Books: June 2024

States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control — Jeffrey Herbst

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ States and Power in Africa is probably one of the best social science books of the last twenty years. It’s about state capacity in Africa, why it’s so low, and the answers Herbst comes up with are mostly about geography.

The story is that, for most of its history, Africa was sparsely populated, in part because of its highly varied, difficult geography. Low population density made it expensive for states to consolidate territory and project power. The result is that early African states “missed out” on the way interstate competition over territory forged strong states in Europe (Tilly’s thesis of state formation).

Colonialism comes along and either worsens or continues some of these long-term trends. Herbst’s telling of the colonial experience is more measured than others. He highlights the continuity between colonial administrators who barely governed the local population and pre-colonial rulers who seemed to do little different. But he also highlights how the Europeans’ prohibitions on interstate conflict, their drawing of arbitrary boundaries, kept artificially weak states alive that in a different universe would have been absorbed by stronger neighbors.

The idea that states become strong through warfare is obviously normatively uncomfortable. Perhaps the earliest states became stronger by accident, but once the blueprint was there, can’t other states simply imitate it?

The chapter on the pre-colonial period left me wanting more. The picture of pre-colonial African polities is vague. The basic idea – that African polities governed people, not territory – was not fully convincing.

But there’s a lot of great stuff here. Herbst has great ambition and is willing to try on different ideas. There’s a whole chapter on the shapes of countries and population distribution patterns that is fascinating even if hard to buy at times. The maps are awesome.

The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Latin America Otherwise) — Greg Grandin

⭐⭐ I was on a reading tear until I got to this book and it totally derailed me. I had to start it a few times and it felt like a slog, even if parts were rewarding. The book is very “dissertation-y” and very specific: basically about the development of national identity in Quetzaltenango, an important city in Guatemala, primarily in the 1800s.

Still, the book was interesting. The core is about relations between the large indigenous population and, first, the Spanish Crown and, later, the Ladino national government. The hook is that the indigenous community is not without its internal divisions; crucially, there is a stratum of indigenous society who benefited from the colonial arrangement. Some were pretty powerful and wealthy; there are great anecdotes of Ladino community leaders reaching out for help or loans from the indigenous community and getting nothing.

Grandin highlights how this elite, indigenous class worked to protect its privilege at different points, often in surprising ways. The most interesting is in the classic Latin American struggle between Conservative and Liberal parties in the 1800s. Surprising from our vantage point, the Liberals are primarily the villains from the indigenous perspective. In wanting to reform society and erase boundaries between indigenous and non-indigenous (assimilating the indigenous population), they come into conflict with the community and especially its elites. During a war in which the Western Highlands briefly declares independence, the indigenous community sides with the Conservatives.

Other interesting moments: during a cholera outbreak, and then in the 1940s during Arbenz rule, indigenous elites actually joined anticommunist efforts to undermine land reform by indigenous peasants.

Great content for thinking about how, even under governance schemes that hurt a group overall, there are still “winners and losers” within the group who respond to strategic incentives.