Chapter 2 argues that imperial powers (Britain, France and Belgium) deployed a similar strategy of legal imperialism during the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa. Indirect rule operationalised the contradiction that colonial power was weak in its effective reach, yet strong in the systemic upheavals it engendered. It also fostered legal and capitalist unevenness, what Benton and Ford (2016) call ‘lumpiness’. The chapter focuses on three crisis situations that were ostensibly solved through juridical means: the 1920s Gold Coast conflicts before the Privy Council; the 1895 Stokes-Lothaire incident before the High Council of the Congo Free State; and pre-independence military trials in French and British colonies. Together, these judicial crises help account for structural commonalities in the articulation of post-independence African states with the world economy: the deployment of merchant law with and without state sovereignty and middling as a durable though variable sovereign resource of the post-colonial state.

This chapter will address the various peoples, polities, individuals, movements, and the social-political and economic conditions of Nigeria before the colonial era (1900). It will also go over the processes that spurred ongoing transformations in the complex patchwork of political, cultural, and religious entities that dominated what is known today as Nigeria. This chapter names five principal events as the primary catalysts for these transformations. They are the abolition of the slave trade and the switch to legitimate trade; the Sokoto Jihad; the decline and eventual collapse of the Old Oyo Empire; freed captives returning from Sierra Leone along with the arrival of missionaries; and the advent of colonial rule. These events would result in an environment of instability which gave way to new powers prompted by shifting demands from an increasingly industrialized and interconnected world. The chapter explores the social and economic shifts that resulted from these political changes and how these social and economic processes impacted the political changes in question. Finally, the chapter gives specific examples of lifestyle changes experienced by millions during this period, such as changes in clothing, religious practices, and diet.

This chapter continues the discussion on Nigeria during the interwar years (1918–1939). It shifts focus away from the reasoning behind colonial actions and paying more attention to their consequences for Nigeria. The interwar years in Nigeria were characterized by the onset of a decade-long economic depression caused by the global Great Depression and the increasing marginalization of local economic activity by private and colonial forces. This marginalization was promoted to increase the profitability of Nigeria’s growing extractive economy at the expense of native economic actors. This, along with the growing development of a new, educated, native elite, would see the growth of “official” indigenous organizations. The bulk of this chapter focuses on the development of these organizations such as the West African Students Union (WASU) or the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), and details the growth of resistance movements fostered by the said establishments. They would demand greater representation in the colonial government, construct economic support groups, and attempt to end disparages in higher education. The chapter also explores alternative responses to colonialism, including the growth of organized crime and widespread regional migration. Finally, the chapter explores the different sociopolitical dynamics in Northern Nigeria.

Chapter 12 details the economic exploits of Nigeria’s colonial government and private foreign firms and explores the responses from local economic and political forces. The extraction and exploitation of Nigeria’s natural and labor resources were the primary driving factors behind British efforts, aiming to create a lucrative territorial possession that would fit snugly into a global imperial patchwork. To do so, the colonial government and some Indigenous polities promoted the construction of expansive, colony-wide infrastructure projects and extensive investments into its extraction economy, such as the development of commercial cocoa plantations. Such efforts yielded significant economic growth, but, as this chapter details, British actors would receive the most economic gains due to the attempted monopolization of these growing industries. The integration of indirect and legal forms of discrimination would harm local economic actors and non-British foreign firms, resulting in widespread poverty and social disturbance. With the onset of World War I and the economic depressions which followed, even this imbalanced economic growth would slow. Because Britain could no longer focus as much on its colonies, Nigeria’s growing class of educated elites would slowly gain more political representation.

This chapter explores the history of urbanization in Nigeria, focusing primarily on the colonial era and, to a lesser degree, precolonial Nigeria in areas that hosted large, Indigenous urban centers like Ibadan or Kano. This chapter will argue that the primary factor that pushed Nigeria toward urbanization was colonialism, driven primarily by economic interests. This development was informed by Nigeria’s unique geographic, social, and political conditions, the specifics of which will be showcased through the exploration of Nigeria’s most prominent cities. Finally, the chapter will detail the urban policies of colonial officials and the actual development of these cities, along with the challenges that arose from uneven, exploitative practices. These issues would mire Nigeria’s urban landscape with poor planning, crime, poverty, and numerous other challenges which continue to plague the nation today.

The imposition of ‘civilising measures’ in the context of a policy of indirect rule included reinforcing the position of the king while at the same time weakening and eventually destroying his symbolic power base. This led to a dramatic shift of authority, as did the imposition of central rule to the entire country and the introduction of a uniform and ‘rational’ administration, even where the kingdom had no historical presence or legitimacy. Together with this extension of the central kingdom’s reach, the spreading of the Tutsi political monopoly, while Hutu had held political office in the past, greatly contributed to Hutu resentment.

Chapter 2 examines a constitution written for the princely state of Mysore in 1923. It interprets the constitution as an early expression of anti-parliamentary model of popular government.

Indirect rule was integral to the colonial governance of religion. The state’s intimacy with Muslim elites gave rise to accusations of ‘Muslim sub-imperialism” by Protestant missionaries and other critics who argued that rather than hinging on the separation of the state from all religions, colonial governance entailed the “unblushing bolstering up of Islam.” This chapter argues that indirect rule did not amount to an elevation or even preservation of the caliphal governance ideals. Instead, that mode of governance entailed the transformation of those institutions. Indirect rule was, therefore, not only governance through ‘Islamic institutions,’ but more importantly, it was the governance of those institutions. That governance process culminated in the making of a distinct British colonial Islamic law. That colonial law emerged from the alteration of the precolonial constitutional balance of powers between jurists’ expositions of the Shari’a (fiqh), on the one hand, and political authorities’ jurisdiction over a law (“siyasa”), on the other. This chapter traces that transformation as central to the career of imperial secular governmentality in the colony.

In the following chapters, I analyse several attempts to interrupt the abyssal nature of the modern state emerging from my previous research on sociology of law. I try to identify the reasons why most of such attempts failed. In this chapter, I analyse some of the most salient features of the state and the legal system in Mozambique proposing the concept of heterogeneous state to highlight the breakdown of the modern equation between the unity of the state and the unity of its legal and administrative operation. The centrality of legal pluralism is analysed in light of an empirical research focused on community courts and traditional authorities. I use the concept of legal hybridisation with the purpose of showing the porosity of the boundaries of the different legal orders and cultures in Mozambique and the deep cross-fertilisations or cross-contaminations among them. Special attention is given to the multicultural plurality resulting from the interaction between modern law and traditional law, the latter conceived of as an alternative modernity.

The British colonial government frustrated European missionaries’ desire to convert Northern Nigeria by curtailing Christian proselytization. This chapter situates missionaries’ tumultuous relationship with the state in the emergence of secularism as an imperial technique of managing religions and religious difference. That technique involved the government’s insistence on its separation from Christian missions, and its indirect rule of the territory through Muslim chiefs. Colonial administrators resolved that paradox–of the state’s rhetoric of separation from Christian missions even while the state remained intimate with Muslim elites–in one of two ways. Some administrators emphasized the superiority of the religious liberty of Muslims over the missionary desire to proselytize; others stressed the imperative for the state to be separate from what remained of the precolonial Sokoto caliphate. As administrators latched on to either argument, so did colonial subjects also deploy either notion to further their agenda. What emerges is a story of a struggle between imperial bureaucrats, Christian missionaries, and Muslim chiefs over the governance of religious difference.

This chapter shows how the modern state’s first two major interventions into society explain the origins of contemporary intra-ethnic inequality in Northern Ghana. The chapter begins by explaining the research design, detailing how the pre-1914 colonial border creates an opportunity to estimate long-run effects of the colonial state’s imposition of new intra-ethnic elites. I then introduce the data and explain how inequality is measured. The analysis first establishes a strong correlation between the invention of chieftaincy and inequality today, comparing the “invented chiefs” and “never recognized” communities. I then explain how the state’s selective provision of education accounts for this relationship. The final section rules out a series of alternative explanations and mechanisms.

The absence and presence of state law was central to the ways in which the colonial project was conceived, enacted and legitimated in the southwest Pacific, and this chapter traces the key ways in which questions of land, property and territory were contested across the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. It demonstrates first, that property disputes formed part of a suite of territorialising projects in which a range of actors competed to delimit and assert control over a geographic area and in so doing, constitute their political authority. Second, territorial struggles generated present legal pluralities in which claims to land are legitimated not only by reference to kastom and the state, but also Christianity. Third, the chapter demonstrates that people were very differently positioned to navigate the new social worlds established by the colonial administration and churches. From the outset of the colonial period, the language of state law and the practices of British administrators tended to consolidate particular idealisations of masculine authority, enabling a small number of men to extend their authority while remaining largely inaccessible to the majority of the population.

Long before the East India Company’s founding, individual Europeans traveled to India as soldiers. Rulers recruited such men to gain access to new technical knowledge and to demonstrate their cosmopolitan reach. Company officials had long sought to make use of these adventurers as informal diplomatic agents, but had little success until the mid-eighteenth century, when the Company’s expanding political power made such connections valuable to European adventurers. As the balance of power between the Company and Indian states shifted, those adventurers demanded more formal positions within the Company, including as political residents through whom the Company asserted indirect influence over nominally independent states. Their success in implanting themselves as Company agents contrasts with the status of Indian officers and sepoys employed by the Company, who were also active in the fluid military labor markets of India. Rather than seeing such figures as potential representatives, Company officials used their growing corps of diplomat-adventurers to compel Indian states into new treaties criminalizing such movement and thus curtailing the fluidity of South India’s military economy.

This chapter addresses the challenge of endogeneity, testing Master Hypothesis 4. Some critics of the grievance-based literature argue that endogeneity may undermine the link between exclusion and conflict, and by implication the opposite one linking inclusion to peace. Endogeneity derives from the fact that the governments' decisions to include or exclude could be motivated by the anticipation of conflict. We counter this threat to inference by articulating a causal pathway that explains ethnic groups' access to power independently of conflict. Focusing on postcolonial states, we exploit differences in colonial empires' strategies of rule to model which ethnic groups were represented in government at the time of independence. This identification strategy allows for estimating the exogenous effect of inclusiveness on conflict. We find strong and systematic evidence that - at least for the post-colonial world - inclusion in governmental power sharing systematically reduces the likelihood that ethnic groups become involved in ethnic civil war. Our instrumental-variable analysis confirms Master Hypothesis 4, because we have found that governments tend to co-opt potential rebels rather than excluding them.

This chapter lays out some of the key concepts and theories that support the book, as well as a key conceptual typology of colonial governance. It starts with an examination of the literature on civil conflict, highlighting its attributes but explaining its limitations in relation to the types and patterns of both insurgent and social violence in south Asia. It then lays out the framework of political order and institutions that has implicitly driven much of the research on political violence and related outcomes in comparative politics. I argue that some of the assumptions embedded in this framework do not allow for the examination of the historical roots of subnational institutions. I provide an alternative in the analytical tradition of state-building, and suggest how uneven state-building in developing countries can shape state-society relations. The chapter concludes with laying out the key conceptual typology of colonial governance, by interacting two dimensions of direct and indirect rule, which serves as the basis for legible categories of colonial difference.

This final chapter explores the patchwork state in comparative perspective. It places the uneven state-building trajectories of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in the context of broader South Asia. It then contrasts South Asian patchwork states with dynamics in East and Southeast Asian cases, which had internal differentiation in colonial governance, but also Japanese conquest and postwar revolutionary and counterrevolutionary mobilization. The chapter concludes with the application of fear, greed and frugality in the creation of the British and American Empires, and their consequences in state strength and weakness.

Mademba marched into his new kingdom at the head of a large entourage of his followers, prisoners of war, and their wives. Upon his arrival in his new kingdom, Mademba demanded that chiefs and notables submit to him, although the town of Sinsani and its region had never had rulers of their own. Mademba’s actions during the first year of his rule exacerbated old rivalries and resulted in a widespread revolt, which formed part of a wider set of revolts against French colonial conquest and rule throughout the Middle Niger Valley. The French attributed the revolts to Islamic conspiracies, which displaced attention from their own colonial policies. The French eventually suppressed the revolts and rescued Mademba from the siege of Sinsani. Archinard removed Bojan from the rulership of Segu, but he retained his commitment to indirect rule by appointing Aguibu as ruler of Bandiagara and reasserting Mademba as ruler of a somewhat reduced kingdom in Sinsani. The Ministry of Marine in Paris intervened to restrain continued military actions and incessant budget overruns by appointing a civilian governor in 1893.