In Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics, Martha Wilfahrt develops a compelling theoretical argument linking historical polities in West Africa to political outcomes today and provides a rich array of evidence to support it. Her central argument is that local governments in Senegal that fall within the boundaries of precolonial states—in her terminology, those that are institutionally congruent with distant kingdoms—distribute public goods more equitably than local governments that are not institutionally congruent. In so doing, her book joins a nascent but growing body of scholarship that documents the long-term consequences of precolonial statehood in Africa. However, unlike many in this literature, Wilfahrt posits a contingent theory about when and why historical legacies of statehood matter. In particular, she argues that institutional congruence at the local government level only begins to shape distributive politics once Senegal decentralizes decision making over public goods provision to the local level. Postdecentralization, she shows, institutionally congruent local governments distribute goods more broadly across communities and with less political turmoil, while less congruent local governments target public goods to a small subset of communities through a more fraught political process.

In explaining how a distant political organization can shape politics today, Wilfahrt focuses on the role of social institutions, defined as “norms of appropriate behavior in the public sphere demarcated by group boundaries” (p. 7). Thus, rather than focusing on the remnants of formal political institutions, such as village governance structures or chieftaincies, she highlights the less tangible legacies of shared identity and cross-village social networks. The sense of a shared identity, defined by tracing one’s heritage to citizens of the precolonial state, creates a sense of obligation and linked fate that encompasses all the communities within a local government, inducing cooperation and altruism. In addition, Wilfahrt argues that precolonial statehood has also ensured that elites from different communities are more strongly connected through familial and friendship ties than in areas of Senegal that were not home to precolonial states. These dense, intervillage social networks further incentivize cooperation and reciprocity. Thus, the identity and social networks mechanisms reinforce one another in generating a less contentious process of elite bargaining over the distribution of scarce and valuable state resources.

As with all research seeking to explain contemporary outcomes through a focus on historical statehood, Wilfahrt must address the question of how these social institutions—born in the precolonial era—have persisted to the present. To do so, she emphasizes the role of local social hierarchies, which tie local status to family lineage. Wilfahrt argues that the enduring importance of heritage-defined social status incentivizes individuals to maintain intervillage social networks and a strong connection to a historical, place-based identity.

Wilfahrt builds and evaluates this argument across 10 chapters. The introduction provides a concise but comprehensive overview of the book’s argument, empirical approach, and contributions, and chapter 1 walks the reader through the argument step by step. Chapters 2 and 3 provide necessary background information on precolonial politics in the area of contemporary Senegal and on the process of decentralization from the colonial era to the present. Both chapters are accessible to nonexperts and can stand independently, making them ideal to assign in courses on precolonial statehood and decentralization, respectively. Chapters 4 through 8 provide empirical evidence for the book’s central argument using a wide variety of data sources and research designs. Chapter 4 elucidates the challenges and constraints faced by local leaders; chapter 5 documents the differences in public goods distribution as a function of local governments’ congruence (or not) with precolonial states; chapter 6 leverages three in-depth case studies to highlight the theory’s mechanisms; chapter 7 shows that precolonial statehood only matters for distributive outcomes after decentralization; and chapter 8 extends the analysis beyond Senegal to include 11 additional West African countries. The brief conclusion then discusses the implications of the book’s findings for decentralization policies more broadly.

These chapters are combined into a beautifully written and effectively organized book, which expertly weaves together theory, social science, and narrative to provide the reader with a window into local politics and decision making in Senegal. The book also offers a master class in marrying sophisticated theorization with deep, fieldwork-based research. The result is a dizzying array of original data sources, all closely linked to the theoretical framework. The original data sources include more than 500 formal interviews, a survey with more than 350 rural elites, network data on elite social connections, and firsthand observations in three local governments. Wilfahrt also compiled geolocated administrative data on public goods provision and local representation across Senegalese local governments since 2002 and archival data on public goods provision from the 1880s to the present. She also used archival data to produce a map of the capitals of Senegambia’s precolonial kingdoms and used reasonable buffers around those capitals to identify the extent of their territorial reach. Wilfahrt’s adept use of so many different original data sources, both qualitative and quantitative, makes her book a model of the best kind of careful, fieldwork-intensive research to which we should all aspire.

She also makes theoretical contributions to several different literatures, which are often not in conversation with each other. First, Wilfahrt’s book contributes to the growing research on the long-run consequences of early statehood. Within this literature, Wilfahrt makes two advances. Unlike much of the work in this area, she identifies the specific mechanisms through which precolonial statehood affects outcomes today—place-based identities and supralocal social networks—both of which she shows are contingent on demographic stability and local social hierarchies. She also advances this literature by demonstrating that the effect of spatial congruence with long-dead states is conditional on the nature of contemporary political institutions: Precolonial statehood only affects local political outcomes after Senegal decentralizes decision making to local governments. Second, Wilfahrt’s book contributes to the study of decentralization and local governance by identifying the conditions under which it “works” well. In so doing, she opens the black box of local government, highlighting the crucial role of intraelite relations and how they are structured by historical exposure to statehood. Her key insight—that precolonial statehood left constellations of social ties that constrain political opportunism—is likely to travel beyond her particular case. Finally, while less central to the thrust of her book, Wilfahrt also contributes to the study of identity in African politics through her focus on supraethnic place-based identities, and to the long-standing debate about the degree to which colonial rule disrupted politics on the continent through her careful documentation of how local social institutions survived French colonialism.

Like all great books, Wilfahrt’s also raises important questions for future research. For one, more could be done to separate the effect of precolonial centralization from the factors that drove such centralization. Wilfahrt is largely silent on why some areas of precolonial Senegal were politically centralized and others were not. As a result, readers are likely to wonder whether certain geographic or demographic factors—such as population density or subsistence strategy—could be driving both precolonial statehood and present-day local social relations. Wilfahrt addresses this possibility through an “off-the-line” case study in chapter 6, showing that precolonial statehood does not affect contemporary outcomes in one locality where migration has disrupted the persistence of social hierarchies. While this case provides compelling initial evidence that it is indeed precolonial statehood (and the stability of its population’s descendants) that is shaping cooperative social institutions today, it will be important to show that this generalizes beyond a single case. In addition, future research should consider how the varied institutions of precolonial polities gave rise to different social structures. Chapter 2 characterizes Senegal’s precolonial states as sharing many features, including ethnic diversity, salient social caste, elective monarchy, and tribute-based political hierarchies. But those polities must have also varied in meaningful ways—and there is undoubtedly even more variation if we consider polities across the continent. Such variation in the formal institutions comprising precolonial states is likely consequential for the type of legacies they leave for local governance today.