The Political Economy of Ethnicity in Africa

• In Event: Rethinking Ethnicity

Abstract

What factors have shaped the ethnic landscapes that structure modern societies? Ethnicity—social identity based, principally, on shared descent—is found to profoundly influence economic and political processes, from the allocation of state resources to public goods provision to civil war. Yet, the historical determinants of ethno-political configurations remain poorly understood. This paper fills this significant gap in the literature, concentrating on the region of sub-Saharan Africa where ethnicity is highly politically salient. We argue that Africa’s ethnic landscape was powerfully shaped by dual economic revolutions that swept across the continent in the 19th and 20th centuries: the spread of cash crop agriculture and the diffusion of printing and writing technologies. We propose that these economic changes shaped ethno-political configurations via their effect on boundary-making and politicization. Both economic transformations are hypothesized to have contributed to the politicization of ethnicity by endowing some groups with higher mobilizational capacity through increased wealth and improved communication capabilities. However, we expect they had divergent effects on ethnic boundary-making due to competing dynamics of social closure and imagined communities. Groups treated with cash crops are hypothesized to have developed exclusionary boundaries as ethnicity was used as a social barrier to prevent migrants from owning land and other means of production. In contrast, groups exposed to communication technologies are hypothesized to have developed more inclusionary ethnic boundaries as the spread and accessibility of language opened the door to new entrants. We test these hypotheses by combining new geographic data on the location and intensity of colonial cash crop production and publishing in African languages, with group and individual-level data on ethnic politicization, salience and polarization. Overall, this research holds the promise of providing new insights into the economic processes driving ethnic politicization.

Authors

• Philip Roessler, College of William & Mary

• Yannick Immanuel Pengl, ETH Zurich