Quinn is an accomplished author. One entire page of the bibliography (341) references his own previous publications. The title of his latest book is exciting, especially for scholars of Institutional Economics and International Relations. With an upsurge of appreciation for the importance of institutions in determining development trajectories, and why some countries remain poor while others move towards accumulating broad-based wealth, the book promised to be enlightening. While the book does contain a novel contribution, it would have been strengthened by following an outline informed by a stronger theoretical framework.

The book's central contention is that ‘in the wake of two global geopolitical shifts, African political and economic institutions have also undergone two major shifts thereafter’ (16). The two geopolitical shifts are the process of decolonisation that started in the late 1950s and the ascendancy of the USA as a global power since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As the colonial powers started to decline in institutional importance, the USA and the USSR became increasingly powerful, creating a bi-polar world order. With USA ascendancy post-1990, global norms shifted significantly in favour of liberal political and economic reforms.

In Chapter 8, Quinn tests the proposition that African political elites who were most dependent on external resources to remain in power were the most vulnerable to international pressure. These countries were therefore more likely than their counterparts to undertake reforms in a liberal direction after the end of the Cold War. This is by far the best chapter of the book, as it establishes a very clear argument: ‘one of the best predictors of a significant increase in levels of political and civil rights in the post-Cold War period in the region was majority state ownership (MSO) of most of a country's capital-intensive manufacturing during the Cold War period’ (253). Using quantitative regression, the finding is established, with the novel contribution that the discovery of new oil and mineral resources attenuated this direction or even reversed it. Where resource exports earned hard currency, it reduced dependency on more powerful states and in turn reduced the pressure to reform and helped to consolidate the power of (mostly authoritarian) elites. By contrast, those states that had pursued inward-orientated economic policies (and lacked resource wealth) – sometimes through the nationalization of state assets – became highly indebted and therefore financially dependent on the very countries whose colonisation they had shed. This is an important contribution to the ‘resource curse’ literature, and more should have been made of it.

Another primary contention of the book is that the relationship between states is essentially hierarchical. Weak states are dependent on stronger states; the two major geopolitical shifts since the end of the Second World War have counter-intuitively reinforced this. Quinn implicitly calls for a modification of Kenneth Waltz's billiard-ball analogy – of international relations being characterised by an effective state of anarchy – in favour of emphasising the relationship between states. This contention should have been developed further, as the idea that dependence fragments the power of elites is important, especially if it might lead to greater political and civil liberties. The arguments were there, but the implication that IR theory should be modified could have been drawn out more forcefully.

By its own admission, the book ‘is a bit of a hybrid’ (16) in that it tries to explain change and endurance in the context of deep description of the two geopolitical shifts. The structure of the book in the end is unfortunate and did not serve the author's objectives as well as it might have. For instance, the introduction would have benefited from a more robust discussion of institutions. There is now a deep and important literature on how (not) to define and measure institutions, with Greif (Reference Greif2006), Greif & Kingston (Reference Greif, Kingston, Schofield and Caballero2011) and Voigt (Reference Voigt2012) being just a few important contributors here that were not referenced. The latest reference to the late Douglass North is his 1990 book. But North's thinking evolved; his 2009 and 2012 contributions (North et al. Reference North, Wallis and Weingast2009, Reference North, Wallis, Webb and Weingast2012) would have provided a solid frame for Quinn. There is also no reference to the work of Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson (Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2006, Reference Acemoglu and Robinson2012). Drawing on these two books alone would have helped the reader to better understand the contribution of Quinn's book to the discussion of democratisation and institutional divergence through critical junctures (the two geopolitical shifts that Quinn emphasises, for instance). A stronger introduction would have avoided the overly thick descriptions that followed in Chapters 1 to 7.

The eighth chapter was valuable and probably redeemed the book. The concluding chapter brought the main ideas together quite well, and the discussion of potential future geopolitical shifts and their impact on institutional directions in Africa was useful. Overall, Quinn could have disciplined the narrative a little more. The explanatory power of the book is unnecessarily reduced by relying on too many variables. It is also worth pointing out that the quality of editing was poor, with too many grammatical and typographical errors.