Paul Nugent builds on the African borderlands literature that he has helped to forge to bring our attention to the ways that three social constructs — boundaries, communities, and states — have helped define much of the political history of West Africa from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.Footnote 1 Founder of the African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE), Nugent, along with A. I. Asiwaju, has led the charge for scholars arguing that African borders are not exceptional because they are ‘artificial’. Since all borders are artificial in that they are socially constructed, African borderlands provide useful frames of analysis for those interested in how states and communal identities affected one another over time, especially on the geographical margins.
Nugent compares the development of two West African borderlands — the Trans-Volta (Ghana-Togo border) and the Senegambia (Senegal-Gambia border) — to argue that West African borderland societies were not marginalized by events at the political center but rather were crucial to them. These ‘margins’ go beyond geography to include social and ethnic groups sidelined by colonial officials and nationalist leaders in state-making processes. Thus, he stakes a claim for the influence of borderlands in colonial state-making in his subtitle: ‘the centrality of the margins’. Nugent shows how trade and exchange on the borders often subverted or avoided state control in the capital or port city, which were often the same thing. Indeed, as Nugent demonstrates, these African states were made less through the ‘war and taxes’ formula of Charles Tilly and more through the regulation of cross-border trade.Footnote 2 Nugent claims that the geographical margins were therefore ‘productive’ in at least three respects:
Temporally, in that states were forged in the process of converting frontier zones into colonial borders; structurally, in that fiscal logics, which hinged on regulating border flows, fundamentally underpinned the morphology of colonial states and that of their post-colonial successors; and politically, in that the social contracts that were forged under colonial rule, and which were reconfigured after independence, hinged on the interchange between centres and the geographical margins (4).
Nugent follows the themes of time, structure, and politics throughout the book.
Nugent's argument is organized into four parts and thirteen hefty chapters before a somewhat extensive (but worthwhile) conclusion. Part One takes the story ‘From Frontiers to Boundaries’, with two chapters that start in the precolonial past and take us up to the moment of colonial partition. Chapter Three focuses on the development of colonial space and ‘the spatial lineages of the colonial state’. In Part Two, ‘States and Taxes, Land and Mobility’, Nugent examines Tilly's thesis on states, war, and taxes to show how and why the ‘social contract’ forged by Europeans applied with various effectiveness in the African context and how Africans affected that relationship in their own ways.Footnote 3 In Part Three of the book, ‘Decolonization and Boundary Closure, c. 1939–1969’, Nugent starts a pattern of alternating chapter-long examinations of the spatial logics of decolonization in the Trans-Volta and the Senegambia. For example, why did Senegal and The Gambia not become one nation-state after colonialism? Why maintain the lock-and-key geography of the two states?Footnote 4 Building on the continued relevance of such questions in the postcolonial period, Part Four, ‘States, Social Contracts and Respacing from Below, c. 1970–2010’, returns to much of the borderland agenda to examine the influence of borderland societies on contemporary African states.
In addition to Tilly's work, Nugent intervenes with that of some of the most influential Africanist scholars in recent decades to make a number of important sub-arguments. First, Nugent eschews Crawford Young's choice between metropolitan and peripheral interpretations of the late-nineteenth-century ‘new imperialism’ and Mahmoud Mamdani's argument about the ‘bifurcated state’ in colonial Africa.Footnote 5 He points to a longer, more comprehensive, systemic, and fluid history in these two borderlands to consider developments in the metropole, the colonial capital, and the ‘frontier’ as part of a fluid whole.Footnote 6 By doing so, Nugent joins scholars who have argued for greater African ‘agency’ in state-making processes at the same time that he supports cultural arguments about the ‘creolization’ of identities in the Atlantic world.Footnote 7 Second, Nugent reemploys some of his previous work on cross-border smuggling to argue that Frederick Cooper's conception of the ‘gatekeeper state’ fails to account for the weakness and the vulnerability of the colonial gate, as well as of those who were allegedly keeping it.Footnote 8 Finally, Nugent argues contra James C. Scott's ‘seeing like a state’ thesis that African ‘colonial states did not opt for maximum surveillance and optimal extraction, but typically followed the line of least resistance’ (23).Footnote 9 In other words, Nugent ‘mixes it up’ with some of the best-known scholarship to show how West Africans ‘mixed it up’ with all comers to these Trans-Volta and Senegambian borderlands. Indeed, mixing was an essential process that enabled these West Africans to avoid or escape some state control at the same time that they participated in it and ‘made the state’ on the geographical margins.
In terms of sources and methods, Nugent has spent a great deal of time in Agotime and Ewe villages in the Trans-Volta and in Jola and Mandinka villages in or near the Casamance. (Oral sources come from over two decades of field work in towns and villages across each subregion). Beyond this ‘field time’, he balances his source base with a number of colonial and national archives and with a focus on festivals, especially in Chapter Thirteen, ‘Boundaries, Communities and “Re-Membering”: Festivals and the Negotiation of Difference’, as cultural sources that reveal much about communities in the past. After so much about states and taxes and trade, this cultural history in the final chapter comes as a welcome respite.
Nugent's book is a big bite to digest all at once (544 pages of text), but it will certainly be useful for undergraduate and graduate courses focused on spatial histories of colonialism. It will also prove to be a gold mine for researchers interested in comprehensive political and economic histories of colonialism in the two subregions. Nugent performs an impressive feat by covering so much history in the Trans-Volta and the Senegambia in such detail with so much theoretical and interpretive finesse. This book will be a gem to the Africanist community and to others interested in colonial political economy, state-making, borderlands, and cultural history for years to come.
