2 - How History Matters

Summary

History is an important determinant of politics. Political scientists have paid special attention to the influence of three historical processes: (1) how states have been formed; (2) how socio-economic transformation (or modernization) has influenced the nature of politics; and (3) how institutions influence economic performance. The changes that these processes have brought are especially evident in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Africa is the outlier because the continent never went through the same type of agrarian revolution that laid the foundation for state development on the other continents. Lack of exchanges with other regions that would spur transformation of the productive forces reinforced its backwardness. When the European colonizers took over, they acted with little or no respect for the local conditions. One of their first measures was to modernize its low-yielding, small-scale agriculture. Trying to incorporate people into a modern state system and economy, however, proved difficult. Much of Africa’s historical legacy is social and informal. It does not easily lend itself to state control. Producers on the land escape through focusing on subsistence rather than commercial crops, those in the urban areas by relying on unofficial rules. The dominant cultural orientation is to evade the long arm of the state. The idea of a social contract between ruler and ruled has been hard to nurture in post-colonial Africa. Instead, history has left the region with a mode of development that relies on intermittent and flexible institutional arrangements, with direct consequences for how society is governed. The prevalence of clientelism, rather than ideology, is perhaps the most significant way that history keeps influencing contemporary governance in African countries.