africa’s export success stories, while Nyasaland was one of Britain’s poorest colonies. All four incorporated different types of indigenous institutions, from hierarchical states to decentralized village- based societies. Due to these differences, they provide good empirical evidence to support our argument that interactions between Africans and Europeans created a landscape of colonial institutions that varied enor- mously both within and between different colonies. We use tax revenue from c. 1948 as a measure of the capacity of Native Authorities.2 The structure of tax systems and the amount of revenue they produce have become important for comparing and measuring state capacity in different historical periods and contexts (Dincecco 2011; Karaman and Pamuk 2013). This approach has been used in compara- tive studies of colonial states in Africa to examine the capacity of central governments (e.g., Mkandawire 2010; Frankema and van Waijenburg 2014). But this work has largely ignored local governments, thus neglecting a significant component of colonial fiscal systems.3 By the end of the colonial period, local government spending as a share of total government spending was over 20 percent in highly decentralized 1 U.K. National Archives CO 1018, various files. The specific files used here are as follows: Gold Coast, CO 1018/10, CO 1018/11, CO 1018/15; Kenya, CO 1018/22, CO 1018/23, CO 1018/24, CO 1018/25, CO 1018/25, CO 1018/27; Nyasaland, CO 1018/58, CO 1018/59, CO 1018/60; Nigeria, CO 1018/36, CO 1018/38, CO 1018/39, CO 1018/40. 2 Dates may vary by a year or two depending on data availability. See Online Appendix 1 for detailed definitions of variables and country-specific lists of sources. 3 Hoffman (2015, p. 308). For a partial exception, see Gardner (2012). 1192 Bolt and Gardner FIGURE 1 BRITISH COLONIAL AFRICA WITH SELECTED CASES Source: Based on Reid (2009, p. 201). The map does not
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