October 4, 2010
Colonialism
o Venn Diagrams:
• Factory Employment; Production of Surplus; Economic
Specialization !
• Urbanization; Literacy; Media Participation !
• Union Organization; Political Organization; Demands for
Universal Suffrage
o How can we make the example in Great Britain play itself out in
other parts of the world
o Mostly, modernization theorists had it wrong; Some countries have
appeared to follow the model of modernization leading to
democracy, but most did not
o What explains persistent wide disparities in wealth?
o Colonialism Maps throughout the 1900s
o Among the 94 countries in the world, 64 are former colonies
o Most of those are developing countries
o We see a correlation between a status as a former colony and
poverty today
o This is a big part of what social scientists do - try to find causality
and explanations of why certain things vary
o Develop accounts of how and why colonialism might have led to
underdevelopment
o Two readings for today are giving us similar but not quite the same
answer
o One looks at Nigeria by looking at pre-colonial conditions and then
on to the second world war and beyond
o Nigeria does not become Nigeria until colonization in the 1900s
o The reading doesn’t really dwell on this but this is important
o In the so-called scramble of Africa, the colonial powers drew
boundaries that arbitrarily excluded different groups – the
boundaries of present-day Africa stays and are based on those
colonial boundaries
o The first part of the reading focuses on conditions of Nigeria
o It is important to be attentive to starting conditions
o What was their level of development 100 years ago?
o Pre-colonial starting point:
• The political system
• The slave trade
• Technological capacity
o Yoruba Kingdoms (picture)
www.notesolution.com
Different Strengths In the South and the North
o South:
• Yoruba kingdoms
• Knowable for two reasons: each one had very little political
power – the kings shared power with the chiefs in very
diffused authority patterns
• They were never amalgamated into anything stronger
• Very little political power – loosely allied, not centralized, very
little power
• Little extractive properties – they cannot extract labour; they
can’t collect taxes; they have no way of coercing their
populations or raising armies of resistance
• They’re fairly easy to conquer and penetrate
o When the British try to expand inland from the coast, they do not
meet much political resistance
o North:
• Sokoto Caliphate in 1893
• Large, centralized
• Common religion: Islam – speaks to the idea of identity
• Greater extractive capacity
• It was able to engender economic development
• Offered some resistance to colonial rule
o Will Colonialism be practiced differently in the north and in
the south?
Slave Trade (Decimated Population)
o The region was involved in the slave trade since the 16th century
o Large parts of Africa are still today under-populated in ways that
undermine development, productivity and penetration of the market
o Some people identify the slave trade as an important contribution
to underdevelopment
o Between 1650 and 1860 approximately 10 to 15 million enslaved
people were transported from western Africa to the Americas.
Low Technology
o In most traditional societies, the common agricultural tool is a hand
hoe – plowing is unknown
o Eventually Nigeria would produce cotton and indigo to develop a
small textile industry but this is still very rudimentary
Traits of Colonial States
o Indirect Rule (Lord Lugard)
• Allow subjects to keep a portion of the taxes they collected
www.notesolution.com