The significance of the agricultural sector in the Sokoto caliphate has been a subject of interest in the past few decades. Important findings have greatly enriched our understanding of the significance of both small holdings and plantations. However, no study that exclusively deals with plantation slavery has yet comprehensively compared the importance of the non-plantation agricultural economy with that based around plantations. Such a comparison leads to two major conclusions. First, echoing Paul E. Lovejoy: unlike peasant production primarily meant for subsistence, plantations significantly shaped industrial, commercial, and other economic developments in the Sokoto caliphate; second: plantations helped to magnify state power.

It is useful to begin by relating this chapter to an earlier effort, Herbst's States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, published in 2000. Briefl y put, drawing on the wealth-in-people theory, Herbst argues that powerful people in Africa were not concerned with land, but rather labor, because the former was abundant while the latter was relatively scarce. Land abundance allowed African populations to be mobile, thereby making the extension of authority over neighboring people difficult, and also making it difficult to tax and maltreat laborers. Based on the challenges posed by land abundance and the “nonterritorial” nature of power in precolonial Africa, Herbst concludes, African states did not gain power through the construction of loyalties and the creation of an infrastructure meant to broadcast power, and they were weak because they exercised power solely through the use of coercion. In addition, Herbst indicates that the size of some nineteenth-century African states expanded or contracted mainly as a result of “their ability to participate in the increasing amount of international trade generated by the growing European presence on the coast of Africa” and not in response to a “war for territory.” Finally, he stresses that states that expanded in the nineteenth century did not legitimate the exercise of state power through accountability to the citizens, but by improving the technologies of coercion. Herbst's interpretation has received support from writers like Cooper.

However, Herbst's interpretation has been challenged. Austin questioned three of Herbst's ideas: that all precolonial African states were weak; that African state-makers were not concerned with land or with the construction of loyalties; and that they exercised power only through the threat of violence.