Featuring Jack Paine, Associate Professor of Political Science, Emory University

Abstract: States are the fundamental building block of the contemporary international system. Nonetheless, despite substantial research on building state capacity, relatively little social-scientific research examines how and why particular states were formed in the first place. We focus on Africa, where the conventional wisdom is that the contemporary states are almost entirely a product of choices made in European boardrooms in the late nineteenth century by statesmen with scant knowledge of local conditions. By contrast, we show instead that European-led state formation was a dynamic process that continued throughout the colonial epoch, even after World War II. The average size of a colonial state grew steadily for decades even after most of the continent was claimed by Europeans, in contrast to shrinking average state size elsewhere in the world. The reason is the continual merger of smaller African colonial states into larger ones that satisfied the colonizers’ goal to achieve benefits of scale. Nonetheless, colonizers did not face a blank slate, as precolonial states and white settlers constricted the set of available options. Although many early, smaller colonial states founded upon precolonial states were merged into larger states, white settlers usually failed in their quest to absorb larger African populations. These local influences are vital for understanding the composition of postcolonial African states.