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The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. By Crawford Young. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 356p. $40.00.
Nicolas Van de Walle, Overseas Development Council
Professor Young's impressive new work attempts to trace certain characteristics of contemporary African politics back to the colonial era. His central argument is that the political structures erected during the colonial era have powerfully conditioned present day institutions and helped to bring about the continent's current crisis.
The book's argument unfolds gradually, beginning with a long theoretical chapter on the nature of the state. Professor Young discusses several essential attributes before defining five "imperatives" that shape the behavior of all states. He then examines the colonial state, focusing on the nature of authority in colonies from those of ancient Roman to the European age of empire in the nineteenth century, and argues that it can be conceived of as a distinctive type of state. Chapters 4 through 7 present a political history of the colonial state in Africa, from the period of conquest at the end of the nineteenth century to the institutionalization of authority after World War I and the subsequent demise of the colonial political order in the 1950s.
Chapter 8 compares Africa's colonial states with their counterparts in other regions of the world. Based on the evidence provided in the previous four chapters, Young argues convincingly that African colonial states were different in a number of key respects; in particular, they were more ruthless in their extractive strategies and established much tougher mechanisms of coercion to subjugate the population and ensure accumulation. The chapter's erudition is impressive. Truly comparative scholarship on Africa must simultaneously...